Put Happiness to Work: 7 Strategies to Elevate Engagement for Optimal Performance

By Eric Karpinski

This game-changing “how-to” shows leaders how to increase engagement by harnessing employees’ motivation for happiness.

Our efforts to increase employee engagement are failing because employees simply aren’t motivated to improve their engagement. In this illuminating book from Eric Karpinski, managers and team leaders will learn the key to effectively engaging employees: focus on happiness. But not all types of happiness drive engagement; by selecting specific strategies that activate employees’ inherent motivation for certain types of happiness, you can simultaneously boost engagement and organizational performance. Everybody wins.

In Put Happiness to Work, Karpinski draws on his deep experience at the intersection of business and psychology to lay out a step-by-step program that includes specific activities to enhance engagement and generate happiness at work. Utilizing existing work habits and meetings, these dynamic yet simple tools will hardwire effective changes into leaders’ and employees’ behavior, creating long-term, sustainable engagement. Based on more than 10 years of experience applying top positive psychology and neuroscience research in the workplace, Karpinski’s strategies are easy to implement and are critical to helping leaders unlock the kind of engagement organizations need to thrive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9781260466737

Book preview

PRAISE FOR PUT HAPPINESS TO WORK

An unusually practical and readable book on positive psychology at work. If you’re looking for something more energizing and meaningful than employee engagement, start here.

—ADAM GRANT, New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and Give and Take, host of the chart-topping TED podcast WorkLife

Eric Karpinski is on a mission to bring happiness to work. If you follow his practical and positive guidance, you’ll deepen engagement in your team and set yourself up for success.

—DANIEL H. PINK, New York Times bestselling author of When and Drive

This book offers a path to work engagement, yes, but it also offers something broader and more powerful than engagement alone; the tools in this book will help you create stronger bonds, find more energy, and radiate more positive emotions. Do yourself—and your team—a favor and use this book to Put Happiness to Work.

—JEAN GREAVES, PhD, bestselling coauthor of Emotional Intelligence 2.0, cofounder of TalentSmart, Inc.

Jam-packed with research-based ideas and data-driven insights, Karpinski lays out an optimistic process for unlocking optimal performance.

—CHRISTINE CARTER, PhD, author of The Sweet Spot and Raising Happiness, Senior Fellow, Greater Good Science Center, University of California, Berkeley

A fascinating and practical approach to finding true fulfillment at work.

—EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH, author of The Power of Meaning

This book is both a great read and a great tool for anyone leading a team, no matter the size. Eric’s science-based approach to understanding happiness at work, engagement, and team performance codifies much of what I had to learn by trial and error over many years. Put Happiness to Work looks at the whole of engagement and offers practical advice for building high- performing teams that will stand the test of time. I wish I had this book and its tools years ago and can’t wait to try some of its tools with my team!

—MICHAEL J. BUFANO, former Chief Financial Officer, Panera Bread

This book is full of powerful tools and novel approaches that can be put to work immediately. Applying the best of positive psychology and organizational behavior research, Karpinski shows how to create win-win situations that help everyone take responsibility for creating a more positive, engaged culture focused on meaningful goals.

—MICHELLE McQuaid, PhD, cofounder of The Wellbeing Lab

Eric Karpinski’s book and philosophy offer a tangible, research-backed road map, enabling organizations to make sure work can be a place characterized by energy, happiness, and connection. A must-read for leaders keen to follow a more contemporary approach to corporate success.

—MARC VAN ZADELHOFF, Chief Executive Officer, Devo Technologies, former Chief Executive Officer and General Manager for IBM’s $2 billion security business unit

This is a fun and informative book that applies the insights of positive psychology to the workplace, and more importantly, gives you concrete tools and practices to transform your work mindset to be happier and more productive. Highly recommended.

—KRISTIN NEFF, PhD, author of Self-Compassion and Fierce Self-Compassion

A game changer! Packed with insightful tools and strategies that tap into and fully optimize the power of positive emotions. Put Happiness to Work integrates the art and science of personal and professional energy management and stress mastery in a way that could truly revolutionize the way we work, making organizations the cure for, instead of the cause of, chronic stress and dis-ease.

