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.