Happiness, engagement and performance

We expect more and more from employees in the 21st century. Driven by technology, changes follow each other faster and the average employee can hardly follow the changes. You could say that in addition to the technological disruptive revolution, a revolution is taking place in terms of people's workplace. We are demanding more and more from employees and that requires smart guidance from leadership, from People Operations (Google) or the Concierge (Klick).

This article has been written in 2015 and I published it in Dutch. To be able to say something about the core traits of successful teams, I publish it now too in English. 

At the aforementioned companies, people are convinced that you have to put employees, talents, at number 1, and that you have to set up your organization accordingly: a people-centered organization (see also Peter Drucker Forum 2018: the human dimension). Of course, you also have to earn money and in this competitive market you will only succeed with healthy and engaged employees who enjoy their work. When you listen to the stories at Google (Work rules, 2015), Facebook (ATD, 2015), Klick (Decoded company, 2014), ASML, Gartner or Menno Lanting, a number of personal resources are of paramount importance, such as:

With regard to "resilient", the term "coping style" is also used, with the definition: The cognitive and behavioral efforts made to master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal demands and conflicts among them (H. vd Vijfeijke, et all, 2013)

Both mental and physical health predict work capacbility and a high work capability is associated with high performance and pleasure in work. Good health is therefore the foundation of a high work capacity; such as adequate exercise, good sleep, no smoking, no overweight, etc. (A. Rongen, A. Burdorf, et all, 2013). 

Research from Gallup found that 70% of the US workforce is not engaged (beware this does not mean that 70% is disengaged). Prof. Schaufeli has done extensive research into the factors that influence engagement and personal resources in the Netherlands. In essence, it means promoting energy sources and good leadership. These two factors are again highly correlated.

With regard to energy sources, Schaufeli assesses the following 4 most important factors, all of which have a great deal to do with the organization of work and culture:

1. Appropriate work 
2. Supervisor appreciation and trust 
3. Varied and challenging work 
4. Learning and develop opportunities Appropriate work scores highest as a determining factor in terms of engagement. 

Appropriate work is about work that matches the strengths and motivations of employees. It is crucial that this is a regular topic of conversation between employee and manager. It is not obvious to all managers to be able and willing to raise this topic. Certainly, when the employee performs well, his or her supervisor will soon have a tendency to hide his/her head in the sand. Other things quickly seem more urgent. And sometimes a supervisor thinks he cannot do anything else, because he or she does not see other options, does not want to lose that person and/or has no other work at hand. The (agile) coach might have an important role to play in the conversation and to look for perspectives together.

Varied or challenging work is another important factor, see also the book Multipliers by Liz Wiseman. This should be much more a topic for discussion between manager and employee; what could be challenging work and how to organize the work accordingly. By the way, it will not always be easy to find something challenging.

Appreciation and trust have everything to do with culture. Valuing or giving feedback is basically simple and it is done far too little, despite all those books that have been written about the learning organization. You cannot solve this with short workshops on (performance) feedback and appreciation. What could you do, so that people naturally express more appreciation to each other; how do you get it in people's genes?

Happiness first 
Engaged, enthusiastic, positive or "happy" employees is the focus. I think the research by Shawn Achor (Harvard) is a nice addition to engagement. He states that it is about "Happiness" and then the successes come naturally. And well, who doesn't want to be happy?

With a positive attitude, he argues on the basis of research:

• Are people 35% more productive; 
• A seller sells 37% more; 
• People suffer much less from stress; Etc. 

He argues that 75% of the successes are determined by optimism, social support and / or people view stress as a challenge and only 25% by IQ. He also argues that positive people are more creative, have a lot more energy and operate smarter.

Shawn's videos are a feast for your eyes; nice to see someone showing what he preaches. According to Shawn, it is possible to adopt new mental habits and thereby become a better employee or manager. He translates scientific results into daily life and gives seven practical advice / principles as a foundation for more success and performance (see his book: The happiness advantage):

1. Happiness lead 
2. Mindset: lever and the pivot point 
3. Tetris effect: make sure you step out of negative automatisms and patterns. 
4. Falling up: use disappointing events as a positive experience 
5. Zorro circle: start small, organize your success, make sure you control that small change, and then slowly expand your circle. 
6. 20 second rule: organize your environment in such a way that you actually do intentions or intended new behavior. Make it easy for yourself 
7. Social environment: ask your immediate environment to support you. 

