Professor Theresa Glomb Works to Make Work Better

“Work hard. Have fun. Choose kind. Be present.”

This four-part motto seems simple. But it’s actually distilling a quarter-century of study by Carlson School Professor Theresa Glomb on worker well-being and the meaning of work in people’s everyday lives.

Glomb, chair of the Work & Organizations Department, says she’s been looking for the answers to these questions, among others: “How can we create positive experiences and mood states at work? How can we foster job satisfaction and work meaning?” What she’s found is that, sometimes, there are small changes people can put into practice to improve their work lives.

As the school’s Toro Company–David M. Lilly Chair in Organizational Behavior, Glomb has studied a variety of workplaces—manufacturing facilities, call centers, healthcare clinics, and more—to determine what makes employees feel happiest and most productive. Her research has landed in local and international media, including Minnesota Public Radio, The Economist, and BBC, and she presented her ideas in a 2015 TEDxUMN Talk called “Let’s Make Work Better.” Through speaking engagements and in her classes, she continues to offer tips for improving work environments.

“I’ll often use this line: ‘Many of us focus on getting a good job, but we can also focus on making a job good,’” she says. “It’s this idea that we have the power to improve our work lives. We can become more intentional and direct our attention to the creation of more purposeful and more satisfying work.”

Finding Focus

Glomb took time to hone her own sense of purpose in her career. In 1993, she earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology at DePaul University in her hometown of Chicago, where she became interested in mood and emotional states, and how they impact work. Her senior thesis focused on anger in the workplace. That led to a PhD in social, organizational, and individual differences psychology from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

In 1998, Glomb became an assistant professor at the Carlson School. She humorously remembers her first time in Minneapolis. “There were huge piles of snow in front of those gates that say ‘University of Minnesota,’ and you couldn’t even see the words,” she says. “You could see the U and the A, and that was it.”

Undeterred, she continued her research in an early 2000s study with “experience sampling,” which involved measuring the moods of employees in a variety of workplaces throughout the day. This led to a key finding: Employees are happiest when they’re making progress on work tasks.

“That set me on this journey to see how we can craft work environments where people can get their work done and be in fulfilling and positive mood states,” Glomb says.

Most workplaces are full of interruptions or organizational barriers that can slow employees’ progress on tasks. As a small step, Glomb recommends workers “park downhill” at the end of their workday, taking a few minutes to plan what they want to work on the next morning so that they can easily get going the next day and pick up momentum, which will improve their mood.

“Work with focused attention for 90 minutes, 60 minutes, even just 30 minutes, and you feel like you got a lot done,” she said in her TEDxUMN Talk. “You’ll feel that pleasure that comes from making meaningful progress on your work.”

Taking Her Own Advice

Glomb, who is also a mother of two college-aged children, works to implement these concepts into her own life, too. Admittedly, it isn’t always easy.

“As an expert on work and wellbeing, I’d like to say I’ve got this nailed, but that is not true,” she says. “The struggle is real. What I do have, though, is a sense of when things are getting off track and what I need in those moments. So, I practice a lot of these tools and techniques. I’m not perfect, but there are simple practices we can all try.”

Her four-part motto became something she sent her children off to school with every day. And when her children went to college, these strategies helped her stay grounded as she transitioned to life as an empty nester.

Glomb’s research turned personal when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2011. In her TEDxUMN Talk, she shared that the diagnosis made her evaluate how she was spending her time and how she managed stress. “Since then, I’ve tried really hard to put into practice all the things I’ve learned in my research,” she says.

Glomb recalls being hesitant to mention her cancer diagnosis in her talk. But it made the cut because she wants to show that life outside of work affects people, too.

“I like to remind people that there’s always suffering in the room. It might be a serious illness, it might be having a child who’s struggling with mental health issues, it might be aging parents, or somebody going through a devastating divorce,” Glomb says. “There’s life going on while you are at work. And when we get into our work environments, it’s about showing up with empathy and being willing to give people a little bit of grace.”

Developing Leadership

While much of Glomb’s work centers on individual people’s power to improve their jobs, she says that doesn’t let companies off the hook. Many businesses have systemic problems, often at the leadership level, that individuals alone cannot fix.

“Some work environments are just not positive,” she says. “We have to ask: Are we overworking people? Do we have work that we can streamline in some ways? Do we have injustice at work? Do we have inequities? How can we make work more meaningful, fulfilling, and satisfying for all people?”

Glomb hopes her students will go on to create positive work environments.

“So much of an individual employee’s work life depends on the quality of the leaders,” Glomb says. “At the Carlson School, we’ve been working really hard on this, crafting experiences so that graduating students are leading with integrity and impact, navigating ambiguity, and being resilient. If we can elevate the caliber of leadership, then we will improve the work lives of employees.”

Andrew Lahn, ’24 MBA, took these lessons to heart in Glomb’s Leadership and Personal Development course.

“[The course content] allowed me to evaluate the topic of leadership and my own personal development through several perspectives,” he says. “My journey was nothing short of remarkable. In eight weeks, I went from ignorant to enlightened about who I am as an individual, professional, and colleague.”

Like Lahn, Elizabeth Doman, ’24 BSB, says Glomb’s teaching impacted her life both in and out of the classroom.

“She has inculcated a sense of curiosity in me to learn more about intentionality and mindfulness,” Doman says. “One lesson that resonated with me was the importance of removing a phone from eyesight to increase productivity and focus. I have carried this lesson with me by not having phones in sight when out to dinner with friends and family, and especially when studying. I have noticed my focus increase and my conversations deepen by practicing her principles.”

New Research

To further her research on worker well-being, Glomb is now studying how work life relates to family life, and how people balance their work and family identities.

She says her work and family roles have always been integrated in her own life: Her children visited her at work—the evidence remains in a drawing on her whiteboard. They were the youngest attendees at her TEDxUMN Talk. They met her colleagues and doctoral students, and she talked about her work with them.

Along these lines, Glomb’s new research includes gathering data on how people talk about their jobs to their children, which she says can be transformative for parents.

For example, a restaurant server who didn’t like her job would tell her young children that she never wanted them to have to work in a restaurant. But then she saw her kids’ enthusiasm when she served pancakes decorated with faces, and their admiration for her talking to an elderly customer eating alone. This helped the woman find more meaning in her work as she saw the impact she had on people.

These days, Glomb is far from the only one thinking about ways to improve work as organizations and individuals consider remote work, integrating new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and navigating generational shifts in the workforce.

Glomb sees this moment as an opportunity to focus on facilitating happy, productive workplaces.

“Employees and organizations are reimagining work right now,” she says. “How can we be mindful, and take this time to be intentional about building better work environments and a more fulfilling work life?”

Illustration by Kate Forrester. Photography by Dan Gunderson.