As we continue to move through extremely troubled and confusing times, I decided it would be good to have an episode about happiness. My guest this week is Nic Marks, a statistician who specialises in happiness and well being. In our conversation, we talk about the importance of happiness at work and how you can measure it. Nic also shares a lot of practical advice on how leaders can help improve the happiness of their teams in our current challenging times.
In the interview, we discuss:
- What does happiness actual mean
- The benefits of happiness at work
- Applying statistical thinking to measure happiness
- What can leaders be doing in the current crisis to improve the happiness of their teams
- The five main drivers of happiness at work
- Happiness in the recruiting process
- The future of happiness
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
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Matt Alder [00:01:11]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 252 of the Recruiting Future podcast. As we continue to move through extremely troubled and confusing times, I decided it would be good to have an episode about happiness. My guest this week is Nic Marks, a statistician who specialises in happiness and well being. In our conversation we talk about the importance of happiness at work and how you can measure it. Nic also shares a lot of practical advice on how leaders can improve the happiness of their teams in our current challenging times. Enjoy the interview. Hi Nic and welcome to the podcast. An absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do?
Nic Marks [00:02:01]:
Yeah. I’m Nic Marks. I’m a statistician by trade, though I also trained as a psychotherapist when I was young. So I have this kind of odd mixture between sort of hard analytical skills and soft people skills. And I most of my work has been about how you measure and improve people’s wellbeing and latterly, their happiness. Originally I worked in public policy, so I worked with the Blair and Cameron governments in the UK about how they measured wellbeing. But in the last eight years, seven, eight years, I’ve been working about work and about how businesses can think about the wellbeing and happiness of their employees, how they can measure and improve it.
Matt Alder [00:02:41]:
So how do you go from being a statistician to specializing in happiness? How are those two things linked?
Nic Marks [00:02:46]:
I was always a very applied statistician, so I was interested in how, you know, like public health statistics and things like that. At university I was interested in systems thinking and about how you could model systems and how you could try and improve them. So I was always very applied statistician. But as I said, I also trained as a therapist, which is kind of my quirky side. When I was young, but over the years they sort of became integrated and I started to realize that there were ways of measuring people’s experience of life instead of their standard of living. And, and that just sort of took me on a sort of journey that moved me from being a quality of life statistician into a well being and happiness one. And really the journey was that people like those statistics. In a sense, you go for ideas that resonate with people. And when I was working in the think tank world and we were putting out reports on well being, they became very popular. And part of that reason was I think that wellbeing was very nebulous as an idea and we were putting hard statistics to it and saying, look, if government did this, it would improve well being. And here’s the evidence. So that’s sort of, kind of how it happened. So it’s part of partly my personal interest. I’m, I’m a very people person and I kind of think that at the end of the day it’s about experience of life that matters. So, so I wanted to measure it.
Matt Alder [00:04:02]:
We can go into more detail about how you measure it in a second, but I want to ask a question that as I, as I think about it, it seems like a really obvious thing to say, but. But how important is happiness?
Nic Marks [00:04:14]:
You can get very philosophical about this and in some ways I think it’s the stuff of life in that the way that I use the word happiness is that it’s about people’s lives going well. I sometimes say it’s feeling good and doing well. There’s a functional element to it in a sense that there’s the feeling of happiness, but there’s a sort of happiness in knowing that you can cope. And so when you feel sort of, you’re confident and your abilities are good, you feel like you can deal with most situations, of course, not every situation, but you feel good in world. And I think in the end, isn’t that what it’s about? I mean, it’s positive mental health, if you want to think of it in that way. And so for me it’s very important. And of course, philosophers have argued for millennia about exactly what it is. And there’s a sort of big split in the sort of debate about whether it’s about pleasure or meaning. I tend to be in the camp. It’s both that if you have a pleasant life without meaning, you tend to sort of feel it’s not worthwhile or, you know, you go off the rails and get very hedonic. And if you have meaning with no pleasure. You’re very dry. And I think it’s both. I think the best life is when you, when you, when you feel there’s pleasures and meaning. So you can get very complicated in it, but ultimately it’s people’s lives going well is how I think of it.
