ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Positive Teams Are MoreProductiveby Emma Seppl

MARCH 18, 2015

All managers would like their teams to be more productive. Yet most companies are using

the same old methods: strategic plans, goal-setting, streamlining operations, reducing

ineciency. Others are oering employee perks, such as on-site food, daycare, or gyms.

Others are oering bigger bonuses or exible schedules.

Kim Cameron and his colleagues at the University of Michigan, however, have discovered a

way to improve performance that has nothing to do with dishing out benets or deploying

new processes. In a research article published in the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Cameron and his coauthors found that a workplace characterized by positive and virtuous

practices excels in a number of domains.

Positive and virtuous practices include:

Caring for, being interested in, and maintaining responsibility for colleagues as friends.Providing support for one another, including offering kindness and compassion whenothersare struggling.Avoiding blame and forgive mistakes.Inspiring one another at work.Emphasizing the meaningfulness of the work.Treating one another with respect, gratitude, trust & integrity.

Cameron and his colleagues explain that there are three reasons these practices benet the

company. Positive practices:

Increase positive emotionswhich broaden employeesresources and abilitiesbyimproving peoples relationships with each otherand amplifyingtheircreativity andability tothinkcreatively.Buffer against negative events like stress, improving employees ability to bounce backfrom challenges and difficulties.Attract and bolster employees, making them moreloyaland bringing out the best inthem.

There are bottom-line benets as well. Summarizing the ndings, Cameron explains that:

When organizations institute positive, virtuous practices they achieve signicantly higher

levels of organizational eectiveness including nancial performance, customer

satisfaction, and productivity The more the virtuousness, the higher the performance in

protability, productivity, customer satisfaction, and employee engagement.

So how do you implement positive practices in your company? The research team found

four main ways:

1. Leadership:Needless to say,it is difficult to implement positive practices withoutsupport from the top. A leader must stand by and exemplify the values he preaches.Steve Schroeder, founder and CEO of Creative Werks, a packaging company based inChicago that has repeatedly appeared on Crain Chicagos 50 Fastest GrowingCompanies list, attributes much of his companys success to a positive culture. Inaddition to providing the usual perks (bonuses and professional developmentopportunities), Steve makes sure his employees are happy. As a longtime student of theDalai Lama, Steve often quotes the Dalai Lamas saying that everybody wants to behappy. He ensures that his companys culture is both positive and supportive. Caringis a quality he looks for when he interviews new employees. Caring people never lettheir colleagues or the clients down, says Schroeder. Creative Werks core values arenot just client and product-focused. They also include also include balance referringto employee well-being and illustrating the importance of a positive and supportiveworkplace.

2. Culture: Because culture trumps strategy in predicting performance, culture changeinitiatives are also important. Jim Mallozzi, CEOofPrudential Real Estate andRelocation, consulted with Cameron during adifficult merger of two companies andduring a time when his companywas undergoing severe financial loss. He found thatimplementing positive practices shifted the company cultureand helped turn thesechallenging times into great successes. He mentions one exercise in particular:Selectthree people, one at a time, and tell those people threethings you value aboutthem. In corporate America, and inmost places in life, people usually tell you, Here arethethree things that you need to change. Rarely do they tellyou, Here are the threethings that youre fabulous at. When you do that, the energy just goes up. So that wasthestart. Okay, were off the beach. Nobodys dying any more.The body parts havebeen buried. Were now saying, Okay,lets start with what we have, because we havesome fabulous attributes.'

3. Small steps:Small changes can produce large effects. Some firms that consultedCameron have simply asked all employees to keep gratitude journals each day, or topositively embarrass someone each day, or spend 30 minutes per day making a

contribution to someone in need. Within weeks and months, the companies havenoticed visible improvements in performance. Shubhra Bhatnagar is a formersuccessful investment banker who became a social entrepreneur. She foundedKarmaLize.Me, a health food distribution company which donates over 50% of profits tocharities. In the intense field of investment banking, she had found that employee well-being was neglected. For this reason, despite the equivalent pressures of running astartup, she makes sure that her staff engage in well-being activities such as meditation:We make sure that the stress of a startup business does not hamper the happinessquotient of our team or impacts our core business values. We use a meditation app(Sattva) to help us reconnect with ourselves and each other and to create a morepositive atmosphere in our office.

4. Retreats and workshops: Changes and improvements can occur as a result of retreats,executive programs, or workshops where employees have a chance to think deeply andstrategically about positive leadership and positive practices. Corporate workshops iswhat Audibles Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Louis Gagnon, opted for. The two-day TLEX retreat in upstate New York started with an exercise where 18 of Gagnonsleaders split into groups to define what is leadership. After collating the results, thegroup realized that 95% of all attributes referred to soft, not hard skills. Gagnonreports that this staff was pleased to hear that for 2-days, soft skills is exactly what theywould be focusing on no corporate goals, no strategy, no alignment but mindfulness,personal mastery, connectedness and collective action. At the heart of the curriculum:breathing exercises. Our team was engaged, opened and excited to have the rareluxury to focus on themselves as individuals individuals as a conduit and lever toourselves as a team. We all felt deeply rejuvenated and at peace with each other. That,ultimately, built trust the ultimate ingredient to teamwork.

Emma Seppala, PhD, is a Stanford University research psychologist and the Associate

Director of Stanford Universitys Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and

Education. She consults is a corporate well-being consultant as well as a science journalist

with Psychology Today, Hufngton Post, Scientic American Mind and the e-magazine she

founded, Fulllment Daily. Follow her on Twitter @emmaseppala or her website

www.emmaseppala.com.

Related Topics: PSYCHOLOGY | PRODUCTIVITY | LEADING TEAMS

This article is about ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

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Yvette Francino 10 days ago

Great article! I blogged about it today: http://workhappier.blogspot.com/2015/04/positivity-leads-to-productivity.html

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