Feelings can be a fluffy word for the workplace, but it’s time to rethink your relationship with the word feelings. Research and common sense indicate that employees’ feelings impact your team’s long-term sustainability and performance. Although leaders can easily disregard feelings at work, doing so can have serious repercussions.
Emotions are essential in the workplace. Fear, anger, or other negative emotions can impair the ability of an individual to perform at work and engage with others. Leaders/managers must understand these emotions and how to handle them.
Leaders can cultivate a healthy work environment for their team and support their success by comprehending and acknowledging the significance employee’s emotions play in the workplace. This post will take you through the three reasons why tracking your employee’s feelings is vital.
Happiness
When individuals mention corporate culture, they usually mean cognitive culture, which refers to the agreed-upon intellectual standards, customs, artifacts, and presumptions that serve as a framework for the group’s success. Cognitive culture determines the tone when it comes to how workers should or should not be competitive, customer-focused, inventive, or team-oriented in the workplace.
Cognitive culture is an unquestionably vital component of an organization’s success. The story doesn’t end there, though.
The organization’s shared emotive values, norms, traditions, and beliefs that determine which feelings people have and express at the workplace and which they are best off repressing make up what we refer to as the loving workplace culture of the team. In addition to cognitive culture, it is the other vital component of organizational success.
Companies experience consequences from not developing a loving workplace culture. Workers who ought to be compassionate develop a cynical and uncaring attitude. Teams that may benefit from happiness and pride put up with an angry work environment. Despite its critical nature, a loving workplace culture isn’t typically handled well by most organizations and frequently needs to be managed.
According to research from the past 10 years, loving workplace culture affects employee satisfaction, fatigue, collaboration, and even objective metrics like financial performance and attrition. Numerous empirical studies demonstrate the significant influence of emotions on people’s performance on tasks, level of engagement and creativity, level of commitment to their companies, and level of decision-making.
Positive emotions regularly lead to extraordinary performance, productivity, and customer service; this is true for all organizational levels, jobs, and sectors.
Therefore, managers who disregard loving workplace culture are glossing over an essential aspect of what motivates people and drives businesses.
When I was in the fourth grade, my music teacher didn’t let me play the snare drum in the band. I loved drums and wanted to play the snare drum more than anything. Instead, he made me play the cowbell! So, I politely asked my parents to find me a drum teacher. George Holmes became one of my most influential teachers because he taught an otherwise clumsy kid to play the drums. Because of him I joined bands that made money at 10 years of age! I played out after two years because of my commitment to drumming and appreciation to my drum mentor George.
My message is:
Don’t relegate your employees to their least favorite tasks. Give them opportunities, create a culture of respect, ethics, integrity, and appreciation; a positive future, a great collaborative culture that makes it impossible for anyone not to love the workplace, and I guarantee you’ll reap the benefits.
Tia Graham, the Founder of Arrive At Happy, the Author of “Be a Happy Leader,” and a Certified Chief Happiness Officer, says that your brain operates very differently when you’re feeling favorable than when you’re feeling negative.
For organizational leaders, it means being more optimistic than pessimistic at work; it’s about tracking emotions at the workplace and creating positive work climates that can have a ripple effect that transfers to their employees. It is part of the science that connects employee happiness and increases productivity and creativity in the workplace.
ADM is a Most Loved Workplace that believes in a positive work climate and practices it. The company offers mentorship and ongoing development to team members to assist them in achieving their career goals to the fullest. Every employee must have a development plan, which they must discuss with their management every three months.
ADM also offers programs at all educational support levels to help colleagues pursuing specific certifications or courses to advance their careers. The company knows its employees have interests outside of work that they want to explore. People managers consult team members to determine where they require flexibility and how ADM can assist them in achieving their individual goals.
Employees love being a part of ADM because it establishes cultural requirements across all teams to have an owner’s mentality, foster a culture of inclusion, and pursue lifelong learning. ADM Cares, the company’s strong corporate social investment program, supports these principles by making substantial investments in the areas where their people live, work, and play to promote social, financial, and environmental improvement.
Fear Causes Stress
Stress can be good when you are there for employees to help them through challenging situations and help them channel stress into greater focus and energy. Holding frequent conversations with employees who are experiencing stress will increase their levels of oxytocin (the love hormone), and also channel stress into more focused work. The key is to help employees reframe their relationship with stress.
To reframe experiences and perceptions of stress, employers and employees should discuss the genuine and significant workplace fear issue. The overall topic of fear in the workplace is complicated since it focuses on the convergence of human-loving workplace factors, psychology, neuroscience, business practices, and employment law.
It is critical to understand that workplace fear affects both employers and employees. Although fear is psychological, it also has physical implications. While anxiety can render a workplace unpleasant (or even intolerable) for workers, it can also negatively affect a company’s bottom line.
The body picks up fear from the intellect. Fear of work-related stress and anxiety can raise heart rate, induce perspiration, adrenaline rush, and a fight-or-flight reaction. Employees who experience this feeling frequently get “paralyzed” by dread and cannot perform their jobs successfully. As a result, there is low employee morale, lower output, and significant employee turnover.
