https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DruTekDAjSQ

Are you going to be a leader and really use this and pursue flourishing as a strategy to gain a competitive edge? Or are you going to be a laggard and do it to catch up? Because this change is hi dear friends, welcome to a special podcast episode. This one is all going to be around work well, being flourishing a core part of what I've dedicated my second half of my life to. And in this episode I want to share with you a little bit around why investment in flourishing makes business sense and how you can truly integrate this science into the way you work, live and eat, lead others to unlock the full potential of yourself, your teams and your organizations. So let's first start with talking a little bit about why flourishing actually matters by itself for us as humans. Let's first describe what flourishing means. Flourishing for me means is living a life that has meaning in relationship, in community with others, constantly learning and growing as individuals, personally and professionally, being able to take care of our health physically, mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and truly enjoying the experience where, whether it is good or bad in the day to day of life, and operating with a high state of resilience. So let's think about why this matters. Why does it matter? Why does flourishing matter? Well friends, most of us spend close to 90,000 hours in our lifetime at work. 90,000 hours. That's approximately a third of our life between 20 to 65 days a week. Majority of our waking hours are spent at work. And if you are like so many who are in high stress, always on roll, even when you're home, you're actually thinking about work. So friends, if you are not flourishing at work or worse, you are suffering at work, how can you flourish or be happy in life? How can you do well in life? We don't live in a severance world. We carry the joy as well as the sorrows, the stress, the frustration, the anxiety from work into our homes. Now I've spoken to 10,000 plus people and for most people you know, when I share this, they step back. And so I want to create a little bit of a step back moment for us, our listeners here on this podcast. If you are sitting down, I want you to close your eyes and reflect on these five questions. I'm about to ask you to take your own inventory. If you are driving or running or walking, just listen to these questions, reflect on them. But then play this podcast back when you're sitting down to do this reflection because I want you to think about these questions not just from your head, but from your heart and from your body. I want you to think about a scale from one to five. One is low, five is high. Does your work have meaning for you or is it just a way to earn a paycheck? If it is just a way to earn a paycheck, rate yourself as one. If your work has meaning and significance for you, rate it as a five. Or somewhere in the middle. Question number two do you feel energized by your work, excited to show up Monday mornings, or do you start counting down your days and hours waiting for Friday evening to arrive? If you start counting down your hours to Friday, rate it as a one. If you are excited and you leave your work with more energy than when you started the day, rate it as a five. Question number three Are you learning, growing and developing both personally and professionally? Or do you feel stuck, stagnant and harboring a dull ache that you can be so much more than that? If you feel stuck or stagnant, rest, rate yourself a 1. If you're constantly learning and growing, rate yourself a 5. Or somewhere in the middle. Fourth, do you feel seen, supported and valued at work or do you feel invisible and expendable? If you feel invisible or expendable, rate yourself a one. If you feel valued and seen and you feel like you belong, rate yourself a five. Last but not least, does your calendar look like a game of meeting bingo? Constantly on running from back to back meetings? Or are you working at your cognitive best with time for deep work on priorities that really matter, Having breaks throughout the day to make sure that you recharge your energy just like you recharge your phone and truly working in neuro friendly ways? If your calendar looks like meeting bingo, rate yourself a one. If it's carefully constructed with breaks and deep work, rate yourself a 5. Now take an average of this between 1 to 5 and calculate your score. When I've asked individuals and leaders to do this, on average people report a score between 2 and 3. Think about that. Dear friends, we are operating at 50% of the full potential of what's possible. And it's not somebody else who's to blame. It's not somebody else who's responsible. As leaders, as individuals, we have the power to change our experience at work. We have to take responsibility. And I'm going to give you a set of tips and tricks and the research in this field from so many individuals whose work you can harness to be an agent of change, be an agent of flourishing. Now look, my invitation and my call to action for you to do this is not just one from a Humanitarian or a personal selfish point of view? It is. There's a strong business case to investing in flourishing too. Let me give you some statistics and data that should convince you and help you make the case behind this to your organizations. 