I came across a video of Lucila, an Algerian by birth who delivered the graduate student oration at Harvard University this year. She outlines her disturbed childhood life due to the turmoil in the country and how her mother came to know of a camp that was offering a chance to immigrate to France. Her mother went there and tried to apply but couldn’t because she had to fill a form with her details and she was illiterate. She left the place very disappointed, but suddenly a young man came running after her and helped her fill out the form. They actually got the opportunity to migrate to France. Lucila’s dreams and ambitions took her far from a life in an underprivileged community to graduate education at Harvard Kennedy School. Her destiny changed with that single random act of kindness. Her speech not only expressed gratitude for that act, but also served as an inspiration to all of us to perform small acts of kindness wherever we can.
This story got me debating in my head about gratitude at workplaces. Should workplaces invest in and promote practising gratitude? Here is my perspective.
Gratitude at Workplaces, the reality…
The politically correct answer to that is “of course we should!”. But surprise, surprise— not much actually happens at workplaces when it comes to actively encouraging gratitude. Most of us know at some level what gratitude is, but allow me to elaborate.
Gratitude in simple terms is being grateful for what we have – giving thanks, not taking things for granted, look for the good rather than the bad, being appreciative of small things, being more compassionate towards each other, being empathetic of someone else’s point of view, and in general, seeing things in a more positive light.
So then what’s the real deal – is it taboo, is it too personal, is it woo-woo, is it too spiritual, or is it just too ancient to be relevant today? Or is it perhaps a long ignored opportunity?
Gratitude in many ways has been and continues to be part of our lives. Giving gifts, making offerings, celebrating Thanksgiving, saying Grace are rooted in gratefulness. In fact, many festivals are about counting your blessings and sharing. So it has been and remains a big part of our environment and yet its not really mainstream in our corporate lives. Why?
Today, while we supposedly have the world in our hands, we still don’t use the power of simple concepts. There is a tendency to trivialise and ignore simple things. We need the gift-wrap and the sales pitch and the hype, and we need it to look expensive and exclusive to appeal to us. So simple yet powerful gratitude lingers on the sidelines like a substitute player waiting for its turn to come into play.
If bias is another common term you’ve heard at your workplace, you may want to read this blog: Deconstructing Bias – My Learnings.
The need for Gratitude at workplaces…
So, perhaps there is a need to explain the science of gratitude and its benefits for the work place. What really is the need for gratitude at workplaces?
To answer that we need to look at the fundamental design of work and performance.
Firstly we tend to use a one-size-fits-all approach where the role is one size and the employee has to fit in to that, but the individual comes with different abilities, aspirations and beliefs.
Secondly, we disregard teamwork even though most things are delivered by teams and in fact reward and glorify individual excellence though we preach collaboration.
Thirdly, and perhaps the most damaging, is the fact that the entire focus of work force management is somehow based on what is not ok— what did you not do right, what is lacking, what can you do better. The entire system of review—work review, performance review, business review, are all focused on why we didn’t get to where we wanted to, what went wrong, what are the gaps, etc.
When someone says to you “I want to give you some feedback,” you know that it’s not good news, because most feedback is always about what you did wrong. In my many, many years in HR, and our many radical innovations around performance management, I am yet to find people who love performance reviews—most people simply hate the process because it’s not structured to make people feel good. Well, one can argue and say there is nothing wrong with any of this, because such feedback and reviews are designed to make things better.
I am not arguing that we should deliver poor quality or not improve things or not recognise merit but the question I am asking is: have we missed the bus on how we can leverage the good? How can we get more done through appreciation and positive reinforcement? What can we do to really build on strengths? How do we get more out of the collective rather than just the individual? I know that we do capture strengths in reviews but what we still have are development plans, not strength multipliers.
The challenges…
Now, our key challenges at the workplace all involve managing talent. The most obvious one of course is dealing with an unengaged work force that is delivering less than expected or quitting on you abruptly. But there are other ones too—differences amongst people, lack of collaboration, lack of trust, bias, and politics.
Have you wondered how we end up creating politics in a supposedly good workplace? All of us hear things like “so-and-so is so political”. Hopefully, that so-and-so is not you. Invariably we blame it on specific individuals and the behaviours they demonstrate as the reason for a political culture, thereby choosing not to deal with it in an active manner.
Now if we correlate this to how workplaces are designed i.e. everyone is only looking for what is wrong, constantly judging and looking for gaps: what are the chances we will find the gaps? Quite high. And then, what does this approach do to relationships? If we mix this approach with the egos that people have nowadays —that’s a heady recipe for disaster. “Who are you to find fault?”, “How dare they say that?”…It’s all personal and downhill from that point.
The ability to be constructive has been lost because we simply ignore the good and take it for granted.
When we nitpick, judge and criticise (which all come naturally) the balance is missing, and it just breeds a negative and defensive attitude where the primary objective is to avoid making mistakes or not look stupid. This decapitates creativity and innovation, and we end up with incremental progress, and far worse, we create an insecure and political environment. We resort to intellectual bullying – going all out to prove a point logically but it is done in such a way that we end up making the other person feel small and stupid.
