4 Steps To A Culture Of Gratitude
The United Project
NFP charitable foundation uniting our workplaces in the early detection of mental health risks in team environments
World Gratitude Day is celebrated on the 21st of September. In the lead-up, The United Project is sharing a set of articles about gratitude in the workplace. Gratitude is intrinsically linked with mental health. Those organisations with a culture of gratitude have been shown to have safer, happier and more productive environments. We hope these articles will stimulate conversations about the role of gratitude in organisations and ignite ideas for how you can make it come alive in yours.
This article presents a process you can use to harness the power of gratitude in your workplace or team. These four steps can start a cycle of appreciation that will uplift your entire organisation. And you have everything you need to begin today.
How To Build A Culture of Gratitude
In The Business Case for Gratitude, we have heard how building a culture of appreciation in your workplace or team can assist with productivity, diversity, talent attraction and retention, creativity and innovation. We have also heard how sharing gratitude starts an energising cycle across the entire organisation. It is a simple and effective way to uplift your people and help your organisation deliver on its desired outcomes. But where do you begin? And when you start, how do you ensure the gratitude initiative is sustainable and doesn't become just another short-lived novelty? Here are the four steps to building a flourishing culture of gratitude.
This model is based on the great work of Kipfelsber, Bruch Herhausen[1] who have researched how companies use positive feedback to energise the entire organisation.
Check Your Beliefs
There are so many beliefs that we hold that can act as barriers to feeling and sharing gratitude. In the previous article, we have seen that these can include:
These mistaken assumptions about lack of impact and recipient awkwardness can hold people back and so need to be identified and challenged with the facts.
The other belief that can get in the way of a gratitude culture is your conviction about your people. For example, if you subscribe to Agency Theory, you may believe that people are fundamentally self-interested and not be trusted. With this worldview, your job is to protect yourself and the organisation from your employees' selfish decisions. This view of people results fundamentally in a culture of control and makes it very difficult for authentic gratitude to flourish.
However, if you take the view of Stewardship Theory, you are more likely to view people as good, decent people. You will see them as people who can be trusted, care for the organisation's success, and are internally motivated to help achieve it. In this case, gratitude is a more natural behaviour that will help you harness the passion and pride of your people, inspire through vision and support them to come together to triumph.
This way, your fundamental beliefs influence every interaction and decision you make. So before you embark on building a culture of gratitude, take a moment to ask yourself the following two questions:
With this insight, you can shape a realistic plan to help capture strengths and overcome personal challenges.
Stimulate Gratitude
The process's next step is giving people the time and permission to reflect on what they are grateful for. To be effective, any stimulation process must be genuine and make it as easy as possible for people to participate. Over time and with commitment, sharing appreciation can become a natural part of business, but in the beginning, it will take some prompting and encouragement to get the ball rolling. This is especially the case if there has been no previous gratitude practice or if there is inbuilt cynicism from previous failed cultural change initiatives. Here are two ideas to help you stimulate gratitude in your team.
Build A Gratitude Wall
You can have a colourful tribute to gratitude in your office with a blank space and some post-it notes. Make sure you have the wall in a high-traffic area and some people on board initially to put up the first few notes. Then advertise the wall far and wide, invite people to come, make contributions, and watch it grow. This is a great exercise to observe how well the concept of gratitude may take off in your organisation and to investigate any barriers that may impede its growth. If you don't get many participants, it is a perfect opportunity to discover what is holding people back. This intelligence will help you build better activities in the future that are more targeted towards removing the inhibitors to expressing and sharing gratitude.
Of course, one of the key barriers is a hybrid or remote workforce. No longer is the office a central meeting point, so a physical wall may not get the interaction required to make it buzz. If this is the case, get creative and consider online options. Using collaborative tools such as Miro or Google Jamboard can make sure gratitude walls are accessible for everyone. Given that people won't be able to walk past them, some extra effort may be required to prompt and remind people of their existence, and perhaps the need to incorporate them into other organised events.
Here are some pictures of gratitude walls for a bit of inspiration.
Start A Meeting With Gratitude
There is no better way to begin a meeting than by contemplating everything you have to be thankful for. All of the obstacles and challenges that may follow are kept in perspective when framed by gratitude, and the positive energy that this practice creates can help unlock the creativity you need to solve them.
Every organisation and team is different, so how this is done will depend on what is right for your people. Here are some ideas:
For some people, this question may be too broad and overwhelming. Perhaps your people may benefit from having a prompt that will help them focus their attention on a particular subject. In his wonderful Gratitude At Work Playbook, Steve Foran has a list of 52 prompts to start a meeting. If your meetings are weekly, you now have a set of prompts to last you the entire year!
In Australia, formal gatherings begin with recognition of the traditional owners of the lands on which the meeting is held. This would be a perfect time to embed a gratitude practice into the meeting. For example, you could say:
"I’d like to begin by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we meet today. I would also like to pay my respects to Elders past and present and emerging and thank them for the great wisdom they share with us.
?In the spirit of gratitude, let's take a minute to think about something you are grateful for today."
?After a period of silence, you could then prompt people to take action by saying:
"Feeling gratitude is great for you. Sharing it with others helps them too. So now let's take one more moment to consider how we could share this gratitude with others today."
?Will these ideas work? Will it result in cynical looks and phone-checking? You won't know if you don't try. And you won't give it any chance of success if you don't enter into it yourself with a whole heart. That is why understanding yourself and your beliefs is a critical precursor to any gratitude initiative.
