4
Enable Thriving at Work
Reflect on a time when you felt most alive at work. What were you doing? Why does the experience stand out? More than likely, it was an experience marked not only by vitality but also by learning and growth—what we term “thriving at work.” People experience growth and momentum marked by a sense of vitality while thriving at work; it is literally a feeling of energy, passion, and excitement—a spark.1 In this chapter, we draw on the growing body of evidence to demonstrate why individuals and organizations should care about thriving. We also highlight strategies for individuals and leaders to enable more thriving at work.
Why Care? The Value of Thriving at Work
Organizations seek thriving employees. They report less burnout,2 because the way in which they work generates, rather than depletes, resources.3 In a thriving state, people exhibit better health, including fewer days of missed work and fewer visits to the doctor.4 When people are thriving at work, they report more job satisfaction and organizational commitment.5 Thriving individuals are apt to have a learning orientation—experimenting with new ideas to propel their own learning. Thriving employees take initiative in developing their careers. Their supervisors rate them as high performers. And thriving employees exhibit more innovative work behavior, generating creative ideas, championing new ideas, and seeking out new ways of working.
Why do thriving employees achieve such positive outcomes? The vitality and learning dimensions suggest several mechanisms. First, the strong sense of feeling energized helps employees have the capacity to initiate proactive behaviors and persist amid daily challenges without burning out.6 Second, the learning dimension helps individuals see that they are making progress and on a positive trajectory. They feel more confident that they will achieve positive outcomes. Third, the original thriving framework suggests these individuals do not view their work environment to be determined by external forces. Instead, they believe in cocreating their work environment to nurture more thriving. Through the process of cocreation, thriving employees create resources, including meaning, positive affect, high-quality connections, and knowledge, to enable continued thriving over time.7 Together, these mechanisms provide the ingredients for sustained performance.
What Can I Do to Enhance My Own Thriving?
We offer four individual strategies to enable thriving at work. They are behavioral strategies anyone can engage in to kickstart their own thriving. Each of these strategies develops one of the previously mentioned key resources that are cocreated by thriving employees. Although the four strategies can be practiced in a piecemeal fashion, they are more potent if undertaken together.
Strategy 1: Craft Your Work to Be More Meaningful
Research suggests meaning is a key renewable resource to fuel thriving.8 Having meaning energizes by creating purpose in one’s work life, and with meaning, people care about their work.9 A study of social service employees found those who reported more meaning in their work experienced more thriving.10 Meaning boosts thriving by increasing focus, such as in getting work done, and in exploration behaviors, such as trying new things. In a study of high-tech workers, those who created more meaning in their work through reflection on how they make a difference experienced more vitality—one of the two dimensions of thriving at work.11 Job crafting, a work redesign that individuals engage in to make work more fulfilling, may be a tool to generate more meaning at work (see Wrzesniewski, “Engage in Job Crafting,” this volume).
Strategy 2: Look for Opportunities to Innovate
Knowledge is a second resource that fuels thriving. It builds feelings of competence, enabling vitality and learning. In that same study of high-tech workers, those who created opportunities for gaining new knowledge in their work, through setting goals or seeking feedback, possessed more vitality. The power of this strategy is further supported by self-determination theory, which articulates how feelings of competence enable vitality and growth at work.12 “Mindful engagement” theory adds insight into how experimentation with new behaviors paired with periods of reflection ensures learning from those experiences.13
Strategy 3: Invest in Relationships That Energize
Relationships are a third resource that fuel thriving. Positive connections at work aid motivation, engagement, and well-being. Social networks also enable learning, as they are the conduits for harnessing information and knowledge, resulting in thriving and performance. High-quality relationships are energizing (see Dutton, “Build High-Quality Connections,” this volume). High-tech workers who invested in their relationships by making a colleague happy or showing gratitude experienced greater vitality. De-energizing relationships, on the other hand, take a tremendous toll on people. They have four times the negative effect as energizing relationships.14 To increase thriving, be mindful of building high-quality relationships with energizers, and rejuvenating or disconnecting from de-energizing relationships.