The first three points are about the mindset and you can train yourself in a more positive way of living and working; "Rewire your brain". 90% of "happiness" is determined by how your brain processes all information. Shawn states that it is possible to look at the world with a different lens and that you can practice and learn that.

He gives the following examples:

• 3 activities of being kind to others; express appreciation; 
• 3 gratitude actions - describe 3 things that you are grateful for and / or that you thank others for something; 
• record positive experiences (at least 1 per day); 
• influenced positivity in your environment; 
• exercise sufficiently; 
• meditate or do breathing exercises; 
• strengthen your strengths; 
• make sure you sleep well (I add). 

The interesting thing about these methods is that people can do this themselves and are not dependent on contributions from others. Of course, a motivating culture is very helpful and it is very useful when top management speaks out for a learning positive culture and acts accordingly.

Learning, happiness and performance 
In line with Shawn, you will connect the organization of the work or the "work rules as Google calls it" more with "happiness" and engagement. As an organization you fully invest in the 4 energy sources of Schaufeli and you work together on positivity. In addition, L&D supports the line to give substance to this. All of this stands or falls again with leadership and as an organization you will have to ensure that they are equipped for this, so that team members can and may get to work together. And you do that step by step, in collaboration with a smart communication department and not with large uplifting learning trajectories. Small changes can act as leverage, Google also speaks of "nudges".

What appeals to me at Shawn is that he takes a practical approach and therefore also appeals to people who have less spirituality or mindfulness. Instead of talking about meditation, you can also talk about short breathing exercises (such as the iceman). Does more choice for happiness mean less attention for performance? Results and success are of paramount importance to the companies mentioned. In all these companies, the information systems are also set up in such a way that the organization and especially people themselves receive real-time information about their results and their performance. You could argue that performance is so embedded in the genes of employees that there is free time to fully facilitate engagement, happiness and pleasure. The words "performance support" will be seen in a slightly different light; everything is more focused to optimally support employees; that it is about realizing engagement and happiness. ‘Happiness’ and performance support

Sensitivity and equal interaction are number 1 in high-performing teams

Google is often cited as a shining example for the organization of work in the 21st century. For a long time, Google thought that creating successful teams means putting the best people together. Google wondered if this assumption was correct. In 2012, Google launched the Aristotle project to find out which factors underlie effective and successful teams. It is no surprise that Google used her very rich data environment for this. In a previous blog I described Alex Pentland's Social physics, an approach that uses big data that is collected using sociometric devices. Pentland has visited Google several times to talk about his insights, and Google's research confirms Pentland's insights. In November 2015, project leader Julia Rozovsky from Google published the results and Charles Duhigg wrote an article in February 2016 about the research in the New York Times.

This article has been written in March 2016 and I published it in Dutch. To be able to say something about the core traits of successful teams, I publish it now too in English.

'Who' is not relevant to excel 
The research showed that a mix of personality, skills or background does not make a significant difference in team performance. The "who" side apparently doesn't really matter; in a knowledge-intensive organization, it is apparently not crucial to coordinate all kinds of competence or job profiles. The importance of the Belbin team role test is for example also not that great.

2 behaviours matter
The Google researchers discovered that two behaviours matter. The first point concerns equality of contribution to work and team discussions; that every team member has the opportunity to speak out on a daily basis and that there are not certain people who dominate the conversations. This was exactly what Pentland had discovered. To which Pentland adds that interaction frequency also matters; you will not get there with quiet open office space, it has to buzz (Sheridan, 2013).

To emphasize the relevance of symmetric communication patterns, you might observe that I visualize teams in all my articles in this way.

