How to Be Happy with Nic Marks

Graham Allcott 0:07

This is Beyond Busy. I'm Graham Allcott. I'm the author of a number of books, including the global best seller How to be a Productivity Ninja. And I'm the founder of Think Productive. We help people to make space for what matters and get more done. And we partner with some of the world's leading companies who share our mission to transform the world of work. Beyond busy is where I explore the often messy truths and contradictory relationships around topics like work life, balance, happiness, and success, and explore with interesting people what makes them tick. In short, this is where we ask the bigger questions about work. My guest today is Nic Marks, Nic is one of the world's leading experts on happiness, and the founder of Friday Pulse, a tool to help organisations find out how happy their people are at work. He also created the Happy Planet Index to show which countries have the happiest people. And he spent years thinking about how to be happy, and the relationship between happiness and success. So in this episode, we talk about how to be happy. He talks about his mentor, a Chilean economist who changed his life, his five ways to wellbeing and much more. This is Nic Marks. I'm here with Nick marks, how are you?

Nic Marks 1:25

I'm very good. Thank you. Very good. Nice to meet you, Graham.

We're here to ask the bigger questions about work. Let's start with your your day job and what you're currently doing. So Friday polls, helping organisations to really focus on happiness and figure out what that means in in the workplace. So you want to just start with Friday pulse and just explain what you guys do.

And so I'm a statistician by trade. So I'm looking to create a measure that is useful for organisations. And basically our measure is happy weeks, which is you know, how people had a good week and and that builds up into a metric for an organisation that allows them to track how every team is how, how the whole organisation is, and it's very, very responsive. I mean, most organisations don't have a responsive people metric. Most of their people metrics are quite lagging. So there'd be you know, obviously a look at things like retention and things like that, but they might look at engagement and tend to do that. And once a year survey, maybe once a quarter now, some organisations so I want to create something very at the moment. And you know, when you start collecting that data, you know, you can see the impact of COVID running through, because you see that sort of dip and arise. And what creates very interesting with the data is that, effectively, the shape of the curve is the resilience, you know, we all have setbacks. Every organisation has a setback, because we've obviously had a global setback, how quickly do we recover, so that I find the data really interesting, and it allows for the fact that, you know, happiness, which is sort of like a good bad signal, ebbs and flows, we had good weeks, we have bad weeks. And in fact, I sometimes think about the fact that just different wavelengths to happiness, you can have, like, you know, three moods in a morning and an hour, you know, and then you know, and then you've sort of got fuel to the day, and then you've got fuel to the week and, and even the year in the decade, you know, we were old enough that we probably had good and bad decades in our life. And it's like, you know, I mean, of course, not every day in a bad decade is bad. But this isn't, you know, you put a year down like this, and you you know, and so, so I by measuring it weekly, you start to get into that, the way that it's very fluid. And that's what I really like about it, and we create useful data for team leaders and organisations to understand their happiness and their organisation.

You know, when I think about sort of leadership and management, like the idea of kind of walking around the office, you can sometimes just get that sort of underlying gut feel around whether people feel up or whether it feels a bit more down or a bit low. And I guess what you're doing is really taking a lot of that, and actually just making it more accurate and more measured, and more more sort of systemic as part of the toolkit for a manager or leader.

I think that our feelings, our data, you know, actually, yeah, sometimes we learn something about the world, when we start feeling it. I mean, there's occasions when we, we don't realise we're angry. So we start saying something. And it's like we we've actually felt it before we, in a way become conscious of it. And so what we're really trying to do is saying, Look, everyone in your organisation is a sensor. They're sensing things all the time. Let's capture some of that. And we capture it in a very simple metric, which is how happy people's weeks are. But yeah, I think it's very, very useful. And you don't really need to go much more complex than that. I mean, yes, we go into deeper dives, where we look at what are the drivers of happiness at work and we do those maps. We do them every quarter and Friday pulse, we do a weekly cadence and of course, the cadence, more deeper dive. But that probably gives you as much information as you really need to know what's going on in your organisation. So we try and keep it very simple, very easy. But yeah, and it's, you know, used to be managed By walking around, I mean, that's what my dad did. My dad used to be a CEO, and he'd walk around the factory floors, and you walk around this, and he, you know, and a smile everybody and but you know, but he would always try and sense it that way, this does actually give you that frontline feedback, digital format every week.

And so if I'm an employee or organisation and I, and I get the link to fill in that survey, one thing I found interesting when I was reading up about it is it takes less than two minutes to do this for the whole week. So what questions am I being asked in that two in two minutes? What, what's my experience as a user of it,

we asked people, you know, how you felt at work this week, from very unhappy to very happy. So that's the good, bad signal. And then we just asked you to share it effectively what you would do in a sort of retrospective, if you were a tech team or something like that, which is you ask people what's gone well, and what hasn't. But we're talking about the culture rather than their work, we try and very much make it about people's experience. So I've experimented with lots of other questions like asking, you know, have you had a good week or not? And, and people give you an answer, but it's tend to be more about what they're doing, rather than how they feel. So I wanted to get it into how they feel. So we use that. But then we ask them, like, what's the success for you this week? Have you got any one you want to thank, you know, we, I think that we're not, we don't express our gratitude enough, you know, and so we just try and put in front of people, you know, maybe want to thank colleague for something they've done. And it's just notes, it's no, it's not sending flowers, it's not sending vouchers, it's just doing that. And particularly with so many teams more virtual these days. But even in teams that are together, you know, people get a little thank you note, and you get this what we call positivity resonance, where, you know, they feel good for being thanked, I feel good for thanking, actually. And then we bring it into a team meeting on a Monday so that everyone knows that I thanked him or, or whatever it is. And so it's sort of shouting out. And then we also allow a space for people to share frustration or concern or have an idea where those are all written and then named, when you answer our digital questions are our numeric questions. They're anonymous, when you put a notice named, and we fold those up into wrap those up into a team meeting, the team needs to be packaged data for them into a PowerPoint for them, so they can talk about it on a Monday. And we we stack the data up to that to the more senior teams, there's just one other thing we do on a Friday is just at the end, we ask a silly question that, you know, we're product about happiness at work. So you know, we'll ask, you know, are you an early bird or night owl? You know, do you like the beach or the mountain or whatever it is, and, and it's just a sort of polling bit of fun,

