[Fan Favorite] Where Joy Hides: Building a Happy Business, with Ingrid Fetell-Lee

Jan 28, 2025

Ask episode

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

Before In Good Companies returns next week, we'd like to help you finish January on a high note; so we're bringing back one of our favorite episodes on joy.

Recent research by Oxford University found that workers are 13% more productive when they’re happy. And yet, another study by BCG found that most company leaders aren’t building their strategies around how their employees feel at work. So joy? It’s a real business question.

In this episode, we are joined by designer and joy specialist Ingrid Fetell Lee, to find out how to make our workplaces, our jobs, and ourselves more joyful. A former design director for IDEO, Ingrid is a self-starter with a decade’s worth of research into the science of joy. Her findings made it into a book: Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness.

Today, she helps us answer the hard questions: how do we get to feel joyful? Our surroundings, the objects in our homes, the things and people we interact with every day… Why do they influence our emotions? And crucially: what does that mean for our companies? Together, we discuss how to make our workplaces more enjoyable and productive, and what joy means for leadership, teamwork and our business philosophy.

Join Ingrid and Ari to spread joy today and make it an integral function of your organization.

Highlights:

When Ingrid first stumbled upon Joy (2:45)
Universal joyful patterns (4:54)
The evolutionary explanation for joy (7:32)
The difference between joy and happiness (9:33)
The Aesthetics of Joy in the Workplace (10:29)
How physical space can impact our mental health (13:32)
The branded environment: “No one wants to work inside the corporate logo” (15:30)
The case of joy contagion at Coca-Cola (16:34)
Adopting a new joyful leadership (18:56)
“The biggest mistake that I've seen employers make is inconsistency” (20:56)
Undoing the corporate bias against joy (22:03)
Signs that we have changed our team for the better (23:23)
Finding joy while working remotely (25:57)
Embracing joy in the present (27:46)
Gen Z: a new philosophy of joy (29:27)

Links:

Feedback:

If you have questions about the show or topics you'd like discussed in future episodes, email our producers, Natalie.Barron@cadencebank.com, Eydie.Pengelly@cadencebank.com, or Danielle.Kernell@cadencebank.com.