—HEIDI HANNA, New York Times bestselling author of The Sharp Solution and Stressaholic, fellow with the American Institute of Stress

As an expert in burnout, I was thrilled to see how Eric Karpinski approaches engagement in his latest book. Leaders will get a step-by step guide to developing authentic purpose in their workforce—known to increase happiness and help prevent chronic stress at work. I plan to hand-deliver this book to every manager and leader in my network.

—JENNIFER MOSS, award-winning author of Unlocking Happiness at Work and The Burnout Epidemic, syndicated well-being columnist

For leaders looking to crack the code on engagement, Put Happiness to Work will revolutionize the way that you invest in and interact with your employees.

—AMY BLANKSON, author of The Future of Happiness, member of the United Nations Global Happiness Council

Karpinski beautifully synthesizes emerging research, personal experience, and actionable insight to create a handbook for positive culture change that you will want to carry everywhere you go.

—NATALY KOGAN, author of Happier Now, Chief Executive Officer, Happier

Copyright © 2021 by Eric Karpinski. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Retta and Jack, who inspire me every day to create a happier, more connected, and more purpose-driven world.

To my wife, Becca, who was with me through every step of this book, shaping ideas, finding structure, keeping me grounded in real-life workplaces and cutting literally thousands of extraneous words. You should all be thankful for her too.

Contents

Foreword by Shawn Achor

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER 1

Happiness Drives Engagement

CHAPTER 2

Integrating Happiness and Engagement

CHAPTER 3

Strategy 1: Hardwire Authentic Appreciation

CHAPTER 4

Strategy 2: Cultivate Connection

CHAPTER 5

Strategy 3: Put Stress to Work

CHAPTER 6

Strategy 4: Activate Employee Superpowers

CHAPTER 7

Strategy 5: Mine for Meaning

CHAPTER 8

Strategy 6: Embrace the Negative

CHAPTER 9

Strategy 7: Approach as a Coach

CONCLUSION

Implementing the Seven Strategies

APPENDIX 1

Habits and Exercises

APPENDIX 2

Negative Emotions List

Glossary

Notes

Index

Foreword

by Shawn Achor

In good times at work, happiness can seem like a luxury item, but in challenging times, we recognize it as a necessity.

We are in an unprecedented period of change and upheaval in our workplaces. While painful and disorienting to experience, this upheaval also creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rewrite how we do our work, to make it more humane, more fulfilling, and less like the stereotypical, soul-deadening experiences of work portrayed in pop culture. In short, we have a unique opportunity to make workplaces happier.

Put Happiness to Work provides a powerful vision of what work could be like: deeply connected groups of dedicated, energized people who find meaning in what they do and support one another to achieve challenging goals. That may sound like an unattainable dream, but 20 years of psychology, neuroscience, and organizational behavior research show that it is possible. To make lasting change, we need to carefully distill complex academic research into concrete actions and work routines that you can implement to create happier, more engaged workplaces for you and your team. And we need ideas we can start using today in the midst of raising our kids and navigating changes to the economic and political landscape.

As with any period of massive change, there are risks and opportunities to our world, and this book helps you navigate them. With the stunningly fast rise of remote work, we risk creating more isolation, loneliness, and disengagement as people lose opportunities for casual in-person connections. Or we could apply the research-backed social connection tools in this book and create flourishing teams full of connected workers. We can let the increased demands of globalization, the fast pace of change, and the unknowns of our uncertain and complex work environments create ever- increasing levels of stress and powerful negative emotions. Or we could apply the tools in this book for rethinking stress and working with negative emotions to learn what those emotions are telling us and utilize all that energy to move forward and work toward our goals. We can let the increased diversity of our workforce—not only in race and gender but also in ways of thinking and connecting, cultural background, life experiences, strengths, and values—cause fractured workplaces that perpetuate the inequities and polarization in our society. Or we could apply the strengths and coaching tools in Put Happiness to Work to ensure that everyone can bring their perspectives and ideas to the problems our teams and organizations face.

