Talented employees are looking for burnout-safe workplaces

Nike and Bubble  have recently taken bold measures to prevent employee burn-out, offering their staff a week's break. They are planning ahead for what the Financial Times calls the next pandemic: employee exhaustion and mental health challenges.

In the current war for talent (almost 4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, according to the Labor Department. The most on record since the government started recording labor turnover in 2000), employee wellbeing has become one of the hot fronts to attract talent. Measuring employee emotional wellbeing not only provides critical information regarding how to improve it, but it also predicts employee turnover. In fact, when your employees emotional wellbeing declines, it is likely they will change jobs within the next 12 months. (Source: Elsevier. The differential impact of major life events on cognitive and affective wellbeing)

What is burnout?

Burnout was first described in the early 1970’s by American psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger as “a state of constant mental and physical exhaustion”.

Mental and physical exhaustion are the result of losing three things: energy, enthusiasm, and confidence. This is known as a “frenetic” type of burnout says Rachel Bostman, author and leading expert on trust.

How talented people slip down to burn-out?

In 2018, Dr Jochen Menges from the University of Cambridge published a study among 1,000 US, Uk and German workers.

“Nearly half of all employees were moderately to highly engaged in their work but also exhausted and ready to leave their organisations,”

To make things worse, the pandemic has added more to create the perfect storm. Imagine that you have had to simultaneously manage important professional and personal projects (and you feel that it has been too much for too long). At the same time, you were bombarded with worrying news, and the fear of possible economic or health turndowns was real. This situation has needed a lot of mental energy and focus.

But the good news is that there are plenty of things that we can do to attend to our wellbeing and protect ourselves from burnout.

There is no silver bullet for solving burnout. Instead try different options, evaluate, pivot and repeat!

Either we work less or we work better increasing focus and productivity while we reduce stressors

There are three main types of time-consuming distractions that prevent employees from focusing at work when they need to:

• social media: Facebook and the like

• working media: Slack and the like

• meetings: online or onsite.

Let's talk about checking news on the media in the first place. Why is it that we are all pulled towards compulsively checking our emails, likes, trending topics, and so on? We are programmed to do so. It has to do with what type of information our brain values most. In fact, our brain has not evolved much since our species appeared. Around 300.000 years ago, the survival of our ancestors, Homo Sapiens, depended on the group. As a group, we hunted and defended ourselves from enemies. How is this connected to compulsively checking media? In two ways.

Firstly, in order to belong to the group, we needed to be sure of our value to the group. And what has for many become the modern currency of social value? The likes we have. 

Secondly, in order for a group to function well, it needs a high level of trust among its members. Getting informed about who does what and with whom, so gossip and news from the group is a type of information that our brain craves for. So yes, that pulls us towards checking on our friends’ feed. 

“At our very foundation, says cognitive neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, “humans are information-seeking creatures.” (source: @discovermagazine)

Thus, the fear of missing has a high cost for our stress and productivity. But we do not realize it, because we think we are capable of multitasking. “There’s a conflict between what we want to do and what we’re actually capable of doing,” Gazzaley says. With each switch [of our attention from one task to another], there’s a cost. For example, one study found that it took 25 minutes, on average, for IT workers to resume a project after being interrupted. Besides putting a major crimp in efficiency, such juggling can lead to high levels of stress, frustration and fatigue”

What can we do? If people are going to check on their social media anyway, try giving them cues to concentrate for shorter periods of time with more breaks. Plan your meetings accordingly. The optimal time of intense cognitive work is 4 hours/day (read the whole article at @theAtlantic).

This is one way of improving how we work. But we can also try to simply work less. For example reducing the hours worked, if your industry allows you for this flexibility. 

