Eveline Oehrlich: Hello everybody. This is Eveline
Oehrlich at the DevOps Institute and this is the humans of DevOps
Podcast. Today, Is a very exciting session with a
wonderful gentleman, Jon Clifton, CEO of the Gallup of
Gallup, and the episode title is the Leadership Blind Spot, the
Global Rise of Unhappiness and how Leaders Missed it. I'm very
excited to welcome you here to our podcast. Today, Jon. hello there.
Jon Clifton: Hi, Evelyn. thank you for having me.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yes, excited to be here with you really
honored to be here.Before we get into our conversation, I want to
make sure that our listeners know who you are, and what you
do. So I'm gonna read a little bit of that, because I could not
remember all of this. So Jon is the CEO of Gallup, global
analytics and advice firm. And Jon, I'll ask you a little bit
later on, give us our listeners a little bit of an insight on to
Gallup they might not be familiar with. So Jon's mission
is to build the world's official statistics for everything
related to work and life, to put people worldwide in touch with
their strength and to help organizations great thriving
workplaces. Jon is a non resident Senior Fellow at Baylor
University's Institute for Studies of religion. He serves
on the board of directors for Gallup and young professionals
in foreign policy, and has also served on the boards of Meridian
International Center, street wise partners, chess challenge
in DC, and find dear, I think that's fine Dyer, I think that's
how you say it. Because of his expertise, Jon is often called
to speak about gallops research to international associations,
including the United Nations International Association for
official statistics and the World Bank. He has been
interviewed on BBC News C spans Washington journal, and Al
Jazeera, and has testified in front of the US Congress, who
are the state of American small business and entrepreneurship.
This is fantastic that you are here, Jon, take taking your time
out of your day to be with us here at the DevOps Institute.
Thank you very much. Again, we're honored to have you on our
podcast.
Jon Clifton: It's great to be here.
Eveline Oehrlich: Yeah. So Gallup, of course, I am reached.
I'm in research, and I have enjoyed Gallup research for
quite a while, even as I was at Forrester not really competition
to Gallup, because your work is very different from what we did
at Forrester. But tell our listeners who might not be
familiar with Gallup. What does Gallup actually do?
Jon Clifton: At the core of everything we do is we help
people be heard, and we help leaders listen and understand
their constituencies. We do that at the individual level, at the
organizational level and at the global level. And for the past
80 years, we've been doing macro level listening, where we
conduct surveys and ask how people feel about their lives,
about the institutions in the countries where they live. And
more recently, we've been helping organizations create
thriving workplaces by listening to their colleagues and also to
their customer bases. And the other thing is, is that we help
build strengths based organizations, this is to
understand how different people are, and also to help them grow
individually, through their strengths. So those those are
the different things that Gallup does.
Eveline Oehrlich: So one of the things you're doing is all you
have done is Clifton Strengths. I call it an assessment, but
it's probably an analysis, right? Give us a couple of
sentences on what that is. Because I have not done it yet.
But my colleague AB has done as we just talked in our pre
podcast, I will do it. Tell us a little bit about what that is.
Jon Clifton: Yeah, so if you think back to ancient
philosophy, almost every single philosopher kind of agreed that
the key to a great life, is to do it through your strengths.
Even modern philosophers like the business thinker Peter
Drucker said something almost identical around the key to a
successful career is through your strengths. And while all of
them agreed that's what was the key to a great life, nobody
really said where to start. And Don Clifton decades ago said he
was going to make it his mission in the world to help people
figure out a way to get started. And that's when he created
StrengthsFinder, which we recently renamed to Clifton
Strengths. He created an assessment that people could go
through, and a lot of times people confuse it with a
personality assessment. That's not what it is. It is a
development accelerator so that people can understand what is it
that makes them unique, and how can they at a very highly
individualized type of way how can they grow because everybody
grew Rosen develops very differently. So that's what it
is. It's an assessment that we make available to anyone on our
website, they go through this kind of 45 minute assessment.
And at the end, it says, Here are the behaviors that and
talents that make you great.
