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Emma Sepp l
March 18, 2015
All managers would like their teams to be more productive. Yet most companies
are using the same old methods: strategic plans, goal-setting, streamlining
operations, reducing inefficiency. Others are offering employee perks, such as
on-site food, daycare, or gyms. Others are offering bigger bonuses or flexible
schedules.
Kim Cameron and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, however, have
discovered a way to improve performance that has nothing to do with dishing out
benefits or deploying new processes. In a research article published in the
Journal of Applied Behavioral Science Cameron and his coauthors found that a
workplace characterized by positive and virtuous practices excels in a number
of domains.
Positive and virtuous practices include:
Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues
as friends.
Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion
when others are struggling.
Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.
Inspiring one another at work.
Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.
Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.
Cameron and his colleagues explain that there are three reasons these practices
benefit the company. Positive practices:
Increase positive emotions which broaden employees resources and abilities by
improving people s relationships with each other and amplifying their
creativity and ability to think creatively.
Buffer against negative events like stress, improving employees ability to
bounce back from challenges and difficulties.
Attract and bolster employees, making them more loyal and bringing out the best
in them.
There are bottom-line benefits as well. Summarizing the findings, Cameron
explains that: When organizations institute positive, virtuous practices they
achieve significantly higher levels of organizational effectiveness including
financial performance, customer satisfaction, and productivity The more the
virtuousness, the higher the performance in profitability, productivity,
customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.
So how do you implement positive practices in your company? The research team
found four main ways:
Leadership: Needless to say, it is difficult to implement positive practices
without support from the top. A leader must stand by and exemplify the values
he preaches. Steve Schroeder, founder and CEO of Creative Werks, a packaging
company based in Chicago that has repeatedly appeared on Crain Chicago s 50
Fastest Growing Companies list, attributes much of his company s success to a
positive culture. In addition to providing the usual perks (bonuses and
professional development opportunities), Steve makes sure his employees are
happy. As a longtime student of the Dalai Lama, Steve often quotes the Dalai
Lama s saying that everybody wants to be happy. He ensures that his company s
culture is both positive and supportive. Caring is a quality he looks for
when he interviews new employees. Caring people never let their colleagues or
the clients down, says Schroeder. Creative Werks core values are not just
client and product-focused. They also include also include balance referring
to employee well-being and illustrating the importance of a positive and
supportive workplace.
Culture: Because culture trumps strategy in predicting performance, culture
change initiatives are also important. Jim Mallozzi, CEO of Prudential Real
Estate and Relocation, consulted with Cameron during a difficult merger of two
companies and during a time when his company was undergoing severe financial
loss. He found that implementing positive practices shifted the company culture
and helped turn these challenging times into great successes. He mentions one
exercise in particular: Select three people, one at a time, and tell those
people three things you value about them. In corporate America, and in most
places in life, people usually tell you, Here are the three things that you
need to change. Rarely do they tell you, Here are the three things that you
re fabulous at. When you do that, the energy just goes up. So that was the
start. Okay, we re off the beach. Nobody s dying any more. The body parts have
been buried. We re now saying, Okay, let s start with what we have, because we
have some fabulous attributes.'
Small steps: Small changes can produce large effects. Some firms that consulted
Cameron have simply asked all employees to keep gratitude journals each day, or
to positively embarrass someone each day, or spend 30 minutes per day making a
contribution to someone in need. Within weeks and months, the companies have
noticed visible improvements in performance. Shubhra Bhatnagar is a former
successful investment banker who became a social entrepreneur. She founded
KarmaLize.Me, a health food distribution company which donates over 50% of
profits to charities. In the intense field of investment banking, she had found
that employee well-being was neglected. For this reason, despite the equivalent
pressures of running a startup, she makes sure that her staff engage in
well-being activities such as meditation: We make sure that the stress of a
startup business does not hamper the happiness quotient of our team or impacts
our core business values. We use a meditation app (Sattva) to help us reconnect
with ourselves and each other and to create a more positive atmosphere in our
office.
Retreats and workshops: Changes and improvements can occur as a result of
retreats, executive programs, or workshops where employees have a chance to
think deeply and strategically about positive leadership and positive
practices. Corporate workshops is what Audible s Chief Product and Marketing
Officer, Louis Gagnon, opted for. The two-day TLEX retreat in upstate New York
started with an exercise where 18 of Gagnon s leaders split into groups to
define what is leadership. After collating the results, the group realized
that 95% of all attributes referred to soft, not hard skills. Gagnon
reports that this staff was pleased to hear that for 2-days, soft skills is
exactly what they would be focusing on no corporate goals, no strategy, no
alignment but mindfulness, personal mastery, connectedness and collective
action. At the heart of the curriculum: breathing exercises. Our team was
engaged, opened and excited to have the rare luxury to focus on themselves as
individuals individuals as a conduit and lever to ourselves as a team. We all
felt deeply rejuvenated and at peace with each other. That, ultimately, built
trust the ultimate ingredient to teamwork.
Emma Seppala, PhD, is a Stanford University research psychologist and the
Associate Director of Stanford University s Center for Compassion and Altruism
Research and Education. She consults is a corporate well-being consultant as
well as a science journalist with Psychology Today, Huffington Post, Scientific
American Mind and the e-magazine she founded, Fulfillment Daily. Follow her on
Twitter @emmaseppala or her website www.emmaseppala.com.