Through our work at GoodThink, a positive psychology research organization, Eric and I have collectively worked with hundreds of organizations, from schools to government, nonprofits to corporations (including nearly half the companies in the Fortune 100), and in more than 50 countries across the globe. We’ve led thousands of programs to bring the best that research has to offer to create positive differences in people’s lives and in their work.

I can say with certainty that Eric understands the research and the complexities of the modern work environment. He has a decade of experience in the trenches with real managers and real teams struggling with the challenges of implementing positive change. And he’s pulled all that experience, along with an in-depth knowledge of the research on happiness and engagement, into a book that can change workplaces tomorrow. Put Happiness to Work is full of specific tools you can apply, habits you can develop, and exercises that create long-term change in how you and your team approach your work and each other. Best of all, it builds on whatever strengths you already have, amplifying and cultivating what is already working.

We all know that information alone is not transformation. Put Happiness to Work will provide a path for creating positive change, a supportive culture, and engaged teams who are motivated and inspired to work together to achieve whatever you put in front of them. It’s in your hands to make your work a happier, more engaging experience. My hope, like Eric’s, is that this research will empower us to move past this painful period toward a world of work that is better than what we’re leaving behind.

Acknowledgments

To Shawn Achor for bringing the word happiness into the workplace with such energy and humor and your willingness to bring me onto the team nearly a decade ago. To Amy Blankson, Michelle Gielan, and Jordan Brock for welcoming me as part of the GoodThink team and for doing such great work to advance positive psychology in practical ways.

To Nancy Hancock for transforming this enthusiastic speaker into an author. To Cheryl Segura, my McGraw Hill editor, for your positive energy, constant support, and willingness to invest so much time in a first-time author. To James Fowler, Dr. Jenn Gunsaullus, Bryan Fitzgerald, and Julia Piercey for your early read and great ideas to strengthen the book.

To Ed Diener for sharing a preprint of your research back in 2016 that inspired the core idea of this book. To Barbara Fredrickson, Robert Biswas-Diener, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and the late Chris Peterson for your roles in starting this revolution and guiding my early thinking on how best to apply positive psychology research to support others on their journey to happier, more connected, and fulfilling lives.

To Greg Kaiser and Greg Ray for integrating me into the Orange Frog training team and supporting my efforts to lead the in-house certification program. And to the rest of the team at the International Thought Leader Network for all your hard work and support over the last six years including Marti Kaiser, Donald Bargy, Andrew Greatrex, Mark McDonald, and the rest of the team! We’ve collectively created positive change for tens of thousands of people.

To Sue Stevenson for helping me look inside and start my own path to happiness and purpose. To John Halcyon Styn for always reminding me about crap or cone and introducing me to the belief buffet. To Brian Johnson for guiding me to some underappreciated books that anchored important strategies in this book and finding new ways to integrate the world’s wisdom into practical steps for optimizing life.

To my parents, Dave and Bobbi Karpinski, and my sister, Kerem, who have always shown me to not only believe there is good in the world but to be that good! To my wife, Becca, who inspires me every day to make the world a better place with her own dedication to supporting others. And finally, to my kids for hiding eye rolls when dinner table conversation focused yet again on cultivating positive emotions.

CHAPTER 1

Happiness Drives Engagement

Organizations have spent more than a decade and billions of dollars trying to engage employees in their work. And with good reason: the data tying employee engagement to increased productivity and bottom-line results is rock solid. Yet over a decade of focused effort has had very little effect on actual engagement numbers. In fact, in the United States, Gallup’s engagement index—the gold standard for measuring employee engagement—has remained stubbornly within a 5-point range of 30 percent since 2000.¹

There’s a reason for this: our approach to employee engagement is all wrong.

Engagement is simply a measure of activated positive emotions at work. The formal definition of engagement is full of positive emotion words like inspired, enthusiastic, proud, and fulfilled.² And many of the activities proven by research to increase engagement are also known to increase certain activated positive emotions.

Throughout the book, terms in boldface type can also be found in the Glossary on page 241.