Eveline Oehrlich: Fantastic, I will do it, I have it on my
plan, I've had it on my bucket list for actually quite a long
time. I just have not done it. While I was at Hewlett Packard
many, many years ago, we did the Myers Briggs, I'm sure you
familiar with that, of course, it's very, very different. So
I'm very curious to do it. Anyway. That's not why we're
here. We're actually here because of this wonderful book
called blind spot. I actually have read this book during my
vacation here in South France. And I have to tell you, it was
fascinating. It was stunning. It was daunting, it was thought
provoking. And it was actually for me, a little bit scary,
because I love my job. I love what I do. I've always loved
what I do. I'm extremely engaged, and those who were
working with me, are very engaged. And I'm just amazed at
all the data in the book and all the details you have gathered.
So the most serious finding, of course, is that almost every
leader in the world has missed that there are huge challenges
in that there are a lot of unhappy. There's a lot of
unhappy people, right. So first of all, congratulations to the
book, it launched September 13. This year, fantastic, great
book, lots of success. I wish you lots of success, I know it
will have lots of success. Tell me about what led you to this
research and write the book.
Jon Clifton: Well, public and private sector leaders still
today are focused on rational indicators, things like whether
or not people have jobs through unemployment indicators, GDP per
capita, whether or not companies are making more profit. But what
they don't focus on are indicators about how people
feel. And that's a problem. Because what we've learned
through behavioral economics now is that decision making for
humans is not necessarily rational. In fact, most of it is
actually emotional yet, we don't really follow indicators about
how people feel. And we think that's a problem. So a little
over 15 years ago, we said we're gonna create the world's
official statistics for how people feel. And we started to
ask people, do you have a lot of stress? Do you have a lot of
anger? Do you have a lot of sadness, because just like today
that we can quantify whether or not an economy is growing or
contracting, we also want to know, if we could pick up if
stress was increasing, or if the world was getting sad, or if it
was getting angrier. And in our first about five to six years of
tracking this, we effectively saw no change. We saw kind of
what we thought in terms of conventional wisdom, which was
that in places that were affected by war, or an economic
crisis, people felt a lot more misery. But about 10 years ago,
we started to see a trend that really started to concern us,
which was the fact that anger, stress, sadness, physical pain,
and worry began increasing all over the world. And it was
happening in places like India, it was happening in places like
China, Brazil, Mexico, almost at exactly the same rate. So we
felt like it was a good time to alert the world about this very
concerning trend and release a book on it. And that's what
we're doing now.
Eveline Oehrlich: So, the type of research you do as a
researcher myself, of course, I'm curious. And in the book it
describes I want you to share with our listeners, how do you
actually go about researching this whole unhappiness or
happiness? I know there's a whole bunch of things, and I
don't want you to give away too much. But first question, how do
you actually do your research? And second question, once you
have done this research, where are you? And how are you
actually sharing that and going forward with besides the book?
Unknown: Well, so the way that we do this research is conducted
through surveys. And for some reason, a lot of people get
uncomfortable when we talk about surveys, I think they think that
individuals may not know how to accurately reflect how their
lives are going. But interestingly enough, most of
the data that we actually consume, at least in terms of
macro level indicators are actually conducted by surveys,
for example, unemployment is one of the most relied upon
statistics internationally. And oftentimes, people think that
that's some sort of headcount or that companies submit their
payroll. It's not the case. Unemployment is measured by a
massive survey in the United States. 60,000 people per month
are interviewed. And after about an hour there, they're asked, Do
you have a job? We effectively did the same thing. But instead
of saying, Do you have a job, we just ask people, How much stress
do you have how much anger and there are a lot of people to
that goal? Is it accurate? Do people know how much stress they
have? They do. And you can actually test this through
things like brain scans, you can actually ask their friends and
if you say to him, is your friend experiencing a lot of
stress and In a lot of times, they are more times than not,
they're very accurate. So people are in touch with how they feel,
and they can accurately report it to a total stranger. And
speaking of its total strangers, so the way that we capture this
in roughly 140 countries every single year is that in 40
countries, we do phone calls, we call people's mobile phones, we
call their landlines, and then we have a conversation with
them. But for the other 100 countries, because not everyone
in the world has a phone, we do face to face interviewing. And
this is not just in capital cities or major economic hubs.
