40: Extraordinary Workplaces

listening and enjoy the podcast. Ron Friedman is an award winning psychologist and founder of Ignite eighty, a consulting firm that helps smart leaders build extraordinary workplaces. An expert on human motivation, Friedman has served on the faculty of the University of Rochester, Nazareth College, and Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He contributes to the blogs of Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes,

and Psychology Today. His latest book, which we're going to talk a lot about today, is The Best Place to Work, The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace. Ron, thanks for talking to you today. My pleasure. I'm a fan of the show. It's exciting to be part of it. Oh really, you like the Psychology Podcast? I do? Is that so surprising? You know what? I'll tell you something.

You're the first guest to ever say that. It's not surprising, but you're literally the first guest where they actually said I'm a fan of the show. Oh, You've got a lot of great guests and always insightful. Well, thank you. Tell me a bit a little bit about your background. Are you a psychologist? I am a psychologist. I studied with ed dec and Richard Ryan, who some of your listeners might be familiar with those names. They're the guys

who are the inspiration for Daniel Pingk's drive amazing. And so there are researchers who came up with the idea of self determination theory, which suggests that we have three basic human psychological needs. So in the best place to work, I take a lot of their research and frankly thousands of other studies and apply it to how we can all work more effectively. Why do you get interested in the workplace? Well, you know, it was largely due to the experiences I had, so I, as I mentioned it,

was a psychologist. I taught at a number of colleges and universities and studied human motivation in the lab, and then I frankly got a little bored of it, so I intended to become a tenure track professor, got on that path, started teaching, and came to recognize that as a professor, you're essentially teaching the same thing again and

again and again. So it's kind of like that. The analogy I give is that it's kind of like being in a really, really good class and then being stuck in that class for the rest of your life and never being able to take another class. And so what got me interested in education and being an academic is learning new things. So I found that the experience of being an academic wasn't as energizing as I had hoped.

So I decided I'm going to take the educational experience that I had and apply it to the real world. So I decided I'm going to go off and get a job in a corporate environment and become a polster. So my job was to measure public opinion, figure out what people thought, and then make recommendations to organizations about how they can persuade people to you know, buy a product or donate, you know, volunteer, whatever the case may be. And I love that job. It's frankly something I continue

to do today. But probably the greatest and most striking finding for me in that experience was coming to recognize the massive divide between what psychologists like you and I know are the factors that lead people to be motivated and engaged and productive and creative, and how most organizations actually operate. And so recognizing that gap is what led me to write The Best Place to Work, which attempts to take over a thousand academic studies, distill them down,

translate them into plain English, and make recommendations. How about how anybody can apply them to become more effective at their job. Well, it sounds like you've done in an interview before in your lifetime. Thank your responses make it easier for me to not actually I have to ask specific questions. That's awesome. Yeah, no, totally, so I can skip three questions now you just answered. You know, when you talk about at the extraordinary workplace, are you necessarily

referring to happiness workplace? Like? Can you be an extra your workplace? But everyone be kind of miserable, not miserable. But I don't think people have to be ecstatic all

the time either. What I mean by it is when people have experiences that make them feel like they're growing their competence on a regular basis, feeling like they're connected to the people around them in a meaningful way, and having opportunities for experiencing autonomy, So feeling like they have some say in the projects they pursue and how they go about pursuing them. That's my definition of what makes

for a great workplace. And I think that in that question that you ask, I think a lot of people, frankly, have gotten somewhat confused about what it means to have a good organization, because I think it's become very fashionable to mimic what these companies that we see in the news a lot, the places like Google, which I think, from everything I've read, seems like a great place to work.

But I think what people have taken away from places like Google is that we need to have a volleyball court, and we need a bowling alley, and we need restaurants that cater to people twenty four to seven. And I don't think that perks are what makes for a great workplace. I think that psychological needs are what makes for a great workplace. Yeah, no, for sure. And so what was your dissertation on? Nothing to do with this? Oh? Ok?