Yet in most workplaces, we are told to leave our emotions at home, that we should suppress our feelings because they are not professional. But the very root of the word emotion is motion—emotions move us to action. By eliminating (or minimizing or hiding) emotions in the workplace, we are taking away our most basic motivation for action and the most powerful engagement driver we have in our management repertoire.

As managers and leaders, we compound the challenge by focusing our engagement discussions primarily on the performance outcomes we want to see. The reason engagement is important is that we want our employees to be committed, proactive, and willing to go the extra mile. So it is no surprise when you set the goal to be more engaged, what employees hear is, We want you to work harder without paying you more money. Ironically— yet unsurprisingly—this often leads to lower engagement.

The challenge is that the majority of employees don’t care about their engagement. When they were kids, they didn’t think, Gosh, I sure hope I grow up to be engaged at work. They don’t organize their lives around how they can increase their organization’s Net Promoter Score. It isn’t even front of mind for them while they are at work. It is employers, not employees, who think about engagement.

But happiness—the amount and frequency of positive emotions—is something employees do care deeply about. An informal survey of over 2,000 employees across North America asked, Which of the following would you be more likely to invest time and energy in: your happiness or your engagement? Over 80 percent chose happiness.

This book is about tapping the intrinsic motivation your people have for increasing their own happiness as a tool to increase their engagement at work. In other words, this book is a way to make sure that everybody— employees and employers—wins.

DEFINITIONS OF HAPPINESS

What happiness looks like varies, of course. What makes people feel happy is as individual as their fingerprints. Yet at the core of so many human behaviors—and often the driver of how employees feel about work—is this question: How can I be happier more of the time?

The stereotype of happiness is a high-energy, bubbly, bounce-around-the-room, high-five-giving, extraverted emotion, but in this book, we use happiness as shorthand for the broader experience of all positive emotions: joy, hope, interest, contentment, serenity, love, and enthusiasm. It also includes feelings such as pride in a job well done, positive connection with others, curiosity about how to solve a problem, gratitude for the support of a colleague, or inspiration from someone’s idea. There is room in this definition of happiness for everyone who likes to feel positive emotions—which is pretty much every human on earth.

Not all happiness is equivalent, though. The ancient Greeks described two different philosophies around happiness.³ The first is hedonic happiness, which focuses on maximizing the experience of pleasure and positive emotions, personal comfort and ease, while working to minimize negative experiences, negative emotions, discomfort, and pain. Unfortunately, pursuing hedonic happiness traps us into constantly needing more and better things and experiences. As we adapt to the good things in our lives, they become familiar and no longer provide as much happiness as they once did. We think something is wrong and expect it will improve if we just get a better house, a better car, or a better partner. Psychologists refer to this as the hedonic treadmill. In workplaces, hedonic happiness can look like massages, beer carts, and pool tables, and it often creates an arms-race situation about who’s the best employer.

The second Greek philosophy describes eudaimonic happiness, which centers around the pursuit of meaning, challenges, and growth as the primary path to happiness. It includes a willingness to forgo some short-term comfort and ease in the pursuit of something bigger. While seeking pleasurable experiences has a place in all our lives, it is the pursuit of eudaimonic happiness that is the focus of positive psychology and this book.

Happy doesn’t mean happy all the time. Short experiences of positive emotions interspersed throughout the workday or month is all that’s necessary to make a positive difference in engagement levels. And it is not about trying to suppress or eliminate negative emotions; they provide important information and direction, and they are essential for making the best decisions as a team. Instead, it’s about finding a balance, what we call rational optimism, where we recognize the real challenges and problems we face but with the knowledge that we can influence outcomes and make a positive difference with our effort and focus. Rational optimism allows us to recognize opportunities for positive change that our more pessimistic colleagues never see.

ALIGNING DESIRE FOR HAPPINESS WITH ENGAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE

The past two decades have seen an explosion in research both in positive psychology (the study of what makes people not just function but thrive) and employee engagement. After a decade of studying both, it is clear that positive emotion is the waymaker to engagement. It is the key that unlocks the kind of engagement organizations have sought and that has eluded them, even after investing considerable time, energy, and money.

