The entire Younity team recently had the privilege of having a day out of the office with in late February, spending a day talking about the F word… Feelings.
As part of our role as recruitment specialists, we are always asking our clients and candidates about culture and cultural fit. It is part and parcel of what we do to make sure we connect the right people to the right roles. However, how often do we introspectively look at our own culture?
To answer that, we asked Lotty Roberts from MindU to join the full Younity team and facilitate an Emotional Culture Workshop with us, using the Emotional Culture Deck tool to spark a discussion about how we want to feel at work.
The ECD tool was designed to fulfil a simple, but critical, shortcoming in many businesses. Most leaders don’t pay enough attention to how employees are, or should be feeling, and underestimate how central emotions are to building the right culture and employee experience.
Traditionally, most companies focus solely on their shared values and behaviours to try and guide how their people think and behave at work. But the other critical factor is the emotional culture of a company – how people feel. This is because how people feel (or don’t feel) drives the way people think and act.
Here’s a brief look at the Emotional Culture Deck in action…
At Younity, we’ve actively invested in our people and taken good care of our organisational culture as we’ve grown. However, we are always looking to be better. The team asked ourselves a few simple questions. Firstly, what is our culture right now? Secondly, what do we want it to be? And finally, how do we collectively want to feel at work?
Lotty and the MindU team ran us through the Emotional Culture Deck individually, then again in small groups, finally culminating in a shared collective response. What we ended up with was a list of five primary feelings that we as a team, agreed our success relied upon. In addition, we also decided that as a team there were five primary feelings we did not want to feel, but realised that we may from time to time. This gave us real clarity as to what our businesses emotional culture looks like, what people need to feel the right things and what rituals and behaviours we need to show to make it happen.
Overall, the process was thoroughly enjoyable and many of us learned a lot about ourselves, our team mates and also discovered a lot more about our business. We’re excited about how we can use these insights as the weeks and months progress.
For more about conducting your own Emotional Culture Workshop, contact Lotty Roberts and the MindU team – check out their website for more information on what they do. Find them here: MindU.co.nz
We thoroughly recommend it!