obviously, you then have access to this data on a real macro level. So do you find that, you know, when there's a, you know, huge, like England team winning in the football or something? Do you get like, everybody's happier that week? Or when the sun comes out? Like, are there some interesting little findings that that that you that you've figured out,

we obviously we saw COVID hit last March. And that was a massive drop. And that came across all of our clients, our clients it, mainly the UK, North America, some European couple of southern hemisphere. But mainly, we saw that hit in our data, probably there are some weather effects. You know, if I look at the weekly average, it bumps along and I've never actually really tried to tie that to weather forecasts. But when you look at the UK Gator, so you got to collect data every week on the mood of the nation. And you definitely see weather effects there. So and you see, so see the effects of lockdowns these this time, you know, Christmas went up. And then, you know, January February was rubbish, wasn't it? And then, you know, right through March, April with the bad weather, and then when the weather started to pick up, even their lockdown, mood start to go up a bit. So weather definitely in the UK at least has it has a big impact.

Yeah, less. So in California, where it's just hot and sunny every day or something. Well,

two of my team of India at the moment, they the ethnically and they went back, some in lockdown, and it's just like, oh, another sunny day, is it? Yeah.

One of things productive sort of ways of working my company is that when we have our daily huddle, we're asking people, you know, what are you stuck on? And it just creates this environment around? You know, it being an acceptable thing that you will be stuck sometimes and that that's part of the thing. Do you find that there are other things that organisations are maybe asking you for or that you're sensing where people are just, they're not asking those questions, or it's sort of causing sort of issues within the culture by just not fronting up stuff or not kind of asking the right kind of questions as a team.

Questioning is such a healthy process, you know, and and I don't think most people do it enough. It's very much in my DNA. I trained as a therapist when I was young. So you know, that idea of reflecting is very much instilled in what I do. And I think that whenever we go we do a roll out in an organisation there's always sceptics, there's always see some of the senior leader team that escaped All these things, and some of it is, it's fear, fear of opening a Pandora's box, you know, how they feel, Oh, my God, these nasty things are going to come out. And and, and actually, it's the nasty things that are there, the better out than in, you know. They fester otherwise, don't they? Rotten. They undermine things. And then you know, when they start understanding that also in there was good stuff that they're not actually getting out and so. So we're really very much sort of designed in the idea to be I mean, you could say bias towards the positive, but certainly based on the same similar ideas to appreciative inquiry that things are that way, you're looking to accentuate the positive, but it's because in, in, in life and in business, you know, we tend to think about the negative stuff, or we tend to think about the next challenge. We don't tend to just stop and pause and think it's a good job. We did that. Well. You know, and, and even sometimes there's lessons to be learned from what's gone. Well, you know, you can learn from what's gone well, as well as what's gone wrong. I mean, people get obsessed with, you got to find out why you felt that. Yeah. But also find out why you You did well, that's that's good, too. And, but also just the human thing of like, yeah, you know, Pat, on the back, good job. We were much more motivated by that, then money. I mean, it's not to say, you have to take money off the table, you know, sometimes ask question around fair pay. But it's not so much, you know, the extra bit of money that you get is much more do you get on with your team? And do you feel appreciated?

Yeah, just be feeling feeling valued? Is such a huge thing in life, isn't it? You know, just feeling like what you're doing matters and has an importance,

as someone who says, when when people feel valued, they add value. And as this reciprocity in the whole situation, you know, if you, and in a way, if you're thinking about happiness at work, you're turning the sort of psychological contract really, of the relationship between the employee and put it on the head, you know, normally, it's like, how much can I get out of you paying in the same money? And this is like, How can I create your great job, so you flourish, and you actually get more back that way? But it does take you to go that sort of orthogonal route, and and had the courage to go that actually we're not we're trust, that if we give people the space, they will flourish?

I don't know if this is a great segue or, or a rubbish segue. You can, you can comment. But that whole thing about feeling valued, and then adding value. So you went to work for an American Management Consultant. My first job, yeah, you write about it saying, I went for that job, because I thought it was difficult to get so it would be a really important thing, and then you didn't enjoy your time there. So I just, I'd love to hear why What didn't you like about it? And then what did you learn from that for the rest of your career?

I mean, I was that arrogant at university that it was, you know, we had no crowns. And we got it's changed, isn't it? You know, and people would come around and I was, I've been to Cambridge, and I went to Lancaster to a master's and they came out to Lancaster and I did a very specialist thing called operational research which is basically systems thinking and decision making Anderson Consulting came up to now Accenture and everyone said, that's the hardest job so arrogant me was the only job I applied for.