These are truly nationally representative samples, meaning
oftentimes the interviewers that we work with, will have to even
drive eight to nine hours in order to conduct just a handful
of interviews, to ask people how their lives are going. So this
is a really extensive process that we undertake in order to
make sure that we're capturing the right kind of information.
Eveline Oehrlich: So we can envision, and I was seeing, I
can see the the picture in the book, a gentleman in Indonesia,
who is going actually into one of the heads in Indonesia, I've
actually traveled there myself, and has a conversation with a
lady, I think asking her the variety of questions. And so you
travel across, you have folks who travel across and they are
local, and they speak the language to actually do that.
Wow, very different from the we do a lot of surveys also at the
DevOps Institute. But of course, you're absolutely right survey,
sometimes we see some biases, and we see some challenges. Of
course, our sample size is nearly not nearly as as large as
your as your sample size. Fantastic. Okay, let's, let's
get into the let's get into the, as we call it, the depth of the
book. And one thing, which really was was important to me,
and what I what I realized, because I believe I'm the only
optimist, German optimist, I think, because Germans are not
very optimistic. And if my German colleagues are out there
who want to get some, get some love on optimism, reach out to
me, but the book discusses this topic of negative emotion index.
across and you mentioned it already, you asked about anger,
stress, sadness, worry, physical pain and sadness, which has been
rising over the past decade. So a couple of things to discuss.
First of all, what does that mean that negative emotion index
elaborate a little bit on that? What what are you asking those
folks? Are you saying, Are you? Are you sad? So yes, no
question, right? Help us understand that negative emotion
index, and then there is a positive emotion index as well.
So if you can elaborate on that, that would be also wonderful.
Jon Clifton: Absolutely. So before I say this, I should also
note that what we are measuring is very difficult. And we are
only 15 years into this work. Where as you take indicators
like GDP are a lot of people feel that the birth of GDP took
place in the late 1930s, when Simon Kuznets approached
Congress and said, Hey, we have an indicator to basically figure
out, is the economy growing? Or is it getting smaller? We're
doing the same in terms of how people's lives are going. So you
know, GDP still almost 100 years in has its imperfections. So
it's not to say that this work that we are doing is yet
perfect. So there may be imperfections, but we're doing
our best. And so the way that we've determined this is based
on extensive research by academics like Ed Diener and
Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman, where we said like, what is it
that makes a great life? Or how do you define well being, and we
did it with two constructs. One is how people see their lives.
And the other is how people live their lives. So how people see
their lives is kind of an overall reflection of everything
that's taken place in their life. And it taps in to what
Danny Kahneman who say, is the remembering mind. And the way
that we capture that is to ask people rate your life on a scale
of zero to 10, where 10 is the best possible life. And zero is
the worst imaginable life. Where do you stand today, the results
of that have been made famous people call it happiness, it's
probably more of a measure of contentment. But the people who
on average rate their lives the best are people that live in the
Nordic countries. It's why you hear that Denmark or Finland,
are oftentimes the happiest countries in the world. Again,
the brand is happiness. But it's probably more accurate to say
that the most content the people who rate their lives the worst
are places like Afghanistan. In our last survey in Afghanistan
and 2021. We did face to face interviews, women were
interviewing women, the Taliban allowed it. And we saw some of
the worst life ratings not just that we've ever seen in the
history of our tracking of Afghanistan, but also in the
history of our tracking of our entire global database. So you
can also see there that it does confirm some of conventional
wisdom that we know things aren't great in Afghanistan. And
we know probably even based on external indicators like GDP per
capita, that people who live in the Nordic countries are doing
quite well. But on the other side of the ledger, is how
people live their lives. And this is more in the moment on
whether or not someone is feeling stress. Whether or not
somebody is laughing and smiling a lot. Now, ideally, we would
have some sort of buzzer that attached to everyone in
humanity. And we could sort of ask them right at that moment,
say, How do you feel, or that we would be able to get to do some
sort of cortisol test so we can actually see their levels of
stress. Unfortunately, we just don't have the ability to do
that. And so the next best thing we can do is say, please tell me
about all day yesterday, did you feel a lot of the following? How
about anger, stress, sadness, physical pain, or worry, those
are the negative emotions. And then we also asked about
positive emotions, whether or not people felt well rested,
whether or not they were treated with respect, laughed and
smiled, experienced enjoyment, or learned or did something
interesting. So those 10 indicators, five, negative five
positive are how people are experiencing life each day. And
the reason we have to measure them differently, is because
they have different drivers. And we can see that they have
different outcomes. For example, the people who say that they
laugh and smile a lot, and also experienced the most enjoyment
or people in Latin America, people in Latin America know how
to have fun, arguably, more than anyone else in the world. And we
can see it in our data. On the other hand, in terms of negative
emotions, this has been true for 15 straight years, the region of
the world that expresses the most anger, the most sadness,
the most physical pain is the Middle East, Iraq and Iran are
oftentimes at the very top. And also places like Afghanistan. So
also in Afghanistan, we saw the highest negative emotions, on
all those indicators that we've ever seen in the history of our
database, not just for Afghanistan, but also for
negative emotions. So those are the two different constructs
that we measure. One is how people see their lives. And the
other is how they live their lives, which we also break up
into two different constructs positive emotions and negative
emotions.
