Why Happiness at Work Starts with the System, Not the Individual with Jennifer Moss

Ashish Kothari:

Hi Jen. It is so lovely to have you on our Happiness Squad Podcast. Thank you for joining us.

Jennifer Moss:

Oh, I'm so thrilled to be here. It's been a long time coming.

Ashish Kothari:

For all our listeners—go check out Jen’s work. It’s truly amazing. Not only is it highly research-based, but I love the stories. I love your own personal life story through it. I love the stories of the clients. I think they’re just such wonderful reads because they combine the brain with the heart.

Jennifer Moss:

Thank you for saying that. We can talk about the data and the research, and that's important because we want to know that it's evidence-backed. But it's in the work, it's in the moments, that we truly see the data and the research being lived out. I think we can all connect to that—those moments where we can see ourselves in it or see someone that we care about in it. That’s where, for me, the stories resonate most.

Ashish Kothari:

Absolutely. So look, I want to start by a statement you used to make. It's actually quite funny because I still write in my books—when I sign Hardwired for Happiness, I always say, "Dear XYZ, choose happiness. —Ashish." That's how I sign it.

But you used to say happiness was a choice. Now you realize you were wrong. Tell me more about that. Maybe I’ll change my signature too.

Jennifer Moss:

I think there’s this sort of gray area with that statement because I do believe that we still need to be engaging in self-care. We still need to develop psychological fitness so we can deal with a crisis when it hits. We should be practicing gratitude and focusing on what we have versus what we don’t have, building up empathy skills. These are all the traits of a happier, healthier, higher-performing person.

So there’s an element of where we can choose happiness in those moments. We can choose kindness and altruism, which is part of being happy as well, instead of being angry and cynical.

The thing is, I think what I like to apologize for in that first book—or even just with Plasticity Labs, which is the company that we started up that was focused on building happiness at work—is that there was a very, I think, linear way of thinking about it. Like, you know, "If you choose happiness, then all these things are going to come after that."

I feel like maybe it contributed to toxic positivity, because then it made people feel like—especially in the workplace and organizations—like, “Oh, it’s your problem, the individual. You are the problem for being stressed out. It’s your fault that you’re burned out. It’s on you to go to self-care and just breathe more. Take a bath. Listen to rain for 15 seconds.”

It’s all self-help. And that sort of world of happiness was built around the individual to solve.

When you really look at certain institutional pressures or policies that hold certain groups back, it’s a privilege sometimes for people to choose happiness.

You ask that woman who is a woman of color, she has three kids at home, she’s the primary caregiver—she can’t always, in that moment, when she’s working 70 hours a week and dealing with maybe not having very good healthcare and support to choose happiness. No.

That’s where the workplace has to come in and support her so that she can make those choices in the moment. And I think we need to talk about both sides of that coin.

Ashish Kothari:

I think it’s so important. And when I write about happiness—when I say “choose happiness”—for me, it’s funny how the same words can land differently depending on where we are.

For me, when I’m asking people to choose happiness, what I’m really asking people to choose is practicing these nine practices that allow them to have more control over their inner climate, their inner weather.

I’m talking about choosing happiness as an outcome of these practices. So I’m like, “Don’t blame the others. Choose these practices.”

And it is so true that 70% plus of our well-being—and 97% of burnout—is not in the hands of the individual.

In fact, I was talking to one of the former senior partners at the firm. His mission now in life, as he’s gone into his late fifties and sixties, is all about helping people live their best lives.

He said, “I’m thinking about how to make that happen.” I said to him, “Come join us. Because Happiness Squad is all about changing workplaces from one of suffering to one of flourishing.”

And he’s like, “Why work? I think we should teach people to meditate and we should do all these things.” And I was like, “No. Because here’s the data: if we don’t change work, we have zero shot at any person.”

It’s like the equivalent of telling someone who is in a toxic relationship at home, “Why don’t you meditate or ‘kind’ your way out of a spouse that beats you every day?”

Jennifer Moss:

That, I think, is one of the most important points. You do have a role to play in your lifelong happiness. You don’t want to have learned helplessness. You don’t want to feel like you don’t have any agency in your life.

But you do have to consider that if you go into an environment where it’s toxic—where you’re working 80 hours a week, where there’s discrimination, where there are microaggressions, where you’re feeling like you’re underpaid and it’s not equal to others, where you feel loneliness or a lack of community—those are root causes of burnout.