2025, the World Economic Forum, together with McKinsey published a report that quantified what the state of poor work wellbeing is costing us. The numbers ranged from 4 to 12 trillion dollars approximately in economic value. The biggest sources of losses come from presenteeism and productivity. Close to 9 billion. Absenteeism and attrition, which together account for about a billion. Five, retention and attraction that account for 900 billion. So we lose $12 trillion of value on the upper end and close to $4 trillion of value on the lower end. They further quantified this for what it means. If you are in a high income country like the US and let's say you're in a digital industry, let's say you do software as a service. If the average annual pay in that is about 80,000, the total economic value lost per employee is about 14 to $44,000. Think about that, friends. That's close to 20 to 50% of value from your human capital that you're leaving on the table. That's massive. That's something that every person should take to their leadership team or if you're a leader, should look into that. Will you accept your physical assets running at that level of efficiency? Imagine if your data centers, your fleets, your machines, your equipment ran at 12 to 50% of their potential. Would you accept that? So then why are we willing to accept that level of of misuse unutilization of our people assets? We spend more on people than machines. Dear friends, if you are in a manufacturing industry like automotive, let's say in the US the average annual pay is about 40,000 and the value we leave on the table is 7 to 22,000 dollars. Again in the same report. There is a real economic value behind this. So now let's not just look at losses. Because if we just talk about loss in the context of flourishing, we're leaving the other side of the equation, which is the gains. The work done at Michigan Ross at the center of Positive Organization Scholarship by Jane Dutton, Kim Cameron, Bob Quinn who are the founders of this field? The last 20 plus years they've convened over 1,000 researchers on this topic. They talk about a work. Jane talks about the zone of potential, this triangle which is the zone of potential. Kim talks about positive deviance. How can organizations not just close the gaps but achieve Net positive results from the norm. Alex Edmonds, London business school in 2009 quantified this. In 2015, this was published in the Harvard Business Review. Companies which have high employee satisfaction, which means employees that are flourishing, one of the elements of it, drive two to three and a half percent higher shareholder returns over eight years. Compound that, dear friends, that's a 20% to 30% higher shareholder value that we can create for anybody who's at the board or if you're a leader who want to take this to the board. Investing in employee satisfaction and employee work well being is not just a humanitarian case, it is your fiduciary responsibility. The most recent work that I've also really been excited about is the work done by Jan Emanuel at Oxford. Jan Emanuel wrote a book called why Work well Being Matters. He has an amazing TEDx talk. You should listen to it. He articulates four key drivers through which he measures work well being, part purpose, happiness, the presence or absence of stress daily and satisfaction. What he found was only 20% of people are thriving at work when and oh, by the way, when you invest in a portfolio of companies, which is the experiment they ran with top 100 work wellbeing companies collected using the data from. Indeed, what they find is those companies outperformed every other index in the next two and a half years. Work well being is positively correlated with profitability, with return on assets and shareholder returns. The simulation, similar to what Alex had done earlier, proved that there is a real causation here. So, friends, the business case for investing and flourishing has never been clearer. In fact, it is time we start to take it seriously. You know, today when I ask people, do you believe Earth is round? They look at me like I am, you know, I've got horns growing out of my head. But today, 1% of people still believe Earth is flat. Five hundred years ago, almost half the world would not sail off because they were afraid of falling off the earth because they thought it was flat. Fifty years ago, the concept of climate change, even to me was quite artificial. What do you mean about climate change? And the Earth is warming today, 70% of people believe that. 30% still deny it, but 70% believe. And I'm not talking about whether it is real. Do we cause it? Is it natural? Is it not? I'm just talking about purely from a science. Is our Earth getting warmer? Are our oceans getting warmer? Friends, the business case for flourishing is that clear. It's significant lever left untapped for us to unlock the full potential of our individuals and our organizations. And oh by the way, the only choice I suggest to you is the following. Are you going to be a leader and really use this and pursue flourishing as a strategy to gain a competitive edge or are you going to be a laggard and do it to catch up? Because this change is coming. The new generation is demanding this. They will not work under those conditions for long. The governments are mandating it. More and more lawsuits around psychological safety, poor work, well being are being filed and won. So friends and the leading organizations are already implementing it. They're not sitting on the sidelines. So that's the real choice that you have is do you be one of the first movers and join in the fray and pursue flourishing as a strategy or are you left behind? Now, if you're listening, I want to also paint a picture about how did we get here? Because many companies today will say yes, we are doing enough on this. We are doing wellness things. We have meditation classes. We give headspace and calm. We have gym memberships, we have employee benefits, we have employee assistance programs. When people are struggling, we actually give them the resources. They have therapists, we have mental health