I'll tell you though. My dissertation was about unconscious influences on people's motivations. So I looked at how sound influences people's willingness to take on achievement goals. Wow, that's neat. I mean your background, your scientific background is really put you in a good position to talk about what you talk about. Yeah. Thanks, And you know, I have to tell you though, it wasn't just the academic background. It

was the combination of the two skills. So you know, as psychologist, we could say, okay, well you know how to read a journal article, and that's valuable. But what really I think put me in a position to write this book is having the experiences of working as a consultant. And what you recognize as a consultant is that people like theory, they enjoy hearing about theory, but when it comes down to what they find most valuable, it's the

action item. So if you're delivering a report or a presentation, well, people are really going to tune in to in a very extreme way, are the recommendations you make at the end and say, here are the executive action items that I'm recommending you take here. And so what I try to do in the book, and frankly, in anything that I do is make the material actionable for everyday people.

How do you apply it? So regardless of whether you're a manager or whether you're just someone frankly who's an intern who's just starting out in their first job, there are loads of insights that we have on how you could be more effective at work. Yeah, so let's talk about some of that. How can you design an extornay workplace experience? I mean, you don't have the answer like every possible way of thereight now, well pick one for me,

like open offices, Like, tell me about that. Well, the way that we design offices is not ideal, right, so we have and frankly, it's not an easily solvable problem. So we have one variation of it is the open office. And open offices are not ideal because you get bombarded with all sorts of stimuli that can be distracting and stressful and prevent you from doing good work. So what ends up happening is you end up working on the evenings, come into work early, working on the weekend, and that's

just not sustainable. So it really says something about an organization where the only way for people to feel effective is to go home, right, that's not Alternatively, we have private offices, and private offices also have a downside, which is that you now don't have the benefit of having

frequent interactions. If you want to have a meeting with someone, you have to get on their outlook calendar, and that presents all sorts of barriers to having collaboration and all of those fortuitous events that happen when you talk about things that maybe aren't necessarily the focus for that day. So what I recommended the book is really looking at the college campus model and seeing how you can apply some of the benefits of the college campus model to

your organization. So what do we have at the college campus. We have, and you know this because you work at a university, is we provide students with an array of different environments that they can then choose to best suit the work that they're trying to do. So they have the option of working in a dorm room, which allows them some privacy. They can go into the library with

again for doing focus work. If they want to be around others, they can go to the cafeteria, they can go out to the quad, and they can go to the gym when they feel like they need to re energize and take care of themselves personally. All of those things are environments that we can frankly provide for people at work. And when we provide people with an option of allowing them to find the environment that best suits the work they're trying to do, they're going to be

much more effective in doing it. Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. So why are people then resistant to why are we doing it the old way? Well, I think it's a couple of things. I think, for one thing, we have inherited a factory model that doesn't work. So once upon a time you would come in at nine o'clock and you would leave at five o'clock, and when you left work you could be at home. That world no longer exists. We now all carry out around an office with us in our pocket in the form of

a smartphone. We work all the time, and we continue to operate offices that don't account for the fact that

work no longer is limited to just the office. That's one thing, And I think another thing is that that's preventing people from offering these sorts of variations of spaces is that we don't have leaders in organizations who are very familiar with the research, and so I think if they were aware of the fact that people are not able to work at their best in the environments that they're given, and that their productivity in many cases could

double if they give them a range of different environments, I think they'd be very open to those insights. And the case I make whenever I give talks or do presentations to various leaders is that, frankly, you guys all want to know how to build a great workplace. And it's not that you don't care, it's that you don't have time to pour over academic journal articles. And even if you did, it'd be hard for you to make sense of them because they're not written for people in

the working world. They're written for other academics and you and I know this. I mean, academics don't write journal articles in order to appeal to a mass audience, and in fact, in some circles that's looked down upon. And so we need people who are willing to be translators and offer people action items that they can actually put to use. Yeah, how do you know all this stuff?

