Another year has flown by…
In the last year, our team at Workplace Nordic attended multiple congresses, seminars, and forums, and now we want to bring you bits and pieces of what we have learned!
Takeaways from the International Congress on Emotional Intelligence (ICEI) 2022 (Palermo, Italy)
🔹 Workplaces need and want people with high emotional intelligence but most don’t measure or evaluate it in any way. People live through emotions – and those emotions come to the workplace with the people, whether we realize / like it or not. That is why, the organizations that accept and act on that will form healthy workplaces with high performance.
🔹 If conflicts are managed successfully, they can actually have positive effects! Constructive conflict management techniques all include showing care/concern for the other person!
🔹 Psychological needs are nutrients: when satisfied they support growth and wellbeing. Sustainable performance is achieved by combining organizational performance goals & employee vitality, and taking care of psychological needs is central to achieving this!
🔹“You have to understand – and give a damn!” – David Caruso. This came up again and again during the congress: It’s not enough to just know how to do something, we must also apply the skills! This means that it is not enough to have high emotional intelligence, we also need to have agency (a supportive environment & willingness to act)
Takeaways from the HR Technology Conference & Exposition 2022 (Las Vegas, USA)
🔹Mental health is the number one issue in work life these days. Employees’ wellbeing was a huge topic here at the conference: psychological and emotional safety are vital to thrive!
🔹Training leaders emotional agency can lead to groundbreaking results in the whole organization. All of VTT’s (Technical Research Centre of Finland) 200 leaders attended an emotional agency training program (by Emergy) and assessed its effects utilizing the Emergy Emotional Climate Audit® and other measures. The program resulted in tremendous success: they saw increases in the entire organization in emotional climate, work engagement, organizational commitment, satisfaction toward leadership, wellbeing, and sense of belonging and relatedness. In addition sick leave days decreased by 25 per cent.
🔹“Groundbreaking innovation requires psychological safety. You cannot innovate if you feel like you are not allowed to fail.” smart words from the CHRO of VTT, Kirsi Nuotto, at the Mega Session about “How CHROs Are Preparing for the New World of Work”.
Takeaways from the Nordic Business Forum 2022 (Helsinki, Finland)
🔹In order to achieve cultural transformation leaders as well as employees need new collective patterns of thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors.
🔹We need emotional intelligence in order to be able to change. We are living through a stressful time: global catastrophes, uncertainty, technological change etc. We need to build resilience in order to cope with the psychological pressure and stress as well as in order to adapt to the changing environment. Mental flexibility and understanding towards ourselves and others is a must, especially in the times ahead!
🔹Psychological safety is the number 1 factor explaining performance differences across teams. E.g. all other factors being equal, on average diverse teams under-perform the homogenous teams, but when we look at teams with psychological safety, teams with higher diversity actually perform better. Psychological safety is particularly important in high diversity organizations.
🔹Leaders need humility, curiosity, and empathy in order to create a thriving environment (Amy Edmonson – one of the leading psychological safety researchers). Ask yourself: Am I playing not to lose? or playing to win? Most of the leaders are actually really playing not to fail due to interpersonal risks at stake. Be aware of fear. When fear dominates, we’re unable to express ourselves and contribute truly.
What’s in the future?
🔹The recently released Emergy Emotional Climate Audit® has been hugely successful and evoked a lot of curiosity and positive reactions worldwide. The next certification program in English is on the 25th of January. More dates can be found here.
🔹Online EECA® certification coming soon! Learn more here.
We at Workplace Nordic wish you all the best in the New Year! Want to hear more about what we have learned from the recent events? Or hear more about the Emergy Emotional Climate Audit®? Contact us!
