The Power of (Random Acts of) Kindness in the Workplace
Today marks Random Acts of Kindness Day. Research shows that kindness can make a huge difference in people’s everyday work experience. So what is kindness? What are the benefits? And how can we generate more of it in the workplace— well beyond today?
What is kindness?
The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley says Kindness is crucial, highlighting it as one of the 4 key pillars of happiness at work.
The Center defines Kindness as “orienting our thoughts, feelings, and actions towards care for others and genuinely supportive social bonds. It helps us in trusting, inclusive, and cooperative ways with people at work.”
Benefits of kindness
Kindness improves emotional and physical wellbeing in the following ways:
Kindness increases your mood and energy levels. When performing an act of kindness, a hormone called serotonin gets released. This creates a feeling of calmness, with reduced anxiety and increased happiness. In one study, 50% of participants reported feeling stronger and having more energy after helping others¹.
It increases positive perspectives. Kindness also encourages the release of oxytocin². Sometimes called “the love hormone,” it encourages optimism and lowers blood pressure. This is important because it allows you to see the world in a more positive light, and who couldn’t use that on a typical workday?
It generally makes you feel better and happier. A famed Harvard study showed that when giving away money, rather than spending it, it was those who gave it away that felt the happiest afterward. The same has been proven in kids, showing that kindness is an innate trait³.
It’s good for your health and even helps you live longer. A study of elderly populations in the U.S. showed that those who volunteered for two or more organizations actually live longer⁴. That’s on top of the fact that the oxytocin mentioned before, slows down aging⁵.
But… can you be kind in business?
All those benefits surely sound great. But is there a risk to be kind at work?
There is a sense that kindness is a weakness when it comes to business. Be too kind, and people walk over you or don’t take you seriously when it comes to important decisions, promotions and pay raises, and generally being taken seriously.
The research says otherwise, however. Showing kindness and helping others actually makes you more likely to become successful. A recent study, for example, showed that when CEOs seem to care more about the organization’s success than his or her own, their firms had significantly higher returns⁶.
“When CEOs seem to care more about the organization’s success than his or her own, their firms had significantly higher returns.”
In his book “Give and Take,” Warton Professor Adam Grant describes how being kind positively impacts your success at work. Years of research led him to one conclusion about the best way to behave in the workplace: by giving, rather than taking.
Generosity without being limitless
But not without limitation: Grant says to focus on giving while knowing your boundaries. Givers are represented at the top and the bottom of workplace performance. What separates top-performing givers from others is that they avoid being completely selfless while still maintaining generosity. They understand that endlessly being helpful just burns you out.
As he described it in a recent HBR article, “Beat Generosity Burnout”: “self-protective givers are generous, but they know their limits. Instead of saying yes to every help request, they look for high-impact, low-cost ways of giving so that they can sustain their generosity — and enjoy it along the way.”
Kindness at Work is Contagious
So yes, dive in, and be kind! And the great thing is that kindness at work is contagious. It really does pay forward, concluded University of Wisconsin professor Richard Davidson. Quoting a new study that examined the effects of promoting random acts of kindness in the workplace, he shared:
The study focused on the behaviors of more than 100 employees who were randomly assigned to one of three groups: givers, receivers, and a control group. The givers were instructed to perform five acts of kindness to specific receivers over the course of four weeks, without anyone knowing they were part of a study about kindness.
Not only did both givers and receivers feel happier and report higher levels of well-being (less depressed and more satisfied with their jobs) two months later compared to the control, but researchers also discovered that the acts of kindness had a positive ripple effect: people who were receivers in the experiment paid it forward by doling out 278% more acts of kindness⁷!
Taking your first steps towards Kindness
It really is the small things that make all the difference. Kindness doesn’t cost any more energy than smiling at someone, showing interest or expressing gratitude. For example, what about:
- Finding out something new about a coworker?
- Asking a colleague who looks overwhelmed if there’s something you can do for them?
- Sending an encouraging email? You don’t even have to awkwardly strike up a conversation for this one!
- Offering to coach or train someone?
- Passing on a book or something else that has helped you to someone at work you know would be interested in the same?
Get to Five
And what’s better than one random act of kindness today? Five. A now-famous experiment by Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky measured the effects of doing one act of kindness every day, versus five in one day.
