How Much Can Positivity Affect Your Company? | Vishen Lakhiani

Richard Branson said, like flowers flourish on water, people flourish on praise. Now, I know this sounds fluffy, so I thought I'd bring in some science. What I'm going to play for you Guys is a 3 minute video by Harvard psychologist and scientist Sean Acre on the power of appreciation. Now this is a two minute exercise that Sean is advising companies to do. Basically, he says the managers to the company show up, they take an iPhone, they set a timer for two minutes and in that two minutes, and this is the first thing they have to do when they start their job, they write an email of appreciation to another person in the company. When the two minute ends, they hit send. That's it. Two minute exercise by Shawn Acher. Okay, now check out what Shawn Acher says about what this has done for massive corporations. And just have an open mind because as hokey and fluffy as it sounds, this is hard science.

Happiness may be a choice, but it requires some effort on our part. And I think it requires effort both at the individual level, but also I think for those of us that own companies, those of us that lead other people. I think that we have not just a moral obligation, but a business obligation to make sure that the people on our team are in a positive state. I think at the individual level, one of the things we found huge success with is we started having individuals each day. The managers oftentimes would lead this, but what we'd have people do at Facebook, we had people do a nationwide insurance in the US we had them every morning when they got into work. The very first task they had to do for 21 days in a row was to write a single two minute positive email praising or thanking one person that they know. Simple two minute positive email. So it could be something as simple as thank you so much for helping me with my work yesterday, or it could be something meaningful like, you're the reason why I come into work each day, you're my best friend here. Or it could be, you know, thank you so much for covering for me when I had so much work going on the other day. But in each one of those moments, what that person is doing is they're actually becoming. They're providing praise to somebody else. And if they do it for three days in a row, they get addicted to it because they think how amazing they are for writing that email each morning. But the real value, and people start writing emails back about how grateful that they are to that person. But the real value is 21 days later, if we come back in and test the group that does it, if somebody did it for 21 days in a row, it turns out that their Social Connection score is in the top quartile of social connection. So a simple two minute habit each day moved them exactly where people wanted them to be within these studies, which leads to not only levels of happiness, but promotion, productive energy, sales, all the things every business outcome we know how to test for. So we did this in Nationwide Insurance. We were working with the president of Nationwide Brokerage Solutions, Gary Baker, who said he was a numbers guy. He said, you know, I thought happiness research was fluff, you know, until we showed him the numbers and what we've been doing at these organizations. So he allowed us to do this intervention with this team. We did a couple interventions, but they think that this was the most powerful one. Over the next 18 months, they had a 50% rise in their revenue, which is crazy. 237% increase. Yeah, that's the incredible part. 237% increase in their application rates. Google flew out to see what they were doing. Their pharmaceutical company client came out to see how they were running their call centers. They started taking people off of their phones each day for 10 minutes so that they could actually have an opportunity to praise one another, to check in on a success that somebody else had had and switch the leader each day. They called them huddles. Turns out that they've had such. They went from $650 million to $950 million in a single year with no new hires at that point, which was phenomenal.

Isn't that data amazing? And by the way, Sean Achor, he wrote the book Happiness Advantage. He's a Harvard scientist. This was an actual experiment at Nationwide Insurance. And how many of you think that you could spend two minutes a day writing an email, right? So this is such a powerful idea, I cannot even express how amazing this is. Now I hack it a bit. I use WhatsApp because we communicate a lot in our teams using WhatsApp. And I leave an audio message, right? Or I use emoticons, but you can do it in any way you want. It's about the feeling of appreciation. So that was concept number two, social connections. Now, Sean did say something there. He said when people start doing this, they rise to the top 25% quartile of a company in terms of social connectivity score. This is a measurement that Harvard uses to identify who, who are the people in the company that typically get rated as the kindest, the friendliest, the most supportive. It's called social connection score. Like if you look at people like Eve Valencia right? Really high social connection score he is here helping and supporting so many people now what the Harvard study found is that people who are in that top 25% of social connection score are 40% more likely to get a raise than than anyone else 40% more likely now when they found that they did this experiment with the two minute appreciation the people who are doing that immediately within one month they go to that 25% quartile so not only are they making their peers happier indirectly based on Harvard data they just created a 40% salary increase for themselves sorry a 40% better chance of them getting a raise it's fascinating but sometimes because it's so easy we don't do it and we bring in these high priced business consultants and strategy consultants not realizing that sometimes a two minute practice that you can bring into a company can cause that company to go from 650 million to 950 million it's all about culture folks it's all about the people.