Strategy 4: Take Care of Your Health through Energy Management
Positive affect is a fourth resource which can be increased through energy management.15 These strategies draw on robust research that demonstrates how exercise and movement (cardiovascular and strength training), nutrition (balanced combinations of carbohydrates, proteins, and fat), and sleep (seven to eight hours per night) enhance positive moods during the workday. Our research also demonstrates the importance of these strategies for individuals who are seeking recovery when fatigued. The energy audit is one tool individuals can use to take a pulse on their energy and develop strategies for sustaining energy.16
What Practices Can My Organization Introduce to Enable Employees to Thrive?
In the previous section, we identified individual strategies for enhancing your own performance. In this section, we speak to the organizational practices that enable a more thriving workforce. Having a thriving workforce is proven to bring many benefits to an organization and its employees. But how does an organization integrate practices that enable its workforce to thrive more? Although potentially more complex to implement because they involve systems, these practices have incredible potential to transform your organization into a thriving enterprise. We are also happy to report that, for the most part, they have little financial cost to implement. However, they require discipline and are most potent when implemented in tandem to reinforce each other.
Practice 1: Sharing Information
People have more capacity to thrive when they understand how their work fits with the organization’s mission and strategy. This practice builds feelings of competence, which have been shown to increase feelings of vitality and growth. Although leaders can play a valuable role highlighting meaningful employee work, research shows customers are even more effective at igniting thriving by serving as proof of the impact of their work. For instance, patients who benefitted from Medtronic’s health-care devices visit the organization’s quarterly meetings to share their appreciation (see Grant, “Outsource Inspiration,” this volume). Seeing how their role contributes to the greater whole, employees are energized. When employees have access to more information about where the organization is going in the future and about business plans or strategy, competitors, and industry, they develop stronger feelings of thriving in their work. The new knowledge energizes employees with a sense that they are learning, growing, and developing.
Practice 2: Providing Decision-Making Discretion
Employees are more likely to thrive when empowered to make decisions that affect their work. This sense of autonomy at work fuels vitality and growth. Decision making works in conjunction with broad information sharing. At Alaska Airlines’ road show, where the top leadership team visited sites sharing their company’s strategy and mission, employees developed their empowerment toolkit. Armed with greater understanding of the big picture, employees were granted control over how to achieve company goals, such as resolving customer issues in a proactive and timely manner. This practice is consistent with principles of high-involvement management, where employees have a voice in the workings of the organization and are signaled that they are valuable to the organization. Providing discretion not only sparks energy when employees feel valued for their ideas, but also taps into learning because employees are not told what to do and how to do it. Instead, they are encouraged to figure out the best way to get the job done. The challenge comes when empowerment leads to mistakes. Rather than pull back on empowerment after a mistake, the leader must look for the learning in the experience to garner thriving. This is crucial, as it is very difficult to take initiative when feeling threatened. A leader who frames mistakes as knowledge to be used for learning and improvement will promote thriving and build a more trusting, safe environment for employees to experiment, take risks, and innovate.
