Dr. Dean Burnett (35:38)
Yeah, actually it was quite telling that because I've been freelance since March, but I worked for a university for many, many years before then and I imagine it's the same in the States, but management ethos and the whole like bureaucracy and reaching out to new people and networking and career climate. That's a big part of academia in this country and probably always has been. Just I saw it up close and personal. And so they were new traditions, new fads, like the latest things, centralization, it's all about that now. Then it's like a year later. Oh no, no, we have to defocus our core objectives. And so that's a big part of academia now as well. And it was strange seeing up close because I didn't sort of never dealt with it directly before. And this is a real thing then, is it? So people do talk like that. And it's interesting, but it seems to be the way of the world right now. But the whole idea of having happy employees who want to be happy in the workplace, that's been around for quite a while now. And it does seem to be something that most companies and employers want to achieve. And it seems to be very difficult because even like the most comprehensive survey show that at best 30% of employees in any one business or population are engaged with their work in any way and that they feel like I want to be here. This is, I want to get involved with how the company's run. And that's a very low number considering how many people are in work. And yeah, I thought that was an interesting angle to look at. And obviously we hear so much about the work life balance. Some people would argue that is the key to happiness is achieving a good work life balance. But I think that does show work in a negative light because if you look at that word work life balance, on one side of the equation you've got life, which is obviously your life. Another side you've got work, which logically is therefore not life. So some people would argue then that means work is a state of waking death. And I've said this to a few people and a lot of time they just nod their head and go, yep, sounds about right. So obviously this works at a disadvantage. Having to work isn't something which makes us happy by default. And I want to look into why that was. And a lot of the time some of the jobs which are constantly score the highest on the jobs that make you happiest are the ones like doctors, teachers, engineers, sometimes reasonably high paid jobs, sometimes quite communicative jobs where you have a lot of authority and a lot of independence. And that does seem to be a key factor in it. Aside from the money thing, that's something I wanted to look at. It's not just about the money. People work because they need the money to survive. If you remove that facet. Other things that make us happy are being able to set our own goals, be autonomous. People don't like being told what to do. They don't like being made to do things. They have no interest in someone else's benefit. That is always going to put us on the back foot when it comes to making us happy. Like, I don't want to do this, but I've got to. You resent that. And obviously that doesn't reflect well in a positive mood. So any job which allows you to make decisions and have control, like doctors and engineers and things, those tend to be viewed more favorably. And also we want to feel good about ourselves. We want other people to look at us and say they aren't good at what they do. So a sense of competence and the brain's always like self assessing. And we tend the brain's very egocentric organ. We want to make us look better than we are whenever we can, or at least give us the best possible impression of us. So anything which allows us to feel like we are good at something and do it well, that also tends to make us happier jobs which allow us that scope. So things like doctors, you make this decision, you save a life, I mean, it's kind of hard to get beyond that in terms of positive responses to your work. And it's also like humans are a long lived species now. We can make long term plans. So we have ambitions, we have goals, long term goals, not just basic day to day survival or like just getting through the day and do your chores. It's I want to be this, I want to be that when I grow up. I want to be an astronaut, I want to be a fireman, I want to be a professor. And these are all goals we can have now. And we have this idea of like, this is what I want to be. So anything which we do which seems to be moving us towards this goal does tend to create a more positive response in the brain. The example I use is you hear a kid, you say, I want to be an astronaut. And you definitely want to be an astronaut. You end up working as a fighter pilot. That's a positive step. A lot of astronauts were pilots to begin with. So you think, right, I'm working towards my goal, this is good, I'm learning all the relevant skills, I'm keeping my record up and this is a good move towards my eventual desire. But if you want to be an astronaut, you're working in Starbucks. It's not quite the same thing, it doesn't really link into what you want to do. Nothing against baristas or anything like that, but it's obviously a different field, so. So that job will probably make you less happy. And if you're anything whereby you're beholden to customers and things like retail, these are very negatively viewed jobs because the customer is always right, go. You're not. You have to do what they say, even though you're trained and they aren't. And there are so many things which affect our happiness in the workplace, but I think a lot of it comes back to the mismatch between what the employer wants and what the employee wants. Because we do seem to have a certain sort of like setup whereby we assess the task in front of us for how much effort involves, what reward comes out of it. And if it's something there's more effort than needed, you don't want to do it. So the brain is constantly assessing what we're doing to make sure we're not wasting too much effort at anything. So the ideal state for an employee would be to do as little work as possible for as much reward as possible. Whereas of course the employer who wants to make profit and run their business, their goal is to make the employees do as much work as possible, little reward as possible. And there's always going to be a conflict there unless your employees employers are very much in sync, which is very hard to do. So there's always going to be that barrier to achieving complete happiness in the workplace. But surprising finding was from one of the more prestigious journals that happy employees aren't necessarily the best employees either. They tend to be more productive according to the stats, but they can also be a bit more demanding, a bit more. It can be more selfish, which sounds weird because they prioritize their own happiness above those of other people and they're a lot more disrupted when things go wrong. So they're used to being happy, they expect to be happy. So when things go bad, badly, which is often quite albums, quite often, they react more poorly to it than they don't have the resources to just power through or deal with it. So this idea that happy employees are essential to the workplace is both difficult and in many ways maybe not the best approach. Maybe people are just there to do the job and that's fine. You don't need to have five year goals, you don't need to show full investment with the company. People who are just there to do the job and then leave. There's nothing wrong with that. That's actually Quite relaxing setup for both sides of the equation.