Eveline Oehrlich: Fascinating. So when I think of Finland, I
actually don't remember them smiling a lot. So how can they
be the happiest people in the world? Right? I think you go
into that in more detail in the book. Are they are they're not
really happy to content? Right?
Jon Clifton: Yeah, there's a really cool kind of study that I
think a journalist did. And they went and asked people on the
streets in Finland, they said, Hey, Finland, was just announced
that they are the happiest country in the world. What do
you think about that? And people on the street, were saying, I'm
not very happy. Those results don't make sense to me. In fact,
one minister actually said, Well, if we're the happiest
country in the world, I feel sorry for all the other
countries. And I think that's because of the brand happiness.
And if you read the World Happiness Report that actually
launches this and they use Gallup data. So the data I'm
referring to are the data that they use, are the life rating
data. And they say that while this might not be happiness that
we're capturing, it might actually be subjective well
being or contentment, they said, the reason that we use the word
happiness is because it's what gets the most attention. Sure.
And if they said, we have the world contentment report, people
probably wouldn't read it. And I agree with him. The reason I
agree with him is because I did report myself on Gallup dot coms
website, or gallops website and actually found exactly what they
found, which is I wrote an article use words like well
being thriving, contentment, and people don't read it. And when
you switch the word to happiness, all of a sudden,
people are much more likely to pick it up. So even if you
remind people in the methodology that we're actually may not be
capturing happiness, we're kind of getting more of contentment.
They're just a lot more likely to read it. So I think it is
important that you have to get the branding, right, if you want
to make sure that the information is consumed, because
unfortunately, people do judge a book by its cover.
Eveline Oehrlich: Absolutely. And we are the DevOps Institute
sometimes have that same challenge. Because when people
think about the DevOps Institute in the word DevOps, they all
think we're geeks, and we all we do is write code. And IT folks
Well, some of us are, and our community is very large. We have
over 90,000 members and followers. Not all of them are
geeks. There's a lot of people out there White, who who have I
don't think so. And then the word Institute is another one of
those words. So we're trying to think about some changes in
words as well. All right, so your most surprising finding for
yourself on the report when when you step back, and you look at
the book, and you go, Jon, this this, this really blew, this
really blew me away. What was it?
Jon Clifton: Well, there were four of them. And there's an
entire section dedicated to four of the most surprising findings
because we at Gallup can't fully make sense of what they mean.
And I'll start with the first one, which is when we started
tracking emotions, we knew based on previous research that you
have to measure positive and negative emotions separately.
Why because they measure very different things. For example,
if somebody attends a funeral, they may experience especially
of, you know, potentially a grandparent that died of old
age, they may experience a lot of sadness and a lot of
loneliness, but they actually might laugh a lot too. Because
as the family gets together and remembers the good times that
they had with them, they can experience positive emotions as
well. So it's really important to measure both constructs,
because we, as humans, process them differently. So we started
doing that. And interesting, the results at a national level were
looked very similar to what the previous research said, Why?
