Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/339857
22 FEDA News & Views reveals that as you develop new habits, you rewire the brain. Engaging in one brief positive exercise every day for as little as three weeks can have a lasting impact, my research suggests. For instance, in December 2008, just before the worst tax season in decades, I worked with tax managers at KPMG in New York and New Jersey to see if I could help them become happier. (I am an optimistic person, clearly.) I asked them to choose one of five activities that correlate with posi- tive change: 1) Jot down three things they were grateful for. 2) Write a positive message to someone in their social support network. 3) Meditate at their desk for two minutes. 4) Exercise for 10 minutes. 5) Take two minutes to describe in a journal the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours. The participants performed their activity every day for three weeks. Several days after the training concluded, we evaluated both the participants and a control group to determine their general sense of well-being. How engaged were they? Were they depressed? On every metric, the experimental group's scores were signifi- cantly higher than the control group's. When we tested both groups again, four months later, the experimental group still showed significantly higher scores in opti- mism and life satisfac- tion. In fact, participants' mean score on the life satisfaction scale—a metric widely accepted to be one of the greatest predictors of productivity and happiness at work— moved from 22.96 on a 35-point scale before the training to 27.23 four months later, a significant increase. Just one quick exercise a day kept these tax managers happier for months after the train- ing program had ended. Happiness had become habitual. Help Your Coworkers Of the five activities described above, the most effective may be engag- ing positively with peo- ple in your social support network. Strong social sup- port correlates with an astonishing number of desir- able outcomes. For instance, research by Julianne Holt- Lunstad, Timothy Smith, and Bradley Layton shows that high levels of social support predict lon- gevity as reliably as regular exercise does, and low social support is as damaging as high blood pressure. The benefits of social support are not just physical. In a study of 1,648 students at Harvard that I conduct- ed with Phil Stone and Tal Ben-Shahar, we found that social support was the greatest predictor of happiness during peri- ods of high stress. In fact, the correlation between happiness and Zimet's social support scale (the academic measure we used to assess students' positive engagement with their social networks) was a whop- ping .71—for comparison, the correlation between smoking and cancer is .37. That study focused on how much social support the students received. But in follow-on research I conducted in March 2011, I found that even more important to sustained happiness and engagement was the amount of social support the students provided. For example, how often does a student help others when they are overwhelmed with work? How often does he initiate social interactions on the job? Social support providers—people who picked up slack for others, invited coworkers to lunch, and organized office activities—were not only 10 times more likely to be engaged at work than those who kept to themselves; they were 40 percent more likely to get a promotion. How does social support work in practice as a tool for employee happiness? Ochsner Health System, a large health care provider that I work with, uses an approach it calls the "10/5 Way" to increase social support among employees and patients. We educated 11,000 employees, leaders, and physi- cians about the impact of social support on the patient experi- ence, and asked them to modify their behavior. When employ- Happiness and the Bottom Line For companies, happy employees mean better bottom- line results. Employees who score low in "life satisfaction," a rigorously tested and widely accepted metric, stay home an average of 1.25 more days a month, a 2008 study by Gallup Healthways shows. That translates into a decrease in productivity of 15 days a year. In a study of service departments, Jennifer George and Kenneth Bettenhausen found that employees who score high in life satisfaction are significantly more likely to receive high ratings from customers. In addition, researchers at Gallup found that retail stores that scored higher on employee life satisfaction generated $21 more in earnings per square foot of space than the other stores, adding $32 million in additional profits for the whole chain. Well Served Pictured left: Outgoing board member Greg Alack of Alack Refrigeration Co. Inc. Member-Driven Clark Foodservice Equipment has been a loyal supporter of FEDA for 25 years. Pictured left: Clark Associates Inc. President Fred Clark.