The Happy at Work Podcast

Hope at Work: Finding Hope in the 9-5 with Marcus Mossberger

• The Happy at Work Podcast • Season 6 • Episode 17

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Marcus Mossberger shares his passion for cultivating hope in the workplace based on research showing that hope is critical for employee motivation and satisfaction. He defines workplace hope as "the active belief in a better future," differentiating it from passive optimism by emphasizing personal agency and responsibility for positive change.

• Hope in the workplace requires active belief and responsibility, not just passive optimism
• The top reason people leave organizations is not seeing anything to look forward to
• Next generation employees prioritize purposeful work and flexibility over compensation
• Agency and control over one's work significantly impacts psychological wellbeing
• Your relationship with your manager affects mental health more than many personal relationships
• Four-day workweeks can increase productivity while providing better work-life balance
• Cross-training naturally occurs when employees cover for each other's flexible schedules
• Traditional retirement may be outdated as we move toward longer lifespans
• Gradual reduction in work hours rather than abrupt retirement supports better mental health
• Technology, including AI, will transform work—our attitude toward these changes matters

Take the workplace hope assessment at workplacehope.com to understand what makes you hopeful at work and embrace the exciting changes coming to the world of work in the next decade.


To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Speaker 1:

Welcome back for another episode of the Happy at Work podcast with Laura Tessa and Michael.

Speaker 2:

Each week we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work.

Speaker 3:

Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the Happy at Work podcast. Hi, my name is Michael McCarthy. Our guest today is Marcus Mossberger, future of work strategist and an expert at hope. Marcus, welcome to the show. Thanks, michael, appreciate you having me, so I'm curious. I see that you're focusing a ton on hope in the workplace. It's a really interesting intersection. Why? Why does hope at work matter? And initially, tell us a little bit about your background, how you got to seeing that hope is really important, and then we'll dig into those details. So tell us about you.

Speaker 1:

It's all really related, actually, and I wouldn't know. I don't know if I would say that I'm an expert at hope. What I am is extremely passionate about it, and that came from a class that I took at the University of Kansas back in the 90s, the 1990s I'm dating myself already, michael Last century. Me too. I was there, all right good. So I went to the University of Kansas and one of the classes that I took while I was there was the psychology of hope, and it was taught by Rick Snyder, who I didn't know at the time, was like the guru of hope. He literally wrote the book the Psychology of Hope and I absolutely fell in love with it.

Speaker 1:

And for me, I realized that hope for a lot of people, if you think about it in Maslow's hierarchy of needs the base of that pyramid, the basics that you need, like air and water and food I think hope is more important than those things, because if you don't have it, nothing else matters.

Speaker 1:

So I realized how important it was, and then I started getting an interest in the world of work.

Speaker 1:

So I decided to study human resources, I went into the field, I got into HR technology and I kind of forgot about it honestly for a while, michael, and a few years ago I decided to dust it off, and I kind of forgot about it honestly for a while, michael, and a few years ago I decided to dust it off, and the reason for that is and I think you'll relate to this, I think most people will relate to this, michael we spend the majority of our lives as humans working, and most people don't have an incredibly positive association with the world of work, and I don't like that.

Speaker 1:

I don't think that's the way it should be. I think we should enjoy our work, I think we should find meaning in it, I think we should be good at it, I think we should be able to establish authentic relationships, I think we should have control over our lives at work, and so I decided to resurface this interest in hope. So I started a newsletter and a podcast and I created a workplace hope assessment. No idea what I'm going to do with any of this stuff other than make it a topic of discussion, because I think we should talk about it.

Speaker 3:

You know what I love about this? It reminds me when I was studying positive psychology at Penn, I had the opportunity to learn under Dr Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, one of his first experiments he ever did, which now, by the way, is unethical and you could never do it again. It was using dogs and it was basically showing them. They were shocking dogs. That's why you can't do it again. But basically they were shocking them where they would stop trying to do things, and even when they could, like, get out of their box or, you know, go for the food or jump over the wall, they wouldn't do it. And when it comes to work, it just gave me the idea. Do you think that if people don't have hope, they won't try?

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I think it's just like that experiment that you mentioned, where they're like what's the point?