Flexible work arrangements. Remote work and onsite work

In an article for @theatlantic, @Joe Pinsker gives the example of one of the companies that has figured out how to work less, without reducing productivity. “In 2018, Andrew Barnes approached the employees of his company, a New Zealand firm called Perpetual Guardian that manages wills, estates, and trusts, with an offer: If they could figure out how to get more done in a day, they could work one fewer day per week. In consultation with employees, the company installed lockers in which workers can voluntarily stash their phones for the day, and soundproofed meeting spaces to reduce the sound of ambient chatter. Meetings were shortened; employees started putting little flags in their pencil holders whenever they wanted to signal to coworkers that they didn’t want to be disturbed. It worked: Perpetual Guardian’s business didn’t suffer, and the four-day workweek is still in place three years later.

When employees are given a good reason to work harder, they often focus more ruthlessly on their most important tasks. Barnes found that even though weekly working hours were cut by 20 percent, employees’ time spent on nonwork websites fell by 35 percent. It also helped that employees had more time outside of work to manage the rest of their lives, so nonwork responsibilities were less likely to intrude on the workday. 

Before the pandemic, many managers were afraid of accepting remote working arrangements for their employees. They feared employees would work less time. The pandemic proved them wrong. As many employees were immediately put to work remotely, the result has been more hours worked than when at the office.

This article by @theguardian “Staff in countries including UK log on for two hours longer at home and face bigger workloads” illustrates the case.

Yes, most employees have been committed to proving that they were worthy of trust even when the boss was not “all over the place”.

Most people think about themselves to be hard workers, many think that other people do not invest themselves as much as they do. Numerous studies show the opposite, most people wish to do good and are really invested in their jobs.

If you ask yourself  if productivity has declined, this is a sensible legitimate question.  A thorough research of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries conducted by @McKinsey found that most industries can implement a certain level of remote work. On the high, we have Finance, where 70% of time can be remote work without losing productivity, and the lowest percentage of possible remote working happens to be in farming.

Finally, it is interesting to discuss what we mean by being engaged at work. Having worked in many different countries, I have found that in some countries/companies, the stick to measure your engagement is the number of hours worked, while in other countries it is the output of your work. Who do you think serves more your business? 

In order to find your perfect balance I find these two data interesting: 

• As we already mentioned, the optimal time of intense cognitive work is 4 hours/day (read the whole article at @theAtlantic)

• Time worked does not necessarily correlate with productivity (check the graph published by the WSJ)
  

The shortfall of this reflection about increasing wellness and productivity while reducing stress comes when talking about employees who earn too low salaries and so they need more hours to work. And, for them, the stress of not having enough is certainly more important than their wellbeing. 

Trust people to help you find what best work for them

There is a final piece of advice, coming from research. John P. Kotter, award winning business and management thought leader, shares this as one of his clearest findings: “successful change efforts have early engagement and support from a broad, diverse employee base”. 

Humans fight back change when it comes from an external force, while they have a go-for-it attitude when they have come up with their own plan.  

If you find this hard to believe, watch this humorous enlightening video on how an  insane 7-circle roundabout actually works, that I discovered thanks to self-management and future of work expert, Doug Kirkpatrick.

 As John P. Kotter mentioned in HBR last August, the idea that “people place a disproportionately high value on things they helped create, often referred to as the Ikea effect…”. 

Finally, to close the loop on increasing well being and decreasing burn-out, there is another powerful reason why you will succeed if you involve your workforce on this journey. Why? Because lack of control over how one works is in itself a factor of burn-out that psychologists call “worn out”.

So, whether you decide to find a way for people to work less time, work better or both, the key for your organization to succeed is that you involve your staff in deciding what works for them and that you find different ways to acknowledge their efforts.

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About the author.

Silvia Garcia is a leading expert in how positive and negative emotions influence consumer and employee decisions. She is Coca-Cola`s former Marketing and Happiness Institute Global Director. Request a keynote, coaching or consulting here!

The most important factor to succeed in a Merger and Acquisition

2020 will be a year high on mergers and acquisitions (Deloitte, The state of the deal: M&A trends 2020). 83% of them will fail (Forbes). Why? Most executives underestimate the importance of the clash between two different company cultures, and therefore they will not assess each culture's DNA and prepare a strategic plan for merging those cultures into a new one. Commonly, every employee will continue working with their own company's unwritten rules and will distrust any new colleague taking decisions differently based on their different company culture.