Matt Alder [00:05:36]:
And what about happiness in the workplace? Because it’s, it’s something that people talk about all the time. There’s huge amounts of content out there about the importance of happy employees and all those, all those kind of things. What’s your, what’s your take on that?
Nic Marks [00:05:48]:
So at a very sort of broad level that in a sense that happiness is when things are going well and people feel good, then there’s masses of evidence that happier employees are better employees, they’re better colleagues. You know, you don’t really want to be a colleague with someone that’s miserable or drain or angry. You know, they’re more loyal, they stay longer because obviously eliminates a big reason why we leave a job. You know, we leave when we’re unhappy. They also more productive and particularly more creative that when people feel good. You know, Amy Edmondson will talk about psychological safety and others will talk about feeling that your manager is looking after you and supporting you, that those people are much more creative if you can fail, if you can have new ideas. So when people feel confident and happy, those things are more likely to happen. And so happy employees are great from that perspective. But then there’s a problem people get into with sort of happiness at work is that there’s an image of it. It’s sort of ping pong and beer or snook or, you know, this is playful. And there is an element of happiness which is very playful and laughter and enjoyment, but it’s not all of happiness. It’s not all. Happiness is really a sort of catch all world for all positive emotions, from sort of quite quiet ones like contentment to enjoyment, but also to sort of curiosity and interest and into sort of ones which help us reach for bigger goals, like sort of awe and wonder and inspiration. And that whole array, I think is what we need in our teams. And so there should be some time for laughter. Laughter is the way that us humans bond, creates trust between people when you can share a joke and you can enjoy yourselves. But it’s probably only 5, 10% of the day you want a lot of the day which is about people focused on their tasks. And so in the sense that happiness is that array of positive emotions, then it’s hugely, hugely functional. But if it’s just purely one of them. Then there are some negative side effects of that.
Matt Alder [00:07:52]:
You talked about your time working in public policy and applying statistical thinking to well being. How can people measure happiness in the workplace?
Nic Marks [00:08:02]:
There are a few ways that psychologists and statisticians measure happiness. So one of them is that they will observe people and see how much they smile or something like that. Another way is that they will ask them questions in surveys to reflect on their experience. And even within the way of sort of surveying, there are different techniques of it. One is that you go for sort of an overall measure which is sort of how happy are you generally in life? Sort of thing. And then another, which is the one that I favor, which is that you cut life up into chunks of time. So I ask people in the work that we do, like, how happy were you at work this week? And what I like about that is it gives you, it allows you, allows for the space that people’s experience of work ebbs and flows. You know, we have good weeks, we have bad weeks. And really the idea of having a good job is that you have more good weeks than bad weeks. And so in that sense I like time bounding it that you sort of, it’s strictly speaking called episodal measurement of happiness. And then you get a timeline which moves very quickly, which you know is very, very helpful in a fast moving world. You know, like we have at the.
Matt Alder [00:09:16]:
Moment talking about the world we’re living in at the moment. Many of us have never seen more confusing and uncertain times as we’re, as we’re currently living, living, living through in 2020. And work is very disrupted. People are working from, from home. Employers are kind of restructuring the way that their, their businesses work. Happiness has obviously never been, never been more important perhaps than it is than it is right now. What can, what can leaders be be doing to here?