And they cannot be solved by just choosing happiness.

So for me, it’s almost like—keep practicing happiness, or keep up the effort to build your resilience and psychological fitness and all of those things. But a lot of what I learned, when I went from being the happiness expert—jokingly—to becoming the unhappiness expert as I was writing all about burnout, was that it is just this impact in the timeline.

You can go up or down. You can be neutral and be optimized. But you cannot go to “optimized” until you at least get to a place of neutrality, where you’re open to those things.

We need to do a better job of understanding that it is a continuum, and that happiness—or well-being or satisfaction, contentment—is the goal.

But you need to really start with the hygiene, the table-stakes stuff about work, so that we can get to a place of motivation.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah, I love that.

You’ve always been one, Jen, who I feel lives this notion of skating to the puck, rather than skating toward today. You’ve always been kind of a futurist and a trendsetter.

Just earlier this year—actually two, three weeks ago—there’s a new buzzword that’s now capturing attention: “brain capital.” That’s the latest. “Brain capital is what we need to measure. Brain capital is what matters.”

And I’m like, “We’ve been measuring things seven times since Sunday already.” But that’s fine—brain capital it is.

But you talked about that way earlier. You talk about it. And you talk about this notion that just as a brain that is healthy and happy is high-performing—so is an organization that is healthy and happy.

That’s why I call you a futurist. You wrote about burnout when burnout was just starting to become a really big deal. That was before—not after—tons of other people wrote about burnout, especially in the organizational workplace.

So I always look for the futurist perspective from you. Unpack that a little bit for us. Why is an organization that is healthy and happy high-performing too?

Jennifer Moss:

It's interesting. In Why Are We Here?, I had that talk with Adam Grant about measuring and why we’re so resistant in leadership and in organizations to understand the value of this data that has been around for a long time.

I mean, there’s been people like Sonja Lyubomirsky and Adam Grant and others—they’re like the GOATs. They know that well-being translates into business outcomes. Yes, Shawn Achor, for example. I mean, they have all established that it is true and factual and real.

And so I said to Adam, why is it that we just don’t believe it? What is the resistance? And he said it’s really about this need to prove things on such a short-term level now. And it’s even increased. We’ve even seen that. You need to respond to shareholder value in these quarterly earnings. And even if you’re exceeding projections, if you had projected more, you’re still in trouble if you don’t meet those projections.

And so it is a very acute response to the problems at hand—to solve for public sentiment towards your company, to ensure that you have this safety net around shareholder expectations. And so we don’t look at the long game.

Even though, if you look at Raj Sisodia’s work, Conscious Capitalism, you see that on the S&P, there’s this huge outperformance of those companies that do care about well-being.

When you have a healthy, happy individual, they’re more likely to go to the ends of the earth for you, especially if they feel like you are the one contributing to their happiness and their well-being. They’re going to be so much more loyal to you.

That whole idea of above and beyond—people tend to feel like they’re more engaged. There’s higher morale. They’re going to produce more. They’re clear-headed, so they’re also not dealing with brain fog that comes with stress.

There are all of these influences that happen to that person that contribute to the organization.

But then you look at the network effect of that—the social contagion effect. You’ve got all these people that are feeling better and coming together. They create all of these exciting and wonderful business outcomes.

It’s just trust in the process—that it is going to take time. That it does take time to build that culture. And we’re so impatient. And a capitalist world right now is becoming increasingly impatient for us to show things in a way that is measurable.

Ashish Kothari:

We live in this real interesting dichotomy, Jen.

So, I don’t know if you knew, but I grew up in the world of ops—operations, transformations. Twelve years. That’s the practice. I was a partner before I shifted to the work around flourishing.

And we really live—and I was seeing this real massive dichotomy—in both, in terms of our patience with results, and how we approach anything when it comes to our physical assets. Whether it is plants, whether it is warehouses, whether it is fleets, whether it is data centers.

Which SAP implementation happened in three months that you know of?

Jennifer Moss:

Right? There’s—We have a patience for a certain type of shift in an organization, and then a complete lack of patience for culture.

Ashish Kothari:

Which lean transformation across 50 plants happened in three months? You know, it takes four or five years. And yet we bet on them because we fundamentally believe that, as a strategy, it will unlock massive shareholder value.

But when it comes to our people, we lose that. And part of this conversation is—I wonder if, as core practitioners or folks who are leading this work—I think we’re actually doing a disservice to the field.

