How to Bring Positivity to the Workplace

Hi. I’m Paul Krismer, your Happiness Expert, and today’s video is going to be all about getting through all the crap that you have to deal with at work and why is it that people bring all their emotional burdens and give you make-work projects to do, and there’s all kinds of negativity, complaining, backbiting, and gossiping and all that crap at work. And this is kind of building from our last week’s video where we talked about negativity bias. It’s happening at work too, so stay tuned and we’re gonna figure out how to fix it.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world, so stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Last week we talked about negativity bias. This is this idea that the things that hurt us, that emotionally hurt, have big impacts on us. We learn from it, it’s hard and fast, it’s impactful, it’s sadly more impactful than the positive things that happen in our lives.

And that’s simply because that’s how we’ve evolved as a species. That helped us survive. A hundred thousand years ago tribal people learned a lot from the scary negative things and didn’t get the same kind of learning and big lift up that we would hope to get from positivity.

So if you watched last week’s video, great. If you didn’t, there’s a link below in the video so that you can go back and watch that video. I think it’s really important and foundational. The negativity bias at work is the same as it is anywhere else. There’s all kinds of things that aren’t going well at work and we seize on them.

And, in fact, at work we probably do it more than other places because it’s like we never go to a meeting where the agenda is “List of things that are going well”. In fact, another name for an agenda might be “List of things that are going badly”, “List of problems.” The agenda items are all things that we have to deal with that are the negative stuff. And most of the hallway water cooler talk we have at work is sadly all too often about the negative crap that’s going on at work and often about personalities and politics and all that stuff. You know all about it.

Well, there’s a reason why, in that last video, I said we need to get to a three to one or better ratio of positive things over negative things. So, for every negative thing that we seize on in the workplace, we need at least three positive things to offset that negativity bias. And the science shows that if you can get it even higher still—four to one or five to one positive to negative things we really start seeing productivity, profitability, the success of the business take off. And this is all based on research done by a guy named Marcial Losada. He’s a brilliant guy. He spent his adult life, after getting his PhD in psychology, studying and working with organizations’ sales teams.

And he had amazing data. At the end of his career, he knew exactly how profitable, how productive, what the customer service ratings were, what the peer and superior evaluations were of the members of sales teams. And he often had it in the same organization, so like an insurance company in Seattle and Portland and Las Vegas and Houston and across the whole country he knew exactly how well these teams did. What he didn’t know was how positive these teams were, but he had something very interesting. Upon his retirement he realized he had thousands of hours of videotape of these sales teams and meetings.

So, along with Barbara Fredrickson, another researcher PhD out of the University of North Carolina, I believe, they got a pile of graduate students to watch every boring minute of these crazy videos of sales teams and meetings. And they evaluated every single word spoken. Was it positive, negative, or neutral? They made judgment calls about whether somebody was advocating for their own position or inquiring about somebody else’s. Or whether a person was talking about themselves or other people. And they made these judgment calls about whether there was kind of a negative component to what people were bringing to the meeting or a more positive component.

And whenever the business teams had a three to one ratio of positive to negative they were really good teams and any ratios below that were crappy teams, really poor performing teams. And didn’t matter if you were one to one or two to one. You needed this tipping point of three to one and if you were better than three to one, the teams got better and better and better. The best team they saw working anywhere had a positive to negative ratio of 5.9 to one and they were the rock stars, beating every other business team for their company across the entire country. So there you have it.

We need these high ratios. And there’s other independent researchers studying happiness and success from completely different fields that come up with the same ratio. John Gottman, for example, who’s the preeminent behavioral psychologist studying couples, shows the exact same ratios. At three to one, couples will make it. At five to one, couples are genuinely happy and have rich, juicy relationships. So these ratios really mean something. So how do we get these ratios up at work is the question.

Well, why don’t we start every meeting that we’re chairing, or ask your chair who’s leading the meeting, to add the agenda item “What’s going well?” It is that simple. Look to your business team around you and just set the tone for the meeting that’s upcoming. Say, “Hey what’s going well?” And I’ll tell you when I first started doing this, it was embarrassing. There would be silence and people would giggle and go “What the hell is wrong with this guy that he’s asking what’s going well?” But I persisted. I knew what the positive psychology literature said, and so every single meeting that I had, especially with my primary business team in my last Here is the fixed transcript:

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, your Happiness Expert, and today’s video is going to be all about getting through all the crap that you have to deal with at work and why is it that people bring all their emotional burdens and give you make-work projects to do. There’s all kinds of negativity, complaining, backbiting, gossiping, and all that crap at work. And this is kind of building from our last week’s video where we talked about negativity bias.

It’s happening at work too, so stay tuned and we’re gonna figure out how to fix it. As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world, so stay tuned and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Last week we talked about negativity bias. This is this idea that the things that hurt us, that emotionally hurt, have big impacts on us. We learn from it, it’s hard and fast, it’s impactful, it’s sadly more impactful than the positive things that happen in our lives.

And that’s simply because that’s how we’ve evolved as a species. That helped us survive. A hundred thousand years ago, tribal people learned a lot from the scary negative things and didn’t get the same kind of learning and big lift up that we would hope to get from positivity. So if you watched last week’s video, great. If you didn’t, there’s a link below in the video so that you can go back and watch that video. I think it’s really important and foundational. The negativity bias at work is the same as it is anywhere else.