Because I was on my way to Singapore. And I started looking
at our data, and I wanted to look at the positive and
negative emotions that we're tracking. And interestingly
enough, I pulled up the positive emotions data and saw that
positive emotions were dropping. And in fact, Singapore was
reporting the least amount of positive emotions in the world.
So instinctively, I thought, well, if positive emotions are
going down, negative emotions must be going up. And so I
looked at the negative emotions data, and it wasn't the case
negative emotions were also going down. And again, this is
because both of these constructs have to be measured differently,
because they don't necessarily move together. And so we
actually started reporting the data very differently. And we
said, let's look at collective emotions, who reports the most
across the board and who reports the least. And what we found is,
is that the country that reported the most at the time
was the Philippines, followed by almost every country in Latin
America. And the country that reported almost no emotions at
all was Singapore. And it actually caused kind of this
article to go viral. Because then people started referring to
Singapore as the emotionless society, which I don't think was
necessarily fair to brand the country as because so much of
what Singapore has done, is helped put together I think, one
of the best run societies in the world. They excel at GDP per
capita, they sell at having one of the lowest unemployment in
the world. They excel at virtually everything, except on
this particular indicator. But after the story went viral, and
it was on the cover of the Straits Times three days in a
row. And the minister actually wrote a scathing piece about it
as well. But we noticed that in our following surveys, that all
the indicators went up, people started feeling a lot more
positive in life. And we don't know why. And so in fact,
Singapore started becoming one of the higher ranked countries
in the world for positive emotions. And so it's one of the
questions that remains is why did this take place? And could
it have been some sort of flaw in gallops methodology? We could
certainly be open to that when somebody says, you know, we can
tell you with 95% confidence about the results of our survey,
what they mean is that one out of 20 times, they could fall
outside of that confidence interval. So was that the case?
We're not entirely sure. But what we are interested in is
what can we learn? What can the world learn from Singapore in
terms of how those data changed overnight, because if it was
something meaningful, then the world would have a lot to learn
from on how we can all live better lives. So that was one of
the top four things that was most surprising to us.
Eveline Oehrlich: Anything else? Any other things?
Jon Clifton: Well, I think, I think another one has to do with
how women raised their lives around the world. Because when
you look at two of the single biggest drivers of a great life,
one is whether or not you physically feel safe. And in our
database. When we asked men and women do you feel safe walking
alone, at night, and you're in the city or area where you live,
one of the widest gaps with respect to gender is that women
are just less likely to feel safe walking alone at night in
their communities. And the second one is economic
opportunities. We can see when we replicate employment surveys
globally that women have fewer economic opportunities than men.
So if you just look at labor force participation, about 75%
of men globally, participate in the global workforce, and it's
50% of women culturally, sometimes culture plays a role
in that take India, for example, where it's 75% of men and 25% of
women. So there are economic and physical safety issues that are
a challenge with respect to women globally. So here's the
interesting thing. When we say to women rate your life on a
scale of zero to 10. Where do you stand today, what we find is
that women rate their lives exactly the same as men, if
anything, they rate their lives slightly higher than men. And
this pattern is true. Globally, every year since we've been
doing this tracking. It's true in every region. And it's true
in every single country in the world and has been true since
we've been tracking. So why is this happening? We're not
entirely sure. In fact, one of our colleagues, Carol Graham at
Brookings, she's one of the top 400 most cited female economists
in the world and also wrote a white paper about this. I
believe the title is something like are women happy? are the
men and she to can't quite put her finger on exactly why this
phenomenon is happening. But the book goes through and I
interview for leading women like Carol Graham, who focused on
this to say, Why do you think this might be the case? And what
can the world learn from this so that we can ultimately help
people see their lives better everywhere?
Eveline Oehrlich: Great research, if you need help on
that one happy to call on the IT women in the in our journey?
Because I think they have something to say on this topic.
Great. Okay, another question. We talk a lot about well being
and you have a lot of topics in your book around wellbeing, and
you discuss five elements. Can you talk a bit more about them?
The Careers, social, financial, physical well being and
community well being just elaborate a little bit, and then
I'll have a follow up question, particularly towards career. But
if you wanted to elaborate on those five elements a little
bit, that would be wonderful.