So, for example, I just finished a TED Talk two weeks ago. It’ll come out in a couple of weeks. I asked this question:

Why is it that when it comes to our physical assets, we look at data every day?

There is no retail CEO who doesn’t look at store data every day. There is no manufacturing CEO who doesn’t look at plant production data every day—where things are, where we are.

Why, for 15 years, are we okay looking at engagement data once a year? Why? Why do we accept that as the norm?

When it comes to physical assets, you expect—I've asked this question to a hundred-plus leaders—How soon do you expect somebody to take action if there is a problem? Twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

How long does it take for any action to come from a survey on engagement? Six months? Nine months? Twelve months? Never.

I was talking to somebody yesterday and he said, “You know what the number one feedback on the survey was—the worst? You know what we scored the worst on?”

And I said, “What?”

He said, “That nothing happens from the surveys.”

Jennifer Moss:

That is the major problem.

First, engagement surveys are looking-back surveys. It’s a point-in-time survey. So there should be a lot more data that we’re gathering. Managers should be given autonomy to be able to measure—just simple measures of trying an intervention.

You know, let’s cut out 20% of our meetings every week because everyone’s over-meeting and they’re exhausted. Let’s take it down by even 10%.

And I’m going to measure how people feel when it comes to their stress and job satisfaction on Day One—simple—and then ask them how they feel in two months when we reduce meeting fatigue by 10%.

I mean, these are those kinds of constant irritants that lead to chronic stress and burnout. That’s the pebbles turning into boulders.

We need to, as leaders and managers, be asking—not just pulse surveys. Everyone thinks, “Oh, speeding up the measure is pulse surveys once a quarter,” but still no one does anything with it every quarter.

So it should be that, yeah, the big surveys are great, and then you have the pulse surveys. But what are managers doing to use data on a regular basis so that they know what to do?

And I think a real big problem too with investing in happiness and well-being is that most people don’t know how to operationalize that—100%.

They understand, “I’m going to do this transformation that I have lots of practice doing,” or at least there’s a framework. “And we’ve tried this; it’s tried and true.” But here I am trying to increase happiness—I don’t know how to do that.

And it’s hard to think of how you have to operationalize it, but it is actually quite simple. And there’s lots of tactics that every manager can be deploying and measuring. But they either don’t have the autonomy, or they don’t have the foundational knowledge of how to do it, or they think, as an organization, it has to be a big overhaul.

“We’re just going to add value—and we’re going to be happier.”

It’s an interesting thing because it’s not complicated in the activities and the actions, the tactics and the strategy.

It’s the intentionality of it that is the hard part.

Ashish Kothari:

100%. And helping people create space for it—and giving them the agency.

Jennifer Moss:

That’s it. I think that is the intentionality of saying, “Okay, we’re going to give these managers autonomy. We’re going to make sure that they have enough time—and that employees have enough time.” But we’re losing sight of that because of this level of workload that’s increased.

A lot of that has to do with so many inefficiencies from the pandemic that have just made it really difficult to kick some of these bad habits and get back to some of the things that we used to do.

We used to have serendipity. We used to be able to catch up by the water cooler. We used to focus on having lunch together and just breaking bread together. Simple things that actually improve morale and community.

When you’re meeting for nine hours a day—and then you have pajama hours in the evening getting the work done that you couldn’t get done in the day—how are you going to build those things?

Ashish Kothari:

I like that. Oh my God. So look, you have studied this from both sides. You originally started on the happiness journey. Before our podcast, you were saying you were one of the 500 companies—Plasticity Labs—you started, that was really focused on happiness in the workplace.

Then you've gone the whole continuum. You've studied burnout. You've asked questions around “Why are we here in the first place?”

So I want to dive a little bit into burnout and well-being. And really, as somebody who's very well-positioned to answer it—what do leaders, in your work, Jen, not fundamentally understand about well-being and burnout?

Jennifer Moss:

It is a real issue right now, especially because leaders are saying, “I'm burned out talking about burnout,” or “I don't want to talk about the pandemic. I just want to talk about transformation and the future of work and how to get there.”

I just had this interview where I said, “Hey, I don't think we can ever forget about the pandemic ever.” It was such a disruption, and it has had such an impact on the neural wiring of our behaviors right now because it wasn’t acute—it was years. And we’re still in polycrisis. So we are going to continue to have this behavioral mindset shift.

