If
you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy,
practice compassion. --Dalai Lama
|
Why
Compassion in Business Makes Sense
--by Emma
Seppala, syndicated from Greater
Good, Nov 25, 2013
Managers
often mistakenly think that putting pressure on employees will increase
performance. What it does increase is stress—and research has shown that high
levels of stress carry a number of costs to employers and employees
alike.
Stress
brings high health care and turnover costs. In a study of employees from various
organizations, health care expenditures for employees with high levels of stress
were 46
percent greater than at similar organizations without high levels of
stress. In particular, workplace stress has been linked to
coronary heart disease in retrospective (observing past patterns) and
prospective (predicting future patterns) studies. Then there’s the impact on
turnover: 52
percent of employees report that workplace stress has led them to
look for a new job, decline a promotion, or leave a job.
But
there’s a different way. A new field of research is suggesting that when
organizations promote an ethic of compassion rather
than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an
improved bottom line.
Consider
the important—but often overlooked—issue of workplace culture. Whereas a lack
of bonding
within the workplace has been shown to increase psychological
distress, positive
social interactions
at work have been shown to boost employee health—for example, by lowering heart
rate and blood pressure, and by strengthening the immune
system.
Happy
employees also make for a more congenial workplace and improved customer
service. Employees in positive
moods are more willing to help peers and to provide customer service
on their own accord. What’s more, compassionate, friendly, and supportive
co-workers tend to build higher-quality
relationships with others at work. In doing so, they boost
coworkers’ productivity levels and increase coworkers’ feeling of social
connection, as well as their commitment to
the workplace and their levels of engagement
with their job. Given the costs of health care, employee turnover,
and poor customer service, we can understand how compassion might very well have
a positive impact not only on employee health and well-being but also on the
overall financial success of a workplace.
So why
does compassion provide such a boost to employee well-being? One reason may be
its impact on social connection. Research by Ed
Diener and Martin Seligman suggests that connecting with others in a
meaningful way helps us enjoy better mental and physical health and speeds up recovery
from disease; research by Stephanie
Brown at Stonybrook University has shown that it may even lengthen
our life.
Despite
this research, managers may shy away from compassion for fear of appearing weak.
Yet history is filed with leaders who were highly compassionate and very
powerful—Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few.
They were such strong and inspiring leaders that people would drop everything to
follow them. Wouldn’t any manager wish for that kind of loyalty and
commitment?
Support
for this view comes from research by Jonathan
Haidt at New York University. His research shows that seeing someone
help another person creates a heightened state of well-being that he calls “elevation.”
Not only do we feel elevation when we watch a compassionate act, but we are then
more likely to act with compassion ourselves.
When
Haidt and his colleagues applied
his research to a business setting, he found that when leaders were
fair and self-sacrificing, their employees would experience elevation. As a
consequence, they felt more loyal and committed and were more likely to act in a
helpful and friendly way with other employees for no particular reason. In other
words, if a manager is service-oriented and ethical, he is more likely to make
his employees follow suit and to increase their commitment to him or
her.
Elevation
may even be a driving force behind creating a culture of compassion and
kindness, whether in a workplace or in society at large. Social scientists James
Fowler of UC San Diego and Nicolas Christakis of Harvard have demonstrated
that helping is contagious: Acts of generosity, compassion, and
kindness beget more generosity in a chain reaction of goodness. This is how
culture is formed. Isn’t that the kind of workplace culture you would want to
work in or lead?
Research
on compassion is setting a new tone for the workplace and management culture.
But this field is still new. Scientists are exploring the most effective ways to
foster compassion in the workplace, and to help these best practices spread
across organizations.
Doing
that successfully will require a robust dialogue between the research world and
the business world. This is the kind of dialogue we are trying to promote at the
Compassion and Business Conference on April 30 at Stanford University, hosted by
the Center
for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), of which
I am the associate director.
Be
The Change:
Think
of a situation in which you normally use pressure to reach another person.
Experiment with using compassion instead.
This
article originally appeared in Greater Good,
the online magazine of UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. Emma Seppala, Ph.D., is
the associate director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism
Research and Education (CCARE) at
Stanford University. Her areas of expertise are health psychology, well-being,
and resilience.