Jon Clifton: Yeah. So when we noticed that this trend of
negative emotions was increasing, what we wanted to do
is understand why. And so what we did is we looked at the
pattern of people who rate their lives the best, and people who
rate their lives the worst, and then looked at their negative
emotions. And what we found is that 15 years ago, about three
and a half percent of people said, my life is a perfect 10.
And we found that about 1.5% said, my life is a zero, my life
actually cannot get any worse. Fast forward to 15 years later.
And what we found is that the people who said their life is a
perfect 10, more than doubled, it's almost 8% today, and the
people who said my life cannot get any worse more than
quadrupled it to is almost 8% today. And if you isolate the
top quintile, and the lower quintile, you can see a pattern
emerge, where the people who are writing their lives, the best,
are continuing to get higher life ratings. And the people who
rate their lives the worst, are rating in the lives even worse.
And then when we look at the people who are rating their
lives the best and the rating lives, the worse and isolate
their negative emotions, we can see those in the bottom quintile
who keeps saying my life is worse and worse and worse, that
they are seeing the biggest increase in negative emotions in
our whole database. That said, what we want to do is isolate of
the people who say my life's at 10, or my life is zero, what do
they have in common, we found that those people who say my
life is at 10, they oftentimes have five things in common. And
this is true across the entire world, which is they have great
relationships, socially, they have high social wellbeing, they
live in great communities, which we call community well being.
Their physical well being is high, their financial well being
is strong, and they also have strong work well being. And the
people who are raising their lives, the worst appear to be
getting less of these five things over the past 15 years.
So those are the five drivers that we identified, and that we
believe are the common source of this global rise of misery.
Eveline Oehrlich: Wow, those numbers are blowing me away. 8%
on the on the left hand side, say whoever miserable life to
get to that point. Wow, unbelievable that I had to just
sit in in awe and listen to that. That's just unbelievable
and scary to where we are. So on the pandemic, did you? I mean,
we are just out of it. Right? We've had horrible to the whole
world and a horrible two years. Did that have any impact on it
at all? Do you think?
Jon Clifton: So this is why we did the book. Because when we
first announced these results, we did so in what we call our
Gallup global emotions report. And we launched it about midway
through 2020. And when we came out, we said in our global
database, we have found that there's a global rise of anger,
stress, sadness, physical pain, and worry, and everyone that we
send the message to, they said, Gee, why is that a surprise? Why
would we be surprised that misery has reached a new high
when we are all collectively suffering from a global
pandemic? And we said, You're not listening, because the trend
started before the pandemic. And that's what's got us concerned.
And after two years of trying to reinforce this message, and also
seeing that the pandemic probably exacerbated this
already increasing negative emotions because of course, the
global pandemic made people's lives collectively worse. People
still weren't listening. And this is why we had a rather
forceful title on the book, which is blind spot, because we
believe that this global rise of negative emotions has been
hiding in the blind spot of leaders everywhere.
Eveline Oehrlich: So no excuse. Because we hear that a lot when
I speak to leaders, about their employees, we just think about a
year. Yeah, well, you know, we understand we're just coming out
of a pandemic. So I will refer to the book and say no, not
true. This is not something which just started because of
the pandemic. There was a whole bunch of things already
lingering and alright. We could of course go hours and hours on
it, but I don't want to take away all the findings into the
Just from the book, but there's one thing I want to hone into,
which of course for us at the DevOps Institute, we are an
institution with learning. We want to bring our community
members together and advance their career, right? Well, we
want to have fun. We also want to be their friends and they
want we're many of us are friends. But one of the things I
read in the book and these numbers again, I hope you don't
mind if I quote them on the career that there is, you know,
there's 7.7 billion people on the planet, right? 5.4 billion
adults 3.3 billion adults want a great job. 1.5 billion have a
good job. And only 300 million have a great job. Maybe you and
I are the two who belong to the 300 million because we have a
great job. And for the listeners ABS hour in the background,
master of podcasts, so shout out to a be amazing, only 300
million have a great job. Why is it that what, what? What's going
on in the world?