When you look at the data now, we’re finding—Mercer Trends just came out and said—81% of the global workforce is at risk of burnout. This year, it's even higher than peak pandemic.

So we can't forget some of the things that have changed us. We can't stop talking about burnout because there are catastrophic impacts.

And what we also need leaders to understand is that we put so much effort into downstream tactics—resiliency training, all this programming around well-being. It’s the meditation or subsidized gym memberships and all these things that, I believe, come from good intentions.

Leaders think, “Okay, I want to help. I want to do well by my employees. I do care about them.” But for me, it was Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory—of hygiene and motivation—that completely changed my mind about how we have to look at well-being.

Well-being is really in these way upstream strategies and tactics. Wellness is downstream. That’s the optimization.

Herzberg’s theory looks at the fact that you need the table stakes stuff. You need pay equity. You need psychological and physical safety. You need to make sure that people feel fairness and justice.

We also need to feel that what we’re doing in our work is effective, that we have the resources to do our jobs. That is hygiene. Once people feel like all of that is being done, we don’t even want to think about it. I love how it was described to me: we don’t really think about being paid what we should be paid. We don’t really notice physical safety. But we feel the absence of it. When we don’t have it, we’re really aware of it.

So we just want that to be neutral. We want our employees to take that for granted. Then the optimization is where people have that baseline met—and now it’s about the added flexibility. It’s the other things that really do create a level of optimization: things like flexibility, workload, being well-managed, having time to build friendships at work. Those are the things that optimize.

It’s not the wellness tech. That’s way downstream. That’s a perk. These are rights. And we need to think differently about what is a right—that’s well-being—and what is a perk—that’s wellness.

Ashish Kothari:

I find that—I love Herzberg’s theory. It’s one of the core foundations. We describe these well-being pieces around this model. By the way, I love the word you used—irritants. That was the inspiration behind the model, Jen.

My wife and I were sitting in Costa Rica, and we had this model. We had all five attributes—three of them were influenced by some of the Michigan Ross work. One was from Oxford, one was from Harvard.

We were coming up with this, and I asked Lizzie, my wife, and she came up with the name.

Literally, our model is called PEARL.

I describe it as: oysters have the ability to take irritants and turn them into something of value.

Jennifer Moss:

I love that—PEARL, yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

PEARL are the skills for managers to turn those daily irritants at work—and we have lots of them, right? Bosses, colleagues, clients, suppliers, the government today, every university is the biggest irritant—changing our way of how anything gets done in the U.S.—turn them into sources of value.

You’ll see the Herzberg theory reflected because PEARL stands for:

Peace and Purpose: For every manager, I say—it’s not nice, it’s your obligation to help every person connect meaning to what they do every day.

Energy: Is the workplace something that creates energy or drains it? If it drains energy, people aren’t excited to show up on Monday. You’re losing people. You’ll have more absenteeism.

Awareness: This is about leveraging strengths instead of focusing on weaknesses. We do so much of that—helping people be more resilient.

Relationships: This is exactly what you said—friendships, relationships. That feeling of belonging. That “I have friends at work.”

Lifeforce: This is about redesigning work in neuro-friendly ways. Somehow we’ve forgotten that most of the work we do is cognitive. And back-to-back meetings, no deep work, constant interruptions—those are not going to help people do their best work.

Jennifer Moss:

Yeah, absolutely. And policies that are being clawed back right now—taking away people’s sense of fundamental freedoms—is a big part of that. We have lots of data to talk about the optimal scenario for hybrid, what works and what doesn’t.

These mandates that are just forcing people back into the office are actually going completely against the data. Flexibility is incredibly important, especially for diverse groups—especially women. It’s an exclusive policy to require five days back in the office.

When we look at unpaid labor—until we resolve that, until everyone is being paid fairly, until every partnership is equal at home and there isn’t one gender doing more than the other, until we solve those institutional pressures—we can’t have an optimized workforce. It really is that simple.

This is where policy becomes important. I love that when the WHO put out the statement around burnout being institutional—workplace stress left unmanaged—that word institutional refers to those policies: paid family leave, equal pay, right to disconnect, and a whole bunch of other protections.

What’s interesting is that when we do have policies, and when they’ve been adopted at the state level, we see more organizations in those states adopting those same policies inside the workplace. And that translates into positive business outcomes—outcomes they’re starting to measure.

