Psychology for Business — How Happiness Changes Groups of People

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer, and I’m working for various organizations every week. Whether it’s a conference, a corporate entity, or a non-profit organization, I’m presenting stuff that’s all along the lines of what I do here on my YouTube channel, which I often share on LinkedIn and other places. However, that work is mostly directed towards the individual because I know I’m speaking to an audience of one most of the time when I’m in those media forums. But when I’m working professionally for an organization, I’m often talking about positive psychology from an organizational context. These days, in the midst of a pandemic, I’m often working here in my home studio with fancy lighting and a green screen behind me. Then, I give a presentation to people sometimes anywhere in the world, different time zones. I’m up at two in the morning doing something for Dubai, and I’m presenting in this fashion. I want to share with you a little bit today about the science a positive psychology from an organizational construct. It’s not just that positive for individuals, positive emotions for individuals lead to better outcomes in our lives, but also that positive emotions in a workplace lead to better outcomes. You’re going to see that. Stay tuned, coming right up.

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. So if it’s true, if the basic psychological research demonstrates that positivity in the individual leads to more successful life outcomes in the individual, then we want to explore is the relationship true when you take whole organizations. Whether it’s a family, a community group, a neighborhood, or a business, and the research has been done in a similar fashion to how it’s done for individuals. There’s something called a meta-study. A meta-study is really a study of the studies. It’s not primary research. It’s where you look at a bunch of previously published studies and say where there’s good science, a well-structured study that had a particular purpose. In this case, the shifting of a more positive emotional context, do we see results that we can find reliable and predictable across similar studies? In other words, can we reach a consensus about what scientists have attempted to prove? And if you find enough proof in many individual studies and you accumulate them, then what’s the body of the science show, and we call that consensus science.

Both positive psychologists and people in organizational development theory, those researchers, have done a number of individual studies looking to see can they inject a more positive set of emotions in a business. And if so, what changes in the business and does that drive any bottom-line results. So I’m going to show you right now some of this really beautiful science. If we take for example the kinds of studies that we’re looking at, well, these are ones that have an intention to change the emotional context in the workplace. So they may be that the researchers were going after, you know, lower stress and reduced anger, or more frequent positive feelings, or higher job satisfaction, or good job engagement, which is a thing that we often hear about. In those studies where an intervention of some kind achieved those ends, this is what the body of research shows happens. You get less turnover in the workplace, greater customer satisfaction, enhanced creativity, more energy, improved social skills, fewer sick days, there’s better safety overall. And there’s something really cool I’ve talked about this concept before called organizational citizenship, which is an amazing thing. It’s a fancy term that basically says people volunteer to do out things of their things outside of their job description to improve the business. Get that, organizational citizenship is just when people start pulling to help the organization in ways that they know the organization needs, even if it’s outside of their job description.

And when you have that in the business, lots of it, when everybody’s got organizational citizenship, businesses become unstoppable, families become strong, communities become united in a mission for safety and just good pleasant experiences. It’s when everybody’s pulling together to make their neighborhood safe. Get this, and of course, this makes perfectly intuitive sense, no surprise here at all that if you change the emotional context and you get great improvements like we’re seeing on the screen here, then you get bottom-line results. That in businesses at least that result in higher productivity, more profitability, and a healthier workforce. So there’s the science. We talk about it all the time, and my inclination is to share stuff on this space that’s important for the individual. But I also want you to know that there are powerful results we can get at kind of a corporate level, at a community level, and certainly in our families and with our friends and those important relationships in the community that we have. So hey, if you like this kind of content, click the like button, share the video with your friends and family, and subscribe to my channel to get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching, we’ll see you next time. Bye for now.