We could argue that c-executives are oblivious to the forces behind their employee's behavior. However, they are not, as 95% of executives (McKinsey & Company, April 2019) describe the cultural fit to be critical to the success of integrating merged or acquired organizations—yet a full 25% of these leaders cite a lack of cultural cohesion and alignment as the primary reason for failure.

To avoid entering the ranks of the 83% who fail their M&A, leaders need to understand the key similarities and differences between the two organizations’ cultures.

Then, they need the right plans to create proven conditions for both cultures to integrate successfully.

If employees don't trust each other, they will not collaborate nor put their efforts into succeeding the integration. Assessing each companies' culture DNA with a scientific measurement offers insights into the evolution of every key element and will successfully detect engagement and attrition trends. 

In times of change, employees are likely to feel a sense of uncertainty about their long-term place in the organization. This fires their brain's center of fear, robbing their energy and resources to access brain areas in charge of complex decision making. As a result, employees react in a defensive mode, seeing those coming from a different culture as potential enemies, which in turn hinders the possibilities of collaborating and working towards business results. Assessing both cultures to see commonalities and differences, and putting in place the right plans to make both cultures blend successfully is key to M&A success.

Silvia Garcia, CEO

sg@feellogic.com

40% of Happiness depends on our decisions. Looking at the glass at half empty or half full is not the question. The glass is refillable!

Do you tend to see the glass as half full or as half empty?
In any case, you are missing the point ;-)

I was recently honored to give a keynote speech on happiness, during the Global Wellness Summit, Florida, 2017. 
The idea that I shared with the audience is that happiness can be cultivated and grown.

Happiness, love, meaning, purpose, relationships, all these matters to everyone. Even more, renowned doctors and researchers have proved that they help us live longer and live better. 
So the question is, is happiness for all? Or just for those born with an aptitude for it? Is happiness learned and shaped by your family values or your childhood? Is there something we can do to grow happiness?

We all know some people that tend to see the glass as half-empty, people that no matter the good things that happen to them in life, always seem to find a sign that things will, in the end, turn out for the worse. A friend of mine preaches: “Always expect the worse, you will never be disappointed.”

We all know optimists and pessimists, and conventional knowledge says they were born like that or maybe, their family reared them to see the world like that.
So let us try to see if our happiness is determined by our genes or our education. Let's explore if happiness is determined by nature or nurture.

The most famous research to decide whether happiness is in our genes is known as the Minnesota Twins Study (1979, Bouchard).
The researchers achieved to find and gather more than 60 pairs of identical twins (monozygotic) who had been separated when they were three weeks old, and who had been reared apart in adoptive families. 
Identical twins happen to have identical genetic makeup. Some of these twins were raised in the same State, by families with similar background and values, others were raised in different countries.
The researchers wanted to see if twins that shared 100% of the genetic information could have different levels of happiness, intelligence, sociability and other personality traits; or if these traits were determined by upbringing. 

The different twins were reunited by Bouchard, Likken, and Tellegen, the researchers, when those twins were in their 40s. Before that meeting, the participants did not know of the existence of a co-bother or co-sister.
Let me take the example of two twins who came to the convention organized by the researchers to exemplify some similarities that the researchers found.
James Lewis and James Springer were one of the couples of twins of the study. None knew about the existence of the other. Both James had married to a Linda, both James had got divorced from a Linda and had got married to a Betty. Both James had had a dog, and both had called his dog Toy. 

These coincidences kept happening with many participants. A couple of twin women, came to the meeting wearing exactly the same cloths. 

Leaving aside these mystical coincidences, the researchers looked into their psychological measurements and found significant similarities in personality traits and intelligence.
The researchers concluded: 
“ It may be that trying to be happier is like trying to be taller, and is therefore counterproductive” Lykken and Tellegen
This conclusion was largely published by media, including titles like the NYT.

Popular media, talked about it saying that trying to change your happiness will just get you frustrated.