Speaker 1:

And the reason that I think that's important. And let me maybe start, michael, by giving you kind of my definition of hope in the context of the workplace. It's the active belief in a better future, and that's pretty nebulous. Admittedly, that was purposeful. But I want to point out two things. Number one it's an active belief. There's a difference between hope and optimism. Optimism is like, hey, things are going to get better, but I'm not going to do anything about it, I'm just maybe things will get better. Hope is actually taking some responsibility, some agency, some control, and saying, hey, I'm going to make it better. So it's active. And then the better future piece is really important.

Speaker 1:

It's funny when you ask people why they leave organizations. Yes, they talk about money, yes, they talk about their manager, but I think, for the most part, if you look at the data, especially over the last decade, the number one reason is I don't have anything to look forward to here, and it's not just like a career advancement or a huge raise. It's like I want to do more. I want to do something interesting. The next generation in particular, I think, is really looking for purposeful, meaningful work. They're willing to forego big titles and compensation. They also want flexibility, right. So I think when people don't see something to look forward to, they're just like those dogs in the experiment they just stop trying.

Speaker 3:

It's funny, you say that I was a professor at two different schools and so I love the Harvard job because it just makes me work harder and harder. The other school was near my house and they paid well and they were nice to me, I had a lot of autonomy, but then I got a micromanager and my autonomy went away and I didn't see a future. I was like I literally I didn't have hope. I was like there is no tomorrow is going to be a better day, because I just felt like I was just being so micromanaged and controlled and so I guess I really left because I didn't feel like I had a hopeful future and I didn't. Everything was prescribed. It was almost like reading off a script. They were giving me slides to teach in class. I was like are you kidding? So yeah, I agree with that. That was my biggest reason, that I just didn't see that tomorrow would be better than today with the way that the workplace had changed.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's interesting to hear you say that too. I think one of the most fascinating topics associated with hope in my mind is the concept of agency or control, and feeling like you have control over your life. And it sounds like in that scenario that you just mentioned, you felt like you lost a little bit of that control and they were like here, here's some slides for you to teach from. We don't want you to actually create your own content or, you know, bring things to the class that you've created yourself, and we see that a lot in the workplace. You know, look at like retail employees. They don't even have control over their schedule, michael. They can't even decide what day of the week they're going to work, let alone the actual tasks that they're doing and the job that they have. They have little to no control over that too. So I think that's an important piece. And then another that you kind of alluded to.

Speaker 1:

You've talked about Seligman. I love his PERMA model. In fact, it's kind of baked into my workplace assessment that I created. But the R in PERMA is relationships, isn't it? And again, I think it's another important point to make when I mentioned earlier that we spend the majority of our lives working. That means these relationships that we forge at work are really important. I read somewhere I can't remember where it was, it was recent and it said your relationship with your manager has more of an impact on your mental health than your relationship with your spouse. I don't know if that's true or not, but it's important, and so your relationship with your manager obviously took a negative turn, and that impacted your perception of your future.

Speaker 3:

What you're quoting is correct and it was coming from I believe it was coming from a derivation of data from Gallup, and Gallup had said that 70% of how you feel about work is coming from your manager and over 50% of managers are burned out and, like 65%, are looking for jobs, so they're not in a good spot. So that is basically just trickling down into the organization with that impact. Sure, it's going to be more than your spouse or your kid, because you spend so much time and when you're not at work, work's rattling around in your head If it's, if it's bad stuff. I remember when I quit my my job a few months ago and I was uh, well, I was kind of screaming at the dean I shouldn't have done that, but it made the hijack and as I was screaming I have no psychological safety here which was sort of fun. I was like you know, I'm tired of you being in my head for six hours after I've left this place and she just looked at me like wow, I can't believe. Like she seemed surprised and I wasn't exaggerating.

