44: {Interview} The Importance of Workplace Happiness with Jessica Weiss

Have you ever wondered why happiness in the workplace matters? It matters because it has a rippling effect on recruiting, retention, company culture, productivity, profitability, sales  and overall well being of a company's health. Healthy companies have high preforming teams, high preforming profits and low turnover. In this episode, Jessica Weiss and I unpack why it is so important to prioritize happiness in the workplace and some actionable items to do so. 

Jessica Weiss has spent the last 15 years doing endless research, speaking to thousands of people, all about happiness.

Jessica is a speaker and consultant who teaches businesses how to find more happiness, fulfillment, and satisfaction at work. With 15 years of experience working with global brands like Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and American Express, Jessica is a trusted source for those who are searching for tangible, research-based strategies to create happier workers.

Jessica is a TEDx speaker and organizational leadership expert who uses her humor and "tell-it-like-it-is" style to teach companies across the country why work can and should be a source of happiness, and how to create spaces where people love to work.

Jessica is an expert in leadership, culture and organizational development who understands what it really takes to unlock engagement. She graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and has an MBA from Columbia University.

You can find more on Jessica HERE

This is an episode you do not want to miss! 

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Transcript

Caroline (00:01.57)
Today I have Jessica Weiss with me. Jessica is a happiness expert, TEDx speaker, executive coach and chief member. So welcome, Jessica.

Jessica Weiss (00:11.102)
Thank you so much.

Caroline (00:13.794)
So I'd love to hear your story of exactly how you got into the workplace happiness space.

Jessica Weiss (00:21.522)
Well, it's interesting.

It sort of happened in two different tracks. So on a very personal level, I have always been super interested in everything having to do with happiness, right? It's just something that I would always watch, read, learn. It's just something that was always just personally, like very interesting to me. And then what started to happen was, after business school, I worked as a consultant. And the work that I did in consulting was around organizational design and culture, and that involved a lot of coaching.

of C-suite individuals and teams and sort of as we peeled back the layers in those coaching sessions

we would always get to this place where people would say, I wanna do more of that kind of work. That's the work that really makes me happy. How do we do more of that? How do we design that feeling more into my team or into my day? And when people started saying that to me time and time again, I was like, oh my gosh, there's something here with happiness at work and people wanting more satisfaction and fulfillment from what they do every day. And that coupled with my personal kind of obsession with happiness,

landed me in this space that I created out of my own interests. So it goes in a million directions depending upon the clients that I work with, right? So it could be very much around helping people feel better about their work and then it can be super granular around what are specific things that frameworks that we can institute into our team to actually start to achieve more happiness.

Caroline (01:58.05)
So I feel like it's almost even a double-edged sword. Everyone's responsible for their own happiness. But also, how can leaders foster an environment that creates more happiness?

Jessica Weiss (02:11.25)
So this is one of those things where we need to be deliberate and intentional about it.

So it's not going to happen by accident. That's not to say that it takes a huge amount of work. And it's not necessarily outside what maybe you're doing now. But maybe you need to add a bit more of intentionality behind it. But there needs to be some forethought and some strategy around creating a culture of happiness, right? So I think the most important place to start and the easiest place to start. And if you listen to any of my stuff, I talk about this constantly.

But it's this idea of connection, right? It's this idea that we have human connection at work, in our lives, and at work. And I think that at work, people kind of disregard this idea that you need to actually have friendships at work. Friendship, connection, all of that wonderful stuff is the easiest way to start to achieve happiness at work, the quickest way to start to achieve happiness at work, and the most effective way

at work. So I think it falls to the leaders and the organizations as a whole to kind of start to create an environment that supports that. So it's not about, you know, silly, nonsensical things like, you know,

you know, like those team outings where you do like fake trust falls or whatever. I'm just using that as like a for instance. So it's not about that. It's about really generally and genuinely fostering the connection between your team members, having people get to know each other, modeling that behavior. But that is the easiest and most effective place to start.

Caroline (03:53.822)
I love that you brought up the connection piece because I agree with you. I think that is so, so important. So how can a leader, an executive member, how do they know if their employees feel connected or not?

Jessica Weiss (04:10.098)
Well, I don't know that...

I don't know that there's like a litmus test that they can do, but I think that you can certainly feel when a team is humming, when a team is connected, you can feel that chemistry, right? It's almost like it's the same chemistry that you have in a friendship. It's the same chemistry that you have in a relationship, right? It's very clear when it's there and when it's not there, it's equally as clear. So I don't think that there's a test that you can do, but I certainly think that you can feel it in the air. You can feel it in the

collaboration. You can feel it even in the way that people treat and respect one another, even in the way that they disagree with one another, right? Because if they're mutually respecting each other and genuinely like each other, they can disagree in a really effective way, which is going to produce much better work in the end.

