Managing Emotional Culture

What do emotions have to do with workplace success? A lot, it turns out.

Take love, for instance.

A recent survey of more than 3,200 employees and 17 organizations found that where employees felt and expressed “companionate love” toward one another - characterized by affection, caring, and compassion - people reported greater job satisfaction, commitment, and personal accountability for work performance.

And by the way, none of those surveyed were employed in the “helping” professions, where you might expect something like companionate love to be a given. They hailed from the less touchy-feely industries of biopharma, engineering, financial services, higher education, public utilities, real estate, and travel.

The researchers who conducted the survey - Sigal Barsade and Olivia O’Neill, management professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University, respectively -  aimed to learn whether and how the “emotional culture” of a workplace impacts its business performance.

(The Gallup organization uses the Q12 as a standard question set for measuring employee engagement. A commonly misunderstood statement on the survey is “I have a best friend at work.” This is measuring the companionate love and caring present in the work environment.)

When any kind of emotion is present consistently - like joy, fear, optimism, anger, excitement, resentment and more that exist on the vibrant arc of human feeling and expression - it defines an organization’s emotional culture.

“Emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even hard measures such as financial performance and absenteeism,” said Barsade and O’Neill in “Manage Your Emotional Culture,” their report for the Harvard Business Review.

“It significantly impacts how engaged and creative they are, how committed they are to their organizations, and how they make decisions.”

Brene Brown shares in her work that we are “Emotional beings that sometimes think,” and since we’re all human, we all bring our emotions to work.

But what happens to them when we get there? Which ones are we permitted to express or expected to suppress, and under what circumstances? Says who? And how do they say it, anyway - is it verbal, or written, or communicated with a gesture whose meaning we’re left to intuit?

These are breakthrough, exciting questions for business leaders to ask because the answers can be game-changers for a company’s bottom line.

CEG’s own research confirmed as much last spring, during interviews with senior executive leaders and change experts about the many aspects of change management and organizational transformation.

They were adamant that recognizing the importance of employees’ emotional experiences during the change process is crucial to its success.

So how can leaders and managers harness the power of human emotion to create a flourishing workplace that, when change comes, is primed and ready for it?

A broader understanding of workplace culture 

Think of corporate culture as a coin with two sides - one cognitive, the other emotional.

The cognitive side, as neatly defined by Barside and O’Neill, is made up of shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that basically guide the “work” of the workplace.These are the posters that hang on the walls in our conference rooms and the words we list on our webpage. In corporate culture, the cognitive side has traditionally gotten most of the attention, for understandable reasons: The transaction of business is largely a cognitive process.

The emotional side, however, is made up of shared affective values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that govern the emotions people feel at work. These are the unwritten rules about behavior in an organization; they are not explicitly stated. Can you email the CEO? Is it okay to use profanity? Can you cry at work? In corporate culture, this often-overlooked emotional side is increasingly being recognized as equal in importance to the cognitive side.

“When business leaders ignore emotional culture, they overlook a fundamental part of being human and thereby stunt the potential of their companies,” Barsade said in a follow-up article for Wharton Magazine.

That’s because even the strongest business plans can be thwarted by an emotional culture that doesn’t support their fruition. As the late, legendary management expert Peter Drucker once famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” If employees are too fearful, anxious, or resentful, for example, to get behind the cognitive fruits of company culture, the cognitive culture will be undermined.

If leaders want their corporate-culture coin to yield its full value, they need to deliberately manage both of its sides.

Why now?

During the pandemic, “when we crossed the threshold into the digital revolution, we found ourselves really trying to reduce the effort for the customer - and unfortunately, the effort for the employee went up,” says management expert and best-selling business author Tiffani Bova in a presentation for Big Think.

“In the end, we saw the Great Resignation, and now we have quiet quitting,” a situation where employees show up, blandly do the minimum work, collect their paychecks, then do it all again the next day. “ So many organizations are asking employees for more, but they're giving them less. It makes you quickly realize employees are stressed, employees are burnt out.”

A post-pandemic survey from McKinsey & Company found that, among employees who’d quit their jobs in the prior six-months, more than half did not feel valued by their organization (54 percent), or manager (52 percent), or they lacked a sense of belonging (51 percent).