Which stuff in particular, Yeah, I mean there's there's so many things in this book that are there's such a drawl in like such different literatures, and you bring it all together in one way. Well, I really appreciate you noting that. Yeah, it took a long time to write this book, Scott, how good it take? It took a year and a half. Okay, I mean, but I was long. It felt long. I know. I would literally print out as many articles as I could find around a topic,

go to the library and read. And it was a struggle, frankly, but you know, it was worth it. I think if I were to summarize my style, it would probably be unapologetically broad. Yeah, and I really like that. Yeah. And I like books that allow you to see all kinds of perspectives that you never even considered because you've been looking at it, you know, in a very kind of narrow lens. I try to be as broad as I can.

But thank you for the compliment. Yeah, no problem. So you were like, we're going to cover some of these things, So why is it good to think like a hostage to goiator? Oh? Well, that's a topic that I think it's really interesting. It's research looking at how you can be persuasive and what hostage negotiators know about persuasion. And we all have instances in our work when we're collaborating

with colleagues with whom we don't particularly agree. And so what do you do when you're experiencing those moments where you feel like you're absolutely right and the other person just has it completely wrong? How do you persuade them? And that's where we can all take a page from hostage negotiators, And what hostage negotiators know is that you don't convince people by bombarding them with facts and by

getting emotional. Rather it's by listening. And so there's all this research showing that listeners are far more persuasive than anyone else. And the other key takeaway here is that often if you want to be persuasive, you're not going to be persuasive over the course of the particular conversation. You're going to be persuasive over time. People don't change their mind within a conversation, it's because they want to save face, so they don't want to say you're right,

I was wrong. They go away, they take a shower, they take a walk, and then a few days later they start to see your perspective, and so there are all of these insights about hostage negotiators and how they communicate more effectively and how we can apply that to the way that we have communications with our colleagues at work.

That's so interesting, Yeah, because there are people like That's what they study in life, is those tactics and things like that, and they probably would find it really interesting that you've applied it to the workplace situation. Yeah. And I talk a lot about active listening and how what that actually means, and it means being more mentally present

if we tell you that in our positive psychology class. Yeah. Yeah, And one of my favorite tips in the book is if you want to be a better listener, then here's something you can consciously focus on, and that is shrinking your talking to listening ratio. In other words, make sure and I'm not doing a very good job of it during this podcast, but you're doing a phenomenal job. Well that's the whole point of the interviewing you so all good.

And then you know, doing things like asking open ended questions. Open ended questions are things that you know we don't do enough of. Is if somebody is trying to persuade you ask them some questions about how can they intend to apply some of their thinking what that would mean for certain areas of the business. It's by asking questions that you actually position yourself to be more persuasive later on, because when people feel heard, they're more willing to be convinced. Okay,

fair enough. So I'm trying to really a transition from there to play, and I'm having trouble coming up with a clever way of transitioning into it. So just let me jump in there to the importance of play. So, so not all of the workplaces negotiating in a hostage sort of situation like way, right, So tell me about a little bit about play. Well, play is not it's

something that we don't do enough of at work. And I don't necessarily mean let's, you know, let's let's take a game of risk into the conference room and spend our afternoons doing that. But what I mean is when we are in a mindset of play. So let me

take that back for a second. So where I think a lot of organizations have misinterpreted the lessons of places like Google is they think we need a football table or we need a ping pong table because then everyone will have this atmosphere of play, we'll all be more creative and will be more successful. But in fact, play is not about an activity. It's more of a mindset.

So what does that mean. It means being curious about different ideas and having the freedom to pursue those interests without feeling like you need to be productive all the time. And what happens when we engage in activities like play is we have opportunities for unconscious thinking. That's when we have some of our deepest insights. We're also placed in an environment where we're rewarded for taking risks and we

open ourselves up to alternative ways of thinking. And so having an attitude of play in an organization again not something that is driven by having play like activities, but rather having managers and leaders who encourage us to pursue our curiosities. Well, you know I'm done with that. I'd imagine you would be. And so how does that lead

to the important of video games for increasing motivation? So video games, I use the analogy of video games in a very specific way, and that is to show that many of the features that are inherent in video games are the very things we seek in our everyday jobs and that are missing. So, for example, what happens when you play video games like Tetris, for example, kind of a classic game everyone plays, Angry Birds. These are great examples of video games that have features that we desperately

seek in our jobs. What are those features? When we play video games, we get immediate feedback on our performance. What happens when you write a memo at the office, Sometimes you have to wait six months to find out if anybody even read it right, Like, you just don't have that immediate feedback very often, and if you do, you get it in the form of the annual review, and that comes such a delay from your actual actions that it often feels like it's coming out of left field.