Tolerance. Humility. Compassion. Empathy for an alternate point of view. Small acts of kindness. Genuinely saying thanks. Being balanced. Constructive win-win discussions. Acknowledging the good in a detailed way (not being superficial). These have almost disappeared from our behaviours at the workplace.
By promoting gratitude at workplaces we can bring these back. Gratefulness can help leverage the power of the collective. It can improve collaboration, it can improve productivity and culture and it can increase longevity and tenure of employees, and more than anything, increase happiness at the workplace. All these will of course improve engagement and work results.
The science behind gratitude…
Scientifically, how does gratitude do this? When the brain feels gratitude, the parts of the brain that are activated include the ventral and dorsal medial pre-frontal cortex. These areas are involved in feelings of reward, morality, interpersonal bonding and positive social interactions, and the ability to understand what other people are thinking or feeling. Gratitude also has the capacity to increase important neurochemicals.
When our thinking shifts from negative to positive, there is a surging of feel-good chemicals such as dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. These contribute to the feelings of closeness, connection and happiness that come with gratitude. But consistency is key to rewire the brain. The brain changes with experience, so the more that gratitude is practised, the more the brain learns to tune in to the positive things.
So what should be done for gratitude at workplaces – should we have an assembly like in schools and pray? 🙂
The first thing is to really bring gratitude into mainstream and acknowledge it as an approach that can help improve our thought process and make us better as people and as firms. This is the secret sauce – bring it into your culture, bring it into your processes, use positive reinforcement more aggressively and get people to start seeing the good consciously, encourage it top down.
What can we do as a firm to foster a culture of gratitude at workplaces?
The list is endless: acknowledge and leverage positives more, appreciate genuinely, shift focus to what is good. Bring gratitude into play at meetings and reviews, make positive reinforcement a part of your design in performance and feedback, encourage humility and small acts of kindness. Start meetings/townhalls/events and reviews with genuine gratitude and appreciation. Thank the family, give out hand written notes, run a gratitude campaign, celebrate wins as a team. There’s really lots you can do to encourage gratitude at workplaces.
When work colleagues learn to see from a lens of gratitude they develop more empathy and if we can teach them to leverage that, they would be able to critique with balance, understand where the other person is coming from and they would be able to use questions to drive insights and hence reduce judgements as well as personality clashes. The same empathy can help us demonstrate more tolerance and when we correct others we do it with care. By focusing on the good things in a person we learn to leverage more of their strengths rather than branding them as ‘no go’s”. Humans make mistakes, use gratitude to forgive and build loyalty.
And as individuals?
Remember your blessings, smile more, say things with the right tone, don’t intend disrespect, don’t make it personal. Many times, how we say something matters more than what we say and when we have a sense of gratefulness in us we recognise the importance of this how. If we are truly grateful for what we have and don’t take things for granted it can help us go the extra mile with no expectations.
Personally for me, one of the ways gratitude has helped is to deal with my ego triggers: I get to know that someone has done something and normally my reaction would be “this is my call” and then I would get combative. But now, I pause and see if that person has intended disrespect, and then bring my gratefulness lens into focus and try to see if there is something good in this and I realise that what is good is that there was no disrespect intended but just a difference of opinion based on our own interpretations and logic. That I can deal with, because I don’t take it personally and I am ready to allow an alternative logic to exist. Believe me, this is a big deal – with this approach I can avoid so much stress and unnecessary conflict.
These are just a few ideas, if we just pause and think from our context many more possibilities can come up.
An alternative logic, difference in opinions is also something we encounter lots at workplaces and I have penned my thoughts on this in – Goan Susegad and the Coexistence of Opposites.
To conclude…
If we change how we approach things, change the behaviours and actions – the results will also change for the better.
This change can be awkward at first and it’s certainly not a quick fix but if we stick to it and make it broad based, an alternate to our default critical mindset can evolve. Sometimes the fear is, would this impact our business results, would we become so nice that we actually finish last, would we lose the edge? These are real questions that come up even for me and am sure there will be those one-off instances where people do take advantage or are unreasonable.
But if I ask myself, do I really believe that by trying to be a better person, I become ineffective? If I confuse myself and avoid doing uncomfortable things by using this as an excuse then, yes. But if I actually think about this as an enabler to do the tough things more gracefully, the answer is a resounding NO. My awareness is better, my empathy is better, I change the HOW – I give feedback in a way that the other person understands, I ask questions in a genuine tone and control my urge to pass a premature verdict and these things make me more effective not less.
Our resistance to change will certainly surface some unfounded fears but if we go deep down into the answer, we will realise that those are just excuses.
One of those excuses is, I want to practice this but I am just a single person what can I do? DO WHATEVER YOU CAN AT YOUR LEVEL- JUST START.
As workplaces, we invest a lot in our people and their wellbeing and we have made significant strides in the last decade in upping what we offer our employees. The idea of this article is to just direct our attention to an opportunity to do more for our employees.
Research has always indicated a significant correlation between happiness at work and enhanced business outcomes – are you ready to leverage the intrinsically human quality of being grateful to make our workplaces better?
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