Not waving, drowning
So, how is everyone going out there in the wonderful sea of emotion?
In my experience, that's what typical workplaces generally feel like when there has been no intention or collaborative effort to establish a desired culture (or maybe more importantly, to identify the workplace culture we don't want).
That sea may not be all about emotionally overwrought people displaying great emotional highs and lows. Emotional culture is not all about the polarities of sadness and happy-happy-joy-joy.
Frustration has certainly been a regular part of several of my workplaces. It may have been frustration with the people I have been trying to support or serve, or frustration over funding cuts implemented from on high by people who don't understand 'what we do'.
A workplace culture that is not clear and intentionally created can lead to uncertainty, frustration, a lack of direction and, eventually, a drop in productivity and poor servicing of the clients and customers who are so important to that business.
When a workplace culture is not healthy and supportive, people leave. And it’s often the best people with the most to offer who are not willing to put up with an unhealthy or unproductive work environment.
Shifting the workplace culture
The Emotional Culture Deck (ECD) is proving to be a powerful tool for bringing these unconscious states of emotion and culture in the workplace into focus, and helping to create a space that people genuinely want to be a part of.
The ECD is a simple tool used to create a facilitated conversation to explore people’s values and behaviours at work. Often, identifying the feelings people want and don’t want to have at the end of their day or week is an investment in the sustainability of your workforce.
As a manager or leader of your organisation, you might think you have your finger on the pulse and have a fair idea of how your team is travelling. But how do you really know? Have you taken the time to consider the way you actually want your team to feel, and – more importantly – how you don’t want them to feel? Have you taken the time to check with the team that your hopes and expectations for the workplace culture are relevant and important to them? Is it possible that we might be simply off the mark in understanding the basic motivation and aspiration of our people?
All workplaces have trade-offs and things we would prefer not to have to deal with, but bringing those things into our awareness through conscious conversations offers an opportunity to change things, and to acknowledge when the situation is less than ideal.
The importance of conscious conversations
A conversation about the culture we want in our workplace is invaluable. There is increasing evidence to show that a culture which has been created intentionally and collaboratively leads to improved team satisfaction and reduces burnout and loneliness. Creating that culture means addressing more than just the values and behaviours that the senior leadership expects. It means finding out how people are feeling and what they want to feel and don’t want to feel, because people make decisions based on how they are feeling.
Yes, we’re rational beings, but we don’t always act rationally. It’s time to acknowledge the power of emotions in our workplace and work to understand, explore, and address them, so that we can ultimately create a more human-friendly workplace.
The Emotional Culture Deck is a fun, practical tool for generating great conversations about your workplace culture.