Highlights from Tom Rath, co-author of Wellbeing: The 5 Essential Elements

Tom Rath, co-author of Well-Being: The 5 Essential Elements joined the show last week. (You can listen here). Tom Rath has:

" ...written three #1 international bestsellers. His first book, How Full Is Your Bucket?, was a #1 New York Times best seller. StrengthsFinder 2.0, is a long-running #1 Wall Street Journal and was listed by USA Today as the top-selling business book of 2008. His latest Best Seller, Strengths Based Leadership, was published in 2009 was also a WSJ and BusinessWeek bestseller. Rath's books have sold more than 2 million copies. "- Global Leader

He about his new book, why Washington D.C.'s residents have higher well-being scores than say...San Diego or Seattle, ways we can increase our Career Well-Being and Social Well-Being and the direct connection of high employees scores on career well-being, employee engagement, to that company's performance.

I don’t encourage stalking. But I know you’re likely up to even more interesting research with Gallup. Where are you? What cool project are you working on?

The most interesting one for me in the past 5 - 10 years is what is the common element of well-being that holds up across cultures from 150 countries.

What’s the one common element of well-being that transcends cultures?

I know both Jim Harter and myself were surprised by how important career well-being is to our overall well-being.

If you step back and think about meeting someone at a cocktail party and you’re asked what do you do and if you can answer that with some enthusiasms then you’re doing well overall.

Then we were surprised at how detrimental can be sustained unemployment to our overall well-being.

Does that importance of career well-being apply equally to both genders?

Yes it does. If you define it as liking what you do each day, then yes, it does.

Only 20% answer yes to that question: Do you like what you do each day?

Sustained unemployment is that one life event that you never come back from for both men and women.

You have written 3 international best-sellers. They all provide research and solutions for creating a world built around our strengths. What compelled you to take this conversation one step further with another probable international best-seller and talk to a more general audience?

We’re always interested in figuring out what’s most important to people as they figure out their everyday lives. One of the things Gallup has done for the past 15 years and we’ve interviewed millions of employees and we started to realize there is something much bigger at play here.

One of the interesting findings as we looked at our big data set is that even among the most engaged people, fully engaged in their job, there’s still 40% of these people who are struggling with their personal life.

My friend Erika Andersen coined a phrase in her book titled Being Strategic. That phrase is reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future. What was your reasonable aspiration or hoped-for future as you wrote this book?

In a real general sense it was to give people a better awareness of what actually drives their well-being. When you ask people what they think will create well-being the two things top of the mind are health and wealth. They are important. But they are 2 of 5 very important elements.

Yet we don’t spend as much time thinking about these other areas.

We don’t have ways to measure the trajectory of our careers or relationships. So, we put together a series of metrics and program called well-being 2.0 that’s included with this book to help people better measure their progress.

What will be the sign that you have reached this?

One of the best signs is that organizations and the social networks within them start to have more conversations about well-being. We’ve started to roll out some programs internally here in Gallup. We spent some time with our software development team and they spent some time talking about their well-being and how to improve and just having the language to talk about it helps having the conversation.

Do we have the terms to have this conversation?

People talked a lot about how employees were doing at work but until we could have the terms to describe what an engaged employee looks like we couldn’t have much of a conversation about it.

The language itself has created as much change as some of the other metrics used to measure it.

Describe the reader you had in mind as you wrote Well-Being: 5 Essential Elements?

There is no shortage of experts out there on topics. We were trying to find that person from the general public who was interest in that topic not because it was broken but from how to find a way to improve it.

We went back to those people who scored real high on these well-being scores and asked them to describe their story. That was the audience we were looking to.

Why does that reader come to mind? Why do they need your book?

As, an organization we’re in the business of helping people to be heard, helping their opinions get out there. I would speculate that if we’re able to start a broader conversation around well-being that most of that conversation will occur through organizations. It’s through those social networks that change takes place.

It’s so easy to see how that change moves through a social network. One of the other things when we were thinking about the audience is we realized we needed some pretty rigorous research.

It may be good timing as more organizations understand they need to be in business for something more than a bottom-line. At the very highest levels of these organizations this conversation seems just as relevant as it is for individuals.

What are the 5 essential elements of our well-being?

Social well-being is about having strong relationships, including love, in your life.

Financial well-being is as much about how you manage your money as it is how about much money you have. Spending it wisely is pretty important.

Physical well-being is pretty much self-explanatory. We found out a lot about sleep and importance of a sound night’s sleep in providing a reset for the next day.

Community well-being. That may be the one element that differentiate between a good life and a great life, the ability to give back to the community.