days, we have doctors on staff. And I hear these all the time. Yes, we are doing enough. We are doing a lot. Look at our spend. It's actually gone up. Friends, let me help you step back and look at those. If you think about the continuum around well being, most organizations are focused on two ends of the spectrum. On one end we are actually giving a bunch of wellness interventions to the individual. We're putting the whole burden on individuals. Friends, if you look at the data on those who use gym memberships versus not the people who use gym memberships are the ones who went to the gym in the first place. Very few people who wouldn't have otherwise gone to the gym sign up for the gym memberships you give. Same goes for meditation. Those who meditate, meditate. They don't need headspace and calm. If they needed it, they can actually get it themselves. What they need is for you to fix work. In fact, an Oxford paper in 2024 looked at so many of these interventions and found zero ROI from all wellness initiatives. If you're a CFO or if you're a leader, think about the level of rigor you put on every investment, whether it is in the manufacturing plant investing in new capacity, a fleet, a data center, a marketing campaign. Why don't you apply the same rigor on the return on investment from your well being investments? Well, the reason is because we think about it As a split the pie strategy. As Alex says, we should just do it even if I can't measure it. Why? We can measure the impact of work well being, give the same level of rigor to it. Second, a lot of these interventions are also on the other end of the spectrum. They come in the form of employee assistance programs, access to therapists, mental health days, sick days, etc, etc Friends, I feel, I know this is going to sound extreme, but I feel that's a little bit like giving people the resources to heal themselves after we have broken them. Giving them resources after we break them. That's great, but that's not enough. We can't wash our hands off this because if you look at again the McKinsey World Health Institute research, 97% of the drivers behind burnout are actually at the job team organization level, not at the individual level. The same goes for well being. 72% of the demands and enablers behind holistic health are at the job team and organization level, not individual. So if all of your investments are on burnout, prevention, anxiety, depression, on the right hand side, giving individuals the resources, or all of them are on the health side, on the individual and you are missing work, you are leaving the majority of the opportunity and your responsibility, you're not exercising that responsibility. We have to fix work from one of immense human suffering to one of human flourishing. Now I am not exaggerating this point, dear friends, the indeed report shows that only 20% of people are thriving at work. 20%. One in five. Would you let your assets, physical assets, run at that level of efficiency? One in five is doing well, the rest are kind of somewhere in the middle. 60% people report experiencing stress daily. Globally, 22% of people are burnt out, 16% in the US and this is using the medical definition of burnout that I feel chronically stressed. I am feeling a high level of cynicism and distance from my job because it can't change. And I am physically and cognitively not being able to do my best work. 20% 15% of frontline finds meaning at work. The level of hopelessness is rising. This is massive human suffering. And this is the reason why just doing work at the individual, whether on meditation, gratitude, giving people the resources is not enough. Friends, with 70% of the factors being about work, this is the equivalent of telling somebody if you're in a toxic relationship that kindness, meditation and gratitude will save the day. When you go home every day and you have a spouse that abuses you physically or mentally, how is this not mental abuse when only 20% of people are thriving. 60% experience stress daily at work. How is that not a form of mental and emotional abuse? Why are we okay with that? Why are we okay with that? Accentuating that in our workplaces? We hope you're enjoying this episode and would love your help in spreading awareness and furthering our mission to help a billion people Rewire for Happiness. Please consider leaving us a review and sharing this podcast with others in your personal and professional life who you feel could benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend and spread positivity. Also, check out Rewire, our proprietary offering to move you from knowing to doing on the Happiness Squad website www.happinesssquad.com Rewire uses the science of habit formation and the power of community to help you build happier habits in five minutes or less daily. Now back to the episode. Now look, I am not asking you right now to take the pitchforks and go for leadership. We are all leaders. There is a lot of resources that we have that we can access. I'm asking you to be an agent of change in the teams you lead with people around you, because that is the beauty of this work. Almost 70 to 80% of this work as a leader of a function, as a leader of a location, as a leader of a team you together with your team can address. And I'm going to share some of those with you. So let's talk about those. What can I do? The first and the biggest one, friends, is you have to think about flourishing as a strategy, not as a benefit. We have to think about flourishing, not as a check the box nice to do when I make money once or twice a year rather than something that you pursue as a long term strategy. What does that mean? Number one, we need to actually have flourishing be a measure that we hold our leaders to just like