Nic Marks [00:09:46]:
I’m with you. That I think that people’s happiness, their positive experience at work is never more important. That you know, it’s very disorientated. A lot of people will be working from home for the first time or suddenly managing a remote team for the first time. And there’s so much communication that goes on in an office environment or an environment where you work together, you know, in physical proximity that now with our so called social distancing, which is an expression I hate, I think it should be physical distance because I don’t think we should stop being social. But you know, but we now we have to be physically different. There’s a lot of nuance that gets lost. You know, if you just communicate by email or instant messaging, you know, team Slack, whatever it is, you use that whole tone to how we speak to each other, the pace, even, you know, when we pace our words differently, they come across differently and that’s all lost. So there’s so much more opportunity to miscommunicate when you’re not in the same room. So I think that you have to go absolutely a long way to furthering the way that you communicate with each other and that, you know, the connection between people is very critical. I mean, the good thing at the moment is that there will be a whole sort of bedrock trust in teams. Well, hopefully there will be. I guess that it would also exaggerate distrust in teams by moving apart. But if you assume that you had trust in your team, that will still be there. People know each other because they work together closely, but just because they’re distant for a few weeks, it won’t matter. But the miscommunications one. So I mean, I think that using video conferencing is really great because you can still see people. But the main thing is communicating very, very regularly. Probably teams should be meeting every day and talking and there should be some space in that for just chit chat in the sense there’s so much sort of water cooler talk that goes on in organizations and you don’t want to lose that entirely because that’s the human relationship between people. Right now my team, we all meet at 9am on a Zoom and we just for the first 10, 15 minutes, just chat. Actually, you know, what you do last night and do you see anything on Netflix, whatever you’re watching or, you know, people have got their own personal stories about what their stresses are at the moment. You know, I’ve got some of my team with very young children at home. I myself had an, you know, my mother’s quite elderly, I guess I don’t think it was elderly, but she is, she’s 85. You know, she’s not infirm, but you know, we had to move her. So everyone’s got their stresses at the moment. I think it’s really important to keep that humanity going. But you know, then on top of that there’s, you know, actually helping people focus on their work. You know, people might not have been used to working from home, so they haven’t got a routine for their, for their way of working at home. They might not have a workstation that really works. So, you know, there are all those technical things about their time boundaries, about their physical you know, their materials. I think organizations that I’ve spoken to in the last couple of weeks have got the equipment stuff sorted. I don’t think they’ve even started to think about the culture and morale element of it. And I think that is going to survive fine for a few weeks and then it has the potential to tank if we’re not careful.
Matt Alder [00:13:11]:
Now, I know that you have a kind of a wellbeing framework that can kind of really help people with their happiness and well being. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
Nic Marks [00:13:21]:
Yeah. So for looking after your teams at work, we say there’s really five main drivers of happiness at work, which is based on a lot of research I’ve done over the last eight years, doing lots of public surveys, particularly with Robert Half, actually the recruitment agency. We did a big piece of work with them where we surveyed. I’m now forgetting the exact number, but I think it was 22,000 people globally, certainly in the 20 thousands. And basically what we find is there are five big things. And the first one is connect, which is relationships, which is what I was kind of talking about then, which is that they’re the bedrock of any good team experience. The second one is be fair, which is that people, you know, really respond well to be treated with respect, being appreciated, being talked to honestly in this environment. You know, lots of organizations are struggling, need to have honest, adult conversations with people. People’s work life balance is in there too, in the beefair. The third one is to empower. Daniel Pink would call this autonomy, but it’s about people being able to be themselves, use their strengths, shape and influence their work, you know, the fourth one is to challenge people, which is that it’s a misunderstanding to think that people are happy to sort of slack. Actually. People really like stretch, like learning new things. What they want really is, you know, good feedback so they can learn and so that they feel that there’s a good balance between their skills and the challenges they face. You know, where just a little bit of stretch is quite exciting. Too much stretch is stressful, of course. And then fifth one is to inspire, which is that people really respond well if they feel their work’s meaningful, they feel part of a bigger picture. So right now, in this context, I think people want to be part of the solution to what’s going on here in the border virus epidemic, or pandemic, I think we have to call it now. So what’s your organization doing about that? How’s it helping people, you know, is part of that? I think so it’s really those five things of connect, be fair, empower, challenge, inspire and thinking how you can, you know, in your leadership of a team or an organization, how can you, how can you do that?
Matt Alder [00:15:39]:
And are you seeing any examples of companies doing, doing that well at the moment?
