The Importance of Social Connections At Work | Vishen Lakhiani

So people look at Mindvalley culture and they ask me, isn't that kind of crazy that so many people in the company are friends with other people in the company? How do you stay professional? What happens when there are disagreements? So there's a reason why I so believe in creating a company culture where when you come to work, the people you work with are close friends. We get our people to bring in their friends, sometimes their spouse or their partner. So we're kind of this weird type of company where many people who work for us claim their best friends also work at Mindvalley. So the question is, is this disruptive or can this in some way actually help with productivity? Now, I want to share with you three significant pieces of research that actually suggest that more companies should be creating connections and friendships at work. Now, the first piece of research came from Gallup. Gallup is this global polling institution. And Gallup asked millions of employees the following question. Do you have a best friend at work? Now, what they found was really interesting. They found people who had a best friend at work were seven times more engaged in their job. Not twice as engaged, but seven times more engaged in their job. And as we know, when you run any type of company, you want to create engagement. But it was fascinating how having a best friend at work increased that engagement by seven times. Now, the second study is even more fascinating. I was talking to Sean Aker and I'm going to, in a moment, actually show you that Skype recording of our conversation. So you can see Shawn explain this in his words. But Sean was telling me about a study where they went to companies and they divided people who worked in companies into four different groups. And these groups, these people, were divided based on how helpful they were for their co worker. Were they the type of people that was constantly optimistic, positive? Were they the type of people that others would go to when they were having a hard time? Were they empathetic? So they divided people and companies into four groups. And what they found is that the people at the top quartile, the people who were considered the best in terms of social connections, interestingly enough, had a 40% more likelihood of getting a raise. Now here's Sean explaining that study in his own words. Listen to this. It's fascinating.

This is an incredible statistic. So this is based upon some research that I was doing where it's based upon social connection, which I know we're going to talk a lot about because it's one of my favorite things. But social connection is the breadth, the depth and the meaning in your social relationships, it's actually the greatest predictor of long term happiness. So your social connection is really important. But the way that scientists normally measure it is we normally ask you, do you have a lot of social support given to you? Do you have people around you when, like if you're going through a hard time, do you have somebody you could talk to? If you're behind on work, do you have someone that will help you out? Do people initiate social engagements for you at your company? I flipped around the questions to find out who is providing social support, who is a giver to go with Adam Grant's research. And what we found was that if somebody was, if you were the type of person that people wanted to talk to when they were going through difficult times, if you had high levels of compassion, if you're initiating social engagements, if you are a positive and optimistic person, which we found in previous research, makes you magnetic, turns out if you're in the top quartile of people that provide social connection at work, you're 40% more likely to receive a promotion in the next two year period of time.

Okay, so that itself was pretty cool, right? If you're in the top 25% of people in your company that are that score highest for social connection, you're more likely by a wide margin to be getting a raise at work. But the question is, can companies somehow use this? And this is the third experiment that I want to share with you. This too comes from Sean Achor. And in this next clip, Sean is going to talk about a simple experiment he did at a large corporation in the United States. Now this experiment caused their sales to soar. It caused happiness at work to increase the number of people applying to the company to shoot up. It caused Google to fly down and see what on earth was going on at this company. But the experiment looked like this. He had people in this company start their day in a unique day. Basically the first thing they had to do when they came to work was set a timer for two minutes. And in that two minutes write a note of appreciation to another co worker. That's it. Listen to Sean tell you what happened next.

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 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 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. And he said, I thought happiness research was fluff 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. 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're 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.

So as you can see, happiness at work, being able to build greater ties with your co workers is a remarkable thing. And it's not just that it increases productivity. A famous study from Harvard called the Very Happy People Study by Ed Diener. They investigated thousands of people to try to figure out what aspect of life, of living, had the highest correlation with human happiness. Well, what they found is that the single thing that had the highest correlation to human happiness was simply the strength of your social connections. It had a 0.7 correlation. It wasn't that you lived in warm weather or your company had multiple perks and a beautiful office or that you had tons of money. It was one thing. It was the strength of your social connections that jacks up happiness. And we all know that happiness leads to greater productivity. So when you put all of this together, you can see why it's so important to create teams, companies, even schools, where these practices that unite people, that help us connect as human beings are crucial to the very DNA of how our companies operate. So if you look at this, it's mind blowing. What social connections, what friendship, what bringing a little love in the workplace can do for productivity, for your company's growth. That's why I'm so fanatical about doing this at Mindvalley. Plus, the side benefit is coming to work every day with a group of people that you care about and whom you know care about you. And it's so different from what we as kids imagine work to be like. So I encourage you to look at these studies to figure out how you can bring these into your companies or schools or organizations. Sat.