we hold performance. We need to tie their incentives to it. We need to build systems and capabilities that allow us to scale flourishing as a capability, as a strategy across the organization and not just leave it for the top team leaders. Every person is a leader. Our issue is not the top. Let me put it this way. Our issue is just not the top. Our issue is the middle. We never train people and help them implement these changes at work. We have to think about this as a strategy. When we think about this as a strategy, we also have to take a long term view when we invest in upgrading our systems, whether it's implementing SAP or a new HRIS system or a new digital strategy. Do you think about that as three months, six months and what's my roi? No, you think about this as multi year, three, four plus year strategies. We've got to think about flourishing on that horizon too. We have to stop this short term. Tell me in three months what did I get? But we should also hold hard if we think it's a four year strategy. I better see the results. I better see the results. And with the research that Alex has done and Jan Emanuel has done and we've done at Happiness squad and at McKinsey, the case is there. We need to measure all the places where human energy is lost and we need to help those leaders drive and close those gaps. Number two, we need to measure what matters. Friends, if you care about work wellbeing, if you fundamentally buy into flourishing work well being as something you should invest your energy is, then measure it. Stop measuring engagement. We've been measuring engagement for 15 years. We do it once a year. Why are we stuck at 30% engagement levels? If it was working, why have we not moved the needle? Engagement scores have just become check in the box exercises. They only measure the tip of the iceberg. If you really want to measure flourishing, measure the ingredients of flourishing. What percentage find meaning at work? What percentage are energized by work and are happy at work? What percentage are learning and growing and operating with a high degree of adaptability? What percentage feel safe, seen and trust their leaders? And what percentage are working in ways that allow them to be at their best rather than constantly stressed feeling under the gun? Measure the ingredients of flourishing and the results measure the losses that are associated with it. At Happiness Squad, we built a diagnostic that literally allows you to quantify the human capital losses in the same language and way that you do physical capital losses. We measure availability losses driven by these ingredients through attrition and absenteeism. We measure performance losses at the individual and at a team level through percentage that find meaning. Those who experience stress, those who work in back to back meetings and multitask, those who feel psychologically safe and trusted. And we measure quality losses around the quality of decision making and also based on the percentage of errors that we make because of multitasking or feeling under the gun, not having enough time. We measure those losses at a team level and can roll it at a function level because we fundamentally believe we need to measure those losses. If we have to fix them, we have to make it real for leaders. We have to hold them accountable, but we also have to give them the insight that they need to be able to make a difference. Number Three, we need to listen continuously and act fast. Friends. I want you to think about how often do you collect your data? If you run a plant or an asset heavy industry, how often do you look at data for your fleet utilization and fleet performance or retail store performance or data center uptimes or marketing campaigns? When it comes to physical assets and investments, we look at data every day. How often and how fast do you expect people to take action? When I ask this question to most CEOs, they say, well, 24 to 48 hours. If there is something that's broken in our physical infrastructure, we want to get it fixed. We want somebody to take action. So why is it, friends, that when it comes to our physical assets, we look at data daily, but when it comes to our human assets, we look at it once a year, maybe six months? Why is it that when we expect 24 to 48 hours to take action, when it comes to our physical assets, 6, 9, 12 months go by between an employee giving their feedback and seeing any action come from it. I was talking to an HR leader and she was sharing with me that, you know, the lowest score in the engagement survey that they got was the company does not take any action, my feedback will not be valued. And yet we keep running it without changing the process. Now look, there are many reasons for this and one of the reasons is the third point that I'm about to say. The current ways in which we do this work, we do one size fits all top down interventions based on the data that we make sense of. In quite contrast to how we do physical asset optimization. The person running that asset, that machine, that line, that plant, that fleet, that location, that region is the one that takes action based on what's needed, not top down. Now if we have to do this top down because we fundamentally believe this is a benefit, this is not what line leaders will care about. Then of course we can only do one or two things at the center. Of course there is a lag between designing something and rolling it out. So this is why our HR business partners can't do this on their own. If we have to build a bottom up system of continuous listening that leaders that are leading teams together with their teams choose the intervention, we have to throw our existing playbook out and actually lean into building a new human operating system. Last but