So the government plays a huge role in executing and enabling this work. Sometimes leaders may have been on the fence or under financial pressure not to implement these policies—but now they can just say, “Hey, it’s the law.” That changes everything. It becomes a risk mitigation factor, not just a “nice-to-have” for being a human-centered leader.

Ashish Kothari:

 Tell me a little bit—your perspective on the role of boards when it comes to this topic.

Jennifer Moss:

Boards also play a massive role because they’re the ones saying, “This is what the shareholder needs.” Boards can fire the CEO if they're not performing.

But it’s layered. I really look at well-being as a quadrant.

We need policy—and the government needs to be involved in making institutional changes. That’s one layer.

Then in the top right, you have board members and CEOs, highest-level leadership—modeling the behavior and providing agency to managers.

Then you have managers. Their impact on individuals is massive. It’s a sway—70% influence on whether an employee is going to be happy or not at work. That’s real impact.

But managers also need to feel like they have permission to play that role. And they need to be people-centered.

Unfortunately, we put managers in roles where the only way to move up is to be a people leader—and many of them aren’t great at it. That’s a foundational design flaw.

And then, we’re here too, in this quadrant, where we as individuals must come in—not expecting the workplace to make us happy, but demanding that it doesn’t make us unhappy.

We need to come in without learned helplessness, and with a desire to make work something that works for us too.

When you have all those things working well together, you see the highest level of performance in an organization.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that—all four: the role of policy and government, the role of boards, the role of managers (and really upskilling managers), and then individuals advocating for themselves.

Collectively working together to solve this really complex challenge.

It is unfortunate that our workplaces today are amplifying human suffering rather than human flourishing.

And there’s such a case for it.

Boards— I always point them to the first person I found who did causational work on this: Alex Edmans.

We had him on our podcast. We have a second episode with him coming out in a couple of weeks. He showed that employee satisfaction—which is another word for employee happiness (I don’t know a single satisfied employee who’s unhappy)—

Jennifer Moss:

Yeah. They don’t tend to correlate.

Ashish Kothari:

Exactly. He showed 2 to 3.5% alpha, year over year, in incremental shareholder returns for companies that have more satisfied employees.

So my point is: this is your fiduciary responsibility as boards.

It’s not a choice between caring about shareholders or caring about employees. At that level of impact, if you’re not investing in employee happiness, you’re leaving 20–30% of shareholder value on the table.

That’s my call to private equity guys. I get it—public companies might say, “Yeah, that’s great, but I don’t have long-term.” The average CEO tenure is 18 months to two years. So they say, “I don’t have four years to wait for this to work, so I’m not gonna do it.”

Back to Adam Grant’s point.

But I say: You’re private equity. You hold companies for four, six years—probably even longer now because the markets aren’t cooperating. Why would you not fundamentally pursue flourishing as a core part of your strategy?

Jennifer Moss:

I think you’re right when you say it’s a fiduciary responsibility. I completely agree.

There should be a measure. There should be a standard outlining the business outcomes. We’re letting a lot of leaders off the hook by not measuring and demonstrating the return on investment.

And I also think CFOs need to understand there’s litigation risk starting to show up.

Look at the Right to Disconnect law in Ontario, Canada. There’s just been a lawsuit—someone exercised their right to disconnect and is suing now for $850,000 because their manager was mad they couldn’t connect after hours and fired them.

So now there’s this almost million-dollar lawsuit.

I’ve always said it’s a bottom-line issue. Look at the pandemic. There was a lot of mobility. The Great Resignation happened.

What did employers do? They invested everything in well-being—increased flexibility, increased DEI efforts. All the things that lead to retention. All happiness-related.

But when employers felt like they had control again, they clawed it all back.

We’re seeing that rollback. And I see it as shortsighted.

Because we’ll also start to see this risk liability emerge. Employees who left organizations that clawed things back are now going to ones that do invest in well-being. And they’ll stay.

Those organizations are going to attract all the talent as mobility returns. And we’re heading into the silver tsunami. We have 10,000 people in the U.S. hitting retirement age every single day for the next five years. That’s a massive shift in the labor market.

People who are 55 are super burned out and don’t want to be here anymore.

And younger cohorts are saying, “I’d rather take less pay for more work-life balance and flexibility.” So they’re putting off buying a home or a car. They might live with their parents longer—but they’ll have agency over what they do for a living.

Leaders and organizations aren’t seeing this five-year shift coming. They’re looking to AI to solve the problem.

