People at Work

Employee engagement is something companies have focused on for years, but when you look at the Gallup polls and the research we’ve barely moved the needle?

Why is that?

One big reason is that a lot of it focuses on the company instead of the person. Employee engagement is always tied to productivity, profitability, and what leaders want to see from their engaged employees. It’s a selfish view and we are likely better off focusing on how to increase the happiness of our employees in the workplace.

On this episode I spoke with Eric Karpinski who is the author of Put Happiness to Work. He spoke about how to develop habits to improve social connection and deal with negative emotions.

Here are just a few of the tips he shared on how to improve social connection:

1. Gratitude practice; takes 3 minutes at the start of the day to write down three people that you appreciate and what you appreciate them for.
   
2. Conscious act of kindness: as soon as you get to your phone each day commit to writing a one or two line email or text to someone telling them something you love about them, encouraging them, or just sharing some good news with them.
   
3. Connection meditation: bring someone to mind that is really close to you and just send them good wishes in your mind
   
4. Pecha Kucha connection presentation: Each week ask someone on your team to pull together 10 photos of their life outside of work that they’re comfortable sharing with the team and then present them. This gives everyone an understanding of each other and plants potential seeds of conversation
   

There’s so much more to this episode and some great tips for dealing with negative emotions. I guarantee you’ll get something valuable out of this episode so give it a listen.

About our guest:

Eric Karpinski has been on the cutting edge of bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for over 10 years. Eric is a key member of Shawn Achor’s GoodThink team, trained as a scientist at Brown University and has an MBA from the Wharton School. He and his wife are regular work-advice columnists on Psychology Today and his new book, Put Happiness to Work, is available now.

You can connect with Eric on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/erickarpinski.

Employee engagement is something companies have focused on for years, but when you look at the Gallup polls and the research we’ve barely moved the needle?

Why is that?

One big reason is that a lot of it focuses on the company instead of the person. Employee engagement is always tied to productivity, profitability, and what leaders want to see from their engaged employees. It’s a selfish view and we are likely better off focusing on how to increase the happiness of our employees in the workplace.

On this episode I spoke with Eric Karpinski who is the author of Put Happiness to Work. He spoke about how to develop habits to improve social connection and deal with negative emotions.

Here are just a few of the tips he shared on how to improve social connection:

1. Gratitude practice; takes 3 minutes at the start of the day to write down three people that you appreciate and what you appreciate them for.
   
2. Conscious act of kindness: as soon as you get to your phone each day commit to writing a one or two line email or text to someone telling them something you love about them, encouraging them, or just sharing some good news with them.
   
3. Connection meditation: bring someone to mind that is really close to you and just send them good wishes in your mind
   
4. Pecha Kucha connection presentation: Each week ask someone on your team to pull together 10 photos of their life outside of work that they’re comfortable sharing with the team and then present them. This gives everyone an understanding of each other and plants potential seeds of conversation
   

There’s so much more to this episode and some great tips for dealing with negative emotions. I guarantee you’ll get something valuable out of this episode so give it a listen.

About our guest:

Eric Karpinski has been on the cutting edge of bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for over 10 years. Eric is a key member of Shawn Achor’s GoodThink team, trained as a scientist at Brown University and has an MBA from the Wharton School. He and his wife are regular work-advice columnists on Psychology Today and his new book, Put Happiness to Work, is available now.

You can connect with Eric on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/erickarpinski.

Leaders have always struggled with being out of touch with people in their organization. That’s worse now. All sorts of new barriers, like the digital divide, disparities during COVID, and muted interpersonal signals, are making leaders more invisible than ever.

Derek Newberry chats with me on People at Work about how leaders can move from invisible to visible. As a cultural anthropologist, Derek sees similarities between tribes and groups of people who gather in organizations. In both cases, leaders have to work harder to bring people together to work in harmony and be productive.

But in today’s work context, where people are face to face less often, leaders must be more intentional about presence. This starts with deep listening, followed by what Derek calls strategic vulnerability, where you arrive without all the answers. Both of these require interest, curiosity, and humility.

Visibility stands to benefit everyone in our teams and organizations. Not to mention the impact present leadership will have on the tone and experience of workplace culture everywhere. If you do one thing today to up your leadership presence, listen and act via Derek’s take.