So you know that thing you did last year, great job, that's not helpful. I need immediate feedback if I'm going to be engaged. The other thing that video games do well is that they provide recognition when we're successful, and they provide something that is critical and that is progressive difficulty. So if you start off with Tetris, the first board, you're going to crush it, the second board, you're going

to crush it. By the tenth or twentieth board, it starts to get a little difficult, and by the fiftieth board, it gets impossible. The same is true for angry birds. That's what keeps us engaged. That's the addictive property of video games is that it gets harder and harder as you do it. At most jobs, we have the opposite trajectory. So we start a job and it's really really difficult right out of the gate, and it's because you're trying to figure out what's expected of you. You're trying to

navigate the organizational culture. And then after a couple of years, your job becomes predictable, and then it becomes boring. What happens when a job becomes boring, it's when you start thinking about what am I doing in the evenings, what am I having for dinner? Where am I going on the weekend, where's my next vacation off to? And that's

where engagement stops. And so if we want to keep people engaged, we can learn a lot from video games, and it's by giving people opportunities to continuously grow their skills in a way that enables them to feel like they're encountering progressive difficulty. That's a really good point. It's a really good point. It also increased the flow state exactly consciousness. That's precisely right what we want to get into. That's great. Okay, So I want you to tell me

a story. Let me pick one of the stories I liked for your book. Okay, so tell me about the president who brought down the world's most dangerous criminal. Can you guys do it is? By the way, no, I can't. Actually, So it's Barack Obama. How he came to the decision of I realized that most recent was that yeah, yeah, after Osama bin Laden. And in that story, what you see is that when Obama struggles with a decision, he doesn't kind of go about it in a relentless way.

He actually allows for unconscious thinking to happen. So there's the example of him being in White House situation room with Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and the entire top brass and they're all analyzing all this data. They're trying to figure out what they need to do, and Obama says, let's stop here, I'm going to sleep on it. And from there I talk about the research on sleep and how unconscious thinking often happens when we're away from the activities.

So you've taken all the information, you go do something completely different, and then you analyze the information, you'll often reach a better decision. And that's not something that's often rewarded at most workplaces. Right. Nobody says, you know, come back to me in a decision, but don't tell me

to me now, come back in a week. And it's just a great example of how when we start applying some of the research that we have on optimal performance to the way that we work, we're going to be a lot more effective, both on an individual level and also for our organizations as a whole. That was very well said. Oh absolutely, so okay, So tell me about the inventor of the cubicle. The inventor of the cubicle. You know, I'm trying to keep you on your toes,

Ron you are, make sure you remember your stories. Would you ask me about Monica Sellis. That's a good one. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah, tell me about Monica Selas. So Monica Sellis is sixteen years old. I think it's nineteen ninety. She is playing for the French Open title against Stefie Graff and she

is way down in the score sheets. I think she's a couple of points away from losing the entire match, and she makes this remarkable comeback, and at the end of the match, she had essentially altered a social norm. Back in the nineteen nineties, I don't know if you were watching tennis back then, I was, and just about no other player besides Monica Sellas was grunting. And now

today you watch tennis and they're all grunting. And it's an example of how when a leader in a particular field adopts a particular behavior, it tends to get mimicked by everyone else. And it's an example of how so Monica Selas essentially altered social norms within tennis, and I think it's a great example of how leaders at the organization, they're the ones who have the opportunity for shaping cultural norms. And it's when a leader changes his or her behaviors

