How to Leverage the Happiness Advantage in the Office

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Achor says bosses would be wise to heed his advice, because a happy workplace is a more productive workplace.

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SHAWN ACHOR

Shawn Achor is an expert in positive psychology and the CEO of Aspirant, a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers—people who are well above average—to understand where human potential, success, and happiness intersect. Achor is also the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures in Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar's class "Positive Psychology," the most popular class at Harvard. Now he travels around the United States and Europe giving talks on positive psychology to Fortune 500 corporations, schools, and non-profit organizations. His research and lectures on happiness and human potential have received attention in The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR and CNN Radio.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in English and Religion and earned a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.

Professor Achor is a Big Think Delphi Fellow.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What steps should businesses take in order to leverage the happiness advantage?

Shawn Achor: I think the biggest discovery that’s wrapped around this revolutionary finding of the "happiness advantage," that our brain works better at positive, is the recognition that our leadership needs to change.  I think oftentimes I think of a good employee or a good leader is one that sacrifices all the type of happiness that they can have to make the company more successful.  When we see individuals do that, they might thrive in a very, very short period of time, but in the long run, we find that those individuals burn out, their productivity goes down, their success rates go down, they can’t keep clients, and their turnover rates at their companies skyrocket.

You know, I even talked to this trader on Wall Street and he said that the way that he manages his team, one of the things he looks around is if he sees somebody that’s smiling on the trading floor, he knows they’re not working hard enough.  That type of mentality is the opposite of the science we’re actually finding out what causes an employee to thrive.  So what it means is that, first of all, a mindset shift.  We need to make sure that we’re actually emphasizing the role of social support, the role of optimism, that we have in our companies.  That if those start to... if we sacrifice those, we need to realize that we are sacrificing the success in the long run.

The second thing that needs to happen is we need to start doing more trainings.  I think a lot of the things we do at our companies are focused on the technical skills and the intelligence.  And if I know all the technical skills and intelligence of an employee, I can only predict 25% of the differences in their job successes over the next five years.

Seventy-five percent of our prediction of job success has nothing to do with the technical skills or intelligence that we normally train people on, but on three other factors.  The first is the believe that you’re behavior matters, which is optimism levels.  If you believe that your behavior matters, you keep working even in the midst of challenge.

The second is your social support networks.  Your manager, your teammates, your family members and friends at home, that social support network is extremely crucial in predicting the success rate of that individual.

And the third is, everyone experiences stress, but some people experience stress as a challenge and other people view it as a threat.  And when you view your stress in a positive way and manage your energy in a positive way, what we find is those success rates rise.  So what we need to do at our companies and at our schools as well is to be able to focus our trainings on that 75%.  On the part that actually predicts the long-term success of not only an individual, but an entire company.

I gave a talk at a private school.  And they said, we know long term it's not just the intelligence and what we teach in the classrooms is going to keep the success of our individuals of our students working really well in the workforce, so once a year we have a wellness week where we try and cram in all the rest of the thi...

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