Nic Marks [00:15:45]:
Yes, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve got clients we’re working with who have both a hospitality and a, and a manufacturing side. And because their hospitality side has effectively shut down, people aren’t going, but their production side is up because their foodstuffs, they’ve taken their employees from their hospitality side and immediately reallocated them to production jobs where they can do. And so, you know, you’re seeing a lot of flexibility like that. We’ve got another client that is also in a vitamin company and their demand’s gone up massively and they are really helping the teams work in new shift patterns and in enabling people to work from home that need to where they’re not in the dispatch. So I think you’re seeing a lot of flexibility and I think they’re all based on really good communication actually, and not ignoring things. Not one of our clients, but, you know, we have a space that we rent in a shared space. And in total contrast, they’ve hardly communicated with us at all about what they’re doing. And I just think that makes everyone feel very suspicious of people’s motives. And I think right now it’s about, you know, reaching out to others and seeing how you can help them. And that includes your employees, it includes their families, you know, and if, you know, we’re all going through this together, I mean, that’s the most extraordinary crisis. There’s no one not touched by it. So really how we help and we give to others I think is going to be critical. And I think that the organizations that do that and try and look after their own and try and be honest with their own are the ones that will, will come out of this stronger.
Matt Alder [00:17:41]:
Just to ask a kind of a very specific question about recruitment, the recruitment process, even at the best of times, can, can be quite stressful for people in terms of, of how it works and the poor quality of candidate experience that some, that some organizations give. What’s your advice to recruiters in terms of how they can create a fantastic experience and get the, that’s going to help them get the talent they need in their businesses.
Nic Marks [00:18:07]:
I think I become quite fundamentalist about my work. Just probably not helpful in some ways. But, but the viewpoint from it is, is to think about those five ways into the, into the role that you’re recruiting for. So, you know, you know, how much has the team that you’re recruiting this person into got good relationships, you know, how, how evenly and fairly are people treated, how much do people get delegated to do the work? They can do that. Then, you know, they’re motivated and inspired to do the work they want to do. So I think it’s good to think in those terms. And I definitely know from the other side that, you know, my advice to people who are going to job interviews is to ask people, you know, when they say, have you got any questions? Is to say, oh, how happy is the team that I’m going in to work with? And I think that’s a nicely disruptive question because sometimes people are recruiting to teams they know that aren’t happy and they difficult for them to sort of bumble their way through that. So I think what I’m saying there really is that in a sense, and this is what I think all employers should try to do, is you make a great internal experience and it becomes much easier for the recruiters to actually sell the business. Lots of people are looking to move jobs for a better experience. Yes, money comes into it. Yes. Other factors come into career development, but, you know, they basically want to work with good people. And I think the more confident you feel about that and the more confident you feel that people enjoy working in your organization, the, you know, the bolder you can be about attracting talent.
Matt Alder [00:19:44]:
A question about the future, which is, which is, which is difficult at the moment. You know, it’s very difficult at the moment to predict what the, what the future will be like. But a new, a new normal will no doubt emerge and it’ll be something that employers and their, and their employees will have to adapt to. What would you, your advice be to employers in terms of, in terms of moving forward, in terms of how they think about happiness within their future organizations?
