3 min read

Put happiness to work with Eric Karpinski

In this episode of People at Work, Eric Karpinski joins us to talk about improving your social connections.

Employee engagement is something companies have focused on for years, but when you look at the Gallup polls and research, we’ve barely moved the needle.

Why is that?

One big reason is that a lot of it focuses on the company instead of the person. Employee engagement is always tied to productivity, profitability, and what leaders want to see from their engaged employees. It’s a selfish view and we are likely better off focusing on how to increase the happiness of our employees in the workplace.

On this episode I spoke with Eric Karpinski who is the author of Put Happiness to Work. He spoke about how to develop habits to improve social connection and deal with negative emotions.

Here are just a few of the tips he shared on how to improve social connection:

Gratitude practice; takes 3 minutes at the start of the day to write down three people that you appreciate and what you appreciate them for.
Conscious act of kindness: as soon as you get to your phone each day commit to writing a one or two line email or text to someone telling them something you love about them, encouraging them, or just sharing some good news with them.
Connection meditation: bring someone to mind that is really close to you and just send them good wishes in your mind
Pecha Kucha connection presentation: Each week ask someone on your team to pull together 10 photos of their life outside of work that they’re comfortable sharing with the team and then present them. This gives everyone an understanding of each other and plants potential seeds of conversation

There’s so much more to this episode and some great tips for dealing with negative emotions. I guarantee you’ll get something valuable out of this episode so give it a listen.

Listen to the episode

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“The more we can focus on finding meaning in what we’re doing, the better long-term happiness we’re actually going to get.”

Eric Karpinski

Author, Put Happiness to Work

Bio

Eric Karpinski has been on the cutting edge of bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for over 10 years. Eric is a key member of Shawn Achor’s GoodThink team, trained as a scientist at Brown University and has an MBA from the Wharton School. He and his wife are regular work-advice columnists on Psychology Today and his new book, Put Happiness to Work, is available now.