not the least you need, based on the losses, address the full system. You have to drive interventions at the individual level, you have to drive individuals at the job and team level, which is upskilling the middle, and you have to Address things at the organization level. Now let me share some of the models and the work that has been done here that you can use to make these changes if you so want. At the individual level, instead of offering people meditation, gym memberships, you know, lectures by experts, enroll them into programs that are cohort based, that are journeys over 3, 612 months in intact teams where they're using the science of happiness to build more adaptability and resilience. These skills will help them be happier, healthier and have more love and meaning so they can be at their best not just at work, but in life. We can train this. We can use micro practices that they do in the work, not outside of work. We integrate them into team rituals. We do this as teams that increases connection. You show that I matter, my happiness matters, my well being matters. We've run these programs now with six different client teams and in every one of them within four months, 40% plus report on a scale of 1 to 5, 4 to 5 level of improvement in stress, hope, optimism. This is possible. We have to do it differently. We have to help people practice at work. We have to put them in peer groups and cohorts that will support them into practice, staying in practice. And we have to make these small. We have to make this something that fits into our busy lives. The Sunflower model that I write about in the Hardwired for Happiness that our rewired course is built around is a good resource, but so is the work of so many others in this field. I particularly love the work of Tal Ben Shahar who's written a series of books. I love the work of Shauna Shapiro who's done tons of amazing work. We've had Shauna on our podcast. I love the work of Emma Seppella. She's going to be on a guest very soon on the podcast so you can look at any of these resources. When it comes to the field of happiness, of course, the og, Marty Seligman and all of his work around positive psychology that really started this field is a powerful resource to go. But if you want a ready off the shelf modules that you can run with your team, come find us at Happiness Squad. Look at our Rewire program and we're happy to make it available to you. Let's step now and talk a little bit about the team and the job that accounts for almost 60% of well being and close to 80, 85% of burnout. Now our PERL model is a powerful model that is an integrated model around this. The inspiration from Perl came from the sea, just like pearls are created by oysters by turning daily irritants. Those irritants in the form of sand particles that get into an oyster, they can make them into pearl. The pearl skills can help any manager transform the irritants that they face daily in the form of conflicts with bosses, colleagues, suppliers, customers, obstacles, external pressures and shocks into massive sources of growth and value. And the five elements of PERL are the same five that I asked you to do an assessment around that we built our Organizational Human Potential Index model around. And there is so much work from around the field that we have integrated into this model. So P is about purpose, doing work that matters, connecting what people do every day as a source of meaning for them. Now the source to go for this the work. The preeminent research that we leverage for this work come from both the positive psychology work around meaning, but most importantly the work done by Jane Tutton and Amy Vrasniewski around job crafting. They actually have a tool that's available that you can directly leverage from the center and integrate with your team. Job crafting is about having a dialogue around how we can craft our jobs at three levels. Task, relationship and purpose Cognitive around the impact that we are having. It's a powerful intervention. It has massive impact. You can also look at the work done by Rad Sisodia in the field of conscious capitalism for valuable tools and resources to access it energy. Do the work we find energize us. Now this has two elements, dear friends. One, it's around how we communicate, how we appreciate, show appreciation, how we create more compassionate workplaces where those who are suffering can find relief. It's also about how we teach people how to have better conflicts rather than avoid them. It's teaching teams how to get better at inquiry rather than advocacy so we can really analyze a problem all the way down to its bare bones, fears and needs that people are solving for rather than positions. Now there are tons of researchers whose work we benefited from that we've integrated into our work. On the one hand, it is a beautiful book and research done by many Monica Werlein and Jane Dutton. They wrote a book called Awakening Compassion. That is the work done by Barbara Fredrickson on positive emotions and gratitude. There is the work done by my dear friend Julian Miravel around positive communications. He has a masterclass. He wrote a book. We had him on our podcast. He defines these six behaviors that any person, any leader can train themselves and their teams on. You don't need change at an organization CEO level. You can do that the work done by Kim Cameron who we also had on our podcast around positive energizers, skills of positive energizers and how you individually can become a positive energizer and unlock massive heliotropic effects around people and performance are resources that are available to you. The work on crucial conversations, advocacy inquiries, locks and how do we address them and how to have better conflicts. Our