Let’s talk about the first one: career well-being. You write about a favorite topic of mine. That’s employee engagement or more commonly disengagement. I read recently where there’s a little pushback against employee engagement and the idea of creating kumbayah, good-feeling moments. Your research shows the physiological effect of being engaged or disengaged. Can you share with us a little of that research?

It’s interesting why employee engage is important is a tactical issue. We can work 40 hours a week and be happy. Whereas if we’re not engaged then we get burned out after 20 hours. Those not engaged are sick more often, produce less, create more accidents on the job.

We looked at how people are feeling in the moment. We had them wear heart rate monitors and we collected spit samples so we could measure cortisol levels and triglycerides.

As Jim and I looked through all this data is what you can see is people who are not engaged at their job show up waiting for that school bell to ring at the end of the day.

The interesting thing is that people who are engaged feel a little stress at the end of their day. The good thing is there’s kind of an interplay with people who are engaged with their jobs are much less likely to be depressed, have heart attacks, etc.

My grandfather died of a heart attack on a Monday morning when I was a teenager. Now we know that’s not so uncommon. Why is Monday morning the most common morning for heart attacks?

Primarily because people go back to work. Especially if you go back to a boss you don’t like. You’re 24 % more likely to have heart attack if you have a boss you don’t like.

One of our researchers pointed out to us that the quality of our manager may be a better predictor of our physical health than the quality of our physician.

Bad managers may be the number one chronic disease right now not heart disease.

Yes. Bad managers, especially if it’s a bad local work environment, where the options are limited. People leave bad workplaces or bad managers more than they will a company.

Judging from the ads on TV we have an epidemic of people suffering from depression.

What are three things you recommend anyone can do to boost their career well-being, prevent Monday morning heart attacks and cancel their anti-depressants?

Well the first thing is identify what some of their strengths are and what are the moments where the time flies by and you enjoy what you are doing.

The 2nd things is find someone who can be a mentor, someone who cares about and will invest in your progress over time.

The 3rd thing is make sure you invest in and think about good friends on the job. We clearly recommend organizations create an environment where people can have close friends, even best friends at work. Those employees who have a best friend at work are 7 times as likely to be engaged at work. Without a best friend at work the chances of being engaged are 1 in 12.

What’s in it for businesses to take these three steps to boost our career well-being?

There is a clear economic interest for businesses. Even if you took out all that altruistic thing. There is direct impact on a company’s bottom-line.

We’re just publishing a paper now that looks across thousands of organizations and doing a causal relationship which is rare in social sciences and you can see how increases in engagement lead to boosts in productivity, increases in customer satisfaction scores, decreases in turnover and all the negative outcomes that have to do with that faction and we’ve even tied it to major increases, even 2-3 times the average earnings per share growth rate.

We spoke to a client of ours, head of a big bank. They’ve been auditing engagement across hundreds of thousand of employees for more than 10 years now. And he described there was no way they would be doing engagement as a big bank if they hadn’t looked across every financial metric that mattered and couldn’t see the relationship with employee engagement.

We’ve spent a lot of time connecting the actual metrics longitudinally over the past 10 years to show if engagement increases then you see the decreases in the metrics of turnover and disengagement.

In the recent healthcare reform debate there was much talk about the costs of care as we live longer, and maybe we’ll need to live longer. . How would enhanced career well-being address those costs?

Well, we can see some direct linkages if people who are more engaged in their jobs lower cortisol and triglyceride levels and lower stress. Being disengaged at your job creates a lot of stress. Being engaged with your job means you’re half as likely to be diagnosed as depressed.

Let’s talk about the 2nd essential. That’s social well-being. Where does the US as a whole rate for social well-being?

I haven’t looked at how the US breaks out on a national level with social being.

Could we use our time in social activities as a nation to judge our social well-being?

It’s a pretty good proxy. Every hour of social time in a given day, we ask people how they experienced their day and rate their levels of happiness...basically if you have no social time in a given day, if you start at 0 you can have just as many stressful moments as happy ones. For people rating themselves happy we found they spent about 6 hours a day being social.

We found that even for more introverted types like Jim and I you need about 5-6 hours a day of social time to be happy.

The average time is just about 5 hours. 6 hours does seem attainable when you factor in all these different ways: IM, chat, phone, email, conversation, social media.

There seems to be a disconnect between our civil discourse and the idea that we’re spending a pretty good amount of time in social activities. I’m hearing we’re doing well with social activities and we should be doing well on social well-being. But when I look at the news or even walk out my door I see something different.

What the psychological research shows is that negative reactions are 3-5 times more powerful than a positive one. We need a lot of social interaction to counteract the negative experiences.

You write that if we have 1 direct connection, family or friends, that is happy our odds of being happy increase by 15%. So, if I’m hearing what you said above, we just need a few seeds of happiness, points of light...to reach our proverbial tipping point.