that something becomes more readily accepted. So you can go ahead and change the values that are printed on the walls of your company and as much as you want, but unless you're changing your behaviors as a leader, you're not going to be changing anyone's behaviors. I mean, I'm learning so much from like your book and let's talk to you right now. This is kind of a different world that I inhabit, but it's not that different. I mean, so,

you know, I'm interested in education. I'm trying to think of how a lot of things you're saying can apply these principles to make more engaged students. Right, Have you put any thought into that? Well? You know, it's interesting because I've come from the educational background, and so much of the work that I had read was about how when we have more autonomy supported teachers, how much better students do. And you know, when students feel like they're

heard and they feel appreciated, that's when they learn. And so for me, the jump was more about how do we apply this to you know, sitting in front of computer all day? So, right, that was the part that was new And I almost take for granted, much like I did when I went into the corporate world. I assume everybody knew all these things about motivation and creativity and they didn't. And I kind of take, maybe I take for granted the fact that everybody understands this in

the world of education, and probably they don't. Well, one thing, there might be a good parallel is when you talk about practices for interviewing people and admittance into positions and you've used the word true potential, you use that phrase, what does that mean? What is true potential? What does that even mean? And how can you eliminate the some blind spots that we have. Well, when it comes to hiring, if you think about how we hire people, what do

we generally do? We invite them in for an interview, and interviews are a disastrous tool for choosing the most qualified individual and it's for a few reasons. For one thing, it's because we have all of these unconscious biases and how we interpret someone's qualifications based on their appearance. So, for example, if someone's tall, we assume that they have high leadership abilities, where as someone's short, they probably have

lower leadership abilities. If someone is good looking, we assume them to be more competent than they otherwise might be. And if someone has a deep voice, we assume that that person is more trustworthy than they actually are. True, thank you very much. Yeah, So that's a great example of how all of these things kind of throw us off the scenter of well, who's really a good candidate? And so it's not just that this thing is happening in the back of our minds and we're not aware

of it. It also impacts the questions that we ask. So if someone if I, for example, I think that you might be extroverted, I might say to you, tell me about your experiences leading people in your organization. But if I perceive you to be introverted, I'm now going to ask you a slight variation on the same question I'm going to I'm not longer going to ask you tell me about your leadership experiences. Now I'm going to say,

are you comfortable in front of large groups? And my question, because it's been shaped by my unconscious bias, then impacts the answers that I get from you, which then confirms my initial impression. So interviews are not a very effective tool. Not saying don't do interviews, I'm just saying they should come further down in the chain of things that you

do when you're trying to learn about a person. So in the book, I talk about the example of blind auditions, which is the tool that orchestras use when determining who

to hire for a particular position. And the reason they use this is because back in the nineteen twenties, there was massive bias that probably is to some extent but much less so today about hiring female musicians, and so they determined that a better method of selecting between musicians was to have them audition behind a screen so that you weren't able to identify who the person was, and it had a profound impact on the rate at which

female musicians were hired. So the obvious question is, well, how do you apply this to the workplace. You're not going to put people behind a blind screen, but what you can do is develop your own blind audition. So, for example, Scott, if you're hiring a web designer, rather than bringing that person in for an interview, have them design a landing page for you, Or if you're about to hire a salesperson, have them come in and sell

you on your company. The key is to figure out what activity is going to give you an objective metric of that person's abilities, and use that as the thing by which you first determine how effective the person's going to be, and only then have the interview. That's really interesting, Yeah, we do that for college admissions, like a project to

base arting or something in high school. Well, in college asdmission, we have people write their personal essay, which is probably not a very effective technique because you have no idea who wrote the essay for right, right, So I think there are a wide variety of tools that you can now use. For example, why don't you have that person?