Speaker 3:

I mean, you know, when you have a problem, you know it can rattle in your head for a long, long time, and so I think that the mental health benefits. But it reminds me to get back to hope. What do you do with people who have a job like you just described? I have zero agency. You're telling me when I'm having my bathroom breaks, when I'm coming to work. How do they get hope when they have so little autonomy? Any hope for them?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's quite personal actually, when I put together the workplace hope assessment which anybody can go out there and take, and I don't ask for anybody's demographic data or any kind of information, I'm just trying to collect information about what makes people hopeful or not hopeful at work. There's a few different components of it, right, and we've already talked about several of them. You know, those folks that are not very hopeful frequently don't have a lot of agency or control. They don't have good relationships with people. They don't have the ability to influence what they're working on or when they work or where they work. They don't find a lot of meaning in it. It might be really kind of administrative and transactional in nature. So I think for all of us those different components have a different sequencing and prioritization. So you know again, I think for the retail worker, let's say, that says I don't have any control over my schedule.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that we're doing this is not meant to be an infomercial, but I work for a company called Infor and we provide workplace technology. So we say to those companies well, why don't you give those folks some self-service tools where they actually have the ability to go out and request a certain schedule, swap shifts with people. You can see whether or not that person has the right credentials to be working that shift. You can see if they're going to be in overtime. So you can set up rules to say no, you can't do it or yes, you can. But what happens then is they feel like they have more control than they actually do, because they have a chance to influence when they work and where they work and who they work with. Maybe they want to work on a shift with somebody they really like. So technology, I think, has the potential to play a role in this.

Speaker 3:

It's really interesting you say this. Let's go back to last century, when I owned a money management firm on Wall Street. I think this was back in. I owned it from 94 to 04. So this is probably somewhere like 1999, 2000.

Speaker 3:

I was when I had got become established and we were, we were, we were a good size. I was doing three day weekends and I got wind that my employees were resentful that you know I'm not working as much as they are. And I got that and I really got a benefit out of having that third day, kind of like just do all the crap you have to do, you know mop the floor, you know brush the dog, that sort of stuff. And then the other two days are like real weekend stuff. Let's have some fun. And I thought you know I have that. I'd like to give them that into what you just said. You can swap, you can take your Friday off or whatever day off you want. You have to get someone to cover you, so they have to be qualified, et cetera, just like what you're talking about. And here's the thing that I never counted on and it was amazing I got free cross-training. They train each other and I had yeah, there was cross-training with it and I think any organization that is looking to have more people to upskill it's a really great way to have.

Speaker 3:

Okay. Now let's say that you and I are working together and we do different jobs, but we kind of get what we're doing in total. You want the day off, I want some extra money, so you're going to train me. Well, now you're my mentor and I'm the mentee. So now we just had a little speed mentorship program, so that's cool. You get to feel great that you're this expert and you get to feel good that you just offered me a kindness. I get to feel great that, hey, well, now I can get more more hours because I can do more things for the organization. And no one paid a training cost.

Speaker 1:

Love it. It sounds like you were ahead of your time with the four day week all the way back in the 90s.

Speaker 3:

It's just because they were angry. It wasn't that I was really forward thinking about it.

Speaker 1:

I think there's legs to that, though, Michael. I think the four-day week has real potential because of what you just described, I think and who knows what will happen, you know but the promise of AI to make humanity 10 times more productive at work could eventually mean we don't have to work five days a week, 40 hours a week, week 40 hours a week, because we become so ultra efficient and productive that we can take Fridays or Mondays or whatever day of the week and get some more stuff done. I could use it, man.

Speaker 3:

It's funny you say that I've done a lot of work on the four-day work week and we actually interviewed a. He was a senator in California but he was from Hawaii, so he was trying to do legislation, and he basically said that Americans work seven days a week until the unions came in and basically the unions invented the weekend and he said you know, our work schedule has not changed in 80 years. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

It's literally, it's forever. When he talked about the four day work week, the data shows that there is a little bump in productivity. So, net-net, you're a little bit better, because when you are in the office let's say it's going to be Monday through Thursday it's heads down, get the work done and no goof off, and I'll tell you if I need to get some serious work done. I got to be home. I need to be home.

Speaker 3:

With the phones off, I can't be in the office. You don't want me in your office, because I'm going to come up to you and be like hey, marcus, how you doing, how's the weekend? You're going to be like dude, like you were, like disruptive, and I am. But because I like relationships and I'm like, if I'm going to be in the office, I want to talk to my friends in the office, but I think there's there's something there. You know, it's really quite interesting that there is really good data that the four-day work week is helpful. The trick to it, though, is that they have to keep the same salary. That's right. That's how the data was done.