In a witty class at Harvard University, professor Tal Ben Shahar explains that people have two different reactions to this statement.
People excited about the self-improvement trend, but disappointed with the "recipes" of self-help books, tend to be relieved. They feel deceived by a flourishing industry that tells us happiness is just thinking positive, doing this or that, and basically, if you are not happier is all your fault. Therefore for these people, it is a relief to learn that happiness does not depend on oneself. 
If the research is right, then it means that if we want to change our level of happiness, we need to change our biology, our genes.

There is another reaction, different to relief, and that is a reaction of resignation, of feeling hopeless and helpless. 

Was the study right? We now know that the study was only “partially” right.
The problem with the study is that it took the average twins' observations and extrapolated them to the whole. 
If we look at the average man and women, we conclude that it is impossible to survive in ice water more than 15 min. So we could infer that it is therefore impossible to survive in ice water. But what if we looked at Win Hof, a man that is capable of surviving in ice water 1 hour, 13 minutes and 48 seconds?! The question would no longer be if we can survive in cold water; but how can we learn to survive in cold water.
The problem with the average is that is just that, an average that does not help us learn from those who master the art of living longer and better lives. “A friend of mine, a sociologist, went to one isolated village in France to study longevity. He met the oldest woman in the village, and she asked him what he was looking for. My friend told the old lady he wanted to know what was the average percentage of deaths per age group in the village. The woman, after thinking said, well, in all age groups of this village the average is one death per person!

The researchers of the Minnesota Twin Study looking closely into the twins' results again and saw there were also twins that had opposite results regarding happiness, despite identical genes and similar circumstances.

One of the researchers David Lykken in an interview to the Times magazine said: "I made a dumbed statement in the original article. It is clear that we can change our happiness levels widely - up or down.”

The question then is no longer “is it possible to change?” but instead “how it is possible to change, and how much we can change our happiness?”

During ten years, I have the chance to learn from some of the most amazing and prestigious researchers of our time. One of them, Sonya Lyubomirsky concluded that happiness depends 50% on our genes; and 10% on our circumstances.
The other 40% depends on our choices. All these percentages are an overage, so, as you know, that they might be higher or lower for some people. In all cases, when you are mindful of your choices, it can have a significant impact on your happiness.

Do I mean by that, that to maximise our 40% influence on happiness we need to become optimists?  My answer is no. Being optimistic and positive all the time is not the solution. The solution is not looking at the glass half-full. Sugarcoating the reality is not a good strategy.
As some humorists put it: “when you are in a tunnel, the pessimistic looks at the rails, the optimistic looks at the light at the end of the tunnel, and the realistic looks at the train coming.”
Things do not happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best of things that happen. The solution is then not looking at the glass as half-full, but refilling the glass.

Let me tell you some of the things researchers have proved to increase happiness in your life or just at work:
* Purpose: Find things that are meaningful to you, not those defined by external forces (power, money...). Some have the chance to be able to find a meaningful job; others not, but they can still find ways to do their job in a more meaningful way. Finally, some might engage in meaningful activities outside of work, as long as they can have some balance in their life. And this takes us to the next component of happiness: balance.
* Balance: Do you cultivate things that you care about (health, friendship, work, family)? Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their biggest regrets. Among the top 5, we find “I wished I had worked less and I wished I had stayed in touch with my friends.” We have choices to make regarding the time we spend on the things that matter to us. And even when we cannot always devote the time we wish,  we can always choose the simplest way of giving quality time. The secret to this is to be present when we are doing something.
* Agency: it means freedom to choose our (re)actions. We cannot always control the circumstances, but we can always do something about them. Victor Frankl wrote in "A man’s in search of meaning" that even in the worst situations when human beings are deprived of the basic needs and freedoms, we can always decide of our reactions. In his own words:  “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.”
*Accepting diversity: Being tolerant and compassionate with others' choices, values, and with ourselves. The hardest critic and worst enemy we sometimes have is our own judgment. Be kind and compassionate with others and with yourself.
* Recognition: one of the most powerful fuels of human nature. A caveat is that many parents think giving positive recognition to their children will make them happier and smarter. There is a whole new research field on how and when to provide positive feedback. To be transformational, positive feedback should not be finding a positive thing to highlight no matter the outcome. Positive feedback needs to be saved for praising the effort of someone confronted with a real challenge for them. It is better to reinforce and appreciate the effort that the outcome. Praising the outcomes seems to deter children from trying challenges if they are not sure to succeed while praising the efforts encourage children to go beyond their comfort zone.
* Learning: as opposed to popular belief, we are not born with a certain number of neurons that irreversibly start to die at a certain age. Instead, our brains are plastic, that means that we can help neurons (re)connect, we can light them on. Learning gives us pleasure, reinforces our self-esteem, and gives a sense of purpose. Learning something every day is a pillar of happiness. And looking at the success of Ted talks, it looks like it works.
* Relatedness: The longest study on happiness, (Harvard) found that the most important ingredient for happiness is having intimate relationships.
* Experiences: having more positive than negative experiences counts for our happiness. But the most common mistake is thinking that we shall try to avoid experiencing negative emotions.
There are two kinds of people who do not experience negative emotions like envy, anger, jealousy...., the psychopaths and the dead!
We need to give ourselves permission to be human, a "license to exist" experiencing the good and the bad.
On the other hand, we also need to train better in appreciating and savoring the positive experiences of our everyday life.
We do not savor what we take for granted. We appreciate health when we are ill; we appreciate the sun, when it rains, we sometimes appreciate people when they are no longer among us. Do we need to wait for something extraordinary to happen, so we appreciate the treasures of life?