I have to think about this. Frankly, I can't just come up with an answer, but I'd imagine you have to first determine what are the kinds of students you're looking for, because not every university is looking for the same type of students. So figure out what are the types of students you're looking for. So, if you're looking for people who are going to be BookSmart, for example, I can see some variation of the SAT being quite frankly,

quite effective if that's what you're looking for. But if you're looking for people who are more open to generating new ideas, I can see you having some creativity tasks. If you're looking for someone who's a good communicator, I can see you interviewing them over Skype. I can see a lot of variations of this, But the key is that we need to first figure out what is it that we're looking for in the person and then design a task that measures the actual thing that we're looking to. So,

you know, we're now in the midst of these presidential debates. Scott, I don't know if you watched last night there was a Republican debate in Texas. Oh boy, and what you did? Okay? So I watched it for two and a half hours. I watched it. I can never have those that time back in my life. Two and a half hours. I watch this and what struck me, not for the first time, because I've been giving this some thought for a few years now, is the way in which we select presidents

in this country is ridiculous. Yeah, what do we do? We take very intelligent people, some of them less so, and we have them fight with each other in front of millions of people, and that, in some alternative universe is supposed to tell us who's going to be the most effective president. What does debating have to do with

being a president? I don't know. And so we put people in situations where frankly, there's a reason why Donald Trump does well at these things is because he has the skills that make for a good debater, you know, and so he draws a reaction and so he's effective at these debates, does that mean he's going to be a good president. I don't know. It's not for me to comment, but I do think that debates are at the very least a very small fraction of what represents

the qualities you're looking for in a president. Well, you said that you're very polite in what you what you said these are a very polite way. But I think that's exactly correct. I'm want to ask you a couple more questions. Sure you're right that employee of the Month awards can make employees less motivated work? Why is that? What happens when you have an Employee of the Month award is, especially with a team with a large number of people, is that you have one winner who's recognized

every month and ninety nine people. Let' say if you have a team of one hundred, ninety nine people walk off every month feeling like this month's efforts weren't recognized. And so even for the person who's just won the award, in the back of their minds, they're thinking, why I just wanted this month? How many more months in a row am I going to win this thing? So the chances of me winning it again next month, probably not going to happen. I don't need to work as hard anymore.

And so in that culture of we provide recognition in this organization from the top down, that I think is not a recipe for success. Much better is to create a culture where recognition comes from other employees to one another. And so if you can have it in a way that's not tied to a particular timeline, I think that's going to be much more effective. Oh cool, that's that's we learn something new as well with that one. I guess I've never been in a position where I've ever

been employee of the month. They don't have that at the University of Pennsylvania. They should they shouldn't. So what will the workplace look like ten years? For now? So I'll tell you three things that I think are going to change about the future of the workplace. And some of them come from the organizational perspective, and some of them I think are going to change in the way

that we ourselves decide that we're going to work. So the first thing is, I think we're going to get a lot better at applying some of the analytics to the way that we make decisions about how we work. So, for example, we have data that shows that working from home makes us more productive having that flexibility, being able to work from home, we do no longer have to guess about whether that's an effective technique. We have data

that shows it's effective. I think we're going to get much better and much smarter about working in ways that allow us to frankly, you know, leverage the energy that we have. Another example of this is that we also know that we're, on average, we tend to be much more effective in the mornings than we are in the afternoon, and so when we become tired, we actually become more creative.

And you know this because you're a creativity expert. And so I think we're going to get smarter at devoting specific hours of the day and calibrating the work that we do to specific hours, because we know we're going to be more effective doing it that way. The other thing that I would say is I think you're going to see more and more organizations encouraging people and paying

people to actively disconnect. You know, already you see examples of this of organizations that are paying people to not check their email when they go on vacations and to do things like having auto responders so that when you are away, so that the messages don't even make it to the server, so you're not even able to see those messages and have them disrupt your vacation. And all these practices are being put to use because we have evidence that shows that people are much more effective at

their jobs when they have opportunities for disconnecting. And it's not just because they're more effective, as you well know, and you know, they also become you also become more creative when we have the opportunity to disconnect. And I think all of those things are reflective of ways the workplace is going to change. Well, those are really great suggestions. Thank you so much for talking to me today. Ron, my pleasure, Scott, thanks for having me. Thanks for listening

to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode, or here are past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com at