Graham Allcott 13:26

And the

Nic Marks 13:28

reason was, I didn't really know what I wanted to do, you know, and I so they said, that was the heart and my tutors were going What about British Steel or NHL? Anyway, and they and then they are they almost crossed with me that I got the job because I was the only one in the year they got the job. I think one other guy actually got offered offered it but he didn't go. He was super bright, super, super bright. Anyway. And I came in down to London. And the thing with Andersen was that it was a great experience in lots of ways because they, you had this cohort that joined together. So you had a great bonding, you went into your first jobs, and I got a plumb first job, which was I was doing marketing software, very, very new stage. I could get a little CD ROM and get close postcodes and find their address. And they were blown away. And it was great. And I had a great time. But what I knew was what was happening to all my peers and they were being sent up to North of England on big NHS projects or this or that. I just got engaged. I didn't want to go to the north of England, I just got a house in London with my girlfriend's into the wife and I I didn't want to go and so I just could see that people were taking a certain way when I got I get they'd have like almost like school sort of my kids used to get good all the marks and bad or the mark but used to sort of get those and, you know, I get these good orders once I think then I got a bad one for having too long hair. And I just thought I thought yeah, really, you know, my hair wasn't this long. But it was, you know, it's really like, is that my most important thing about me? You know, I'm always In a slightly one publicist describe I look a bit under Nic, you're like, okay, yeah, this probably I kept that says you're not quite unkempt, but you're just under anyway. And I, I just didn't didn't yet. So I also was starting to figure out that I was interested in sustainability issues and things like that. And I thought, maybe I should apply my intelligence to that. So that's kind of the way I went, Yeah,

that whole thing with being sent off to places I remember actually working with a couple of people from Accenture for a little while. And it was this whole thing, if you just be in Basingstoke for a month, and then you'd be in Manchester. And then you'd be, and I yeah, I remember just thinking, you know, the lifestyle of it was so all encompassing, you just have to kind of throw yourself into it. And actually, the two people that I'm talking about, were really good at just going out to a pub, or a nightclub, or a sort of city square, and just talking to strangers, which I just thought was just, you know, just totally out there. But it was like, That was how they would get their social life because they weren't sort of surrounded by, you know, friends and family and networks and stuff. Yeah.

I it was a lot to do with the fact I was engaged. You know, I wanted to live with Marie, you know, and it's like, I didn't want to have that. So, yeah,

that might bring us nicely on you started to think about environmental issues and thinking about happiness in that kind of way. And you write about this person that you came across Manfred Max Neef. Correct. And just the way you the way you write about him is just really intrigued me. So it, it sounds like you went along to see a talk of his and then we're just totally blown away by his way of thinking and his ideas.

Yeah, I handed in my notice at Accenture. And I didn't have another job to go to. And my dad was very concerned about me. And he, he took me to a talk by Manfred. And my dad was a business leader. And he was quite into things like spirituality and business and alternative ways of thinking. And so he would, he would go to these talks, but he took me to see Manfred. And he did obviously met Manfred before because I remember him introducing himself advantageous. And Manfred started to talk about language, and about how we didn't have the right language to talk or to discuss the issues that we face. So the dominant language of today is the economic language he was talking about. But our major issues were about sustainability and poverty. He came from Latin America. So there's a lot of persistent poverty ideas he wanted to talk about. And, and he said, you don't have the language for it. And he started to put forward the idea that we should talk about the language of human need, rather than offset of dollars and pounds. And, and I just was like, wow, you know, and I do say is, it's, it's, it's the talk that changed my life. But of course, I was ready. I was ripe, in lots of ways, you know, one to be quite unhinged, for one talk to change your life. But I was searching, you know, the reason that I left, you know, essentially, our innocence was that I wanted to do something with social value hadn't really identified what yet. And anyway, the opportunity came to work with Manfred. And I did that for three or four years. I mean, mainly a distance or in actually quite a few times. He was Chilean. And yeah, it was, it was I learned a lot from him. Yeah.

One of the things that you wrote was that he was the person who made you realise that none of us asked big enough questions.

Yeah, he wrote this great paper on them. I wrote some great papers. But what was bat issues? I think it was called a stupid way of life. But the he was very fascinated stupidity if it was the fastest moving human, human trait, not intelligent stupidity. Anyway, I don't know these rights. But he had interesting ideas. He wrote another one on pruning of language about cutting away words so that you can get the truth. Right, I might have been in that paper, but he talks about issues of primary and secondary importance. So an example he would give is that, you know, people get very worried about whether their party gets in power. And they think that if people like them were in power, the world would be better. But we sort of tried every range from left to right, the middle to this, you know, and we still seem to have problems. So he said, maybe the problem is the structure of power, not who is in power. And so it's that sort of thing. And in that way, I think he got me engaged in very big questions. And, and I think in my own way, I you know, found my way to happiness, you know, through quality of life statistics, through health statistics through sustainability sophistic through court, you know, well being into happiness because in a way, happiness in its nebulous word that uses but it's you know, it's gets close. That's what people want from life. And therefore, can you can you can you help them with that?

Are there some? I mean, I love that thing about stupidity. And it strikes me that that could just in itself be a sort of like a lens that you could apply to so many topics, like look for the stupid stuff, and then suddenly it starts to open things up. Do you think there are other things like that, that would help to help people to ask bigger questions. So someone listening to this, if I was to say, how, how can we help them to ask bigger questions? Or how can you help me to ask bigger questions? Like what what are some tips and tricks that you use to help with that?

I've not really talked about like that. So the question is, what if you know? I mean, you know how it is, if you've got kids? Yeah, I have one. Yeah. I hadn't how old? He's seven,

he's coming up.