I’ve spent the last decade on the front lines working with organizations such as Facebook, NASA, IBM, Genentech, SAP, T-Mobile, USAA, Intel, and Eli Lilly bringing this actionable research directly to their teams. I’ve seen strong engagement results from bringing a training focused on boosting positive emotions at work into organizations across the globe through the Orange Frog training program. Orange Frog provides a full-day experiential training based on Shawn Achor’s book, The Happiness Advantage. Here’s just a small sample of results:

•   After receiving the training, the BSO division of Cemex, the world’s largest producer of cement, saw a 20 percent increase in its engagement scores, the largest increase of any division in this 50,000-employee company.

•   A major insurance brokerage division saw its engagement results increase by 14 percent, which created a 50 percent increase in sales and a decrease in attrition from 12 to 3 percent (with annualized savings of over $1 million).⁴

•   The faculty and staff of Genesee Intermediate School District in Flint, Michigan, showed significant increases in key engagement contributors such as I feel connected and committed to my organization (50 percent increase); My organization cares about my growth (40 percent increase); We receive recognition for our efforts (90 percent increase); and My organization encourages feedback, suggestions and opinions (50 percent increase).

•   In 2017, Genesis Health System, a six-hospital health system in Iowa, was facing a profitability crisis, and it underwent two rounds of layoffs. Integrating the Orange Frog training against this negative backdrop, it was able to increase the number of its employees who were very expressive of optimism at work from 23 to 40 percent, increase the percentage of people who were happy at work from 43 to 62 percent, and reduce the number of people who were burned out often from 11 to 6 percent. And this positive outlook spread to the patients as patient experience scores doubled in the following 12 months, transforming a $2 million operating loss into an $8 million profit.⁵

In this work, I’ve seen over and over again how activated positive emotions drive team engagement.

WHY ENGAGEMENT EFFORTS FAIL

This book addresses three of the most significant traps that await organizations hoping to increase employee engagement.

Not Articulating Any Clear Personal Benefit in Engagement

When we position engagement as a path to organizational success, employees don’t buy in because there is nothing for them in the short term. They hear that we want them to be more committed, to give discretionary effort, and to be proactive and persistent in reaching organization goals (see the right side of the diagram in Figure 1.1⁶), all of which sounds suspiciously like a request to work harder. There might be explicit or implicit promises of more money, a promotion, or something else, but these are not strong or consistent motivators. The problem with engagement is that it is not something you can do to people. They must be active participants.

FIGURE 1.1 Activated Positive Emotions Increase Both Employee Happiness and Engagement

Source: See note 6 in the endnotes at the back of the book.

Instead of focusing on the attributes and benefits the organization gets out of engagement, we can choose engagement efforts that bring more positive emotions into work for employees, to help them feel more valued, inspired, enthusiastic, and fulfilled in what they do. We can make their happiness a priority as the path to engagement. That is a much more motivating prospect in day-to-day work and exactly what you will learn to cultivate in the seven strategies in this book.

Focusing on the Wrong Kinds of Happiness

The second engagement trap that organizations fall into is thinking that if their people are content and satisfied at work, engagement will follow. We’ve all heard stories of incredible perks offered at some companies. I led a talk with 500 recruiting leaders at Facebook headquarters where I found espresso machines and free snacks on every floor, along with nap pods and massage rooms, Ping-Pong and shuffleboard tables, and high-quality cafeterias that served three free meals a day for all employees. These perks absolutely drive positive emotions such as contentment and satisfaction (and are great for recruiting!). The problem is that not all positive emotions are created equal when it comes to driving the engagement outcomes organizations want.

These rest-and-digest types of positive emotions—satisfied, relaxed, tranquil, content—do not actually drive engagement (see the left side of the diagram in Figure 1.1). They are the general good feelings your people may have about their workplace, but they don’t translate into real motivation or move people to action. These aren’t the emotions to invest in if engagement is your goal. Instead, we want to use tools that will increase the amount of activated positive emotions that