About our guest:

Derek Newberry is an organizational development consultant who specializes in helping leaders build great cultures and drive transformational change. He’s co-author of a new book “The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces that Drive Your Organization’s Success”. Adam Grant called it “a stimulating, sensible guide to understanding—and improving—the values and norms of your workplace.”

You can connect with Derek on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/derekonewberry.

Resources:

The Culture Puzzle is available on Amazon or wherever you get your books.

Over at Voodle, there’s excitement about how short videos can create micro-connections for people who don’t work face to face. But that’s not all.

Voodle’s Chief Customer Officer, Rachel Lanham, is excited about the possibilities the new work landscape presents. She’s also curious about how to prepare for the transition to hybrid work.

So, the Voodle team asked 800 US technology workers what they’re thinking about. The result is a comprehensive “Hybrid Workplace Report” that details five big challenges in the transition to hybrid. All of these challenges relate to people and how they’re connected to each other.

Turns out maximizing an employee’s experience in the new normal means being open to new ideas about what culture is, how people are included, and the opportunities for new connection habits.

Tune it to hear Rachel speak on People at Work about what this research means for all of us. She also shares how she’s interpreting the data and implementing solutions for Voodle’s own people and culture. As Rachel says, employees are loose in the socket and ready to plug in somewhere else. Let’s listen and understand how to keep them.

About our guest:

Rachel has dedicated her career to solving big business problems with digital innovation and is currently obsessed with the promise of the future of work - a more flexible, inclusive, distributed, and human experience. Her home base is Seattle, WA but, born and raised in Southern California, she reserves the right to complain about the weather anyway.

You can connect with Rachel on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/lanhamrachel and on Twitter @RachelLanham8.

Resources:

Hybrid Workplace Report

Virtual Onboarding Toolkit

Even if you sit right beside your manager, there’s no way they have complete visibility into your work. Now that many of us are working from home, this visibility is decreased even more. Add on a flexible work schedule and more distractions at home and it’s a recipe for your manager to accidentally overload you with work.

Which is why it’s ok to push back.

Ben Brearley gives some tips on questions you can ask to get the conversation started when you feel like you have too many competing priorities. It really does come down to prioritization and trust. Otherwise you run the risk of setting a precedent that you’ll just accept all work that is thrown your way even if you’re drowning in it.

About our guest:

Ben Brearley is a certified leadership coach, MBA and consultant who helps thoughtful leaders to manage the tricky balancing act of leadership and helping them to lead with confidence.

You can connect with Ben on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/benbrearley.

Ask 100 people what happiness is, and you’ll likely get 100 different answers. But, as Becky Morrison tells us on this episode of People at Work, joy is the root of happiness for us all.

Your recipe for happiness relies on where your joy comes from. We maximize happiness when we do more of this, and less of the rest.

It’s not quite that simple though. Which is why Becky has created a framework to help tune into what matters, and then find that joy in every part of your life.

In the context of work, employees and employers alike have something to learn from this conversation. If we build more joy into our workplaces, we create environments that welcome choice, diversity, and authenticity.

Hear Becky’s thoughts on how to make joy a priority. Just imagine what this would look like if it works.

About our guest:

Meet Becky Morrison. Lawyer turned Happiness Coach, book author, international speaker, and mom to two. Becky also comes from a basketball family – her husband is a basketball coach and both her kids play as well.

You can connect with Becky on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/beckymorrisonbfs, on Facebook at facebook.com/untanglehappiness, and on Instagram @the.butterfly.society.

Resources:

Book: The Happiness Recipe: A Powerful Guide to Living What Matters

The Happiness Recipe Workbook: view.flodesk.com/pages/606cc3f1156ede2be20c611b

Things are happening quickly at Dooly. With a recent $80 million Series B raise, they’re scaling most things in their business, not least of which their culture.

Candace Bajgoric is Head of People and Culture at Dooly, with a background of building and scaling companies and their workplace cultures in the tech space. This is complex work under normal circumstances. Throw in a global pandemic with forced remote work for all, and everything from hiring to onboarding to doing productive work together, becomes more challenging.

At Dooly, the key is being human-centric. Candace joined the People at Work podcast recently to talk about how they’re achieving this, even when they’re not face-to-face. She talks about:

• Authentic and vulnerable leadership, where humility and openness starts from the top
  
• The importance of employee storytelling to create connection and celebrate commonalities and uniqueness
  
• Placing greater emphasis on what people actually want in their workplace and how that fits into their lives, rather than prescribing rules, perks, and quirks in your culture
  

Regardless of where you are in your culture-building journey, there’s a ton we can learn from Candace and her team of Dooligans. With additional pressures arriving due to the pandemic, such as greater demands for flexibility and more mobility in the workforce, companies like Dooly are showing how to keep ahead of change while looking after their people.