So he, why is probably a word that comes up quite a lot. I said, why? My middle child was particularly curious, right? And used to always ask, right, you know, five why's and you're at the Big Bang. Eventually, you sort of get to a place where you kind of like, you know, sort of you go, I mean, I think it's about asking big questions is about being open to not knowing, which is quite scary. I think lots of people that they want to know, it's like, you know, because, in the end, you know, none of us really noticed that we were all fools finding our way through the world and finding our path and, and just trying to, you know, avoid doing too much damage. And, you know, I mean, just, you know, I think that people often go, you know, masculine meaning and purpose. And I think it's really important. But it's like, you can't really answer those questions, and we're all quite different. And we were similar, and we're different. So I think it's asking bigger questions is trying to just go underneath it, ask us, you know, to, like, if you say to someone, you're right, there, just go Yeah. And, you know, then you go, and particularly during COVID estimates, they really are, you know, and you can immediately open up, but the second it takes two or three to open up that space. And so, don't take people's first answers, I think would be one way to get to bigger, deeper stuff. And, and then, you know, when you want to go to sort of bigger, which is deeper, and there's bigger, which is higher, you know, that sort of that that you know, and, and it's seeing behind that veil, another thing I like I don't know if you know him is Stafford beer, you know, stuff a bit know, stuff, a beer was a systems thinker, he was one of the founding fathers of what's called cybernetics, he was very active in the 60s and 70s, he used to be that in British Steel, actually, you know, helping them with how they designed, all the systems that made the steel is a great thing, a great, great thing. But anyway, he wrote a book called Think before you think and the parameters for which you sort of want to approach a problem. Think about that, before you think about today just rush in. And as a statistician, you know, as an old statistician, now, you know, I worry sometimes about the big data well, because I don't think people think enough. Before they start analysing the data, they got so much data, there's so many toys to play with, they can see patterns. I don't even think enough about why they're doing what they're trying to achieve. I mean, I'm not a brilliant statistician, you know, technically, you know, actually, I always work with better statisticians than me, technically. But what I can see I think, somehow is how things connect together. And what I'm looking for. So you know, you know, some of the things that I designed over the years, you end up creating quite a quite simple, we just like about happiness at work or think, create something quite simple, because that will create the traction, but it takes you quite a while to get to that simplicity.

Yeah, maybe that leads us on to a skill that you very much have is just a storyteller and using data in ways that really, you know, explain the trends and get things across. And you did this very famous TED Talk in 2010. Talking about the Happy Planet Index, do you want to just talk about that work and because that was probably the first thing I saw of yours. And yeah, love to just hear that story of how all that came about.

First big thing thing that just came out of the woodwork really says 2006 the first Happy Planet Index was released and I was working at New Economics Foundation, which is a think tank in London, I founded the Centre for wellbeing there and coming with the idea that well being was a topic coming to government, but no one knew how to measure it. So I was like, Let's drive some measurement underneath it. Anyway. We were doing a project I think, with WWF can't member someone like that, and not the wrestling one? No, no, well, yeah, they are.

They had to change you know the story of that is the The wildlife charities sued the wrestling people and one. Yeah, they have to change it now to WWE. I think it is. Okay. Well, it's definitely the environmental one. So, the environmental, although I

do own Mexican wrestling mask, I mean, my son, we used to play rugby. So we used to go on rugby tour, and we had a black and gold rugby evening themed evening. And I was in Mexico three weeks before, and I saw these amazing black and gold wrestling things. So we went to wrestlers. Anyway,

that's everyone in the corner shop.

Anybody they think they think they could take me down? I think I think I've been in a fight since I was about nine or 10. Anyway, we're doing a project for them on on sort of her environment and wellbeing came together and and we'd written a report, it was okay. And that the head of comms at Neff said to me, she said, Can you have something a bit more statistical in here, your statistician, you know, could you not do something. And, of course, what I really wanted to do was a big survey where you'd look at people's environmental behaviour and their well being and you bring it together. But we didn't have the budget for that. And I had I was very active in the well being welfare, there was an indicator called Happy life years, which is happiness and life expectancy brought together. So it's quality, adjusted life expectancy. And I, and I've seen routine Herman, who's the guy that developed any state, oh, well, life's never been so good. Worldwide happy, like has never been higher. And I turned to my friend next to me, he was a Norwegian psychologist called your, your professor. And I said, yeah, do but slightly messing up the planet as we do it. And I think that was a seed of an idea. And then, when I did this, I thought, what if I took happy life years, and I divided it by ecological footprint, I would have sort of a bang for buck or wellbeing for resource use. Now, how much planet are you using, and I actually had this idea on a walk with my dog, you know, and as the top of a hill, and I pretty much ran down the hill and got my laptop out. And two hours later, I had my first wave, I read data from here and there. And I and I, and I thought, this is something quite interesting. So I took it to an F meetings to pitch things. And the Policy Director goes on make this quite profound. Maybe we won't do that for the WWE. And it became the Happy Planet Index. And and when we released the Happy Planet Index, you know, New Economics Foundation, we had a we had a report was downloaded 40,000 times we thought was pretty good. Happy plan, it was a million in the first week, it went in 180 articles around the world, it just went like that. And we're actually going to we done a few updates. And we can do a new one in October, November this year. And yeah, sure.

And tell us more about how that's used. Because I think you're involved in is it Bhutan? That does the Yeah, through national happiness instead of gross domestic product or something?

Yeah, I think I first went to Bhutan, about 2003 Four, and I, I will say I advise them on how to do Gross National Happiness. Apparently, foreigners don't advise they do. Quite, they're quite. They didn't really operationalize my ideas. I went at about four or five times to do quite a bit work them. They mean, it's a tiny country, Bhutan is 600,000 people, they don't have a statistics agency. They don't you know, they rely on some un things. And even the population of Bhutan was unknown. When I was there, they then did a census and they discover they're only worth 650,000. In the UN it said 1.1 million at that time, they actually got more actually was in their self interest to inflate the population because they got more funding. So I think they were very happy for it to go up. But I then discovered it was an excellent it's a convenient anyway. It's it. I did advise on gross national happiness is extraordinary country, Bhutan, not without its problems. It's got ethnic cleansing, and in the south, it's got some issues about it's I don't actually like the statistics they came up with. They didn't hit my simple, easy to use criteria, but it's a very worthy effort.

