The president of Nationwide Brokerage Solutions, Gary Baker, decided to apply positive psychology research to the company’s workday. We’ve also seen this at play out at our client companies, with the most compelling example coming from Nationwide Insurance. A one-second free behavioral change taught people a different social script: we are connected and your positive behavior can have a real impact on others. Just six months later, they observed a significant increase in the number of patients visiting the hospital, an increased likelihood of referring that hospital based on the quality of care received, and elevated engagement levels for the employees. Our own research has shown how quickly positive cues can affect our behavior. In our previous HBR article, Positive Intelligence, we described how a group of hospitals in Louisiana trained 11,000 doctors, nurses and staff to make eye contact and smile at people who walk down the hospital hallways within 10 feet of them. In a classic study in the 1980s, for example, Seligman followed insurance salespeople at Metropolitan Life and found that optimistic salespeople outsold their pessimistic counterparts by 37%. There is an equally compelling body of research that links optimism to higher performance. In psychology, believing our behavior is irrelevant in the face of challenges is called “learned helplessness,” which has been connected with low performance and higher likelihood of depression. We see the market dropping 500 points or ISIS poised to attack, and we feel powerless to change those outcomes. The majority of news stories showcase problems in our world that we can do little or nothing about. We believe that negative news influences how we approach our work and the challenges we encounter at the office because it shows us a picture of life in which our behavior does not matter. Our hypothesis, given substantial evidence that negative moods affect workplace performance, is that it will have a negative impact on performance levels in both cases. We’ll look at the effect of watching negative news on TV while at the gym, as well as the effect of negative news stories on sales and customer service at call centers in the Midwest. In the next phase of our research we will investigate the impact of negative news not just on individuals’ mood but on their performance. We were stunned by the results (we even reran the analyses to double-check it) because the effects were much more significant and dramatic than we expected. Individuals who watched just three minutes of negative news in the morning had a whopping 27% greater likelihood of reporting their day as unhappy six to eight hours later compared to the positive condition. This survey contained a battery of positive psychology metrics to gauge things like stress and mood. Then, the participants were emailed six hours later and asked to fill out a survey within two hours. Two of the videos included inner city kids working hard to be successful in a school competition, and a 70-year-old man who got his GED after failing the test dozens of times. The solution-focused news group watched stories of resilience to build the belief that our behavior matters. This is important: the second group did not watch saccharine stories about cute puppies, rainbows, and waterskiing squirrels (although we love that viral video). the second group watched three minutes of solutions-focused news. In this study, 110 participants were blindly placed into one of two conditions: one group watched three minutes of negative news stories before 10 a.m. This year, we partnered with Arianna Huffington to examine the longer term impact of news on well-being and performance. In 2012, we conducted a yet-to-be-published preliminary study with Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania where we found that just a few minutes of negative news has a significant effect on mood. Just a few minutes spent consuming negative news in the morning can affect the entire emotional trajectory of your day. We’ve known for some time now that hearing negative news broadcasts can have an immediate effect on your stress level, but new research we just conducted in partnership with Arianna Huffington shows how significant these negative effects can be on our workdays.
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