Tom Rath Quotes

I’ve seen people be effective, even among local teams, by offering something that improves wellbeing in a small way – people who get passionate about smart investment strategies and managing finances for retirement, for example.

It’s tempting to work more than 60 hours a week and sacrifice sleep, not move, and eat bad foods as they are convenient. But this comes with a cost.

I always thought there were some people who were just destined to be disengaged in their jobs because that was their personality, and no matter how hard managers tried, there wasn’t much they could do with some of those people.

Make it easier to do things that increase your wellbeing before you have to make a choice because a lot of our choices, though they seem small in the moment, have a big effect.

Regardless of your age, you can make better choices in the moment. Small decisions – about how you eat, move, and sleep each day – count more than you think. As I have learned from personal experience, these choices shape your life.

Employees who report receiving recognition and praise within the last seven days show increased productivity, get higher scores from customers, and have better safety records. They’re just more engaged at work.

Having fewer unhealthy days and, in turn, more days when you have the energy to get things done is probably the global constant through which businesses and individuals can think about the quantifiable upside of increasing wellbeing.

Team members care about one another, listen, share secrets, talk about the latest news, have heated arguments, are sometimes jealous of each other, and even cry together.

Don’t worry about breaks every 20 minutes ruining your focus on a task. Contrary to what I might have guessed, taking regular breaks from mental tasks actually improves your creativity and productivity. Skipping breaks, on the other hand, leads to stress and fatigue.

We don’t have any measures in most cases of the health of our social relationships, of what we’re giving to the community.

I think trust is primarily built through relationships, and it’s important because it’s the foundational currency that a leader has with his team or his followers.

When we look at what has the strongest statistical relationship to overall evaluation of your life, the first one is your career well-being, or the mission, purpose and meaning of what you’re doing when you wake up each day.

Leaders need to be thinking constantly about what they’re doing to create a basic sense of security and stability throughout an organization.

For wellbeing to take hold, it’s got to be something that individual team members are getting excited about in their own lives. It can’t be something that a company is forcing top-down through hierarchical structures.

Positive defaults protect you from yourself – and that helps you to make decisions in the moment that are better for your long-term interests.

The vast knowledge we have to prevent cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses is staggering.

People who say they have a best friend at work are seven times as likely to be engaged in what they’re doing. And if they don’t have a best friend at work, the odds of being engaged are just 1 in 12.

Even though people spend more of their waking hours at work than anywhere else, people underestimate how work influences their overall wellbeing and daily experience.

On average, spending time with your boss is consistently rated as the least pleasurable activity in a given day.

While the things that motivate us differ greatly from one person to the next, the outcomes do not.

I would absolutely recommend against excessive positivity and optimism. Any positive emotion that you’re infusing into a workplace needs to be grounded in reality. If it’s not realistic, sincere, meaningful, and individualized, it won’t do much good.

The most important thing executives can do is send a very clear message to their employees that they care about each person’s overall wellbeing and that they want to be a part of helping it improve over time.

When you ask people about what they enjoy doing, time spent with the boss is even worse than time spent cleaning the house. So this suggests that there are a lot of leaders out there who are not doing an adequate job.

At a very basic level, people need to know that there is constancy in their jobs and, more broadly, in where the organization is headed.

If my colleagues stop eating donuts and are more active, it saves me money on next year’s insurance premium, and I get to work with people who have more energy and creativity each day. Yet most organizations fail to make health a cultural priority. Instead, they treat healthcare like any other expense.

Figure out what you really love doing and use your strengths on a daily basis.

If a school makes an effort to provide kids the right foods and help them to be more active, this benefits the student and the family’s health. If you embark on a program to improve your health with a church or community group, you are more likely to stick with it over time.

Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs.

Even if people just change two or three things that they are able to sustain over time, it makes quite a difference eventually.

The quickest way to be a little bit happier and more engaged in your job is to spend some time thinking about developing closer friendships.

The reality is that a person who has always struggled with numbers is unlikely to be a great accountant or statistician.

Positive defaults align our short-term decisions with our long-term interests. And we don’t always do that.

I’m a researcher, so I’m realistic that there’s nothing I’m doing that’s going to prevent me from getting cancer in the future. But I can slow it down.

When we asked people if they would rather have a best friend at work or a 10% pay raise, having a friend clearly won.

You can intentionally choose to spend more time with the people you enjoy most and engage your strengths as much as possible.

When I speak with people who love their jobs and have vital friendships at work, they always talk about how their workgroup is like a family.

Our relationships with people are formed by small moments – and relationships are crucial in business.

‘StrengthsFinder 2.0’ is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers – it was oriented more toward managers – or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.

Wanting a more positive environment isn’t enough. You need to do something, and it doesn’t require a great deal of effort or some huge change in the way you approach things at work.

No matter how healthy you are today, you can take specific actions to have more energy and live longer.