Graham Allcott 29:28

Okay, so I'm going to interrupt the broadcast which you know, I don't do very often and that must mean I've got something very important to share with you. So why don't want to share is I've got these really big events coming up, and I would love you to join me

Nic Marks 30:01

Like, where are we at with trying to get some of those statistics, more mainstreamed in places like the UK or the US, because it does feel like we're as far away as we've ever been really from thinking about the well being and happiness of people. And we are still very focused on the economic indicators. And, you know, very blunt economic indicators of that. So what what needs to change? How, like, if you could wave a magic wand, or if you were sort of advising, I guess, the next prime minister or the next opposition leader? Yeah, what would that look like?

Well, Britain does better than most of measuring it. So when the Cameron, particularly coalition government, when they really took wellbeing very seriously. And they did actually give the ONS a budget to measure well being of UK and we do have well being indicators, you'll sometimes see something about, you know, what's the happiest place in Britain? Or what's the, and it comes out every year, and it goes right down to ward level. And so a really, really

cynical take about that one, though, that they brought that in, and then through austerity, there was a year where it really went down. So they're just kind of swept under the carpet of it. Is that true? Or did I read that wrong?

I don't know whether they did that. I mean, I left the policy world about 2012. And part of the reason was that, you know, I founded the Centre for wellbeing, accidentally, in 2001, most of my things didn't happen a bit accidentally. And, and I had one of our aims was to get the government to measure well being and that was achieved. And so I knew that if I was to stay, it'd be more in critiquing, and lots of committees and things like that, to do that, and not really my personal style. So I I left really let the Centre for wellbeing existed for a few years after I left, but doesn't actually still exist now. Which is a shame. Because I think Neff could be a good critiquing voice about what's going on now. But they let that work go for their own reasons. But But I, so I, what would I be advising when I think that, you know, when we look at things like levelling up, we look at things like that, that, you know, there is levelling up to do it's not, it's not particularly geographically based, it's more about opportunities. So, you know, when we, when we see this debate around racism going on at the moment, and about the fact is, it's systemic racism, is it? Is it just some individuals? Is it both? I mean, it's always both, isn't it? But you know, that there are other factors other than race that, you know, that predict that the great things and race is an independent factor to it. So it's like the first report that came out that said, I really, you know, it's really about economic and as well, it's true that this act, but it's still an extra burden about about facing the uphill struggle of, you know, not being white in a country that's dominated by workers, although we're not white, or we were pink. But then it's, then then, you know, it's, and then never the people that say, you know, oh, it's everything systemic? Well, you know, we have had improvements too. So I think people don't understand the data well enough. And don't don't report it enough. But there is data there on well being there is, there is quite a lot we can understand about it. The well being data is not quite so good at picking up things through time. It's okay does pick up things in time enough, but it's much better at cross sectional comparing because, you know, we we adjust things that we have slightly happen. So, you know, like, there's famously we don't have well being subjective well being increasingly increases with rises in GDP. Even though we know what's going on, they were part of it, it's just a measurement artefact, which is that when we ask a question on a nought to 10, scale, you can't go to 11. Whereas you can always get the 11th thing in GDP, so you can keep going. So there's things like that, which are purely measurement issues. And then there, you know that, and what comes out of these, we see this international thing. So we see that there's the World Happiness Report says Finland was the happiest country at the moment, people go on the fence, they can't be that happy. It's always dark there. You know, and they've got suicide rates or whatever like there are people don't understand this. The reason the Finland and Sweden and Norway and Switzerland are the happiest countries is because they, their social safety nets, stop the poor from being miserable. It's not so much that the middle classes and the rich are happier is that the poor people are much less unhappy. And that brings up your national mean, and then you just then people go, Oh, that makes sense. But I mean, I don't understand why people don't say that more, because it's like, it's about you know, it's about looking after the bottom 20 40% Whether that's an income or whether educational standards, all those things, and it's about creating mobility through the through through society set becomes a more meritocracy, and then you get to decent levels of human happiness.

And I've read a couple of things as well that as well as it, obviously just statistically what's happening there's it's pulling up the data of the boss 20% or happier, but also that the level of inequality between your set of richest 10% of the poorest 10%, it tends to be happier when that's closer to right, which I think, is also to do with just people's sense of fairness and sense of control around this stuff. And all of that's going to get a play into, right.

Absolutely. And, and, you know, we all compare ourselves, and we're all actually, you know, tend to make up with comparisons rather than downward. So we tend to be whatever income level we are, we tend to look up at people, you know, what's my brother in law, and so I used to always that, you know, and it's like, you know, in London, so if you live in London, and you've got money, it's a nice place to live, if you haven't, it's not only is it not easy to live in London, that money, it's also you see money about you all the way. So it's right in your face. And it's the reason why urban poverty is is worse than rural poverty. In lots of ways. Often, people who are putting the war in rural poverty have access to other resources, greenspace other things, they might have more sense of community, which is an important factor, there might be what higher levels of trust might be low levels of crime, there's lots and lots of things, and it's still not good to be poor and a robot, I'm just saying it's less bad than being urban. And so, you know, we, you know, we see that in stuff in the data, I think data is very strong in that way.