We have stock in other’s well-being. We have shares in the well-being of those around us and those around them.... A good book was published titled Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks. They found you can trace everything from well-being to obesity and smoking all the way out to 3 degrees...If there’s someone, my wife and I share friends and they have a much larger impact on our social well-being. One person can drain an entire network.

So often a manager walks in and sees someone disengaged and sees it as a problem in isolation. A good manager has a responsibility to the entire group.

Does your research show we are tipping towards or away from increased social well-being as a country?

There are a lot of conflicting opinions on this. The ways we are interacting is changing a lot.

Basically what I see in the data is that we need one close connection. Most people need also 3-4 good friends

If work accounts for the majority of our working hours and only 30% of us report we have a friend at work....where’s that leave us?

I think that’s a best friend at work.

We tried asking people questions if they had a good friend or a best friend. They didn’t differentiate the work output like asking if they had a best friend at work.

There’s a conventional wisdom in some businesses you don’t want people to get close because there’s a lot bad things that can happen if that falls out.

There are a lot of businesses who don’t realize the speed and efficiency that comes from the trust and relationship with a best friend at work.

I think there is going to be a big shift in that people are joining an organization where you get something out of it, they get something out of it. That’s very different from compact than what we had in the past.

What are your thoughts on social media and being social and the social well-being element ? There are the usual articles about how it increases our isolation. But I live in rural Iowa and without social media I AM isolated.

We haven’t looked at it systemically to have a definitive opinion. But my hunch is that there are a lot of upsides to this that might not get as much attention in some of the articles and books research I’ve read.

What are three ideas for boosting social well-being?

My first recommendation is to think about your network. Who are the mutual connections in that network? Essentially every hour you invest in that network you should have some pretty good returns on that overall.

Another thing is to think more consciously about dedicating social time, to make sure you do spend 5-6 hours of social time, enjoying your life on a day-to-day basis. People don’t think about a half hour of social time as getting the same benefit as a half hour of sleep or exercise. But it looks like you do get a good boost there too based on our datasets.

Another tip I learned from the people I interviewed was they were real smart about mixing social time with physical activity. It’s a pretty good use as we need that physical activity during the day and that gives you social time in parallel and that helps in a variety of ways.

Can we talk a little bit more about connecting employee engagement, increasing career well-being and financial metrics of a company?

What we’ve seen is productivity, customer satisfaction scores go up. And if you look on the other side of the sheet, you see that as their engagement scores go up you see sick days go down in parallel.

We’ve also been able to trend the disease burden. We can see how improvements in well-being slow down the rising costs of healthcare.

In particular, we’ll see organizations in the US getting more involved in well-being just for the sake of their financial well-being.

You live in Washington, DC. That is ranked as the number one city for well-being among its residents in cities with 1 million or more in population. How is this? How does our nation’s capital rank higher for well-being than say the cool cities of San Diego or Seattle? What are the metrics where it outscored those two cities?

Most people think that if they move to California or win the lottery they’ll have a boost in their well-being. But it doesn’t play out that way.

When you look at the metrics in the book a lot of that is based on asking the people the questions:

• Imagine a ladder with 10 steps, where do you see yourself?
  

• And where will you be a year from now?
  

People rating themselves a 7 or higher have pretty good well-being.

Cities with a strong job market is a pretty good indicator. There’s a pretty strong relationship between people who rate their cities well and a strong job market.

Prediction time. I hope we talk again next year. Which way will our national well-being move and what’s the catalyst for that movement?

Right now if you look at our overall trending, things look pretty well for our well-being.

Money is pretty important if you consider it as means to lower our stress. As the economy improves we’re likely to see an overall improvement in our well-being. But that’s on a macroeconomic level.

With our book, we’ve given readers the language to talk about their personal well-being.

Leaders are readers. You’re a leader. What are you reading? What’s been the best 3 books you’ve read this year. Work or not.

• Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks: Fowler and Christakis

• SWAY: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior: Ori Brafman

• SWITCH: How to Change Things When Change is Hard Chip and Dan Heath

Where are you speaking in the future?

We've got some public events in Chicago, Los Angeles. The information’s all on Gallup.com.

Where are you on the web?

• Book. WBFinder. You can find info about the book and the well-being assessment.

• Work. Gallup Consulting for information about strengths or engagement.

Upcoming guest:

Thomas Koulopoulos, founder and CEO of the Delphi Institute one of, if not THE, world's leading advisor on innovation for the past 20 years. He is the author 8 books. And his latest The Innovation Zone: How Great Companies Re-Innovate for Amazing Success looks at how companies are building cultures of innovation. 9:30 AM, Central, Wednesday May 19, 2010

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