For top employers, healthy business is motivated staff

If there’s one thing the winners of The Boston Globe’s 100 Top Places to Work have in common, it’s this: They all believe it’s good business to keep employees satisfied, motivated and working hard.

“Show them respect,” says Shirley Leung, assistant managing editor of business news for the Globe.

But not every company is so lucky. In fact, many organisations are bastions of dysfunction, where overwork and stress fuel negative and aggressive behaviours.

For example, take bullying — one of those behaviours that tends to increase during stressful times.

One recent study states, “37 per cent of the US workforce (an estimated 54 million Americans) report being bullied at work; an additional 12 per cent witness it.

Simultaneously, 45 per cent report neither experiencing nor witnessing bullying. Hence, a silent epidemic.”

If this sounds like your company, maybe you need an office intervention.

Some say dysfunctional workplace behaviours, such as bullying and aggression, are an inevitable part of work and don’t affect the bottom line.

People should just “knock it off” and get back to business.

But this rationale negatively affects business.

“The threat response is both mentally taxing and deadly to the productivity of a person — or of an organisation. It impairs analytical thinking, creative insight and problem solving,” says David Rock of Strategy & Business.

For one such company, an employee engagement survey revealed poor morale, rampant relational aggression and a bully at the centre of it all.

Leadership hadn’t addressed the dysfunctional dynamic, and staff members weren’t held accountable for workplace relationships.

As advisers to this company, we focused on changing the entire environment and required that leaders be intimately involved, claim full responsibility for the state of the workplace, include and support human resources, and make a public commitment to do what it takes to create a thriving, functional workplace.

People promoted

The results? “Two years after we finished our ‘office intervention,’ morale is still great, productivity is consistently high, several new initiatives have been introduced and successfully implemented by staff, no one has left, several people have been promoted. It continues to work,” declared the chief operating officer.

So we think office interventions are a good way to combat dysfunction in the workplace.

But you don’t need to hire consultants to make the change in your own workplace if you’ve established a context of trust, mutual responsibility and mutual accountability. That’s not so hard to achieve when you practice the following:

Start talking: One-on-one confidential interviews with all employees created a context for trust — first venting, then sharing and eventually creating solutions.

Reinvent what you remember: A variety of group exercises were designed for staff to experience new memories together, interrupting their habitual reactions to each other.

These exercises included sitting in a circle to engage in relaxed eye contact, which has significant impact according to neuroscience research: “(Parts of the brain can) actually be stimulated through eye contact because specific cells are particularly responsive to facial expression and eye gaze. Caring social signals activate this higher region of the brain and promote learner safety.”

Change routine: Centring exercises, including deep breathing, were incorporated into daily routines, allowing people to interrupt the fight or flight response and choose to “respond rather than react” to situations on the spot.

Be helpful, not forceful: Leaders shifted their focus to making change, as employees also learned to take personal responsibility.

Neuroscience tells us that managers and leaders who “help people think better and don’t tell them what to do,” while allowing them to define their concerns, are fundamental to transforming workplace , according to Rock’s book, Quiet Leadership: Six Steps to Transforming Performance at Work.

Don’t just talk – change. In their book, How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work: Seven Languages for Transformation,” Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey outline a clear process for turning complaints into commitments.

Employees get committed to stopping the relational violence and dissolving camps.

Create a partnership within firm: Managers partnered with staff, enabling commitments to work. Accountability involved ongoing conversations, regular meetings and consistent performance management, creating new habits. These behaviours became the new “normal.”

Positive workplaces are possible.

Dolan is an executive coach and speech/language pathologist, specialising in leadership, presence, communication and creativity. Oliver, president of Oliverworks, is a thought leader who marshals innovative thinking and techniques to help organizations.