Switching gears very slightly, but staying on the same tax if we think if we take this back into happy workplaces, and morale at work. So you've done some, some really interesting work and writing around company morale and ideas for for promoting good morale. So if someone's listening to this as a, as a leader, what can they do to to keep the morale high, and to notice where morale might be

obviously going to say measure it. So do something like Friday post, that there must be other things that are available to you, if you're checking what how people are feeling regularly. And, and it's about taking that seriously, because in the end, if you ask people and you don't act on it, then you just lose yours. In fact, it's worse than probably not asking them. So it's about actually are you going to, are you going to take this data and do some different things about it. Now, people can get themselves in a bind about this, and we're gonna make them happy have I know, it's about making them happy. It's about creating the right environments. And of course, our experience at work is very, very proximal, it's very much who we work closely with what we're working on. And so you can, so it's a lot about the team level. And, you know, my dad, when he was alive, he used to say to me, when I started getting into the workspace, he said, but whatever you do, make it work at the team level. Teams are the engine of change that the engines of organisations, you know, whether that's, you know, he used to be in manufacturing, he introduced quality circles around the machinery in the 70s, or 80s. From Japan, you know, that he got talking about what's going on with their machine, because he said, I don't know what their machine is, they know it absolutely intimately. They're the ones who will know if there's a problem, or if there's a problem coming, or they just hear a lot of noise changing, or they've got an idea about how to improve efficiency. So what you want to do is to empower them to do it. So we built very much around him. Supporting team leaders, what often happens with measurement tools, is they undermine team leaders. They basically you know, that, you know, an engagement survey will go, you know, this team's got low engagement, it must be Steve's fault, because he must be what we try and do is let's say, Steve, I've started there. Now I don't know Steve is as like, let's, let's let's that supports the, to have better conversations with his team. Because, bless Steve, he might have been promoted for his technical skills are his length of service, not his people skills, so he might not be the best people leader. So let's help him be better. And so what we do is try and present to him. So what we do with that data that I was saying, we collect about how happy you were this week, but also what's the success what's the thank you as we package it up a bit like something like HelloFresh or gussto sends you a box to cook from, we sent him a box to run a team meeting from and then the box is, you know, what's gone well, last week, who wants to be thanked, who's been thanks, anyone got any frustrations, we need to fix things like that. So basically help make a better, more productive, start the week meeting, which you've got the right data for to deal with any team issues you had before, or to shout out people doing a good job. And that's the way you keep morale is very, very team based. I mean, yes, of course, sometimes things go through a whole organisation. You know, I just think, you know, people in John Lewis probably haven't woken up, you know, today great with a news that's 1000 job losses. So there must be 78,000 it's still it's still a lot of job losses. And, you know, other organisations are going to be having the same problem as we start coming out of furloughs and everything. But that's not good, but much more is, do you get on with your colleague you're working with, are they right? Are they a jerk? You know, how's your boss? Do they give you good supportive feedback that helps you learn or do they just either say gloss over and go old stuff late or, or go very, very negative you need but neither are they As a baker, so it's about creating those habits at a team level. And that's really, I think, where the magic happens, you know, there's magic here. It's about alignment. It's about aligning our own strengths, our own skills with the charts we do. We get on with the people we work with, we're working towards goals that we all want to work with. That's when the magic happens when there's alignment. And I think that's, that's what any productivity tool must do. That's what any happiness tool must do that we do. You're looking to get that alignment.

Nice. You mentioned the P word there. And actually, that leads me really nicely on I was gonna ask you whether the obviously the work you've done for for many years is focused on happiness? And has that given you some some ways of thinking about the sort of intersection between happiness and productivity? Like, what do you see is the relationship between being happy and being productive? I can

give you a statistical answer for that. Yes, please. So we asked our happiness questions on a scale of one to five, very unhappy, unhappy, okay, happy. If you team moves up half a point. It's on average, 8% Extra productivity. Now, how do you measure productivity is sometimes it actually particularly the team level, but you know, if you're doing something, if it's impacts both the quantity and quality of work that people do. So people, you know, you know, when where we get in the zone, flow, people would call that flow. Yeah. And we get in there and it just quickly, that's, you know, both about speed and quality of the work we're doing. So if people are doing a very defined role, whether that's manufacturing, whether that's in a call centre, whether it's whatever, there is some impact, absolutely, from happiness, on the speed with which they do work, but they don't necessarily have the option to do the creative bits of it. Their call centres, there's all this stuff about tone of voice, opening up combative conversations with the client on the other, the customer on the other end, sales calls, brilliant piece of work by Joanna manual, Denise from Oxford University on BT call centres, and how it just goes right back to the weather. When the sun shone, people were happier, they sold more, and even working out people closer to window, or, you know, they sold more when the weather was good. And that's to do with having a relaxed tone of voice, being open and hearing the customer more, because they had no prospecting in that work. They just having a call falling through to them, can you sell them something or not? So So, so we see in those days, and then there's the whole innovation and creativity bit. And they're the impacts even bigger, which is that when we've got that baseline of psychological safety and a team, we've got teams that trust each other that they just as you were saying about, you know, fixing? What did you say about you ask your team every Monday you say they,

they? One of the questions, that's just where are you stuck?

