How to be happier at the workplace: connect with your colleagues | Marie Schneegans | TEDxEMLYON

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community.

How to be happier at the workplace and enhance your creativity: connect with people within your own company. Marie's experience working in the banking sector: stress, burnouts, and little interaction between employees. For her, the answer lies in connecting people within the company, from different branches and hierarchical levels, to enhance creativity and employee well-being.

Marie is a born entrepreneur who loves to create experiences that connect people. While attending a Bachelor degree simultaneously in Paris and Frankfurt, she also worked in Wealth Management at UBS in Zurich and founded [Freespace] in Paris, an experiment to show what becomes possible when a community shares the gift of a physical space. She is now starting her own company, Never Eat Alone, which is a mobile app to connect employees inside large corporations. She also just started Young Sunshine, a non-profit dedicated to teaching young people to be more conscious and to step out of their comfort zone.

Within the next three years,
I want all employees around the world

to feel happier
and more connected at work.

In large corporations,
employees are often unhappy,

which can lead to burn-out
and even sometimes suicide.

One of the main reasons
is the lack of social engagement,

and this is what I want to fight.

I want to share my experience
working in a big bank in Switzerland.

Don’t get me wrong.

I love to work.

But these conditions are very stressful.

I had little to no free time,

I cried often, and I was usually unhappy.

I wasn't really meeting anyone new,

and I was always with the same operants
from my department.

At lunch, I would always eat alone
in front of my desk

or with the same colleagues
from my department.

So, I decided to change that.

I realized that if I wanted
to be happy at work,

I had to get to know people
from different backgrounds,

and understand how the company works.

So, I went to different floors,

and asked people randomly
to have lunch with me.

They were very surprised,
but most of the time they said yes.

Once, I had a legal issue

for the wealth management project
I was working on,

and I thought that instead
of looking on Google for one hour,

why not have lunch with someone
from the legal department?

The next day we had lunch,

the problem was solved,
and I made a new friend.

Colleagues from my department
started to tell me,

"Marie, you just joined us and Ethan,

and you already know everyone.

Can I come with you so I can also meet
new people during lunch?"

Of course I told them to join.

And at some point, I even had lunch
with the president of the bank.

At the same time, I started opening
a collaborative space in Paris

where people from different backgrounds,

like engineers, designers, and artists
come together to meet and collaborate.

And my motivation
for this project was simple.

I believe that everyone
should have the ability to create.

So I was flying every weekend
to make this project happen.

And I was very creative,

I had a lot of energy.

I thought that everyone should create.

Creation went exponential.

The more people meet,
the more they discuss,

the more they create.

And I believe this model could also work
in banks and large corporations.

So, I decided to leave
the banking world and university,

in order to create an app,

where employees can meet
and have the option to never eat alone.

When a company has many employees,

I see this as an amazing opportunity.

Let’s pause for a minute and think

that the true size of the company
is not the number of employees it has,

but the connection between them,

because this is
where the true strength resides:

when people connect
with each other, they do things.

they create things,
and potentially amazing things.

Big companies are starting
to take care about this.

When people connect, they’re
more productive and happy at work.

The benefits for employees
and companies are simple.

It improves knowledge exchange

and collective intelligence
to spark innovation.

It improves talent retention.

It improves employees'
happiness and engagement.

It improves
the internal professional network.

If big companies want
to attract the future generation,

they need to create a workplace
where they are happy and creative,

where speaking to your boss
or to someone from another department

is a norm rather than an exception.

And for all of you who will soon graduate,

think about this:

what will your future employers do so
that you’ll be happy working with them?

Thank you.