Speaker 3:

I would do it. I would use it as a competitive advantage, especially the people who the ones that are being forced to go back to work, the ones that are being forced to go back to work. We just did a piece on LinkedIn that and this was referencing some other data that usually our younger generations they're willing to take about a 10% pay cut to work remotely, and I'm thinking diversified workplace. If the internet goes out in one place or there's another COVID, we're not going to have any breaks in the productivity. We've got these people who are also cross-trained and it's just a huge benefit and I think it would be really competitive, especially to someone who's trying to start a business, if they're willing to attract talent and say, look, it's remote work and it's four days you'll have a line out the door, you will.

Speaker 1:

I think it's a brilliant concept. I completely agree with you that if you're going to ask people to come into a physical office and you know, use a carrot and a stick and the carrot being hey, but you only have to come four days a week, I think that could be significant. I just love this whole idea of these very traditional 100 year old workplace norms starting to be questioned. I don't know if you've read the book the 100-Year Life. No, tell me about it. It's a really interesting book. It was actually written like a decade ago almost, so they were way ahead of their time, like you. Basically, the premise is this Life has three stages education, work and retirement. We all agree to that.

Speaker 1:

Now, I don't know about you. You and I may not live to be 100, but my daughters probably will, because of you know they're going to live healthier than their dad, they're going to have access to better medical care and they're going to have their genes edited so that they avoid all you know kind of sickness and disease, but bottom line is they're going to probably live longer. Well, let me ask you a question, that if we live to 100, do those three stages still make sense. Well, let me ask you a question, then If we live to 100, do those three stages still make sense, especially in the? To stay relevant, I also think we're going to have to work a lot longer into the future because we're obviously going to live longer, so we're going to need more money.

Speaker 1:

So, anyway it just it begs the question why not rethink those stages, why not rethink all aspects of our working lives? One of the concepts in the book was talking about if we, you know, re-sequence some of those stages, maybe in the middle of your life. You know, you've heard of the term of a gap year, right, where kids come out of school and they take a gap year and they backpack around Europe. I read this book and I said to my wife I'm going to take a gap decade.

Speaker 1:

And she's like what are you talking about? Like, well, listen, I can stop working from 50 to 60. We can travel the world, we can do anything we want, and then I'll get another job from 60 to 80. And you know, there's no rules, there's no reason why we can't do that. And she's like, yeah, I don't think so. We need health insurance and so there are prohibitors to this. I mean, I just love this concept of rethinking everything about work.

Speaker 3:

Well, I love that and I think there should be a rethink on retirement. And I have this really strange, unique experience that when I had the money management firm, I retired when I was 36. Wow, and that was 22 years ago. And I thought, oh, I'm doing great. And I could not believe how depressed I got, like seriously depressed. I went through 24 different antidepressant combinations. You know they give you two, three pills and they tinker five milligrams here and there and nothing worked. Until I looked at orthomolecular medicine, which was basically a food for medicinal function, and that popped me out of it, you know so, less alcohol, less going out to restaurants with delicious, unhealthy food, and that popped me out of it, you know. So, less alcohol, less going out to restaurants with delicious, unhealthy food, and that popped me out of it. And what really? What really worked was going back to work.

Speaker 3:

And when I went to Penn and Marty Seligman, the father of Positive Psych, was my professor, yeah, when we, when I got into the program on the first day, he like opened it up and he said um, oh, there's, I read one person's essay. I'm going to have him, like you know, give you the his three minute bio. And it was me and I was like, oh, oh boy. And so I tell him my, my little story, um, and he stops it like in 30 seconds. He just reduced me to nothing. He goes um, yeah, this is very typical of people that have early success. They lose their meaning and purpose in life and then they get depressed and I'm like, yeah, that's actually correct. You just watered me down to one sentence, marty. Are you serious? Yeah, I mean, I felt like so tiny, but the funny thing is it's helped me create a theory for retirement.

Speaker 3:

I will never retire, so what I did is, when I did go back to work, it was as a professor, which that's where I belong. That's my thing. But I don't want to work too much. I work about three, maybe four days a week, but as I get older I'll bring it down to three, and then I'll bring it down to two, then to one, then I'll just be crawling to work. I'll probably get a wheelchair, I'll pay someone to push me and then when I'm they retire from everything.