Yeah. So you open to the fact that work is hard, sometimes that things can go wrong. And if you're allowed to, if you're not, you know, you're not planning to fail. But if failures are allowed, as we've tried, and it hasn't worked in due time, then you know, those are good things. And the innovation one is massive, you know, they do experiments, one was quite just as easy to understand. But it's called a dunker candle experiment. And psychologists they set people this task. And what they do is they give them some some candle, box of matches, and a candle something about finances something else. Anyway, you have to attach the candle to the wall and light it. So matches and tax and you have to attach size brain freeze senior moment, you have to attach the candle to the wall and light it in such a way the wax doesn't drop. It's a lateral thinking thing. And you have to basically notice a box of tacks and you enter the tax that put on the wall. It's very easy when you know, but it's not easy when you see it. And so they get this test to people and if people are in a in a neutral mood, 13% of people solve it in five minutes. If they put into a into a negative mood 20% of people join it. That's weird when you're when you're in a negative mood, you've got energy. So you're basically more energised and trying to do it. So if you're angry or something, you might get yourself a better than the totally flat. But people in a positive mood 70% 75% sober, three, four times more. And we take that to innovation and coming up with ideas, you know how you just in a meeting and ideas of buzzing around, you've got that safety, you do it and then, you know, one in 20 ideas is suddenly something that could be really helpful. And so you need that in so if your team's very creative, and the effect is even pick up on productivity.

And I think also, you know, the other thing is that the other way around is also true, right? So if you're having a period of productivity then I'm sure the morale goes up. But you know, that focus on happiness will also lead to productivity. And I think that's the sort of key key focus for managers and leaders, right is to really think about providing the happiness and the psychological safety, then everything good comes from that

it goes, it actually does go both ways. So if you measured financial success of a team, and happiness at time, one and the same at time, two, six months later, you do get a correlation coefficient from sort of success, I think's going well and happiness. But you get one the other way from happiness to success, but it's twice as strong. So basically, what that means it's a virtuous cycle, but the happiness to productivity is stronger than positivity to happiness.

Interesting. Yeah. That's incredible. And having that as the focus of your work for so long. Yeah. What, what does that mean for your happiness

and demanding way, in a way I prioritise, I do prioritise my, I think, I think people don't necessarily prioritise their own happiness enough. And people go that selfish, when it's not selfish. Happiness is actually very social, very, very, between us it's very, as a whole giving part of happiness, all sorts of things. So and I, you know, I talked earlier on about, you know, Anderson Consulting and getting married, well, I'm a divorced man now. So there's that, you know, that remarried, but it's, but it's like, you know, I've had my own things in there. And, you know, one of the reasons that marriage broke down was that I really recognised although my marriage was really meaningful to me, my kids are really meaningful to me, I was not happy. And I had to make that very difficult decision, because I was gonna have to make on my own because my ex was quite stuck, and didn't really want to move with me. And it's like, I had to make a decision to leave a marriage. And that's a very hard thing to do, but is about and you know, and 10 years later, very good decision, you know, in the sense that, you know, my kids are good. You know, my ex is still in her shoes. And I'm a lot happier. So it's definitely a net gain. For me, it definitely gave me I don't think it was a net loss for the kids, they learn things about honesty, authenticity. You know, and, and, and sources, different human beings. I think sometimes kids see two parents as one thing, one team, and they show us differently. And I think it wasn't a bad experience. But you know, I did have them every other week that did, you know, we did, we did co parent well together. So you know, there were things like that. But that is a decision, where I have to prioritise. And then, you know, with my work, when I left Neff, I realised I got stuck. And I been there for 10 years. And I remember talking with, I'd left my marriage, and I was going out another woman, like I saw, you know, very loyal to Neff. And she said, No, you got to be loyal to the idea, you've got a great idea about happiness at work, that's what you should be loyal to not building the organisation that you're with, you know, that'd be fine, you got this, you've got this idea, be loyal to the idea. And you know, she actually helped me, you know, move myself out of the think tank world into the business world,

it strikes me that those experiences are experiences where you're, you're, you're really being quite good at being honest with yourself and like really appraising your own situation and wrestling with stuff that a lot of people would just leave that like, just sweep it under the carpet or just bury it will forget about it, wherever. Is there anything that you learned just about how to ask yourself the hard questions through that?

I think I said earlier, I trained as a therapist when I was young. So the therapeutic model is interesting to me. And, of course, I returned to that occasionally. So I obviously did at that stage. So I mean, a lot of questioning about what I'm doing, why I'm doing it is I think, is helpful. And and then there's some things which are certain actually healed, and they, you know, that some of it is about time and, you know, you know, I made some poor choices with dating. And, and then after a while, you start to think, well, you know, like, laugh about that person, that but that person, and I need this for me, I need to smell space for me and I need to walk by don't walk in life, I get a bit grumpy. And so, you know, I need someone that's sort of going to be confident, I'm gonna walk and come back. I mean, that walk is trivial, but you don't mean it's like, if you're, you know, I was very happily married to Zoey now, you know, one of the things was, you know, I'm a speaker, I go and travel sometimes, but you know, she knows that's what I do. And it's like, it's not so it's so it's, it's, it's, it's finding out what's right, right for you, isn't it? So I think it is about questioning what's right and also being always open because, you know, happiness is not a destination. It's a journey. It's always changing. And these bad things are going to happen to us in the future, to both you and me. To every listener here. You know, we're going to die in the end, we're going to have some suffering, things are going to happen. You know, life is not all all bunches of roses, and how do we deal with that and how do we cope with it and and how do we make the best To this extraordinary life that we've been offered to, you know, just, you know, here, we're here. Let's enjoy it.

Absolutely, totally hear you on that. And I'm about halfway through that thing of the dating myself. So when we, when we stop, start the record of every week, or maybe compare a

painful process, though. The price is good.