The results were remarkable. One act of helping a day didn’t do much to lift people’s moods. But helping 5 people once a week made a significant difference⁸. It’s the idea is that you feel like you’ve mattered much more.
The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation has hundreds of other ideas if you need even more inspiration.
Becoming a kindness pro
It may not always be easy to stay kind in the workplace, especially beyond that one instance, or that one day. Yet, if you want it, you can put some time and effort into it and become a kindness pro.
According to the happiness gurus at GGSC, being consistently kind at work involves a combination of treating others with dignity and respect, extending empathy and compassion, practicing gratitude, and constructively managing conflicts.
1. Be Respectful.
Respect is the most important trait that employees look for in their leaders⁹. We deeply want to be respected by others, and neuroscience research shows that if we feel respected by other people who matter to us, safety networks in the brain are activated that allows us to feel comfortable and at home¹⁰.
In short, it’s no surprise that when we feel at ease, the work becomes a better and more productive place to be. That’s why kindness at work begins with respect. In applying respect in the workplace, it’s important to practice both owed respect and earned respect. Balance the two, and you’ll be soon seen as the master of respect.
Owed respect includes being mindful of your tone and non-verbal communication, thinking about others, being a good listener, and sharing resources with everyone. Giving feedback, credit, and recognition makes people feel valued and counts towards earned respect.
And we need more of that! For example, even though 88% of people said that expressing gratitude to colleagues made them feel happier and more fulfilled at work, on a given day, only 10% of people reported saying thank you to colleagues.
2. Be Prosocial.
Going beyond being respectful, the next step to a kinder workplace is to be proactively social. Prosocial behavior happens when you do something to actively improve the situation of people in the workplace around you¹¹. Great examples of prosocial behaviors in the workplace are empathy, compassion, and altruism.
Empathy.
Kind, supportive relationships are vital to happiness at work. To build those relationships we have to understand other people’s needs, wants and challenges. This is where empathy comes in. Empathy is the “ability to understand and share the feelings of another” and comes to life in one of two ways:
- Emotional empathy is when you feel the same emotion as another person and how that subsequently affects you.
- Cognitive empathy is about perceiving and understanding the emotions of another. It’s also called perspective-taking or “putting yourself on someone else’s shoes.”
Cognitive empathy is very easy to practice and a great way to become kinder. One way to do this is through active listening. Show people that you’re truly with them by nodding, paraphrasing what they said, and actively asking follow-up questions.
Empathy is key to our success at a species, as it allows us to communicate better and achieve the things we want to. In work, we see the same: people who are more empathic are more successful, are seen as more appealing, and competent.
Because their relationships, which are key to positive workplace engagement, tend to be higher quality and more supportive, people higher in empathy are also happier and healthier.
Compassion
The terms Compassion and Empathy are often used interchangeably. Tania Singer, the world’s top empathy researcher, separates the two by highlighting the difference between wishing someone the best, versus actively feeling their emotions: “Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other¹².” On top of that, compassion is not only taking perspective but actively wanting to help.
When we practice compassion, we tap into the same systems dedicated to caregiving and nurturance and suppress our own pain. Here again, being kind to someone ends up positively impacting yourself.
How important is compassion for the collective? Research from the Center for Positive Organizations shows that employees who rate their workplace as more compassionate, feel positive emotions more at work and are more committed to their organizations¹³.
Altruism
When you detect and understand the feelings of others, actively want to help, and selflessly do so, you’re practicing altruism. This is where the people around you can most tangibly experience your kindness!
Neuroscientist Donald Pfaff has studied altruism and says it’s hardwired into our brains and our biology.¹⁴ We wouldn’t have made it as a species if we didn’t turn our empathy into altruism. And even beyond evolutionary theory, he says, it’s what comes most natural to us: we tend to ‘first act morally, then ask why.’
This, of course, means that we don’t have to teach others or ourselves to be altruistic, we just have to find more ways to do what comes naturally to us!
3. Resolving Conflicts Well
Many people we speak have felt bullied or had to deal with difficult people in the workplace. This is bad not only for how joyful you find work and the workplace but also because you tend to take these enormously stressful relationships home with you.
