This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Jason Kelly on Bloomberg Radio. All right, so we want to talk um about joy in the workplace. It's actually something you and I talk about so much that, um, you kind of need that when you're doing your job to really I think, make it as good as as it can be. So creating creating joy and positivity in the workplace. It sounds basic and yes, and yet it is really important.
Alex lewis Chairman imagining partner at Carney UH and he's here to talk about a specific movement, joy at work. That's the movement. And he's in our Bloomberg Interactor Broker studio here in New York. Nice to have you here with us. Thanks, Alex. I mean it, like Jason, I talked about it all the time. It's like really sad if you're surrounded by people who don't enjoy what they're doing, and it really kind of takes you down. Um, And
so we think about that a lot. Tell me about this movement and and and a little bit more about the thinking behind this. Sure, No, I mean I think about there's such untapped energy in the workplace and positivity as you mentioned um. To me, the term joy at work means a true and authentic and deep alignment with the whole Hawaiihuai and who of the workplace. When you think about being on a championship athletic team, right they're pursuing a championship, or you think about the first workplace,
which is a seven year old of the playground. They don't care about who you are, what color, what gender. They want to climb the jungle gym. Why if we had that same level of purpose, alignment, passion in the workplace we um, don't we already? Well? I mean think about it. We've got all these sort of silos and matrices and layers and kpi s and things that prevent you from being yourself and understanding true connectivity with with your colleagues. Now, when we we did some research on this,
because it's not just some millennial movement here. We want workplace justice, we want purpose. I mean that's something we all want. We looked at companies all all age groups, baby boomers, millennials, generation next. There's a joy gap. There's a gap between what they expect from work. I mean, you spend half your time, a lot of your energy and anxiety there but only actually get it. So it's like a fift gap across all cohorts. So it's an issue that that that is more more human than it
is demographic. I mean, it's a it's a huge opportunity to change. And was it always this way or did we lose it along the way? Well, I mean, I think, you know, I think UM companies have complicated things. I mean, you think about what you want from work over the playground or an athletic team. You want harmony, you want acknowledgement, you want impact, so you want on the harmony side, you want roll clarity. Look at these big companies that have huge complicated matrices, be us that or you know,
competing with each other versus the customer acknowledgement. This whole diversity and inclusion. People want to feel like they can be yourself. Being yourself is good enough. Bringing your best self is even better. You know, we had a conversation last week about something like open environments at workplaces good or bad? Do you think in terms of creating joy and positivity? You just got about forty seconds and then
we'll take a break and come back and talk more. Yeah, I mean, I think the physical helps the mental, but more importantly, it's the hidden, it's the hidden collaboration that's that's uh the problem. I mean, if you look at any workplace, it's not just how they move interact physically. It does reinforce us a feeling of connection. But if you're stigmatized, if you don't feel like you belong, if you feel isolated, there's an epidemic of of mental health
and isolation and disillusionment. And you don't get that just by meeting people in the workplace. You have to deal deal with a sense of belonging. Carol Master along with Jason Kelly here on Bloomberg Business Week. Alex Alex lou
is our guest. He's chairman and managing partner at Carney and he joins us in our New York studio, and we're talking about joy at work, the movement, and I do wonder if there's differences in terms of workers who are urban workers working in major cities, and whether or not there's more joy less joy versus maybe out in the suburbs or out in the Midwest where space is more open and it's not maybe in a major city. Yeah, I mean, I think what we're talking about is trying
to overcome a sense of isolation and alienation. And I think you pointed out earlier Jason, which is, you know, in an ironically, in a world of such connectivity, hyper connectivity five G in the rural networks, there is an epidemic of mental illness and health and isolation and suicides and like so. And if there's no connection in the city where you're already connected, you know, you you need to you need to be able to have more than just a technology and your location to define your sense
of belonging. Um. A lot of the workplaces now are actually remote, you know, so you don't need to have your your colleagues next to you, side by side with you. And does that help or her, well, I think there's probably some reinforcement. I mean, our research shows that people are more connected in the common purpose, whether you're side by side them or not. It's not just sort of joint workspaces that we work. I mean you have to have a real sense of a teamwork that is beyond borders.
