Being Social Makes us Happier

We all need food, water and shelter to survive. But if we want to truly thrive, we need something else: social connection with the people around us. Luckily, our brains have evolved over millennia to help us connect and understand our peers. All that remains for us to do is recognize just how important sociality is to our wellbeing and take full advantage of that evolutionary hardwiring.

What you can do:

Harness the power of social connections to motivate employees.

If you’re having trouble motivating a team at work, try leveraging the brain’s built-in social leanings to help people connect more meaningfully with their work. So how do you do that? Well, here’s an idea: remind your team of the people their work benefits. Take it from Professor Adam Grant of the University of Pennsylvania who wrote a study which looked at people trying to raise money from university alumni for a scholarship program. All it took was reading letters from scholarship recipients to supercharge the callers’ motivation, increasing the pledges for donations by 153 percent!

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