How are your Teams Feeling Right Now?

Article in collaboration with Genos International Europe

A lot of different elements underlie organizational success. You've got to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right product, and with the right people. But even with the best of these, a great workplace culture truly matters. Do you know the emotional culture of your organization? Eventually, competitors can come along and replicate your best practices, strategies, and processes. As Herb Kelleher from Southwest Airlines once famously said, "All airlines have airplanes." "We've never had layoffs. We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don't do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions of grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine."

So consequently, culture matters.

 In 2016, HBR ran an article titled Manage Your Emotional Culture. The article distinguishes between Cognitive Culture and Emotional Culture and points out that organizations tend to manage cognitive culture but rarely focus on Emotional culture.

 ?   “Emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork…financial performance and absenteeism”

?   “Positive emotions are consistently associated with better performance, quality, and customer service – negative emotions usual lead to a negative outcome, including poor performance and high turnover”

?  “Emotional culture is rarely managed as deliberately as a cognitive culture—and often it’s not managed at all.”

Many organizations suffer as a result. The effects can be especially damaging during the upheaval and financial downturn, such as what organizations have experienced this year due to the pandemic. 

 WHERE DO YOU START WITH UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONAL CULTURE?

To understand the concept of emotional and physical intelligence and emotional culture, we need to look at the underlying science of emotions and patterns. Why do we react the way we do, how does others' behavior impact us the way it does? We all experience a wide range of pleasant and unpleasant feelings at work as we interact with others. These feelings influence our decisions, behavior, and performance. Pleasant feelings have a 'broaden and build' effect causing us to think more broadly, engage more deeply, and perform better. Unpleasant emotions tend to have a 'narrowing and limiting' effect, causing us to be more closed-minded, less engaging, and perform worse. Collectively, these emotions have an impact on the bottom-line.

Let's start looking at the impact of positive/pleasant emotions and mindset. When employees feel relaxed at work, they tend to be solution-focused. If they feel cared for, they are more engaged and go the extra mile to achieve results. Finally, employees that are empowered are often the hardest-working and innovative team members. Conversely, if employees are experiencing negative or unpleasant emotions, they are more likely to be reactive. When an employee feels fearful, they tend to blame others When stressed, they can become aggressive. It's human nature. Finally, when people feel disempowered, they can assume a lack of responsibility and ownership for their work.  

Research shows that how employees feel ultimately impacts the bottom line. Employees in high-performing organizations experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions than those in low performing organizations. (Boedker et al. 2011) 

Why aren't more organizations focusing on understanding how their people are feeling and managing their EMOTIONAL CULTURE? 

Whether your organization regularly conducts employee engagement surveys or measures Net Promoter Scores, the emotional culture data might be buried or not be actionable. 

Emotional culture surveys are the most direct and impactful way to measure emotional culture by measuring specific indicators: 

· Experienced emotions

· Expected emotions

· Ideal or desirable levels of emotions

They provide an accurate picture of how people feel, how they would like to feel and point to where the gaps are. The data is actionable since it allows making informed decisions about training employees in Emotional or Physical Intelligence that can make that important shift and positively impact morale and productivity. 

 An effective way to measure emotional culture is leveraging the Emotional Culture Index. It measures three dimensions of emotions in a survey that takes a few minutes to complete: 

Current state: How often do employees experience certain feelings at work.

Expected state: How often employees think it is reasonable to experience these feelings at work. · 

Ideal state: How often your employees think they should ideally experience these feelings to be effective. 

Participants can share confidential comments that provide important insights to design the right actions. 

 As we increasingly surround ourselves with technology, AI, and machine learning, personal interactions, praise, and effective communication are at the core of our needs and a major factor determining our wellbeing, productivity, and creativity.

 If you are interested in learning more about the Emotional Culture Index and how to impact your organization's morale and productivity positively, reach out to me for a complimentary consultation.