But a lot of senior leaders I’ve talked to—who were bullish on AI—now say they don’t even know how it’s going to fit in or whether it really will replace all these jobs.

There’s a lot we need to step up and say as organizational leaders.

Fiduciary responsibility.

Litigation and risk.

And a labor market that, within five years, will be in a state of total flux.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. And a technology that either will really help us—as Rasmus, in his book, writes—be more human, or it can further take away humanity from us. Because we start treating people as completely fungible. “Oh, you don’t want to be available? No problem. I’ve got this agent who can work 24/7.” So no problem—don’t show up.

I think it can either make us really hard, or it can really push us to say, “Hey look, I used to spend 80% of my time collecting data to have a 20% conversation with Jen on how she can do better. Now I’m going to spend 80% of my time having the conversation because I could collect that data in 20% of the time.”

That’s the potential. Do we lean to the left or do we lean to the right and say, “Actually, I’m just going to have AI collect all the data. In fact, there’s an AI avatar of mine who’s going to call Jen, have the conversation, and then we’re done.”

It’s our choice. It’s our choice where we want to go and what we create.

Jennifer Moss:

It is a very important moment that we’re in, because there’s a lot of discussion when we talk about policies.

There’s some legislation on the table right now that talks about every state committing to 10 years without having any sort of restrictions on AI—that the commitment would be, in this bill, that AI will not be regulated in any way.

We need to make sure that AI has regulations that ensure humanity is the priority. And in leadership roles, we need to make that position clear.

We’re finding that one in two employees right now are feeling FOBO—fear of becoming obsolete. This AI anxiety is huge. It’s incredibly toxic. Young people are fearing that by the time they end university, the job they were hoping to get based on their education might not even exist.

They’re feeling this sense of, “What does the future look like for me?” They’re wondering if the job they planned to land after four years of investment in university could disappear.

When you look at the Microsoft Trends LinkedIn report—that was so telling—they found that 67% of CEOs don’t know the why of their AI. They’re really unsure of how to communicate it. We need to take a moment. It’s all happened so quickly, and I know there’s pressure to adopt it. But what is the point of it?

This is why people are asking, “What is the point? Why am I here?” It’s because they’re not seeing themselves in the future of work.

We can’t have a hopeless generation. We can’t have people who don’t see the future—because that’s survival mode. When people are in survival mode, they’re not investing extra time. They’re not being loyal. They’re always on the lookout for something safer or better.

That’s what happens when we’re in survival mode. So I think AI needs a reset around: What is the point? Because there are areas where AI makes excellent sense. There are great partnerships that can happen. There’s a lot of time-saving that I believe AI can offer.

But when we start looking at it as replacing humans—that’s a bridge too far. We want technology to be a partner. We don’t want it to become human.

And a lot of the current goals seem to push toward replacing us.

I also want to make the point that this hyperbole around AI taking over everyone’s jobs—we need to nip that in the bud. Because there is no way a government, or a prime minister, or a president, is going to allow their entire population to be unemployed.

How are people going to purchase things? Is the government going to pay everyone to live? Will we have to create an entire welfare state, giving people money just so they can survive and continue to participate in the economy?

None of the ways we currently run the world—our capitalist systems—are based on no one working. And we need to come up with a solution for funding no one to work. That doesn’t make sense. So the idea that everyone’s job is going to be replaced? That’s just not an economically viable or sound prediction.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. It goes back—as I’m hearing you, Jen—it goes back to your book: Why Are We Here?

If we ask that question as executives in a company, we’re not here just to earn profits. I always love Alex’s line: “If you want to reach the land of profit, follow the road of purpose.”

We are here to serve. We are here to create value for all stakeholders—or at least for the stakeholders that matter.

Employees, for sure, are one of the stakeholders that always matter in the research, it always shows up.

Other stakeholders? Questionable—do all stakeholders equally matter for an enterprise? But employees come first. Because whatever you do for shareholders, you do it through your people.

So shareholders matter—but employees matter. There’s no doubt about that.

If we reorient ourselves to ask, “Why are we here?” and answer, “We’re here to serve our stakeholders. We’re here to serve humanity,” then any solution that creates more value for one stakeholder at the cost of another won’t hold.

But you have to ask the question: Why are we here? That’s point number one.

As I reflect on this—and I hadn’t thought about this before—but as I was hearing you and staring at the title of your book, I was drawn to that question.