I mean, our company is a global company. We have connectivity twenty four hours a day in various countries. Were not together, but we worked together with a common purpose, whether it's a project or a situation. UM the sense of being having roll clarity, knowing what your role is in the team, UH, knowing how to contribute, and being acknowledged for your impact. I mean that those are the key factors that determine whether or not you feel satisfaction, belonging, inclusion,
and ultimately ultimately joy at work. We're here with Alex Lude, chairman managing partner of Carney. We're talking about joy at work and I want to, you know, over the next few minutes Alex sort of go down to level and understand what can we do. What's the practical advice? Because you know, Carol and I, as she said at the top, like we talked about it all the time. We talked about it among our team. We talked about what you know, we can do candidly like with each other and and
to to really inspire this. What's some practical advice here? I mean, ultimately, it's about your commitment to the people agenda. And I think the employees, the staff, your colleagues are all looking for leadership to show the passion around these topics that we have great programs around. It's diversity and inclusion, it's training, it's job rotation, it's apprenticeship, UM. But you need to hear from the top and there needs to
be some clear commitment to that. I mean in my own company, one of the first things I did when I took over this role was the dial initiative Diversity, Inclusion, Apprenticeship and Leadership dial it Up. We put this into everyday conversation, we resource programs UM. We supported that by focus on values. You've got to have reasons why people connect with each other. So for us, it's very simple. What you know that there's often you know, multiple layers
sometimes in terms of management that still exists. So what if you know the guy or girl at the top, you know there isn't a lot of joy that's coming from that individual, you know, how do you counter that, especially when in a lot of places you've got business to aeams or like in our place, we have showed units like how do you then can you can you create joy if it isn't coming from the top by
just kind of the lower level managers? Yeah, Carol, I mean, I think layers in complexity always get in the way of human interaction, and I think one of the responsibilities of any leader is to create followership. I mean that's sort of the definition of leadership, right, And if you don't have open, transparent communications, if you don't actually lay out this is what I care about, or this is what we care about. Uh, we care about more than financials,
you know, we care about a broader purpose. You know, A lot of the discussion around stakeholder capitalism kind of supports that, but it's always been there under the surface. Do you care about us as people? Do you care about us having lifelong employment, not just employability, not just
lifetong employment at this particular company. Um. So that shines through in the way you communicate, how regularly you communicate um and and the ways you communicate with your with with your with your audience is internally you know, we have you know, I have a seven you know, scalex anything yam er site. Now that's not that's just for me. Where a professional services firm, we can't you know, we're not a manufacturing site with all kinds of different walls
and boundaries. You know, we can do that in a people business, and you can do that in the media business. And so how do you find that this synthesizes with people's desire to have a life outside of work to you know, sort of create a much more holistic in the in the true sense of the word, sort of life where work is a part of it, but it's not all of it. I think that's two two parts of that, Jason. First, I think you're right in pointing out that work life integration is key. I mean, there
are so many ways of working now. You can work from home, and every company in the world is adapted to that. But feeling a part of a larger group is the important thing. The other piece of the equation is joy and work should not be, you know, be counter opposites to each other. I mean, you say, I gotta work, I gotta get you know, put up with these eight hours, and I'm gonna have a bad day and I'm gonna come home and kick the dog. That is a exactly not what you want. I mean, you
want to have joy and work together. And this is all about the sort of having the sense of acknowledgement that you can bring yourself and actually be yourself, your best self and accomplish a broader purpose, whether it's getting that client victory, whether it's you know, winning some sort of championship equivalent or analogy in a company setting, it's not just graduate. Well, I just I wanted to follow up on that for a second, because you talked to
a lot of CEOs. I mean, these are your your clients. You talk to I'm guessing a lot of hard charging CEOs, and they read or hear about what you're doing, and they're basically like, seriously, I want you to make me more profitable. I want you to get my sales up. I want you to make my organization more productive. That's why I hired you. I don't want to hear about this.
I think it's another narrative. I think the best CEOs out there that I've seen, UH see that in order to reach the full potential of what their business objective is, what their mission statement is, you've got to reach. You've got to have all the people pulling the capabilities of the company have to rise and in hand. You can't be hiring and firing people all the time. That's not that kind of world. You want people who are committed to the job, to the tasks, to training the next
generation of employees. So I don't I don't see them as saying no, this is counter to the business mission. In fact, it's quite supportive. Um, you know, retention economics. If you're happy employees, you have happy customers, I mean, the whole drill. And if you've got bureaucracy, no one likes bureaucracy. I mean that's beneficial of the bottom line, the time to serve, the cost to serve, the number
of people involved in approving decisions. I mean, come on, so, so what do you do with employees that don't have a lot of joy in them in terms of their job? Like what do you do in the instance of maybe somebody who actually is a great performer but they're not so much fun to be around or something like that, Like, how do you then deal with that? Well, again, listen, the purpose of all you know, direct supervisors and leaders have to be to find the best ways to make
the team work better. Now, if this person is in the wrong job, they don't have the right capabilities, which happens a lot. I feel like rotation training, there's much more of a commitment to different types of training, online training, job rotations. Within a division um skill development, we do a lot of online degree training basically where you get authenticated and certified on all kinds of skills, whether it's a I of whether it's a digital analytics type of tools.
So having the ability for the employer to re certify and upscale your existing workers so they have another challenge, they'll get more adventure when you learn. I mean it's it's actually a neuroscience. The fact that you know your parts of your brain when it discovers something new and it's trying to learn new things actually gives you a shot of dopamine in writing the right and that's kind
of a hit. And so there's ways of actually getting the employees to perk up by actually showing you care about their development al Right, So to that point, you went exactly where I wanted to go for sort of the last couple of minutes, which is can you measure this?
Like how do you measure success? Because again I'm going back to like the potentially like grumpy CEO, who you come in and you're you know, giving this great feel uh and with like diversity, like you know that they've made the business case that having diverse boards or diverse employee base that companies actually find, you know, perform better financially. So can you measure joy? Yeah? Yeah, I mean, the best way that measure it is to actually ask your
employees how they feel. I mean, employee satisfaction I think is an imperfect measure. It's kind of static, and it's actually not aspirational enough or inspirational enough. What we do is actually, twice a year we ask all employees, right from the most junior to the most senior, eighteen simple questions about belonging, a sense of inclusion, purpose, And there's this algorithm the back that basically says, boy, your global engagement, your sense of justice, your sense of happiness and joy.
I mean, they do all kinds of alignment, and you know, cross tabbing and things. So there is a way to measure it by asking very simple questions. You don't need to go into the giant cross tab exercise interesting market research. It needs to be regular and it needs to be shown that the leaders are looking at this. The first time we did this, you know everyone did it. Okay, fine,
you can write in one thousand verbatims. The next time there were three thousand verbatims because they knew that we would listen and actually take action of the things that would make the workplace better. Or haven't you thought of that? It's just showing listening helps you. It is amazing. That's actually huge with everything. That's great, all right, thank you so much. Alex Loud, Chairman managing partner over at Carney.
He is a leader at the Joy at Work movement Derrick Carney, advising CEOs all around the world about it. I love it.