The Surprising Science of Workplace Bliss
Good Life Project
Jonathan Fields / Acast
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 7 April 2015
⏱️ 64 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"Rather than making perfection the goal, make improvement the goal."
If your work environment and culture empty you out, it will make it near impossible to live a good life. Along the way, it'll make the business you're working for grind to a halt. And, if you happen to own that business, then you end up in a personal and professional world of hurt.
So, what makes for a great work culture and environment?
We point to companies like Google as a shining example of incredible performance based on a creative culture, a beautiful campus and innovative and engaging projects with plenty of time to do crazy things.
But, what's really going on there? Turns out there's science behind it.
Today's guest, Ron Friedman, is a genius in this realm. He has spent years of his career researching, coaching, and writing about the actual levers that aid in creating the best places to work.
In our conversation, he breaks down the academic studies into layman's terms, cites fascinating examples from real companies who are changing the norm, and shares nuggets from his new book The Best Place to Work. We even talk about video games and how we should structure work progression like them.
No matter if you're an entrepreneur, working in a large company, or preparing to enter the workforce, this episode is so important to understand what is changing in our work methods and what still needs to change.
Some questions I ask:
- Is having meetings outside scientifically supported as being more productive?
- How do you deal with managers who are the problem with the company culture?
- Is it possible to grassroots a cultural change in a company from the bottom up?
- What have you seen around the culture of failure?
- What surprised you the most about what benefits work in your research for this book?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And so you should feel free to take more risks because the mathematics of risk taking |
| 0:07.2 | is such that the more risks you take for less critical, each one becomes because you're |
| 0:12.6 | succeeding at more of them. |
| 0:16.4 | We've spent pretty much the vast majority of our waking hours working, not all of us |
| 0:22.3 | and not all of us traditionally, but one of the things that we tend to focus on so little |
| 0:29.0 | is the actual environment that we create in which to do our work. |
| 0:33.6 | Turns out that that environment and so many of the factors that go into it, the culture, |
| 0:38.0 | the physical setting, all sorts of things make a profound difference in the way that we |
| 0:43.0 | not only experience the work we do, but the way we live our lives. |
| 0:47.2 | That's the conversation that we're going to dive deep into with today's guest, author |
| 0:51.4 | of the best place to work, Ron Friedman. |
| 0:54.8 | I'm Jonathan Fields. |
| 0:56.1 | This is Good Life Project. |
| 1:02.0 | I want to dive into your current work because of the fascinating stuff in your recent book, |
| 1:05.7 | but I want to dive into your journey also because you're doing some really fascinating research. |
| 1:11.2 | So tell me, sir, just sort of your general field of what do you do now? |
| 1:16.3 | What do you explore? |
| 1:17.3 | What are the burning questions that really lights you up? |
| 1:19.7 | Well, I'm really interested in ways that we can take existing research and make it applicable |
| 1:25.9 | to our everyday life, whether it be in the workplace or outside of work, but there's |
| 1:30.5 | just so much information that psychologists have studied over the last few decades. |
| 1:34.7 | It just hasn't made its way into popular culture. |
... |
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