The second point is about a high degree of social sensitivity; in other words, are team members able to intuitively sense how the other team members feel and they make that negotiable. They are skilled at observing the non-verbal communication of the other and hearing what someone is saying. Both aspects are about psychological safety and group culture and it is by far the most important of the 5 dynamics for excellent teams, see listed below. People are reluctant to show behaviour when it could have a negative influence on how others see them in terms of person, competence and awareness, and you shouldn't have that reluctance right now. Professor Amy Edmondson defines this dynamic as a shared belief among team members that the team is a safe place to take interpersonal risks. (in 2019 Amy published a fantastic book about the fearless organization). It is a feeling of trust and respect that team members do not embarrass, reject or punish a team member when he or she takes the floor. If attention to each other is so important, then according to Google you should not make an artificial distinction between private and work; it is important that there is also room to share things that play privately, the pleasant things and also the emotionally more difficult aspects of life.

In a team with high psychological safety, employees will be less likely to leave, they see more opportunities to harness the power of ideas and suggestions from their teammates, they generate more income and they are twice as effective, according to their managers.

The researchers discovered that it is important how team members work together, communicate with each other, structure their own work and how they see each other's contribution. The following 5 dynamics are characteristic of successful teams at Google:

Dynamic
1. Psychological safety	In our team we can take interpersonal risks, without feelings of uncertainty and without being embarrassed
2. Dependency	We can count on each other to deliver high-quality work on time
3. Structure and clarity	Goals, roles and plans are clear
4. Meaning of work	Work is personally important for all team members
5. Impact of work	Team members experience that their work really matters and brings about change.

What strikes me is that structure and clarity (goals, roles and plans) is only 1 of the dynamics and not the most important. At Google, they use a light performance variant: the OKR (objectives and key results) and in a data-driven organization, everyone's dashboard of course shows real-live how the projects are doing, transparent for those who want to see it. It seems that the structure is a precondition to excel; it is the license-to-work and not the license-to-excel. Performance support is important but it is not the key to success and excellence!

Google has developed a simple tool to give teams feedback how they score on these 5 dynamics. The conversation about the scores was experienced as valuable, as the tool puts the dynamics in the spotlight. I think project leader Rozovsky correctly states that you should not underestimate the value of a shared platform and language.

In short; as leaders and the organization, ensure the conditions and focus as a team on a safe, inspiring and dynamic learning and interaction climate within the team. Based on this solid foundation, team members can effectively interact with the external environment and make that resonate with the team process.

This requires that the CEO and the Management team arrange the conditions, to position the teams and to promote a learning and interaction climate in and between teams wherever it can. It means smart support for team leaders, coaching of managers and team leaders and a step-by-step process. And please do not start a whole circus of workshops and training sessions again; preferably no team coaching, it is the team leader and team members' turn. And help people after each external intervention how to apply and implement things in terms of behaviour; that is not rocket science, but it is often necessary. Focus on the learning abilities,

By paying attention to each other and to the environment, both with mindfulness, team members can build a so-called collective meaning structure with each other. And that is more than the sum of the members and this will pay off twice and for all! Collective learning can only be built in the 'heat' of the work and therefore in the context of the team (Weick, 1993), in the appreciation of all interactions between team members

Face-2-face and telephone conversations are the most determining for team performance, thank you big data

I am fascinated by the use of sensors, which can generate all kinds of data, so that people can do their work better and with more pleasure. In the last years, one new sensor is launched after the other; you may have heard of the smart thermostat Nest, the smartwatch, etc. The word big data falls on and off. The term human analytics is increasingly mentioned in relation to HR or work. An appealing example is the approach of the authors in the book: The Decoded company; know your talent better than you know your customers! They talk about data like 'the sixth sense'; data for the benefit of the employee so that their talents can come into their own even more.

From sensing and interpreting data it seems a logical step to sense-making in other words: learning. In relation to behaviour and therefore also to performance, "sensing" is important in the interaction with others. In behavioural training you see that at a given moment participants are keen on the interaction with another person and have a keen eye / antenna about their own behaviour. You often see that sharpness in the work environment quickly disappears and people fall back into their old behaviour. Are there perhaps sensors that can help people, managers and companies in the workplace to remain sensitive about their interaction with others and also about themselves?

This article has been written in January 2015 and I published it in Dutch. To be able to say something about the core traits of successful teams, I now also publish it in English.

My eyes fell on Alex Pentland's book: Social Physics, how good ideas spread (2014). Alex is the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship program and he is co-leader of the World economic Forum Big Data. He leads a group of excellent top researchers. Alex and his team use big data to show interaction patterns between people.

