According to the Harvard Business Review, many empirical studies correlate positive social connections at work with less sickness, faster recovery from surgery, less depression, faster learning, longer memory, higher tolerance for discomfort, more mental acuity, and better performance at work. Even with this body of evidence many workplaces still struggle to create an honest and inclusive workplace. The American Psychological Association estimated that 550 million workdays are lost annually to workplace stress, and stress levels in America only continue to increase. Building a positive workplace culture and alleviating stress starts with facilitating interpersonal connections. Designing and implementing inclusive positive interactions was the basis of the Scaling Positive Interaction group’s first set of experiments, which measurably improved happiness and collaboration among new interns. 

What makes a positive interaction? 

Positive interaction design gets especially complicated when transitioning to a new work setting, like moving your entire team to remote work. By implementing collective intelligence (shared knowledge that comes from collaboration), many new and exciting ideas can be recorded for people to critique in the future. Doing a quick sprint (small experiment/exercise) with a group of people can garner a lot of interesting data on differences in workplace perspectives. 

Doing these exercises on the best practices within the workplace can promote the feeling of positive inclusiveness, and the aspect of employee opinion recognition. When employees know that they have had their opinions heard and answered, they will have more respect for the workplace culture decisions set by supervisors. 

‘Taker’ cultures are those where employees aim to gain from others while giving less in return. According to Robert Frank, a Cornell economist, many organizations are essentially “winner-take-all markets [that are] dominated by zero-sum competitions for rewards and promotions.” Alternatively, ‘Giver’ cultures are those that implement collective intelligence for self-improvement by encouraging employees to share knowledge, and make connections without expecting anything in return. Consistent, daily progress by individual employees fuels both the success of the organization and the quality of those employees’ inner work lives. To harness this powerful force, you must ensure that “consistent forward movement on meaningful work is a regular occurrence in your employees’ work lives, despite the inevitable setbacks that all non-trivial work entails.” Whatever your role in an organization, you bear some responsibility for the productivity mindset of your coworkers and collaborators. Through your actions, you can create and nurture positive or negative company culture.

Positive workplace engagements in action 

In exploring ways to scale positive engagement within PII, a group of interns experimented with implementing a question of the day at the start of our daily morning meetings. The goal was to see if a personal interaction could improve people’s moods before tackling the meeting’s agenda. 

In a remote work environment, personal interactions become more rare. Since PII’s meetings are typically held over Zoom, we used breakout rooms to our advantage, putting two people in randomized rooms and providing them with a prompt. This also allowed for interactions between people who normally do not get to interact with each other. Based on feedback from experimenting with this method, people genuinely felt better after their interaction. Everyday we provided two basic questions: “How are you feeling today?” and “What time zone are you in?” (we are lucky to work with so many people from around the world so time zones are an important factor in our workplace!). Along with these two questions, we also had a unique question of the day as mentioned previously. Based on the feedback data we collected, some of the most successful questions were the following:

1. Did you do anything fun this past weekend?/What was your favorite part of the weekend? (This is a great energizer for Monday mornings!)

2. Did you have any breakfast today? What’s your favorite breakfast food?

3. If you could travel anywhere after the pandemic, where would you go? (This is a great question for WFH!)

4. What’s your favorite movie/TV show?

Giving opportunities in the workplace for coworkers to bond over a non-work related topic is an excellent way to increase positive interaction, even if it’s just for 3 to 5 minutes a day! This is the type of positive engagement that can scale into forming closer work relationships and reducing meeting stress. Creating a happy, productive workplace, can sometimes seem like a daunting task, but it starts with small scale steps such as these personal interactions.

Slack also makes positive, remote engagements easy and accessible by providing apps such as Donut and BirthdayBot. Donut makes it simple to schedule casual, virtual meetups with coworkers, just as if you were to get coffee with a coworker in a physical workplace. BirthdayBot will remind everyone of upcoming birthdays. Wishing someone a happy birthday is a simple gesture, but an amazing way to make someone’s day.

Scalable Positive Interactions - The Effect One Small Positive Interaction Can Have

Repetitive small positive interactions could potentially improve your workplace environment, especially in terms of productivity and general co-worker interaction . It’s best to start at the smallest scale. An example of a small scale positive interaction is when you tell someone they did a good job on the work they have done. At PII, we use an application called Disco to promote these kinds of engagements. That one sentence of acknowledgement can encourage someone to work even harder because they feel appreciated. Something as small as a thumbs up could brighten the day of someone and let them know you see the work they put in and think it is good, providing encouragement. 

However, when multiple positive interactions occur within the same environment, such as a workplace, the encouragement is scaled higher and the entire workplace becomes both happier and more productive. It can start with a simple interaction between two co-workers and then those two people talk to other co-workers. Before you know it, the whole office has a network of positive interactions and the mood of the entire workplace is better. Or you can try to start on a larger scale, and an example of this is if the manager of a company tells their employees about the wins of the week at a meeting. As a result, everyone leaves the meeting happy about the wins of the previous week and motivated to create more wins this week. 

Conclusion 

Organizations should think about how they can foster an environment that allows employees to enter a positive mindset.  In PII, we experimented with positive interaction exercises to promote a positive workplace environment during meetings. Through our research and experiments we concluded that increasing one-on-one interaction and implementing positive encouragement were the most effective methods of increasing episodes of positive interactions, and as a result we saw increased efficiency, team morale, and engagement.

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Written and edited by: Catherine Quinn, Neil McNair Jr., David Gerstenfeld, Dieondra Garner, Raaghav Seth, Jake Lieberstein, and Inesse Hanna