COMPASSION ACROSS CUBICLES
Jill Suttie
FIVE-FOOT TALL PANELS divide the physician’s billing department into a maze of cubicles at Foote Hospital, in Jackson, Michigan. Each cubicle contains one of the 39 employees who make up the billing office staff. Most of the employees are women, many are single mothers, and they spend each day on the phone trying to collect unpaid debts owed to the hospital. The work is repetitive and may seem uninspiring. Yet the hospital staff widely considers this department one of the best places to work at Foote.
“Our department is special,” said Sarah Boik, head of the billing unit. “People care about each other here.”
Deb LeJeune agrees. LeJeune had been on Boik’s staff for only five months when her husband needed a kidney transplant. She said she was worried and distracted in the days leading up to his operation and couldn’t concentrate at work. She needed to take six weeks off without pay to care for her husband, a financial strain she wasn’t sure she could handle. When her coworkers learned of her situation, they pitched in to make her a basket full of puzzles, books, and snacks she could take to the hospital, took up a collection to help her make her house payments, gave her gas cards to use for the drives back and forth from the hospital, and visited her at home just to check in on her.
“It was amazing!” said LeJeune. “I couldn’t have gotten through without their support. They are like family to me.”
These days, it’s rare to find people who consider their workplace “special” and feel close to their coworkers, let alone call them “family.” Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior at Carnegie Mellon University, traces that fact to a steady deterioration in employer-employee relationships that began in the 1980s, when changes in technology, globalization, and a volatile stock market pushed major manufacturers to lay off large numbers of employees. Other organizations followed suit, and soon managers were hiring and firing their workers at will. “The downsizing surge in the ’80s left employees feeling betrayed,” said Rousseau. “Employees no longer felt they could trust their employer to provide for them, so they had less attachment and loyalty toward their places of work.” Rousseau’s statements are borne out by statistics from a recent Gallup poll, which found that 59 percent of American workers are disengaged from work—putting in their time, but with no energy or passion for it—while another 14 percent are actively disengaged, acting out their unhappiness at work and undermining coworkers.
But a growing number of researchers, mainly at business schools across the country, are working to determine what’s behind anomalies like the Foote billing department, where ennui and malaise are displaced by excitement and compassion. This movement, called positive organizational scholarship, or POS, breaks with traditional business research. Instead of analyzing organizational failures, POS looks for examples of “positive deviance”—cases in which organizations successfully cultivate inspiration and productivity among workers—and then tries to figure out what makes these groups tick, so that others might emulate them. “We’re a combination of positive psychology, sociology, and anthropology,” said Jane Dutton, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Michigan and a leader in the POS movement. “POS seeks to cultivate hope and a sense of possibility that people don’t always know is there.”
Over the last six years, Dutton and her colleagues have studied an array of organizational settings, including hospitals, universities, and businesses like Newsweek, Reuters, Macy’s, and Cisco Systems, using a combination of surveys, structured interviews, and observation to learn how organizations respond to employees experiencing personal difficulty. Their studies yielded some stories of compassion, where distressed workers received cards, flowers, financial help, emotional support, or time off from work; in other cases, workers complained of receiving little sympathy or help. “We found that employees who’d experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their coworkers, and the organization in a more positive light,” said Dutton. “Statistically, they demonstrated more positive emotions, such as joy and contentment, and more commitment toward the organization.” Interestingly, she added, these results held regardless of whether employees received compassion directly or merely witnessed it.
Dutton sees compassion as a natural response of people witnessing others in pain or distress—something we are hardwired to do. The problem with bringing compassion into the workplace, she explains, is that people don’t know what’s acceptable to express in that setting. Many workers assume that they are supposed to check their personal problems at the door when they enter the office. “Ever since organizations began moving toward more bureaucracy and measuring success by reliability and efficiency, the relational aspects of work have been de-emphasized,” said Dutton. But when stress at home inevitably spills into the workplace, Dutton added, it can contribute to lost productivity and higher health care costs, and compassion becomes a vital response. “If compassion heals, as our research suggests, then people will be able to get back to work more quickly, to bounce back from life’s setbacks,” she said. “This has to be of interest to employers.”
Thomas Wright, a researcher in the University of Nevada’s managerial sciences department, agrees that managers would do well to pay more attention to the mental health of their employees. In several studies, Wright has found that psychological well-being accounted for 10 to 25 percent of an employee’s job performance and was predictive of positive employee evaluations up to five years in the future. “Organizations that are able and willing to foster a psychologically well workforce and work environment are at a distinct competitive advantage,” said Wright. “Managers should take note.”
Apparently, some are. At Cisco Systems, a California company that creates technologies for the Internet, whenever an employee suffered a significant loss, such as a death in the family, CEO John Chambers made it a policy to contact that employee within 48 hours to offer his condolences and help. His example gave others within the organization a green light to act compassionately toward their coworkers, and employees consistently rate the company as one of the best places to work in the country. “When an organization’s capacity for compassion comes from the top, it can result in a kind of compassion contagion that sweeps the whole organization,” said Dutton.
Of course, not all organizations have charismatic leaders to serve as compassionate role models, but that’s not necessarily an obstacle to building a compassionate workplace. According to Monica Worline, a professor of organization and management at Emory University and a POS scholar, overt displays of compassion usually come from coworkers, not management. But through in-depth case studies of several organizations, she has found that organizations that implicitly encourage positive contact among employees, through regular meetings or by providing spaces for employees to gather together informally tend to have higher levels of compassion. Frequent interaction gives workers more opportunities to notice when someone needs help and to offer it; when workers share news and ideas, it helps foster empathy between them. “An organization which has high-quality connections between people will have much more fertile ground for compassion to happen,” said Worline.