other series of powerful work done at Harvard at McKinsey that you can leverage let's now talk about adaptability and awareness. Now adaptability was a key area of research for me when I was at McKinsey. There are several resources here that you can leverage Adaptability. A lot of the work that we did, there's a paper that we wrote on the adaptability paradox that you can leverage around these Learning mindsets versus anti learning mindsets. There is work by the Conscious Leadership group around how we can shift from reactive to more creative structures. There is all the work that has been done by Jennifer Garber and Carolyn Coughlin around complexity. That is powerful resources for you that you can access. And of course there is the work done by Gallup on Strength Finder and leveraging our strengths so we are continuously growing. All of those skills are available. You don't need to execute all of them. You need to first find what are the gaps in your organization and be able to leverage that work. R is relationships. Relationships are about building an environment where people feel trusted, people feel included and psychologically safe. Now here there is a series of foundational 20 plus years of research that you can leverage. There is of course the work done by Amy Edmondson on psychological safety. There is also work done by Carol Robbins and her colleagues at Stanford. They wrote a book called Connect. We had Carol on our podcast around how we can build exceptional relationships. That podcast and those resources are available to you. You can leverage that work if you want to build exceptional relationships. Last but not least, Lifeforce Lifeforce is about doing work to alleviate stress to work in neuro friendly ways. Now all the work of Cal Newport is a powerful resource here. Mihaili Szyzmisky's work on Flow is a powerful resource here. The work from Oxford around stress is powerful. The work at Johnson and Johnson's Human Performance Institute also provides resources in this space around how we make stress into an ally. The Energy Project is another resource. So we'll put many of these in the blog in it so you're available. I want to make sure that you have all the resources that you need. Now look, there are so Many of these that are highlighted, you can go pick each one of them. Our program around flourishing integrates all of this into easily accessible once a quarter, once a month programs. We've built a playbook which we call the new human operating system that can help you not just train but transform your workplaces. We do this work in agile sprints working with leaders. So we would be at Happiness Squad. Delighted to work with you to really implement this rather than just know and learn about them. We can be the integrator of all of this work into your workplace. And we'll start with the diagnostic to first choose the levers that will matter to you and then help you design a long term strategy. Last but not the least, you have to address some organizational factors that get in the way. These are things like role conflicts. These are things like work and time pressures that organizationals sometimes face on individuals because of lack of strategic priorities. This is toxic bosses who are allowed to stay around till too late when their best people have left. It's around fixing our upskilling and how we think about roles and capabilities. Now this is work where I am delighted to be partnering with Dr. Angela Jackson at Harvard her work in this field. She wrote a book called Win Win workplace that has so many of these organizational factors that we can address. So friends, a whole set of resources that are available to you. Look the business case, the rationale for investing in this and really tapping into flourishing as the next source of competitive edge. The evidence is as clear as it can ever be. These resources are truly available and can help us not just unlock massive performance gains. As I said, 2 to 3.5% higher shareholder returns, $12 trillion in economic value. But they can truly transform our workplaces from one of massive human suffering to human flourishing. And you as individuals have more power than you need than you think you have. You have more power than you think you have. If you lead a team of six or eight, you can start making changes that will make a big difference. I want to end with two of my favorite quotes. One is from the spiritual traditions Khalil Gibran who said work is love made visible. Work is love made visible. Work is not something to be bore as a burden. It can help you grow into your fullest potential. And the second is Clay Christensen. In his book how will you measure your life? He called business and leadership one of the noblest professions. It's only noble if we use the resources, the skills and the obligations we have as leaders to transform the experience of those we lead and help them flourish. Rather than suffer. Thank you, dear friends, for listening. I hope this invites and inspires you to be a positive agent of change and we'll keep bringing some of these expert voices onto our podcasts. We'll put these resources for you. Have a blessed day and a wonderful summer that wraps up another episode of the Happiness Squad podcast. We hope you found the insights actionable to enhance your journey towards happiness and fill your life with with more joy, health, love and meaning. Please consider leaving us. Review and share the podcast with anyone in your professional or personal life who you feel will benefit from some of these very insights. It's a really simple way to extend support and spread positivity. Take care and remember, happiness is a choice that's available to you moment to moment in the here and now. Take care and see you next week.