Manage your emotional culture

Before leaving work each day, employees at Ubiquity Retirement + Savings press a button in the lobby. They’re not punching out — not in the traditional sense, anyway. They’re registering their emotions. They have five buttons to choose from: a smiley face if they felt happy at work that day, a frowny face if they felt sad, and so on.

This may sound like a human resources gimmick or an instrument of forced satisfaction. But it’s neither. Ubiquity is using the data to understand what motivates employees — what makes them feel a sense of belonging and excitement at work. Other organizations are starting to do the same.

When people talk about corporate culture, they’re typically referring to cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms and assumptions. Cognitive culture sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work — for instance, how customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented or competitive they are.

But cognitive culture is only part of the story. The other critical part is what we call the group’s emotional culture: the shared affective values, norms and assumptions that govern which emotions people express at work and which ones they are better off suppressing.

Emotional culture is rarely managed as deliberately as cognitive culture — and often it’s not managed at all. Companies suffer as a result. Employees who should be showing compassion (in health care, for example) become callous and indifferent. Teams that would benefit from joy and pride instead tolerate a culture of anger. People who lack a healthy amount of fear (say, in security firms or investment banks) act recklessly.

So when managers ignore emotional culture, they’re glossing over a vital part of what makes people — and organizations — tick.

Delving beneath the surface

Some companies have begun to explicitly include emotions in their management principles. For instance, PepsiCo, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, The Container Store and Zappos all list love or caring among their corporate values. Similarly, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Camden Property Trust, Cisco Finance, Ubiquity and Vail Resorts, along with many startups, highlight the importance of fun to their success.

But to get a comprehensive read on an organization’s emotional culture and then deliberately manage it, you have to make sure that what is codified in mission statements and on corporate badges is also enacted in the “micromoments” of daily organizational life. These consist of small gestures rather than bold declarations of feeling. For example, little acts of kindness and support can add up to an emotional culture characterized by caring and compassion. Facial expressions and body language are equally powerful. If a manager consistently comes to work looking angry (whether he means to or not), he may cultivate a culture of anger.

Emotional cultures in action

Understanding the most basic emotions — joy, love, fear — is a good place to start for any leader trying to manage an emotional culture.

— A culture of joy. Vail Resorts recognizes that cultivating joy among employees helps customers have fun too, which matters a lot in the hospitality business. Management tactics, special outings, celebrations and rewards all support the emotional culture.

— A culture of companionate love. This is the degree of affection, caring and compassion that employees feel and express toward one another. In a study of a long-term-care facility, workers in units with strong cultures of companionate love had lower absenteeism, less burnout and greater teamwork and job satisfaction than their colleagues in other units. The families of patients in units with stronger cultures of companionate love reported higher satisfaction with the facility. These results show a powerful connection between emotional culture and business performance.

— A culture of fear. In “Turn the Ship Around!” the retired U.S. Navy captain L. David Marquet describes how a culture of fear plagued the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine. The crew had low morale and the worst retention rate in the fleet. Marquet argues that the constant fear of being yelled at — for making mistakes, not knowing things, challenging authority and so on — made it harder for sailors to think well and act quickly.

Marquet changed that emotional culture by using classic “high involvement” management techniques, such as empowering crew members to make decisions and not punishing them for every misstep. As a result, they became more confident and accountable — and less inclined to simply wait for permission or directions from their commanding officer.

Creating an emotional culture

To cultivate a particular emotional culture, you’ll need to get people to feel the emotions valued by the organization or team. Here are three methods:

— Harness what people already feel. Some employees will experience the desired emotions quite naturally. This can happen in isolated moments of compassion or gratitude, for example. When such feelings arise regularly, that’s a sign you’re building the culture you want. If people have them periodically and need help sustaining them, you can try incorporating some gentle nudges during the workday. You might schedule some time for meditation, for instance; or provide mindfulness apps on people’s work devices to remind them to simply breathe, relax or laugh.

— Model the emotions you want to cultivate. A long line of research on emotional contagion shows that people in groups “catch” feelings from others through behavioral mimicry. If you regularly walk into a room smiling with high energy, you’re much more likely to create a culture of joy than if you wear a neutral expression. Your employees will smile back and start to mean it.

— Get people to fake it till they feel it. If employees don’t experience the desired emotion at a particular moment, they can still help maintain their organization’s emotional culture. That’s because people express emotions both spontaneously and strategically at work. Social psychology research has long shown that individuals tend to conform to group norms of emotional expression, imitating others out of a desire to be liked and accepted. Those who begin by expressing an emotion out of a desire to conform will start to actually feel it through emotional contagion. They’ll also receive positive reinforcement for following the norms, which will make them more likely to demonstrate the emotion again.

Emotional culture is shaped by how all employees — from the highest echelons to the front lines — comport themselves day in and day out. But it’s up to senior leaders to establish which emotions will help the organization thrive, model those emotions and reward others for doing the same. Companies in which they do this have a lot to gain.

Sigal Barsade is a professor of management at Wharton. Olivia A. O’Neill is an assistant professor of management at George Mason University.

Idea in Brief

The problem

Most companies pay little attention to their emotional culture — which feelings people have (and should have) at work, and which ones they keep to themselves. That presents problems for both individuals and organizations.

The reason

Research shows that, for better or worse, emotions influence employees’ commitment, creativity, decision making, work quality and likelihood of sticking around — and you can see the effects on the bottom line. So it’s important to monitor and manage people’s feelings as deliberately as you do their mindset.

The solution

Once you have a handle on your existing emotional culture, you can shape it in several ways. Explicitly say which emotions will help the organization thrive, channel the feelings that people have and express naturally, and cultivate the ones you want through emotional contagion and the power of “deep acting.”

This month, NBR ONLINE is piloting some content from the widely-respected Harvard Business Review. As ever, our core focus is on local news, but HBR articles provide a useful complement with their tips for business leaders and analysis of trends. Click on the HBR tag at the footer of this story to see all we've published so far. The ball is in your court, readers. If enough of you read HBR stories, we'll keep them on. So if you like them, do share — CK.