About our guest:

Candace is a down-to-earth, people-focused leader who has spent the past eight years working with emerging and growing companies in the tech space. In 2019/2020 she took a different (but also super fulfilling) people and culture role, spending the year traveling in Europe with her young family.

You can connect with Candace on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/cbajgoric

Andrew moved from the UK out to San Francisco to open up a new office and hire rapidly. That’s hard enough to do.

Just as he started doing that, the pandemic hit. The in-person interviews weren’t possible anymore. So he had to adapt to virtual interviews. Instead of thinking about how to connect two offices, he now had to think about how to connect everyone remotely.

That’s a whole lot of change and a whole lot of learning so I was excited to pick his brain a bit. We chatted about the pros and cons of virtual hiring, how to maintain your culture when rapidly hiring and switching to remote work, and what he plans to do with the two offices once things go back to “normal.”

About our guest:

Andrew Butt is the Co-founder & CEO of Enable, a modern, cloud-based B2B software solution for rebate management. Distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers across over 50 industries now have an easy, seamless solution to execute and track their full range of trading programs. Andrew and his co-founder met twenty years ago while learning to fly helicopters and have launched three businesses together since.

You can connect with Andrew on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/awbutt

Workplace culture is like an octopus on roller skates. There are many moving parts, and if we don’t move those parts in the same direction, chaos ensues.

That’s why this week’s guest on People at Work, Gina DeLapa, believes that the future of workplace culture rests on shared purpose. As we’ve shifted (a bit awkwardly like invertebrates on roller skates too) into overnight remote work, our physical spaces are now far less important for building our cultures than rallying everyone around a common goal.

But vibrant and engaging workplace cultures go beyond shared purpose. They also require more self-aware leaders who understand why human-centric environments are best for people who work there. In addition, collaboration, openness, and inclusion are now minimum viable elements for any organization and its culture.

Listen in for more about Gina’s look into the future of workplace culture and her call to action for all of us at work. Workplace culture is up to all of us, and there’s much we can influence for good if we choose to do that.

About our guest:

Gina DeLapa helps company leaders transform their culture so employees engage, drama disappears, and company culture becomes a competitive advantage.

Gina has been collecting great quotations for more than half her life. They often inspire her writing and speaking. Here's one from Ed McMahon, as he was wrapping up his time on The Tonight Show: "Play your role — to the very end."

You can connect with Gina on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ginadelapa, on Twitter @GinaDeLapa, on Facebook at facebook.com/ginadelapa, and on Instagram @ginadelapa.

Resources:

50 Traits of Exceptional Leaders: info.ginadelapa.com/50-traits-of-exceptional-leaders

Workplace culture is like an octopus on roller skates. There are many moving parts, and if we don’t move those parts in the same direction, chaos ensues.

That’s why this week’s guest on People at Work, Gina DeLapa, believes that the future of workplace culture rests on shared purpose. As we’ve shifted (a bit awkwardly like invertebrates on roller skates too) into overnight remote work, our physical spaces are now far less important for building our cultures than rallying everyone around a common goal.

But vibrant and engaging workplace cultures go beyond shared purpose. They also require more self-aware leaders who understand why human-centric environments are best for people who work there. In addition, collaboration, openness, and inclusion are now minimum viable elements for any organization and its culture.

Listen in for more about Gina’s look into the future of workplace culture and her call to action for all of us at work. Workplace culture is up to all of us, and there’s much we can influence for good if we choose to do that.

About our guest:

Gina DeLapa helps company leaders transform their culture so employees engage, drama disappears, and company culture becomes a competitive advantage.

Gina has been collecting great quotations for more than half her life. They often inspire her writing and speaking. Here's one from Ed McMahon, as he was wrapping up his time on The Tonight Show: "Play your role — to the very end."

You can connect with Gina on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ginadelapa, on Twitter @GinaDeLapa, on Facebook at facebook.com/ginadelapa, and on Instagram @ginadelapa.

Resources:

50 Traits of Exceptional Leaders: info.ginadelapa.com/50-traits-of-exceptional-leaders