Systemise Gratitude
Your organisational policies, processes and roles are the key planks to systemise gratitude.
Ingraining the importance of gratitude in policies is showing management commitment to feeling and expressing appreciation and permitting staff across the organisation to do the same.
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Creating clear and simple processes for stimulating, collecting and managing positive feedback (including from staff and customers) enables gratitude to become an embedded part of the organisation's success story. It provides the foundation for further dissemination to improve individual well-being and organisational energy.
Having clearly assigned roles and responsibilities for championing gratitude practices enables the organisation to maintain momentum and provides resources for those across the organisation looking to strengthen their gratitude systems.
Whatever method is used for systemising gratitude, it is founded on the understanding that positive feedback forms a really important part of the organisation's story and can play a significant role in its future success. It is based on the belief that gratitude is an important business asset to build customer satisfaction and employee engagement and optimise organisational performance.
Note, though, that the process of systemisation comes after the stimulation of gratitude. This is because there is nothing worse for breeding cynicism than launching a policy or process and then not following through. Taking time to instigate and embed a gratitude practice will allow people time to acclimatise to the concept and, more importantly, see the benefits for themselves. In this way, the systems of policy, process and roles become a support to a practice that people already support, rather than one which they may feel is being imposed upon them.
Distribute Gratitude
Feeling gratitude certainly sparks a whole host of positive emotions. However, one could say that then not sharing gratitude is an act of selfishness. If you do not find ways to pass the gratitude on, the potential energising cycle ends with you.
At its simplest, distributing gratitude may be the quiet thanks given to a colleague at the end of a difficult task. At its grandest, it could be gifts, public accolades or prizes. In the middle, it could be an employee recognition program that recognises the valuable contribution that people provide and provides them with the tools they need to achieve their full potential.
The exact nature of your gratitude distribution program will depend on what is meaningful for your people now but also allows for expansion as the culture of gratitude grows.
If you are struggling with this part of the process, then it may be worthwhile to reflect o the barriers to gratitude, which include:
These things will hold you back from expressing gratitude and warrant some introspection if this last piece of the process is letting you down.
Learning From Experience
In the insightful Gratitude at Work Playbook, Steve Foran shows us that gratitude can be grown. All it takes is the right mindset and the discipline of learning. Continually working through the Confidence Cycle developed by Dr Russ Harris [3] will help you build confidence in feeling and sharing gratitude. In this way, gratitude is definitely a practice.
Like any transformational pursuit, the building of gratitude does not happen overnight, and not everything you try will work. But suppose you truly believe that embedding more appreciation into your organisation is the right thing to do. In that case, you need to learn from each experience, tinker, tailor and keep trying. Perhaps this is an opportunity you have been waiting for to present a vision to your people and engage their strengths and wisdom to pull together meaningful and effective practices. Your people may well thank you for it!
Resources:
Gratitude At Work – a Canadian organisation founded by Steve Foran
Blueprint for Mentally Healthy Workplaces from the Australian National Mental Health Commission
The Greater Good Magazine from the University of California, Berkeley
This article has been written by Belinda Tobin, Chief Strategy Officer at The United Project.
About The United Project
The United Project Foundation was formed in 2020 in response to the growing rise of mental ill-health in workplaces and teams, exacerbated by the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the exponential growth of technological disruption. These events have highlighted that while our time at work represents the lifeline to our existence, security, and prosperity, it can also be a major source of anxiety, stress, and depression. The statistics are heartbreaking - 84% of all suicides worldwide occur in the working age population, and 63% of employed Australians report that workplaces have harmed their mental health.
The United Project has embarked on developing programs to combat this trend directly within our workplaces. We are taking a proactive approach and developing strategies and tools to assist with the early identification and prevention of mental health risks in workplaces and teams. Just as miners once took canaries into coal mines to detect toxic gases early, we see our role as the canary in the organisation, establishing a safe environment that allows everyone to thrive.
A mentally healthy workplace leads to improved productivity, lower staff turnover and the retention of skills and experience. Comparatively, a mentally unhealthy workplace can lead to increased stress for employees (and employers), disengagement and reduced productivity. We have set out to deliver programs that will make teams and workplaces safer for the individuals within them and assist the organisation and its people in living up to their full potential.
We are called The United Project because our tools and programs bring together individuals, teams, and organisations to deliver safe and productive workplaces. We work across the globe to unite our partners in driving systemic change.
We Are Grateful
We are thankful for the time you have taken to read this article, and for the energy you bring into making your workplace one where people are safe and can thrive. We are also deeply appreciative of our volunteers and supporters. The United Project is driven by a team of passionate volunteers and our work is supported by people like you – who care about creating environments that are psychologically safe, inclusive, and supportive for all staff. If you have enjoyed this article, and would like to help us continue our work, then your donations would be received with immense gratitude.
References:
[1] Kipfelsber P., Bruch H. and Herhausen D. 2015. Energising Companies through Customer Compliments. Marketing Review St Gallen. Vol 1.
[2] Kumar A, Epley N. Undervaluing Gratitude: Expressers Misunderstand the Consequences of Showing Appreciation. Psychological Science. 2018;29(9):1423-1435. doi:10.1177/0956797618772506
[3] Harris, R., 2011.?The Confidence Gap. Boston: Trumpeter.