Speak up!
The importance of promoting a “speaking up” culture inside your company.
Speaking up is definitely something desirable in any workplace. Great workplace cultures and great companies -in addition to wanting employees to speak up with ideas, doubts or even complains- encourage a safe and comfortable environment for employees to share those ideas or thoughts.
The study
In a recent study from Michigan State University, researchers found that employees find more mentally demanding to express concern or criticism than to suggest new ideas or give positive feedback in the workplace.
This mental fatigue led employees to be more reluctant to speak up again in the near future. On the other side, speaking up with ideas instead of concerns seemed to reduce employee’s fatigue.
Workers who regularly point out problems or errors might be mentally fatigued because this often means they’re pointing at other workers’ mistakes or errors which can cause tension between coworkers.
“The irony of that is, when people are mentally fatigued they’re less likely to point out problems anymore, in addition, their own work performance suffers, they’re less likely to be cooperative and helpful, and they even exhibit deviant behaviors such as being verbally abusive and stealing from the employer.”
Make up your own “speaking up” culture.
This interesting study reminds us that the approach to encourage the behavior of “speaking up” really does matter. Do you ask employees to bring up complaints or problems or do you ask for their ideas, opinions and suggestions for improvement?
Asking employees for positive feedback strengthens trust in the employer/employee relationship by showing a real interest in their ideas, and increases employee buy-in to solutions or changes, because the employees thought of the ideas themselves.
An easy solution to reducing fatigue and improving engagement and involving might just be encouraging a positive speaking up culture.
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Lila Miller
Behavioral Psychologist, Happiness Manager at Icalia Labs, founder of Internet Sweet Internet and RconErre.
Follow me on twitter: @lilamiller