Jon Clifton: Well, we have a problem right now when we're
trying to understand the global jobs picture. Because right now,
the way that unemployment is captured does a great disservice
to the misery that exists in the global workplace. For example,
right before the pandemic, the ILO said that 5.5% of people
were unemployed, if you use that as just an overall estimate to
understand the global jobs picture. Again, we know that the
amount of people that are living in poverty, that does not
accurately represent the global jobs picture. 5% is even what
many economists consider the natural rate of unemployment. So
it means that there's no slack in the in the global jobs
market. And it's just not the case, even after the pandemic,
unemployment, only rised to 6.5%. How could that be? And so
the challenge with it is how its measured. And in many developing
countries take a place like Nigeria, for example, right now,
in a place a no excuse me, Burundi, I believe their
unemployment rate is less than a percent. But think about that
this is one of the poorest countries in the world. And
apparently, they have kind of the most optimal job market,
it's not the case. And the reason for it is that we kind of
blur the lines between this concept of self employment in
the West, when we hear self employment, we think someone is
self employed because of freedom, or because they want to
be the next great entrepreneur that creates a multi billion
dollar company. And it's seen as a source of pride, either one
for which you determined to become become self employed. But
in poor countries, it's not the case. Because people don't. And
again, other economists have said this. So I'm quoting their
work. They don't have the luxury to be unemployed. What does that
mean, in many poor countries, they don't have unemployment
benefits offered by the government. So people are forced
to do anything they can. And so when somebody is conducting a
survey, and they say, Did you work an hour in the past week?
Or did you work 30 hours in the past week, someone who is
potentially selling trinkets on the street or begging, they'll
say, of course, I worked. Now, they didn't have meaningful
work. And that is a very large percent of people currently in
the workforce. In fact, I believe it's 30%, or self
employed, yet half live or live under less than $2 a day. So
again, this masks over the real global jobs crisis that we have.
But the other piece is the misery of people who are
currently working full time for a paycheck. And when somebody is
totally emotionally detached from work, and they're
miserable, and it's usually caused by their manager. They'll
take this misery to places like tick tock so when you hear about
people who are quiet, quitting, quiet quitting is not a new
concept. It is a new term for an old concept. But people who are
quietly quitting or you know, pronouncing their misery on Tik
Tok are actually doing so overtly and not so quietly at
all. And their frustration is real. And this frustration is
what we've referred to historically as active
disengagement. And if you look at somebody who's actively
disengaged in their job, we find that they have the same amount
if not more stress, sadness, pain, worry and anger. As
someone who has no work whatsoever. This is a
statistical fact. So the misery that's currently happening even
with people who are full time, employees is causing a major
problem for us globally and contributing to the global rise
of unhappiness. So to help curb the global rise of unhappiness,
this isn't just about sorting out issues like poverty, which
it is also about helping curb the global rise of hunger. It's
also about making better workplaces because it's causing
just so much misery to people in the workplace today.
Eveline Oehrlich: Interesting. I just read some research from
Gartner. They published the top five priorities for HR leaders
in in organizations I think it is I think they interviewed 800
HR leaders globally, and work place happiness didn't show up.
Number one, they, the number one thing they that is good for HR
leaders is to focus on their leaders and how to develop their
leaders, which is good, right? Because if we have good leaders,
hopefully, depending on what we mean by good leaders, but if we
have good leaders, hopefully they will be able to create a
workforce an environment where happiness is there and where
people can thrive and where people can actually feel
engaged. And that, again, brings us back to whatever else we want
to do. But I found that interesting I can see you have
something to say to that?
Jon Clifton: Well, I think one of the problems right now is the
word happiness, because there are a lot of executives that
hear that word. And it completely turns them off. Why?
Because they believe that happiness at work is created by
ping pong tables, right? Whose ball tables whatever. And,
again, I think it has to do with the word happiness. And that's a
problem that that I am participating in. But it's
because it gets more attention, unfortunately. And the reality
is, is what I think the best executives are trying to do is
it's not necessarily this sort of ephemeral, ephemeral,
fleeting, or transitory feeling of happiness, what they are
trying to do is create thriving workplaces, and thriving
workplaces are not necessarily about foosball tables. You know,
I think workplaces mean that somebody cares about your
development, that you have the opportunity to do what you do
best, and you have the things you need in order to do your job
effectively. Those are the basic needs of people at work. And
when those are met, only then can someone truly be thriving at
work. And so I think that's the distinction when we use this
word happiness, if we can get an address that is more of an
emotional attachment at work and just getting someone's basic
needs met, then I think, then you see the presence of thriving
in a workplace. So
Eveline Oehrlich: it is, you know, I love what you said, but
as an individual, if I'm in a organization, where a leader
does not see that and are as many as we know, as when we know
there's only 300 million of us what really happy out there.