The second question I think every leader—and honestly every person—needs to ask is: Why are you here?

Unfortunately, in our hustle culture, most people tie their identity to work. “We are here to work.”

But if you go back to the orientation that we are here to serve others and create value, then we can start to think differently.

For example, if I can replace 30% of work with AI—and I do think 30–40% of work can be replaced—in programming, almost 80–90% of tasks today could be replaced through AI.

The question we can ask ourselves is: If we are not just here to work, but to live our best lives, then why wouldn’t we use the advances—say, 20–30% productivity gains from AI—to move to a four-day workweek?

We could still deliver the same impact, but without overworking people.

Why is the answer always: “Fire 20%”?

Jennifer Moss:

This is the thing that I feel—the lie of AI or the under-delivering on the promise of AI—is that it was supposed to give us our time back.

We should be looking at this as increasing time wealth and reducing time poverty. Making it so that we don’t have to worry so much about a huge swath of our workforce going on long-term disability leave from burnout or mental illness-related issues.

If AI is giving them their time back, let’s not just throw more work on them because they’ve been more efficient. The promise of AI was to solve for that.

It was also supposed to increase our chances of working on more creative parts of the job. So have we, as we’ve adopted AI, continued to focus on that program of upskilling and reskilling?

We see that’s not happening. It’s just that AI has come in, but we haven’t really been strategic about making sure that the person who was inputting data is now able to read the data and provide insights—because they’ve been trained to give that layer.

That, I think, is a very human aspect to it. But there is a very special thing that humans have always needed and that is core to humanity—and that’s cooperation.

That’s where we see progress. That’s where energy gets built. It’s why we’ve survived for so long. It’s why we continue to be high up on the food chain—because we’ve learned how to cooperate.

And we can’t just take that away.

Yes, every single job could be replaced—but should it be replaced? That’s the question we need to continue to ask.

What aspects of the job can we say technology can play a part in? But we shouldn’t be replacing jobs at a wholesale level.

It should be: how do we think strategically about what kind of economy, what kind of world we want?

How can we make sure that there’s human connection and cooperation that’s still part of that strategy—and then design the role of technology accordingly?

This is where the idea of not having any sort of regulations on AI means that humans aren’t still at the center of our future.

And that is so critical—not just to happiness at work, but to happiness in society. Happiness writ large across our global community.

Us getting along. Us respecting each other. Us not ending up in a world war.

The implications of us not cooperating as human beings anymore—there are so many future potential risks to that.

And I think leaders in every organization should be advocating for, lobbying for, and making sure that this idea of unregulated tech is really focusing on bridging the divide that humans are feeling right now.

Using technology for good is the most important strategic lens we need to be thinking about in the happiness space for this next five to ten years—before we can’t go back.

Ashish Kothari:

I can see a book coming, Jen. I can see a book coming from you.

Jennifer Moss:

You can see me noodling on this conversation. It’s been something I’ve been really concerned about.

Usually it’s my concern of my own things—I feel like my books are therapy, because I feel this gut fear about something, and then I go out and research and explore it.

And then lots of other people are also feeling those feelings, and then we have to talk about it so that we can protect happiness.

We need to protect happiness. That is crucial.

Ashish Kothari:

I have an outline around how we elevate well-being in the world of AI.

I love that. I do think it can solve so many problems—if we choose to.

We should find some time. We should brainstorm a little bit. It'll be fun.

Jennifer Moss:

I love it.

Next time, it’s going to be the “Happiness + AI” conversation, and we’re going to solve this whole thing.

We’re going to solve it in an hour, and we’re going to be able to execute on a framework for people.

It’ll be great. World peace!

Ashish Kothari:

 Bring us home, Jen. You’ve been in this whole continuum.

As I said, you ran a company for seven years—Plasticity Labs—so you worked with companies to implement happiness. You’ve studied burnout. You’ve looked at well-being.

The business case, as we’ve talked about, is very clear.

What are four or five key ways you would encourage our listeners—most of them are leaders—they might not be running companies, but they’re definitely running functions, and several are running companies…

What are four or five really specific things you would invite them to do—based not just on research, but from practice—that they should start tomorrow?

Jennifer Moss:

Well, as you know from the books, it's really important for me to bring these big ideas and these big conversations into super practical applications.