Nic Marks [00:20:07]:
Well, I think in some ways the near, the near future is quite uncertain, but the long future I think is, I think we’re accelerating towards it actually. So I think I’ve been saying for ages, surely remote working will become more popular. I mean, this is going to be a huge kickstart into so many more people working remotely. I mean, whether those offices will ever fill up again in London in the way that they did, I don’t know. I doubt it. I think people will like working from home and organizations will learn that they can trust people to deliver. Of course, there’s boundaries, of course there’s feedback and Ways to manage remote teams, which are differently than managing people internally. But getting rid of the commute, the commute is the least happy part of the day for most people. So there’s huge benefits to be found in that. So I think we’re obviously going to see a massive acceleration towards that. And of course it’s a huge drop of cost for the organization. So it’s in their favor if they don’t have to have so much expensive real estate. So that would seem to be coming more and AI isn’t going away. And the idea that we’re going to have machine learning, that tasks that can be done by machines is still going to increase. So. But all of those I think are about experience. Because what machine learning can’t do and I can’t do is it can’t. They have no emotion. So there’s going to be very limited ability to be creative from AI and so they’d be good at repeat tasks, getting them at it. But that actually leaves even more space for humans to add to the workplace, which is basically our creativity, our emotionality, our, our aesthetic, our ability to care, you know, in the sense that, you know, face to face, face to face roles are always going to be better with people. You don’t really particularly want to go to a screen to do everything, maybe for some simple things you do, but. So those long term trends aren’t doing. And I’ve said consistently, really, I think that people’s experience of work is what’s going to be needed in the sense that that creativity, that innovation comes out from feeling psychologically safe and feeling happy in your team. So in that sense, I don’t think it changes. I think we’re going to accelerate towards that with remote working massively. And I think that the other change we have is that, you know, I don’t like using the term millennials, but they’re. Again, I’ve just used it. But younger people, I think have grown up in a more experienced based economy where they’re thinking more about how much they like their jobs. Not necessarily the sort of career professions that someone, myself, you know, in my 50s, which we did, and certainly my father’s generation did. So there are those changes coming where I think people are more thinking that there is a slightly bit, there’s a bit more job hopping, but not, you know, as much as that’s come from the other side of employers making people redundant and therefore people feeling that psychological contract between the employer and the employee is not resilient to shocks. You know, ever since the 2008 financial crash where, you know, so many people lost their jobs. And of course we’re just coming into that again now, but for very different reasons. But people lost confidence their employers were going to look after them. And so people became a little bit more, well, okay, what’s in it for me? And experience is there. So my opinion is that people’s experience of work will only become more important. That people. And that people. The way we naturally rate our experiences is to say how happy we are. But included in that, as I said, is partly how much we enjoy it, partly how much we feel we’re growing and developing, we’ve got meaning in our jobs. So those two things are coming through and I can only see that getting more. So I think people, people’s happiness will matter more and more as we go forward.
Matt Alder [00:24:03]:
So final question. Where can people find you and find out more about your work?
Nic Marks [00:24:07]:
Yeah. So my business is called Friday Pulse. And the reason we’re called Friday Pulse is that, as I said, I’m interested in measuring weekly. So every Friday we ask people how they felt at work this week, from very unhappy to happy. We also collect feedback from teams. Our website is fridaypulse.com and that’s where we do our work. I’m also, some people call me a thought leader. I just think that means I’ve thought about one thing for a long time. But I have my own personal website which is Nic and that’s Nic without a K, N, I C. And just at the moment in this, you know, in this crisis, we like many other organizations that are reaching out, thinking, what can we do? We’ve decided we’d offer free access to the Friday Pulse platform for any small, medium sized organization for the, you know, for their first three months of using it so that they can try and ride out this crisis and look after their employees experience as we’re all quite disorientated and it’s a way of checking in on how people are feeling every week and in organizations that sort of, that’s going to be so spotty, how, you know, it’s so, so mixed and variable, how people are coping with, working with remote teams. And it allows, you know, senior and HR leaders to have an overview of how every team is feeling every week and they can work out where things are going wrong very quickly, which in this extraordinary, rapidly moving world is, I think, what we need. And I think, I believe that Friday Pulse is the only tool that creates that weekly measure of people’s experience anywhere in the world.
Matt Alder [00:25:42]:
So, yeah, Nic, thank you very much for talking to me.
Nic Marks [00:25:46]:
Thanks so much indeed.
Matt Alder [00:25:48]:
My thanks to Nic Marks. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts or via your podcasting app of choice. You can also follow the show on Instagram. Please search for Recruiting Future to Find Us. If you’re a Spotify or Pandora user, you can also listen to the show there. You can find all the past episodes@www.recruitingfuture.com. on that site, you can subscribe to the mailing list and find out more about working with me. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next week and I hope you’ll join me.