Fries is good. I'm looking forward to one last question I wanted to ask you about. So you had an endorsement from Tony Shea, ex CEO of Zappos, who, sadly died recently. And I just as someone who's obviously written this book Delivering Happiness, and you know, he was a big inspiration to me, I just wondered if you had any reflections on on his life and the work of Tony Shea,

Tony say, Yes, I first met him back 2011 I think and I, I work with that he set up a group called Delivering Happiness and work for them for several years. I wouldn't say I knew Tony, I met him a dozen times or something and definitely got drunk with him and and he was always a bit of a lost soul. It you know, he there was something about him that was quite distant, but I knew him and he was already fantastically successful. And he's sort of surrounded with a lot of he surrounded himself with a lot, a lot of people, he was quite a genius. I mean, he was both strategically and culturally a genius. I mean, clearly, very, very bold move to set up an online shoe company. As he used to say, it's like the poster child of the disasterous internet idea. And he made a billion dollar business. And he did that through culture, he had some really, really wise things about the culture. What's so interesting as he couldn't apply that wisdom to himself, you know, he was, uh, he was, you know, and he, I know people that knew him very well. And, and, and they would still say they didn't know him. And he was also unreachable in the last time in his life. He'd got a lot of money and he got very into some certain types of narcotics. And that's what killed him. Really. Not literally baby when he got caught in a fire, but he was presumably high and whatever. But bless him, he was a lovely. He was an interesting man. He was very you know, he was someone that likes organising things and seeing how they were and he was very, very ambitious, very, very visionary. And, yeah, in lots of ways. Yeah. Yes. I still feel sad about him when we, we talk about him because it was huge shock when I heard he died. And, you know, obviously, I wrote to people, but it's such an Oscar like to see what he did. I'd like him to have had his dark period, and then come out of it. Because I think those people who do that redemption, I think he needed to go through some darkness. But if he could have come out, he did done other brilliant things. You know, he'd already left that boss.

Absolutely. He really, he sort of really struck you as someone who had lots of businesses in him. But you know, different, maybe even not businesses, but that whole like regeneration thing. He was down in

the Stanford scope perfectly, but the idea is brilliant. He was a great, great. And the book is worth reading, because it's it's a very heartfelt book on, on on building business, and quite honest. Could have done a slight edits, in my opinion, not not for length, but for continuity of the jump. But it was he was inspirational. Inspirational. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I feel like we've just covered so much stuff in in this 54 minutes. And so just want to say, just thank you for being on the show. It's been great to have you. Do you want to just share how people can get ahold of you and find out more about Friday polls? And where can people go?

Yeah, so we lose something called Friday, one, Friday one.com, which is a personal happiness at work checkup. And so if you want to go and think about your own happiness at work, it's a statistical thing that helps you reflect bit like those personality tests, but about happiness at work. So that's something to go and do you find me on LinkedIn. So Nic is about that. Okay. It's and I see marks and you find me and, and I post every two weeks a blog article on basically on happiness at work many. And yeah, Friday pulse.com. If you're interested in our tool for your organisation, your team, we have a startup product for small and large one for businesses, and but the main thing is just to take your own happiness seriously. I think that's the tip.

Absolutely. And that feels like a really good way to finish. So Nic, thank you so much for being on beyond busy.

Thank you so much, Graham.

So there you go, Nic Marks and thanks as ever to Emilir, my assistant for all of her work behind the scenes on that episode, and also to Pavel my producer on the show as well. So what I've been up to so it's been a weird few weeks, actually, I've been writing and sort of, you know, just keep myself pretty locked away finishing this book, which is called kind and it's all about kindness and leadership. There'll be lots more on the podcast along those lines over the next few months. as well as we bring a bit more of the kindness of leadership stuff into this podcast, but I've been doing that. And then yeah, the last few weeks have been really interesting, actually, my son has been going through some quite big medical stuff. So he had a couple of operations last week. And you know, that was all pretty badly timed in terms of my book deadline. And then just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, I got COVID. And then I was just in bed for two weeks. So yeah, it's really knocked me out and still, to be honest, coming through the other side and starting to get my energy back a little bit. So if you're out moving around in the world, and you have any doubts, let me just tell you that COVID can still follow you, even when you double back. So yeah, take care out there and keeping all those proportions in place masks all that stuff. It's not going away. And you know, it didn't really need to be honest, it didn't really feel like it was that different. Having been vaccinated, obviously, there, there are huge differences in terms of not ending up in hospital and stuff. But yeah, it still floored me. So just wanted to say that and hope you're keeping safe wherever you are. And the other thing I wanted to just share with you is I have done a bit of sea swimming. So I've been in the sea in October. So I live in Brighton on the south coast, those of you don't know. And then I have actually never been in the sea in Bryson in about 10 years of living here. And then a few weeks ago, I got encouraged to take the plunge and check it out. And yeah, honestly, the first time I did it, the cold shock was just like phenomenal. Like the whole rest of the day. My body was just kind of my heart was kind of racing a bit and felt pretty odd and how to have a big hot bath at the end of the day. But yeah, it's one of those things I think is going to get easier. I'll give it another go. I don't know if I'll be in on Christmas Day. That's a big thing down here is going for a swim on Christmas Day. So we'll see. But yeah, so what about the dryer? Oh, you got over the dryer. Oh, and then you can get warm pretty quick after you get out to see but yeah, all good. So that's what I've been up to lots going on. And yeah, I'm just really getting my head down to really finish this book over the next couple of months. So that's really the plan. And if you want to catch up with everything I'm doing and be in the room when I when I share stuff, sign up for my rev up for the week email. So just go to Graham allcott.com forward slash links. And then you'll see the thing there for rev up for the week and sign up for that and I send you a positive or productive thought every single Sunday night. 4:05pm really for the week ahead. So sign up there and then you'll hear everything in terms of my updates on the book and everything else as and when they happen. But that's it for this week. So thanks for tuning in for another episode. And we'll be back in two weeks time with another one. We've got a really good one coming up. You're gonna really love with a little bit of a kindness chat to it as well. So that's coming up in two weeks time and until then, take care bye for now.