Current social science so far had to draw conclusions based on laboratory analyses or through questionnaires and that feels artificial. The predictive value of testing, for example, is simply not high. In the meantime, the science of social psychology does not have a good reputation, see the Stapel affair. The conventional approaches do not take into account the complexity of normal life, they lack details with whom we interact and how we interact with them. Contact between people consists of millions of small transactions. New sensors with big data give us the opportunity to better view society in all its complexity with all its micro patterns, it offers insight into the many networks of person-to-person interactions. This flow of information is important to understand the diffusion and generation of new ideas and how they are a driving force in behavioural change and innovation. 

Social physics tries to understand how the ideas and information flow results in changes in behaviour and action; how human behaviour is driven by the exchange of ideas - how people work together to discover, select, learn and coordinate their actions. The sensors record everything during normal work; the work has thus become a "living laboratory". The engine that drives social physics is big data; huge amounts of data are increasingly available on many aspects of our lives. Because of the increased computer power, we can do calculations based on millions of data.

How is measured? 
Alex uses sociometric badges; it is a small box that you wear around your neck. The badge collects data and analyses social behaviour. It contains a location sensor, captures body language, determines who is close by and records when the person himself and another person speaks. The badge does not record what is being said. It is still a small box; I can well imagine that there might be a chip on your company ID card (note that privacy is nowadays much an issue).

The badge can also:

• make engagement and exploration transparent over time; 
• measure personal energy level; 
• measure the degree of extraversion and empathy through body language and the degree of "flow". 

 The data can then be combined with:

• mobile phone data (their "funf" system); 
• credit card statements; 
• logs from social media etc. 

When you make the interaction patterns visible, you can make remarkable observations, as Pentland shows at a German bank:

It is striking, for example, that managers have hardly any face-to-face contact with sales and customer services. Product development has hardly any face-to-face contact with customer service and with sales.

2 social physics concepts 
Social physics has 2 important concepts:

• Strengthen ideas flow within networks (creativity), with a subdivision into: 

          * exploration (finding new ideas and strategies with diverse network)

          * engagement (interact with each other and coordinate behaviour).

• Social learning: how new ideas become habits and how learning can be accelerated and shaped, among other things through social pressure. 

Pentland defines the ideas flow as the transfer of behaviours and beliefs into a social network through social learning and social pressure. The researchers measure the flow of ideas as the probability that a person's behaviour will change when a new idea appears in the network of those people. He also makes the comparison with the spread of flu. 

The most valuable flow of ideas within an organization are face-to-face and telephone conversations. This is not surprising in itself, but perhaps it is in the light of the fact that employees are increasingly interacting with each other via the computer screen. MIT, for example, visualized the interaction patterns at call centres and came up with the advice to facilitate more face-to-face conversations and showed that this significantly increases productivity. 

It is important that people have insight into the behaviour of others, both directly and indirectly. You should therefore see Yahoo's measure to limit working from home in this light. The more people want to learn from a certain peer group, the more they want to belong and are close to them. It is the flow of ideas within a community that generates knowledge and makes you successful. 

Exploration 

MIT concludes that the best ideas come from careful and continuous exploration of others. The most creative people with a lot of insights are "explorers." Working groups that generate a high amount of ideas from outside the working group seem to be the most innovative. His research shows that these people invest a lot of time in meeting new people with different ideas and they do not naturally look for the best people or best ideas. They are open to people with different and different ideas and ideas, especially outside their own team. 

The most productive people constantly develop a new story and then test it countless times; they add new ideas to the story and try them out on everyone. For them, sculpting ideas is a game. In addition, they are very curious about the successes and failures of others and ask questions about what has played a role in them. They make their decisions based on all those experiences. 

Alex distinguishes 3 important factors for exploration: 

1. Social learning, learning from others (modelling and see also Bandura); 
2. Promote diversity of people and perspectives; 
3. Meeting opponents; they have independent information. 

A so-called "star" network is good for exploration and a smaller richly connected network (team) is best for engagement, idea generation and behavioural change. 

