Emotional Culture and its Connection to Wellbeing
Have you recently answered the question, “How was your day?” from someone at work with – “Fine, good, bad, okay, busy”?
How would you answer a question about how you are feeling when discussing an uncomfortable topic in a team meeting, or being asked to do yet another project that you don’t understand, or having to have that difficult conversation with a team member?
Imagine you have had an emotional culture conversation as a team; this set the expectations of how you collectively want to feel at work. Now you have a shared language to use to express when you were uncomfortable or to share your desire to know more about a project or to tell someone the impact of their behaviour on you and your wellbeing. Emotional Culture has a direct impact on stress management, productivity and wellbeing for you and your team.
There are many emotions and ways of expressing how we feel, yet for most of us our emotional vocabulary is limited, or we struggle to share how we really feel more deeply. To some, the idea that discussing and sharing their emotions in the workplace is unheard of, and to others it’s the norm for their team and organisation.
“The emotional culture of an organisation isn’t just a soft, feel-good factor—it has real consequences for employee health and performance. Companies that take emotions seriously can create healthier, more engaging workplaces where employees thrive.” Riders and Elephants
The difference between emotional culture and cognitive culture
Most tools that measure culture do a great job of measuring cognitive culture, that is the thinking and behaviour of employees in an organisation, and these are highly important ways to regulate how the team and organisation are doing their work and working together every day.
Emotional culture focuses on how we feel, or don’t feel at work, which drives how we think and behave. This recognises a deeper understanding of how we turn up to work every day.
We have all heard the saying attributed to Peter Drucker, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I like to think emotional culture is the pre-breakfast coffee.
Wellbeing driven by identification of emotions
A recent study by Andrew P Knight, Jochen I Menges and Heike Bruch from the Academy of Management1, found that the emotional tone of an organisation can negatively or positively impact employee stress and wellbeing. While positive emotional tone has been shown to reduce stress and potential for burn-out, negative emotional tone has contributed to more sick days, stress and exhaustion.
This is where we lean on emotional culture tools such as the Riders and Elephants’ Emotional Culture Deck (ECD) with teams and leaders across organisations. We can collectively discuss how we want to feel when we are at work as individuals and then share and agree as teams; committing to taking steps and holding ourselves responsible for our wellbeing.
Keeping emotional culture alive
The true gifts of ECD discussions are that they:
- develop agreement for how people want to turn up every day
- develop openness in sharing how the team is feeling
- allow for team responsibility to continue to work on how we show up for ourselves, each other and our organisation.
Emotional culture discussions are not a ‘one and done’. It’s important to continue discussions, and there are many ways to do that. You could have any of the following:
- Regular check-ins: Pick one of your chosen feelings and share around the team how it’s going for you all.
- Kick-start and closing activities for planning sessions: Ask each other how you are feeling about the upcoming project/month/year, and again how you feel at the wrap-up of the planning session. Check for clarity and motivation.
- Retrospective check-ins: How have you been feeling as an individual in the past week?
- Future check-ins: How do you want to feel about your performance once a project is finished?
- Coaching sessions: Use the deck more broadly in coaching sessions as a leader to do a deeper dive into how an individual is feeling in the moment.
The way people want to feel at work will change and shift across teams, and over time, dependant on who is leading, joining and leaving an organisation.
Once Emotional Culture becomes part of the fabric of the way you work, it allows for new agreements on emotions to change and adapt seamlessly with the shifting landscape of the team. Leaders and teams can become more cohesive, trusting and productive in the process in turn leading to a higher degree of wellbeing at work.
Authored by Marjorie Blake, one of our ECD accredited specialists. If you would like some help with building team culture and wellbeing, contact Nicky on 021 133 1201 or info@odi.org.nz.
1. Knight, A., Menges, J., & Bruch, H. (2017), Organizational Affective Tone: A Meso Perspective on the Origins and Effects of Consistent Affect in Organizations, Academy of Management