Caroline (05:02.274)
So why is it important for companies to create a place that people actually wanna work?

Jessica Weiss (05:07.538)
Yeah, right.

That's the big question. And you know, a lot of times people, I get met with a good amount of resistance, like happiness at work, why is this my responsibility? Like that's your responsibility. You come to work to work. Like it's not my responsibility to make you happy. But there's been countless studies, like happiness is sort of that competitive edge that puts you ahead of all the other organizations. And there have been, like the research backs this up time and time again. And my favorite study to talk about

Jessica Weiss (05:40.488)
that looked at the S&P 500 and then looked at those companies that reported it was like a study that was with indeed.com and it looked at the companies that reported higher levels of happiness through engagement surveys and specific questions that they asked and those companies that had higher levels of happiness higher levels of satisfaction outperformed the S&P by something like 13% so why do you want to have happiness at work well if you want to have more

a great place to start.

Caroline (06:13.054)
And that is key. That is why we were working. This is not a nonprofit.

Jessica Weiss (06:14.718)
Right? Exactly.

Caroline (06:19.97)
So what happens when leaders neglect this topic or like you just mentioned, have the mentality of that's their problem, that's on them, it's not on me. I mean, what happens.

Jessica Weiss (06:29.906)
Well, that's when you start to see disengagement. That's when you start to see absenteeism. That's when you start to see burnout. That's when you start to see mistakes being made. That's when you start to see, you know, you don't get like internal referrals that someone on your team has now referred someone else to come work for you, right? You see it in a million places. You see it in a work product. You see it from a talent retention point of view. You see it from a recruiting point of view. I mean, it comes up.

It comes up in customer service. I mean, it comes up in sales. You'll see it everywhere. It'll rear its ugly head in different ways, but you will see it pop up in potentially every area of your organization.

Caroline (07:15.57)
If you've got an unhappy employee on your hands, what do you suggest? I mean, do you work with that person as an employee, as a coach and give them a chance to turn around because maybe it's something situational going on. You know, we're all human beings. We all have things happen. Or do you say, you know, terminate the employee and let's find somebody new?

Jessica Weiss (07:25.662)
Sure. Yeah, yeah. Of course.

Jessica Weiss (07:37.778)
Yeah, so one of my basic tenants around happiness at work is that it begins with you, right? You have autonomy and agency over your ability to have satisfaction at work. So as much as I say that organizations and leaders have a huge role to play, and they do,

But the story begins with you. So certainly, if it's circumstantial, if there's something going on, this goes back to that thing that we just talked about at the beginning of the conversation, right? If you're genuinely connected as a manager to your team member, you'll know if something's going on. You'll understand that there's a life situation that's happening. So I think that it's personal responsibility on the part

part of the employee, for lack of a better word, and I think it's personal responsibility on the part of the manager to know, right, to know what's going on and to help people through it 100%.

Caroline (08:38.83)
So you touched on happiness, having tentacles into different departments, recruiting, retention, sales. What would you say are the top five benefits of having happy employees? I mean, like in addition to profits, how else are they impacting company culture or things like that?

Jessica Weiss (08:57.256)
Right.

Right, okay, so we can talk talent retention and talent recruiting. So when somebody's happy at work or they're satisfied with their job, they are something like 12 times more likely to recommend their organization to somebody else, even if they no longer work at that organization anymore. So right there, it goes to this idea around reputation and talent and recruiting. It also shows up in productivity.

So when people are engaged with their work, there's something that happens called intrinsic motivation, right? We've got extrinsic motivation, which is like those carrots and sticks like oh, I'm gonna work really hard if you're a salesperson I'm gonna work really hard. I'm gonna meet my quota. I'm gonna hit my bonus Those are all extrinsic forms of motivation. They work they work well, but what works even better is Intrinsic motivation. So when people are satisfied and they're enjoying their work, they're that much more motivated and they're

for productive in what they do, right? The other place it shows up is in sickness, right? In absenteeism. I mean, when somebody is suffering in any kind of way, they're not gonna come, even if they show up at work, they're not gonna be their 100% best self. So those are some, did I answer five? I think I might have hit on three. But those are some big ones that, where it will show up for sure.

Caroline (10:24.738)
How do habits affect happiness?

