How are your Teams Feeling Right Now?
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 because eventually competitors can come along and replicate your best practices, strategies and processes. A 2018 Global Culture Survey found that 65% thought an organization’s culture was more important to performance than its strategy or operating model. A strong culture will promote engagement, positivity and a sense of community / belonging within your teams, all of which drive productivity and grow your profits.
Do you know the emotional culture of your organization? Have you measured it over the past 6 - 12 months to gauge how your teams are really feeling?
Culture matters
Culture is defined many ways, one of the more business-related ways of thinking about it is this, culture is the degree of alignment between strategy and the way employees think and behave.
In 2016, HBR ran an article titled Manage Your Emotional Culture. The article talks about and distinguishes between Cognitive Culture and Emotional Culture.
It goes on to talk about the fact that emotional culture is rarely managed as deliberately as cognitive culture and that it’s often not managed at all. It gives some great examples of how much companies suffer as a result. Employees who should be showing compassion, but do not in health care, for example, become callous and indifferent. Teams that would benefit from joy and pride instead tolerate a culture of resentment. People who lack a healthy amount of fear (say, in security firms or investment banks) act recklessly.
The effects can be especially damaging during times of upheaval & uncertainty, such as organizational restructurings and global pandemics .
Where to start understanding emotional culture
To discuss and understand the concept of emotional intelligence and emotional culture, first we need to look at the underlying science of emotions.
Why do we react the way we do, how does others’ behaviour impact us the way it does?
We all experience a wide range of pleasant and unpleasant feelings at work as we interact with colleagues, customers, suppliers and others.
How emotions show up in the workplace
These feelings influence our decisions, behaviour 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 poorer at performing. Collectively, these emotions impact the bottom-line for better or worse.
Research shows that people in high performing organizations experience more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions than those in low performing organizations. (Boedker et al. 2011)
So why aren’t more organizations working to focus on understanding how their people are feeling and managing their EMOTIONAL CULTURE?
Do you know how your people are feeling right now?
Emotional culture surveys are the most direct and impactful way to measure emotional culture because they measure three distinct things to help identify whether or not emotions experienced need to shift. They measure:
Experienced emotions
Expected emotions
Ideal or desirable levels of emotions
When you understand how your people are feeling, how they’d ideally like to feel and where the gaps are – you can do something about it.
It allows you to more easily understand where the differences are – so you can be informed in making decisions for your L&D, training and development of your teams and workplace culture. You can continue to strive to be a great place to work.
Pleasant feelings have a "broaden and build effect causing us to think more broadly, engage more deeply and perform better.
Emotional Culture Index Sample Report
The Emotional Culture Index is designed to measure three dimensions of emotions at work:
Current state – How often your people experience certain feelings at work.
Expected state – How often your people think its fair and reasonable to experience these feelings at work given the nature and context of your workplace.
Ideal state – How often your people think they should ideally experience these feelings in your workplace in order to be effective.
It also allows participants to share confidential free text responses on key areas. You can customize the survey by department, team, region or a particular demographic or group.
Revo Consultant would like to give you the opportunity to experience The Emotional Culture Index from Genos International.
The ECI is completed online and takes only a few minutes to complete. You receive a report with its findings and have the opportunity to discuss privately with Alison Coates, a Genos Certified Emotional Intelligence Practitioner, outcomes and strategies for designing your culture for success, even during uncertainty.
To experience the Emotional Culture Index within your workplace send us an email via our Contact Us Page or Schedule a complimentary 30-minutes discussion with Alison Coates to discover more.
This article was written in collaboration with Genos International Europe. Alison Coates is a certified Genos EI Practitioner.