Speaker 3:

And I don't think you're going to live as long if you retire without a purpose. And I think hobbies are great, but a purposeful hobby is something that really jazzes you up Like my dad goes fishing and I think you need more than that Like you know, volunteering or you know whatever your your second thing is going to be but what do you think about never retiring? We don't have the money to do it anyhow. The average 401k balance is $45,000 in the US and you need about 2 million. So, guess what? You're going to retire for three months, and so what do you think of the concept of just never retiring?

Speaker 1:

I completely agree and I've actually seen more and more come out on that topic in the media about the idea that retirement is really unhealthy for you and an alternative to retirement would be. Most of us have some kind of passion in our lives and if we won the lottery tomorrow maybe we would pursue that passion. But we can't. What if you decided that passion was going to be your point of existence instead of retirement, and that could take the form of a side hustle or a passion project? But I think what you're going to see, michael, is retirement not completely go away, but exactly how you described it. Instead of going from you know, 40 to 50 hours a week down to nothing, I think you'll see a gradual decline in the amount of activity associated with your main hustle and then there will be more of an investment in your side hustle, which will eventually become kind of what you spend your time in your retirement on.

Speaker 1:

In fact, I'm starting to see more interest in internal side hustles. I'm gainfully employed at this company, but I want to do some stuff, other stuff. I'm interested in a lot of things. Can I do a side hustle inside of my company and learn something new? And, to your point cross train and people are starting to realize that's probably smart. So I think you're absolutely spot on. I think we're going to see a redefinition of the term retirement for a wide variety of reasons, including financial, but I'm never planning to retire either, which is literally why I created all of this Hope at Work stuff. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it. I may do nothing with it monetarily and simply just make it my passion project. Who knows, I love that.

Speaker 3:

I love that and I think it's a great way to close our podcast. I have loved this random conversation that we just had. It was just really interesting and it's like the whole point of my podcast. It's kind of like to your point the podcast is my passion project. I don't make money off of it. I don't want to, I don't want to. I think money would kind of mess it up a little bit.

Speaker 3:

I just really like to have a cool conversation and learn something and if people listening in can come away with some tidbits. So in closing, Marcus, what messages do you want to leave the people that were listening today about your work and hope and ways that you might be able to make their lives better? As we sign off and go for a beautiful weekend?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, again, I would love for people to visit the site it's real simple, it's workplacehopecom and take the assessment and it's literally got 10 questions and then there's a few demographic questions just to better understand who's taken it. But that would help a lot, you know, just for us to understand hope a little bit more you talked about I didn't realize that you studied under Martin Seligman. That's amazing. You must have learned incredible things To your point.

Speaker 1:

Positive psychology has done so much and it has come so far since the 1990s. But hope isn't something that people have spent a lot of time researching and understanding. And if we're going to spend the majority of our lives working, then I think we need to get better at understanding what makes people hopeful at work. And I do expect there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all magic wand, and that's okay. There's going to be a lot of personalization, but I think it's important that we make it a priority. And the second piece I'll mention, michael, is I think technology is going to play a huge role in changing how humans work, and I'm not trying to be all Pollyanna, no-transcript, but your attitude is going to play a big role in whether or not you embrace that or you fear it. So I would suggest to people don't fear it, embrace it and see what comes of it. It's going to be an exciting decade. That's the other reason why we can't retire right. It's not going to be an exciting decade.

Speaker 3:

That's the other reason why we can't retire right. It's not going to be boring and you do not want to be left behind. No, marcus, thank you so much for being on the show. I've really appreciated your insights and for our listeners. Thank you for listening. It's Friday here and we hope you have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon. Bye everybody. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the happy at work podcast and leave us a review with your thoughts.

Speaker 2:

Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or want to collaborate with us? Let us know. You can send us an email at admin at happy at work podcastcom.

Speaker 1:

Send us an email at admin at happyatworkpodcastcom and lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness. See you soon.

People on this episode

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Laura Hamill, PhD

Host
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Michael McCarthy

Host
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Tessa Misiaszek, PhD

Host
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Braden Misiaszek

Producer