Sunday, June 17, 2018

WORKPLACE SPECIAL...... How Oxytocin Can Make Your Job More Meaningful PART II


How Oxytocin Can Make Your Job More Meaningful PART II

Yield. 
Whole Foods Market has embraced Yield from the executive suite to the store aisles. Each department in their stores is run as a nearly autonomous unit, deciding what it will sell, who to hire, and how to display their products. Departments have their own profit and loss statements and are responsible for staying in the black. Teams are arranged in a lattice so they can learn from others’ successes and mistakes. Bonuses are team-based and compensation is shared broadly. Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods, has said, “When leaders give their power away to others, they create space for those people to flourish.” 

Transfer.
 One of the fastest-growing and most profitable agricultural companies in the U.S., Morning Star Tomato, has no job titles. At all. Everyone is a colleague; even owner and founder Chris Rufer’s business card just has his name on it. Each colleague chooses which work group she or he will join based on a commitment to create value for the group. Morning Star Tomato produces more than half of the U.S. output of processed tomato products (sauce, paste, and stewed tomatoes) and has nearly single-handedly driven down the price of these products by 80 percent over the last 30 years. Rufer attributes their success to their culture of inclusion and excellence. Processing tomatoes is a highly regulated industry. Each plant has an on-site FDA lab randomly testing for quality and cleanliness so everyone must perform well. Excellence at every stage of the production process is achieved with Transfer.

Openness. 
Openness is part of the core business model at Buffer, a software company that optimizes social media impact. Salaries are posted online, as are revenue and the number of customers. All company emails are accessible by everyone. “Transparency breeds trust, and trust is the foundation of great teamwork,” according to Buffer founder and CEO Joel Gascoigne. Within three years of its 2010 founding, Buffer was serving one million customers a day. Clarity about Buffer’s goals and practices using Openness reduces the stress that inhibits trust, so Buffer’s colleagues can focus on wowing their customers. 

Caring. 
SAS Institute is the world’s largest privately held software company with over $2 billion in revenue. Employee turnover at SAS is two percent, the lowest in the industry. They have sustained high profitability and colleague retention by building a Caring culture. SAS emphasizes work-life integration by having colleagues work 35 hours per week. They also offer on-site daycare for 850 children of their employees at one-third the market cost, offer basic medical services at no cost, and provide healthy snacks and meals at campus cafes. “We’ll take care of you if you’ll take care of us” is the approach taken by SAS Institute co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight. SAS Institute is consistently ranked among the best companies to work for in the U.S.

Invest.
In the early 2000s, British-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever created a health and well-being program called “Lamplighter” to help executives manage their energy and performance by reducing chronic stress. Its success led to a rapid rollout of Lamplighter to Unilever’s 172,000 employees around the world. The program assesses physical and mental health and creates individual scorecards that team members use to develop work-life integration plans. These plans include exercise and nutrition goals and even psychological counseling, if needed. Unilever’s analysis showed that for every £1 spent on the program, £3.73 was returned in higher productivity. Lamplighter is good for its colleagues and profitable for the company.

Natural. 
In 1999, personal computer maker Lenovo Group was going global. But this Chinese company had a very Chinese culture. People would only speak in hierarchical order. Tea was served at every meeting. And titles were paramount. CEO Yang Yuanqing was called “Chief Executive Officer Yang” by everyone. Mr. Yang sought to change Lenovo’s culture to one focused on being Natural. One of the first things he did was to post himself in the lobby of Lenovo’s Beijing headquarters for more than a week wearing a “Hello, my name is Yuanqing” sticker and shaking hands with everyone who walked through the door. He asked employees to address him by his first name. He also changed the official language at Lenovo to English. The changes worked. Lenovo grew from an Asian-only brand to a global behemoth shipping more PCs than any other company in the world. Lenovo generates over $46 billion in annual revenue and Barron’s magazine consistently names Yang one of the “World’s Best CEOs.”
What about Purpose? In addition to OXYTOCIN, there is one more ingredient my research shows companies need to improve that triple bottom line: a sense of transcendent purpose. “Through commerce, we create value that helps each of us pursue a better life and forge human connections that enrich our shared experience.” This is eBay’s Purpose statement. The use of “we” and “us” clearly signals that their goal is not to maximize profits or stock price, but to serve all of humanity. Service is essential in Purpose narratives. Colleagues at organizations that have a clear and well-communicated Purpose use “we” much more than “me.” Aaron Hurst, founder of nonprofit Taproot, advocates thinking of Purpose as a verb: the organization has to live its Purpose or it will have little impact.
The impact of trust and purpose
The science relating trust to team performance is convincing, but how much does trust really improve outcomes in actual businesses? If it is only a little, then there is not much to get excited about. 
The data I have collected from the organizations that have asked me to help them reboot their cultures showed that trust substantially improved multiple outcome measures. But these are a self-selected set of businesses and nonprofits that already thought culture was important.
To confirm that these findings apply broadly, in late 2016 I collected a nationally representative sample of 1,105 working adults in the U.S. and queried them about their organizations.
·         My team found that those working in companies in the highest quartile of trust, compared to those in the lowest quartile, had 106 percent more energy at work, were 76 percent more engaged on the job, and said they were 50 percent more productive.
·         High-trust companies had one-half the employee turnover of low-trust companies, with employees at these companies telling us that they were 56 percent more satisfied with their jobs. 
·         Trust improved alignment with their organization’s Purpose by 70 percent and reduced sick days by 13 percent; those fortunate enough to work in high-trust organizations were 29 percent more satisfied with their lives outside of work. Trust not only improves work, it improves life.
Trust matters. A lot. Our analysis of showed that if a company moved up one quartile in organizational trust, the average employee would produce an additional $10,185 in revenue. Every year. Many of the ways to increase trust that I discuss in Trust Factor do not cost very much, so the return on an investment in trust is often hundreds of dollars for each dollar spent. Don’t tell economists this, but working at high-trust companies with Purpose is fun: Colleagues are doing important work for the world with people who support them. 
It all starts by identifying your organization’s Purpose—how you connect to, and serve, others. Then, empower colleagues with trust and challenge them to reach audacious goals that improve the world, one customer at a time.
There are no human resources at work, just human beings. It’s time to start treating those at work as the fallible, emotional, surprising, and intrinsically wonderful human beings that they are.
BY PAUL J. ZAK 
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_oxytocin_can_make_your_job_more_meaningful?utm_source=Greater+Good+Science+Center&utm_campaign=4143945fb7-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_GG_Newsletter_June_6+2018&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5ae73e326e-4143945fb7-51482775

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