There’s all kinds of things that aren’t going well at work and we seize on them. And, in fact, at work we probably do it more than other places because it’s like we never go to a meeting where the agenda is “List of things that are going well”. In fact, another name for an agenda might be “List of things that are going badly”, “List of problems”. The agenda items are all things that we have to deal with that are the negative stuff. And most of the hallway water cooler talk we have at work is sadly all too often about the negative crap that’s going on at work and often about personalities and politics and all that stuff. You know all about it.

Well, there’s a reason why, in that last video, I said we need to get to a three to one or better ratio of positive things over negative things. So, for every negative thing that we seize on in the workplace, we need at least three positive things to offset that negativity bias. And the science shows that if you can get it even higher still—four to one or five to one positive to negative things we really start seeing productivity, profitability, the success of the business take off. And this is all based on research done by a guy named Marcial Losada. He’s a brilliant guy. He spent his adult life, after getting his PhD in psychology, studying and working with organizations’ sales teams.

And he had amazing data. At the end of his career, he knew exactly how profitable, how productive, what the customer service ratings were, what the peer and superior evaluations were of the members of sales teams. And he often had it in the same organization, so like an insurance company in Seattle and Portland and Las Vegas and Houston and across the whole country he knew exactly how well these teams did. What he didn’t know was how positive these teams were, but he had something very interesting. Upon his retirement he realized he had thousands of hours of videotape of these sales teams and meetings. So, along with Barbara Fredrickson, another researcher PhD out of the University of North Carolina, I believe, they got a pile of graduate students to watch every boring minute of these crazy videos of sales teams and meetings.

And they evaluated every single word spoken. Was it positive, negative or neutral? They made judgment calls about whether somebody was advocating for their own position or inquiring about somebody else’s. Or whether a person was talking about themselves or other people. And they made these judgment calls about whether there was kind of a negative component to what people were bringing to the meeting or a more positive component. And whenever the business teams had a three to one ratio of positive to negative they were really good teams and any ratios below that were crappy teams, really poor performing teams. And didn’t matter if you were one to one or two to one.

You needed this tipping point of three to one and if you were better than three to one, the teams got better and better and better. The best team they saw working anywhere had a positive to negative ratio of 5.9 to one and they were the rock stars, beating every other business team for their company across the entire country. So there you have it. We need these high ratios. And there’s other independent researchers studying happiness and success from completely different fields that come up with the same ratio. John Gottman, for example, who’s the preeminent behavioral psychologist studying couples, shows the exact same ratios. At three to one, couples will make it. At five to one, couples are genuinely happy and have rich, juicy relationships. So these ratios really mean something.

So how do we get these ratios up at work is the question. Well, why don’t we start every meeting that we’re chairing, or ask your chair who’s leading the meeting, to add the agenda item “What’s going well?” It is that simple. Look to your business team around you and just set the tone for the meeting that’s upcoming. Say, “Hey what’s going well?” And I’ll tell you when I first started doing this, it was embarrassing. There would be silence and people would giggle and go “What the hell is wrong with this guy that he’s asking what’s going well?” But I persisted. I knew what the positive psychology literature said, and so every single meeting that I had, especially with my primary business team in my last role, I began the meeting with “What’s going well?” and pretty soon we got into the habit of it and people would start sharing these stories.

Not only did sharing these stories lift our mood and make us kind of collectively celebrate our successes, but we learned from each other on an ongoing basis the little tweaks we were making in the aspects of our business that we could apply with our teams to lift the overall performance of the business. It’s a very very powerful intervention. Ask the question “What’s going well?” Here’s another little technique for those of you who are in leadership roles and maybe even for those who aren’t. Every day the first thing you should do is start with some act of appreciation. If you’re the kind of manager who walks around the office to start the day with your cup of coffee and have social visits with people, that’s beautiful.

If you’re good at that and you’re sincere, and it comes across as really genuine, when you’re there talking to your people, make a point of appreciating the things they’re good at. I was never that “walk around” kind of manager, so I made a habit of starting every single day by the first email that I’d send would go to some individual specific in my office, and giving them some word of appreciation. And I’ll tell you, when I read this research, I found it hard at first.

I didn’t think I could really do it, but I found that with my administrative staff, it was pretty easy. There was transactional stuff that was obvious that they did. “Hey, thanks so much for organizing those meetings for me. I really appreciate the meeting rooms being booked. Thank you so much.” Easy email. But when I got good at this, I realized that my high-level professionals doing very complicated, autonomous tasks. It took a different kind of appreciation.

And so that’s when I’d say to people in an email something like, “I really appreciated the way you did that case file review yesterday. You brought the whole team on board. We understood the problem and I got great action items that I think everybody’s taking away. I really appreciate that kind of meeting.” And you notice I don’t even need to say thank you in that email. The fact is the professional who’s receiving it is simply going to feel seen and understood and appreciated for the actual work they’re doing.

And these kinds of acts of appreciation not only make it a habit for you to see more of what’s going on well and then spreading it to your team so that they feel some resonance with the organization that when they come in, they belong here. People appreciate them, and they’re being recognized for their good work. And I’ll tell you, that is going to lift your ratios way way up over three to one in your workplace, so that you can get not only the happiness that comes from that but the greater business success that comes from higher ratios of happiness in your workplace.

And, in fact, I think we have a video from the past where we talk about how happiness clearly leads to more success in business and we’ll put a link in the video below. Look, if you like this kind of video, please like and share it. That means it gets spread around, and more people in the world get happier. And if you enjoy this content, subscribe to my channel and you’ll keep getting a video every Sunday morning.

I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your Happiness Expert. Thanks for watching. Bye for now.