What can I do as an individual, I walk up to my manager and say,
Hey, I'm unhappy.
Jon Clifton: I think this is where leadership emerges.
Because engagement and a thriving workplace is not
necessarily dictated by the leaders in an organization. Now
we do see some of the strongest correlations. Again, as I
mentioned, 70% of the variance does depend on who you named
manager. But let's be clear, concepts like recognition, which
matter in workplaces, sometimes are best not when they come from
your boss, not when they come from a senior executive. But
when they come from one of your peers, and when they're random
and when they are sincere. And when that takes place,
engagement increases and workplaces are just
fundamentally better. The other thing is, is the inner the
personal relationships that exist at workplaces, one of the
single things that keeps people to work place, even in some
global studies more than pay is whether or not they have close
relationships with their colleagues at work. This idea
that, you know, we shouldn't be friends with our colleagues at
work is something that we need to end forever, because it's
just not true. We're basically fighting human nature when we
come in with that kind of belief. And we also know that,
you know, when you ask adults in a place like the United States,
where is it that you're most likely to meet friends, they
don't say that it's through a religious institution, they
don't say that it's through the friends have their children's
friends, they say it's at work. And these types of bonds not
only keep people in their jobs, it also makes them more
productive. It also creates an environment where they give more
direct feedback, where they have somebody where they can have an
outlet to talk about things that are frustrating them. And it
also causes people to work the extra hour because they're not
necessarily doing it for the leaders of the organization.
They're doing it for each other. There's kind of a famous study
when they say that, within the military, that people in the
military, they do join, to fight for their country to fight for
their loved ones. But when they fight, they do it for their
brothers, they do it for the other individuals within the
military. There are parallels to that in the workplace, that the
reason that we stay the extra hour is because we have a close
relationship with those that are that we're working with. So I do
think that creating thriving workplaces is not necessarily a
role of the leadership, the manager, there is a huge role
the individual contributors can make
Eveline Oehrlich: Beautiful, just one more thing and then I
know we need to go. This reminds me of my first position. I just
finished business school in Germany. And I started you at
Hewlett Packard. And this was a time where Dave and Bill were
still there. The founders of HP. They came around to us in the
town in Germany, and the culture at the company was fantastic. We
love each other. We, we care for each other. And this might not
be politically correct, but I'm going to say it anyway. Hewlett
Packard at the time was known as the best marriage advice
company, you found your partner there? I did. I found my
husband, I moved with him to the United States in 1986. It was
just a wonderful place. And because of that, we worked hard.
We were engaged. And when you were just saying that that's
exactly what made me think of, I stayed there forever, until I
left in 2006. Imagine 1983 until 2006. I worked at one company at
multiple jobs, but I loved it. It changed in the in the latter
years because they had some challenges. We won't go into
that right now. But exactly that feeling I had when you were
describing that super. Okay, we have taken so much time of yours
have one more question for you. That has nothing to do with your
research. What do you like to do on the weekend?
Jon Clifton: I read a lot on the weekends. And I also spend time
with my wife. And so it's a great boost for work well being
and also for social well being so yeah,
Eveline Oehrlich: Super Jon, this was wonderful. Thank you so
much. This was a really, really great conversation. I hope our
listeners out there enjoyed. To learn more about Gallup, it's
easy to find, go look at www gallup.com. The book, the blind
spot is out can be bought can be read. There's many, many other
resources blogs, there's lots of research coming up. This was
fantastic. Have a great rest of the day everybody listening and
Jon, wonderful to have you if you ever need anything on
DevOps, reach out to us. We're happy to hear. We're happy to
help you on on it or if you want to do some joint research, happy
to work together. Thank you again.
Jon Clifton: Awesome. Thank you everyone and thank you AB for
having an interest in what we do.