It’s the flip side of the positive effects of kindness. Having to deal with conflict, or sometimes being constantly surrounded by it, can lead to less motivation, less engagement, more sick days, reduced productivity, creativity, and goodwill. In many ways, conflict and bullying at work are very costly.
Dealing with conflict
If there is a conflict, it may take all your energy to be civil, let alone pro-social. That’s why as a first step, it’s good to realize that dealing with this is natural. Don’t beat yourself — or the other party– up over it. When people work together, it’s bound to happen. Accept the fact that conflicts are unavoidable.
Secondly, practice forgiveness. Building on your empathy and compassion, try and see it from the other’s perspective. Forgive them for their reaction, or their role in the conflict.
And finally, if you played some role in this conflict –no matter how small– apologize. Research shows that apologizing, often considered a sign of weakness, is good for trust and, in turn, happiness at work. Apologies inspire greater respect and commitment in the people around you and make organizations better at rebounding from setbacks.
What if the apples around you a truly rotten?
Is it sometimes hard to be kind when others are being outright and consistently demeaning & mean-spirited? If you don’t mind a bit of profanity, then check out this classic talk from IDEO Fellow and Stanford Professor Bob Sutton’s on “How to Deal With Bad Apples”:
What can workplaces do to increase kindness at work?
As the place where hundreds of people come to work every day, it’s also up to us and others like it to make sure we build a culture of kindness.
For us, one way we do that is through training.
Our “Kindness at Work” workshop shares the research and helps HR-leads, managers, and employees put together their own Daily Kindness Calendar.
Another one is to keep reminding people that it’s both easy and rewarding to be kind. We do that by actively encouraging people to practice gratitude for example. Or to remind them of small ways to practice kindness.
And of course, to our own team, constantly model behaviors of kindness, appreciation, and recognition. While it’s never easy, it’s important. Because a kind workplace is the cornerstone of a happy, healthy workforce.
Sources:
- Allan Luks, “Doing Good: Helper’s High,” Psychology Today, Volume 22, Issue 10, 1988.
- PJ Zak, AA Stanton, S Ahmadi, “Oxytocin Increases Generosity in Humans,” 2008.
- Lara Aknin, J. Kiley Hamlin, Elizabeth Dun, “Giving Leads to Happiness in Young Children,” PLoS One, June 2012.
- Stephen G. Post, “Altruism, Happiness, and Health: It’s Good to Be Good,” International Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2005.
- Christian Elabd, Wendy Cousin, Pavan Upadhyayula, Robert Y. Chen, Marc S. Chooljian, Ju Li, Sunny Kung, Kevin P. Jiang, Irina M. Conboy, “Oxytocin is an age-specific circulating hormone that is necessary for muscle maintenance and regeneration,” Nature Communications, 2014.
- Suzanne J. Peterson Benjamin M. Galvin Donald Lange, “CEO Servant Leadership: Exploring Executive Characteristics and Firm Performance,” Personnel Psychology, Volume 65, Issue 3, August 2012, Pages 565–596.
- J. Chancellor, S. Margolis, K. Jacobs Bao, Sonia Lyubomirsky, “Everyday prosociality in the workplace: The reinforcing benefits of giving, getting, and glimpsing,” Emotion, Issue 4, 18 June 2018, Pages 507–517.
- Sonja Lyubomirsky and Matthew D. Della Porta, “Boosting Happiness, Buttressing Resilience: Results from Cognitive and Behavioral Interventions,” 2005.
- Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath, “The Power of Meeting Your Employees’ Needs,” Harvard Business Review, June 2014
- Naomi I. Eisenberger, “Social ties and health: A social neuroscience perspective,” Current Opinion of Neurobiology, June 2013, Volume 23, Issue 3, Pages 407–413.
- Hans Werner Bierhoff, “Prosocial Behaviour Social Psychology: a Modular Course Series,” 2002
- Tania Singer, Olga M.Klimecki, “Empathy and compassion.” Current Biology, Volume 24, Issue 18, 22 September 2014, Pages R875-R878.
- Jane E. Dutton, Kristina Workman, Ashley E. Hardin, “Compassion at Work,” 2014
- Donald W. Pfaff and Sandra Sherman, “The Altruistic Brain: How We are Naturally Good,” Oxford Press, 2015