Practice 3: Minimizing Incivility
Incivility, such as rude and disrespectful behaviors of co-workers or customers who put others down or demean people for mistakes, impedes thriving. Not tolerating incivility builds feelings of belongingness, which have been shown to increase feelings of vitality and growth. Those who experience incivility find their energy quickly depleted. Fear and anger, often engendered by the experience of incivility, also stops the learning process because negative emotions constrain cognitions and behaviors. In contrast, trust and connectivity create a nurturing environment that enables thriving. Leaders need to set norms about what behaviors are acceptable and call out uncivil behaviors. Danny Meyers, owner of twenty-seven New York City–based restaurants, preaches civility and tolerates nothing less. Bad behavior, even from an exceptional chef, must be corrected quickly. If not, the chef will be gone. Meyers is convinced customers can taste incivility.17 Our research shows that incivility not only hurts employees, but also influences customers and their willingness to do business with your organization. Businesses we have analyzed have learned the hard way that it simply does not pay to harbor uncivil employees, even if they are rainmakers or star performers.18
Practice 4: Offering Performance Feedback
Feedback—especially two-way, open, frequent, and guided communication—creates opportunities for learning. This practice builds feelings of competence and, in turn, thriving because feedback helps people know where they stand in terms of their skills, competencies, and performance. Positive feedback energizes employees to seek their full potential. Even constructive feedback, when provided in a supportive way (rather than one that beckons feelings of incivility), garners an interest in learning how to improve. The best organizations encourage employees to seek out feedback rather than to wait for it.19
Putting It All Together
Thriving at work can come in many forms, and they are all important. You can enable your own thriving as an individual and also empower others as a leader. This chapter provides a definition of thriving at work and why it is important. It also describes what you can do as an individual and as a leader to enable more thriving at work. Thriving individuals not only have more positive individual outcomes, but they also help their organizations better achieve their goals. Individuals can change their own behavior to craft more meaning, seek out learning opportunities, invest in high-quality connections, and manage energy. But the most impactful seed is to craft organizational practices building autonomy, competence, and belongingness. These practices include providing decision-making discretion, sharing information broadly, minimizing incidents of incivility, and offering performance feedback. We encourage you to begin or to strengthen your journey to build a thriving organization.
A COMPANY THAT EPITOMIZES THRIVING
Zingerman’s Community of Businesses
Zingerman’s, a world-famous community of businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, enables employee thriving at work. Founders Ari Weinzweig and Paul Saginaw had a vision to make a positive difference to customers and the community, but also build a great place to work. They crafted a wide range of strategies, even going so far as to create their own training company, to hold them accountable for living out their mission. A visit to any Zingerman’s business clearly shows employees are thriving at work. This living policy of employee thriving has served all well. Zingerman’s revenue has been growing, achieving $45 million in 2012.20 The company’s leaders credit the thriving environment they have created as a key factor in their success.
Organizational Practices That Enable Thriving
Wayne Baker has written several cases on Zingerman’s. In this sidebar we highlight some of the practices that contribute to their success. Information is shared. Weinzweig and Saginaw adopted the principles of open-book management. They hold regular “huddles,” which are weekly gatherings around a whiteboard at which teams track results. They “keep score” and forecast the next week’s numbers. Not only do the team members track financial performance, but they also keep a pulse on service, food quality, and check averages. They also track “fun,” which could mean anything from weekly contests to raise customer satisfaction or generate employees’ ideas for innovation. This information transparency helps motivate employees to continually improve.
Armed with this information, Weinzweig and Saginaw believe employees will make better decisions. Zingerman’s provides employees with decision-making discretion. They are encouraged to share ideas with top leaders and are expected to be proactive in interactions with customers, especially in the rare need for service recovery. Zingerman’s is structured to be a flexible hierarchy, allowing employees to learn and to grow continually.
Another core value is to minimize episodes of incivility, stressing that leaders need to treat employees in the same way they expect customers to be treated. Employing principles of servant leadership, they have built a civil environment where leaders set the tone and serve as role models. Managers are taught how to deal with employee issues so that conflict is resolved. At the end of each meeting, managers and others take time to express appreciation to employees. Employees are encouraged to keep their own pulse and their group’s energy by doing regular energy assessments.
Finally, Zingerman’s provides feedback to enable employee thriving. Examples include open-book management and the creation of various “mini games,” which are short-term incentive plans involving goals, scorecards, and rewards to fix a problem or capitalize on an opportunity. For example, Zingerman’s Roadhouse created the “greeter game” to track how long it takes for customers to be welcomed. Other Zingerman’s businesses started similar games to improve delivery time, reduce knife injuries in the bakery (which would lower insurance costs), and keep kitchens cleaner. These games help to highlight issues and motivate employees to improve scores. Overall, they have increased frontline employees’ learning and energy.
TWEETS
Thriving matters because people feel like they are energized and growing at the same time. It helps people stay at the edge of their game.
To enable thriving at work, encourage employees to cocreate the work environments to be more meaningful and more healthy by building positive relationships.
Leaders can create a more thriving work environment by sharing decision making, information, and feedback throughout the organization.