Conversely, according to research from BetterUp Labs, employees who reported feeling a sense of belonging at work experienced 92% more growth professionally; 83% more growth personally; 36% stronger well-being; and 24% more resilience.

To better attract, inspire, and retain employees, leaders need to create a culture where they’re seen as being as important as customers, and “as shareholders in the success of the organization,” says Bova. “Make no mistake, there is a deep connection between what employees feel and do every single day and what customers feel and do every single day.”

Change Enthusiasm is on a mission to deepen that connection by giving employees an approach to managing the intersection between emotions and change. Our signal emotions of anger, frustration, grief, anxiety, and fear light a path to opportunity and choice.

Creating a healthy emotional culture starts at the top

Barsade and O’Neill cite examples of companies that explicitly include emotional states in their management principles. Whole Foods, for example, highlights “employee growth and happiness.”  Zappos stresses a “positive team and family spirit.” Hospitality organizations like Vail Resorts, along with many start-ups, use the term “fun” as an umbrella term to signal that emotions like amusement and pleasure translate to the company’s success.

None of this will land with employees, however, if a company’s stated values and principles aren’t supported in reality with observable behavior, especially in those of senior leadership.  A workplace can stress “open, honest communication” and “curiosity,” but if leaders get angry when employees question, challenge, and throw out unconventional ideas, those principles become farce, and the emotional culture one of wariness.

So stewardship of the principles begins at the top. When leadership behavior  - exhibited through communications, policies, and comportment - aligns with the highest values of a company’s emotional culture, it nurtures an environment of trust. The trickle-down effect on employees is that they build emotional agility and feel psychologically safe to bring their full selves to the job.

The overall effect is one of “emotional contagion,” supported by research showing that people in groups “catch” feelings from others through behavioral mimicry..

Cassandra Worthy, CEO of Change Enthusiasm Global, says, “Emotion can be conserved, transferred, or transformed.” Change Growth Accelerator™ programs give practitioners and leaders the tools needed to support a healthy organizational relationship with emotions.

So where to begin?

“Colleagues who feel their work environment is psychologically safe are more willing to engage in interpersonal risk-taking behaviors that contribute to greater organizational innovation — like speaking up, asking questions, sharing unspoken reservations, and respectfully disagreeing,” according to a report from the Center for Creative Leadership. “This ultimately yields a more robust, dynamic, innovative, and inclusive organizational culture.”

To build an emotionally agile culture that creates the psychological safety that employees need to thrive and contribute, the Center suggests these steps for workplace leaders:

1. Make psychological safety and emotional agility an explicit priority. Talk with your team about the importance of creating psychological safety at work.
2. Facilitate everyone speaking up. Show genuine curiosity, and honor frankness and truth-telling.
3. Establish norms for how failure is handled. Don’t punish experimentation and (reasonable) risk-taking. EXPERT TIP: Celebrate failures with empathy and share what was learned.
4. Create space for new ideas (even wild ones). Provide any challenge within the larger context of support. EXPERT TIP: Ask for ideas and appreciate them when they are offered.
5. Embrace productive conflict. Promote sincere dialogue and constructive debate, and work to resolve conflicts productively. EXPERT TIP: “Hold healthy heat.” This concept, the work of conflict-resolution facilitator and author Priya Parker, means we can have conversations, conflict and even controversy on ideas while respecting the person offering them.
6. Make an intentional effort to promote dialogue. Promote skill at giving and receiving feedback, and create space for people to raise concerns. EXPERT TIP: Speak last. Leaders have positional power and they shape the dialogue of a conversation.
7. Celebrate wins. Notice and acknowledge what’s going well. EXPERT TIP: Develop a regular practice of gratitude. Do something every week that shows your appreciation for the efforts of others.

Lastly, say the business executives and experts interviewed by CEG about managing change, never forget your company’s most powerful asset: the employees themselves, whose passion, energy, and smarts are needed for any change initiative to flourish.

And never forget the power of leadership to manage the emotions of change for good. Indeed, the role of leadership in setting the tone, facilitating collaboration, and empowering employees was consistently emphasized by the CEG interviewees as a crucial factor in change growth.

"When you're [going through change], you can't forget the people part of it,” one executive nicely summed up. “That's the most important thing."