Engagement 

Pentland defines "engagement" as to learn from each other (social learning), often within a working group (peer group). This leads to the development of behavioural norms and social pressure to strengthen these norms. According to Pentland, there is increasing evidence that the power of engagement is vital for promoting collaborative behaviour. Even if intimately connected people cannot see each other, they have a higher performance with a shared rhythm, body language, speech and pitch. It appears that employees with the most engagement have the least difficulty in adapting new interaction patterns. 

When people see that many other people adopt new behaviour, they will often follow those others quickly, we are a bit a herd of animals ... When someone receives 3-4 invitations to participate in a network, the person will also participate quickly going to do. And that certainly applies when their trusted warm network contacts do the same. When the people you are talking to also talk to each other, you are "in". Moreover, social or peer pressure is one of the most effective mechanisms for promoting collaboration. 

The number of direct interactions that people have with their "buddies" was an excellent predictor of how their behaviour would change. This also applies to trust in each other. Changing behaviour was most effective when it strengthened social relationships. 

Given the importance of interactions, it is important to offer smart support through small, subtle incentives (triggers), so that people connect more with others. The most effective network influencing actions should be targeted at those people who have the strongest social ties and with the most interactions with others. According to Alex, social network promoting actions are almost 4 times as efficient as a traditional individual reward market approach. 

The most important factor in predicting group intelligence is the degree of equality in terms of conversation contribution. This means that you have to contain dominant speakers. In addition, the degree of social intelligence is important, something that women are often just a bit better at, often it appears that teams with more women do better ...

Engagement asks:

• Interaction; 
• Collaboration; 
• Trust, take care of building trust 

The pitfall of engagement in one's own team or network is the so-called echo-effect; not being open enough to outside sounds with the result that people only talk to each other. 

Performance 

Alex Pentland found in research that the interaction patterns between people determined almost 50% of the performance variation between high and low performing groups. The degree of face-to-face engagement (ideas flow within a group) has a huge impact on productivity. Individual intelligence, personality and skill, were much less significant than the pattern of ideas flow. This does not apply in situations with a lot of stress and enormous work pressure. 

Interaction characteristics of high performing groups were: 

• Many briefly formulated ideas; 
• Lots of interaction and overlapping cycles; 
• A high diversity of ideas. 

The pattern of ideas flow can be influenced by leadership. Managers should pay less attention to the individual talent approach and focus more on managing organizations and stimulating much interaction between team members. The social style of managers is then a good predictor of how well their team will perform. You could call a leader who knows how to properly influence interactions in a team a charismatic connector. Charismatic connectors also have a lot of influence on the interaction between teams (exploration). 

A note to this story is that social networking is less helpful in solving more complex problems that require reflection (Lyad Rahwan, www.socialphysics.org). 

Online Collaboration 

As far as digital networks are concerned, Pentland believes that there is still work to be done to make them effective in business. As a follow-up to studies in collaboration with MIT, Wooley and Malone (2015) investigated whether groups that collaborate online showed collective intelligence development and whether social capacity would also be important when people shop put in a platform. Again, it turned out that teams worked smarter with team members who communicated a lot, with equal participation and who had a high degree of emotion-interpreting reading skills. 

Make interaction patterns visible 

To get a good idea flow, you will first have to make people aware of their interaction patterns. Visual feedback of the interaction pattern is a useful tool to improve interaction. An app. developed by MIT can, for example, reflect to what extent the interaction pattern in a team is balanced. 

Also, with mindful observations you might become quickly aware of the interaction patterns and then a tool is not necessary. Especially the agile coach should be able to do that.

Finally 

It comes down practically to the following: encourage employees to come together: drink coffee, lunch, go for a walk at 3 p.m., ... In short: make sure that we talk a lot with each other. 

The layout of the workspace is therefore important. In my opinion, that does not automatically mean that you have to choose for an open space office; people must be able to concentrate ... ... and headphones do not promote the mutual communication that matters.  

So, organize regularly face-2-face formal meetings (rituals) and informal encounters and ensure that the exchange delivers as much as possible within as little time as possible. Guidance from an agile coach is then handy. 

Supervise or coach leaders how they can influence and strengthen the level of exploration and engagement within their team, in terms of communication and equal participation in conversations.