Finally, I wanted to tell you that a secret of happiness is to keep innovating and surprising yourself. Luring happiness is like luring love. You need to invest yourself in keeping the interest, in surprising the other. Is the small novel things in our day to day that create excitement. Exotic creates erotic. It is as valid for couples, as researched sociologist Daryl Bem, as it is for happiness.

Happiness fuels success: Harvard says Face to Face requests get 34 times more "YES" than emails

If you want to be more successful, invest in face-to-face relationships versus email.
Harvard recently proved that participants had 34 more chances of attaining their objective when they made their request face-to-face rather than when they sent an email. Curiously, or not that much, before the experiment, participants thought that email would be the best way of communicating allowing them to be able to convince with a well-thought argumentation.

Read the Harvard article here

Are you also privileging email versus face-to-face communication? It might be because of a social belief that ignores the science of happiness and, instead of helping you, is drawing your chances to sell your arguments. Let me explain why.

Our society values rationality over emotions. It is so since Descartes, a French mathematician, and philosopher of the 17th century, formulated the "Cartesian method" that praised the mind as the solution for knowing the truth and that can be summarized in his famous quote "I think, therefore I am."  Although this approach has enormous benefits, believing that individuals are rational beings and that we take decisions based on facts can prove us all wrong.  Rafael Nadal won Roland Garros despite coming back from injuries and being technically over the age where tennis men retire. You probably dated this man or girl that your mother gave you reasons not to. You might even be married to him/her!

When we use or pretend that others take decisions solely based on rational criteria, we are scientifically wrong; Neuroscience has discovered that our mind uses both emotions and real observations to take a decision. If we persist on using solely rational argumentation, we will not be using our full potential of persuasion, forgetting that emotions also play a critical role in decision making.  We should say: "I feel and think, therefore I am."

Now, coming back to the Harvard research. How do you think we can achieve to arise more positive emotions to influence others: by email or face-to-face? 
Face-to-face interviews offer the perfect moment for anyone to send our interlocutor a lot of emotional information. How friendly we are, how much we care for them, how truthful we are, and much other relevant information. Our interlocutor will use, aware or unaware of it, all these emotions together with more rational information, to decide whether to say yes or no to our request.

So next time you want to harvest a YES from someone, think of meeting face to face and be mindful of the whole potential of the positive emotions partnering with your thinking!

The science of happiness has proven that those individuals who are happier are also more successful. It is not that they are successful and that makes them happy. It is because they are happy that they are more successful.

I created Feel:)Logic to help companies measure happiness, and set the conditions for their employees to thrive. Within six months, they achieve higher customer satisfaction, employee engagement, retention and, get better bottom line results.