You need a manager to not be thinking it’s an overhaul. It needs to be 20 minutes or less to change culture. That really is how it has to be—no overhaul. No one has time for an overhaul. It has to be 20 minutes or less a week—not even a day.

So Why Are We Here? and Unlocking Happiness at Work are all focused on how we can do things in these micro, incremental ways.

I mention in Unlocking Happiness at Work too—Charles Duhigg’s idea of building habits and stacking habits. That’s a big part of changing culture. It’s about a manager just making these simple choices.

Some of my favorites—one of them is altruism.

When you look at Williams’ work from Oxford, he wrote this big headline that said, “The only well-being program that works is altruism.”

What I think is really important about that is—it’s about kindness. It’s about choosing kindness.

I love this new research from the World Happiness Report. They did the Lost Wallets Experiment. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this, but I love it.

This was done globally, but I’ll give you the Toronto version.

They placed wallets around the city and asked people if they believed their wallet would be returned. In Toronto, only 23% believed it would be. But in reality, 80% of the wallets were returned.

So our perception is way off on how good people are. And that’s making us unhappy. We’re becoming unhappy by perceiving that people aren’t good—when in fact, they are.

So this belief in others—just looking for the good and doing something kind for someone else, especially inside the workplace—it matters.

Don’t just say “Good job.” Spend time paying attention to what someone’s saying in a meeting. Really value what they’re contributing.

Then send a note on a Friday afternoon. Create a calendar reminder to say something nice to someone.

Say, “Hey, I heard what you said in the meeting. I actually found these two points really important. I’m going to bring them back to my team because I think we could leverage those. Great job.”

That is the difference between something being fleeting versus something having a lasting impact—and it literally takes 20 more seconds.

Cornell University came up with a study on eating lunch. Just 20 minutes once a week. They tested this across different groups, even with firefighters.

What they found across the board—morale improves, team cohesion improves, productivity increases. And with firefighters, the risk of getting hurt on the job decreased.

So 20 minutes of lunch for them is life or death. That’s a big impact.

Spreading positive gossip—another great study. When people talk behind someone’s back nicely inside an organization, onboarding speeds up—by 5x.

People go in, spend a few days, and realize: everyone says nice things behind each other’s backs. They perceive psychological safety immediately. They take more risks. They speak up. Innovation increases.

Again, these are very small tactics.

20 minutes. Have a 20-minute meeting once a week that is non-work related. Ask: “What lights you up? What stresses you out? What can we do for each other to make next week easier?”

Those are the pebbles being solved every week. That’s learning what someone loves.

We’re moving from simplex relationships—transactional—to multiplex relationships—multidimensional. We care more. Team cohesion goes up. Shorthand improves. We work faster together.

These are fundamental. And they’re so easy. They’re free. They’re easy to adopt. Anyone can do it.

It’s all about being intentional.

When we’re busy, we tend to let go of things like the non-work-related check-in. When we’re exhausted, we don’t take two minutes to say thank you.

But it’s really consistency and frequency that equal trust—which improves happiness at work.

So the one thing we should never drop off? The happiness interventions.

They should always stick. Because we can get through everything else if we have higher well-being and happiness in the group.

Ashish Kothari:

Yeah. And friends, in today’s world, we need to be more adaptable and resilient.

It’s the number two skill in the World Economic Forum.

We all feel it. You don’t need to look at the research. The pace of AI is changing everything. Tariffs are shifting daily. The world is evolving fast.

There is nothing more needed than adaptability and resilience.

And if there is one short, sure way to increase your adaptability and resilience—it’s through the science of happiness.

So yes, Jen. Thank you.

I can’t wait to read the second edition. I loved the first one. I can’t wait to see how you’ve updated it. We’ll have a link in our show notes for everyone.

I’m really grateful for the time you spent, and the care you put into bringing human stories to the research—which can sometimes be pretty dry—and turning it into something very practical for people to apply.

Thank you for your work. Thank you for being who you are. I’m grateful to call you a friend.

Jennifer Moss:

Oh, the feeling is so mutual. I feel exactly the same way.

I’m so glad you invited me here to chat.

I think we can all have a role—but the more we do it together, the more we collaborate, the more we cooperate in this space, the more prolific this conversation will be.

And that’s our goal. That’s our altruistic goal, in the end.

Ashish Kothari:

Absolutely. Thank you, my friend. Be well.

Jennifer Moss:

 Thank you.

Ashish Kothari:

 Bye.

Jennifer Moss:

 Bye.