Jessica Weiss (10:28.838)
So habits are the whole thing. And that's what I talk about all the time. Habits, you know, we all think that happiness is kind of like this very...

ephemeral kind of thing. Some people are lucky to feel happy or like you wake up in a good mood so you're happy. And then people say things like happiness is a choice and I actually disagree with that. I mean I think that there are certain things that we can do that affects our mindset and the way that we approach life but happiness isn't a choice. It's not about choosing to be happy or choosing to be unhappy. So what we know about happiness is the brain is this very primal

you know structure and really what the brain is hardwired for is survival basically. Happiness apparently is not part of survival, right? You don't need to be happy to survive, right? There's flight or flight. There's you know, all of those kinds of things. There's you know, reproduction, you know, continuing on with the species all these very basic things. That's what our brain is hardwired for. So when it comes to happiness our brain actually does like the wrong things when it comes

comes to happiness. We intuitively think we know, but we don't know. So the habits goes back to the science and the research and we now have decades of research around the science of happiness and that is where habits come in. Because habits are not you know one day on one day off. Habits is like this continual constant everyday toolkit that you can fall back on even when you're in a bad

happiness is not about and the kind of happiness that I'm talking about is not like good mood happiness it's like this very deep-seated long-term sustained happiness that even if you have some kind of negative emotion that doesn't mean that you're not satisfied with your with your life but the habits are the toolkit that you can go back to and be like okay wait if I just kind of dig in here I can start to generate a little bit more happiness in my life so the habits are the whole thing

Caroline (12:37.006)
So let's unpack the habits more. What habits are go-tos for you that you teach and that you speak about?

Jessica Weiss (12:47.942)
So the first one that I talk about is this idea that and that we have this like negativity bias, right? We're all very hardwired to kind of take the negative and internalize it and really kind of have that sit with us and last for a really long time. So the first habit I say that people need to do and it's really easy and it works really, really quickly is this idea of a joy journal. So that's at the end of the day, I want you to write down three things

that day and why.

So, and it doesn't need to be like really, you know, deep things. It can be like my meeting was canceled and I had an hour of free time, you know? Like that totally works. So what that does is that's a really effective tool on shifting your mindset. Because now what you're doing is you're going through the day thinking about things that are going to bring me joy, right? You're noticing it. It's like when, you know, when someone's pregnant, you look around, everybody's pregnant, right? When you wanna buy a new car

or you bought a new car and you buy like a white car, you're like, God, every car on the road is white, right? It's what you draw your attention to is what is going to have a huge impact on your brain. So the first one I say is this idea of a joy journal. It takes about two weeks to take hold and it is one of the most effective tools on kind of shifting mindset. That's the first one. In terms of happiness at work, I...

tell people, you know, I think that...

Jessica Weiss (14:20.754)
For everyone who's a striver, who wants to do really well, who's highly ambitious, we always think about all the stuff that we need to get better at, right? It's always like, oh, I gotta fix all these weaknesses. If I fix my weaknesses, then I'll start to really do a better job. And the truth is we need to shift that perspective, and you need to lean into the work that you do well. So that habit is understanding what your strengths are, right? And working that into your job,

every single day. So it's a bit of intentionality about one, understanding what your strengths are, and then two, doing that work every single day. So if you can start to incorporate those two habits like the Joy Journal and

this idea of leaning into your strengths and incorporating that into your work every day. Forget about knowing your strengths. That's just one part of the equation. Now you need to figure out how to do it every single day. Sometimes that takes a little bit of creativity, but if you can work those two habits, both on a personal and on a work day, you can really start to generate more happiness in your life.

Caroline (15:33.794)
I feel like happiness translates both into your personal and professional life. Do you agree or disagree with that?

Jessica Weiss (15:42.918)
I think that it's like a two way street, right? If you have happiness in your.

personal life that cascades into your professional life and if you have happiness in your professional life that satisfaction most definitely Cascades into your personal life, right? So you can be super happy at home and really happy with your friends and your family and everything like that But if you are going into work every single day and you are miserable that is going to bleed into your general levels of happiness so that's why I

an important piece of the puzzle that needs to be groomed and grown and watered, you know, because all of that spills over into your entire life. Absolutely.

Caroline (16:32.258)
So as we wrap up, how can our listeners find you?

Jessica Weiss (16:35.742)
So how can you find me? So I'm certainly on LinkedIn. So everyone, I would love to be connected with you on LinkedIn. Excuse me. My website is jessicaweiss.com. So that's easy. And then on Instagram, I am the Jessica Weiss. So that's, if you can, one of those three places you can certainly get, you can find me.

Caroline (16:57.73)
Thanks, Jessica.

Jessica Weiss (16:59.111)
My pleasure.