Not only does fear at work have an enormous impact on a company’s ability to maintain a loving workplace, but it also has serious financial implications. According to the American Institute of Stress, 83% of U.S. workers experience stress at work, so employers need to pay attention since they frequently foot the bill for pervasive workplace anxiety.
The same institute also reports that US firms lose up to $300 billion annually due to workplace stress, the good news is, stress and negative emotions caused by fear in the workplace can be monitored and mitigated. For example, Bedford Consulting is a Most Loved Workplace that ensures that stress due to fear related to work does not impact its employees.
With a great culture and a clear roadmap for the future, Bedford has created a culture of love and belonging where stress or negative emotions caused by fear are minimized for employees. One of Bedford’s more successful efforts is a biweekly coffee roulette in which employees are paired up randomly and instructed to engage in a 15-minute coffee conversation about topics unrelated to their jobs. The team loves them, and they have enjoyed two years of tremendous success.
Love Is the Reason We All Win (And We Perform At Our Best)
You don’t often hear the word “love” in meeting rooms or workplace hallways. Nevertheless, it has a significant impact on work outcomes. Employees are more engaged when they experience greater love at work.
“Love is gravity because it makes some people feel attracted to others. Love is power because it multiplies our best and allows humanity not to be extinguished in their blind selfishness. Love unfolds and reveals. For love we live and die.” – Albert Einstein
A loving culture is critical for employee and client well-being and performance, as shown by a recent study from Johnson Cornell University conducted in a long-term care facility and published in the Administrative Science Quarterly.
Employee satisfaction and teamwork were better and absenteeism was less among those who felt their workplace was a loving, caring environment. The study also showed that this culture directly impacted patient outcomes, such as better patient contentment, quality of life, morale, and fewer emergency room trips.
Although many people might view the long-term care context as slanted toward the “loving workplace,” the conclusions apply to all types of businesses. In a subsequent study, the research team questioned 3,201 workers from seven companies, including financial institutions and real estate, and the findings remained the same.
Individuals who worked in an environment where it was acceptable for them to show love, compassion, care, and empathy for one another were more devoted to the company and accountable for their work.
Employees who are devoted to their organizations put in more effort and perform a better job, and of course, these companies profit from having such employees. But, there is still a need to identify the organizational features that instill in employees a love for their organizations.
The Best Practice Institute (BPI) and Most Loved Workplaces® performed research to address the following questions to meet this demand and to advance both scientific and practical knowledge of the interaction between employees and the organizations they work for:
- When we state that employees love their companies, what do we mean?
- How can businesses foster loyal employees who love their company?
- How do Most Loved Workplaces® make sure enterprises perform more efficiently?
With the Most Loved Workplace® metric, the research performed made significant progress in identifying and characterizing engaged people.
The study examined how much employees love their workplace to determine the most vital relationship between workers and their jobs. Consider the colleague that arrives early, always has the solution and has a sense of commitment to his or her team and job. One of the main objectives of high-performing organizations is to hire as many of these people as possible since they are passionate about their jobs.
To answer the second question regarding fostering loyalty, we surveyed more than 150 employees from Fortune 1000 businesses. Ninety-four percent of employees said they are likely to perform at a better level when they work in a highly loved setting, and 59 percent said they are four times more likely to deliver exceptional performance. Additionally, workers in Most Loved Workplaces® reported greater team cohesiveness, decreased plans to leave their jobs, and 41 percent said they would recommend their employer to a friend.
Finally, by questioning members of high-performing companies about the characteristics of their organizations that gave them a sense of connection, we used qualitative analytic approaches to identify areas of organizations where employees felt highly connected to their work and their firm.
Then, to determine the essential characteristics of a Most Loved Workplace®, we coded the content of the employees’ responses. We found five key areas:
- Teamwork/Collaboration
- Positive Vision
- Respect
- Alignment of Values
- Supporting Achievement
Organizations with these characteristics, which predict employee performance and organizational outcomes in the empirical literature, are recognized as Most Loved Workplaces.
Employees in high-performing companies can interact with one another to collaborate and achieve common objectives. They work with people whose characteristics lend themselves to putting in a lot of effort and acting responsibly. These businesses also foster cultures where workers feel valued by those around them.
These themes were stronger predictors of the best organizational results in the current study than compensation, scheduling flexibility, or upward mobility. They are, therefore, necessary for workers who love their workplaces.
Final Word
Emotions are a common and essential aspect of who we are as people. They tell us about our environment and support our social environment navigation.
A good mood connects with higher productivity levels, but a bad mood might result in mistakes and accidents. Managing emotions in the workplace is crucial for wise decisions because research indicates that we are more prone to make decisions based on feeling than reason.
A loving and caring environment – a Most Loved Workplace environment – helps to make managing emotions in a workplace easier. When we are conscious of our emotions and can effectively control them, we are more inclined to make wise decisions that are advantageous to our company and ourselves.
