Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (38 page)

Economist Arent Greve studied three Italian
consulting companies to find out.
He measured the human capital and social capital of the employees at these companies and then related that finding to how many projects each person completed in a year as a measure of productivity.
Bottom line, in two of the companies, social capital accounted for all the benefits in productivity.
In the third company, human capital did have an effect, but this effect was augmented to the degree to which a person also had strong social capital.
The assumption that productivity is about smart people working hard on their own has been masking the fact that individual intelligence
may only be optimized when it is enhanced through social connections to others in the group.
Social connections are essentially the original Internet
, connecting different pockets of intelligence to make each pocket more than it would otherwise be by itself.
These social connections turn out to be even more important for small companies and start-ups that specialize in innovation.

Even a social factor as innocuous as fairness in the workplace can significantly affect job performance, absenteeism, turnover rate, and organizational citizenship.
The extent to which employees perceive decisions
to be fair in their place of work can account for 20 percent of the differences in their productivity.
I’m not aware of any analysis suggesting that financial incentives can have nearly the same impact.
Fairness might seem like a squishy motivator
, but recall that fairness activates the same reward circuitry in the brain as winning money.

Status, connection, and fairness all have demonstrable effects on the bottom lines of organizations.
Yet few take these issues seriously.
Enhancing these factors are low-cost, efficient strategies for improving workplace outcomes.
Whether employees realize it or not, they have been wired to be motivated by being accepted and valued by the groups they are socially connected with.

Care to Succeed?

The SCARF model is a great way to keep track of the things that motivate us other than money and physical comfort.
That said, there is one more particularly counterintuitive social element to add to the ideal work environment: opportunities to care for others.
When we discussed social rewards in
Chapter 4
, we used the parent-child relationship as our jumping-off point.
We discussed how there are two sides to this equation and thus two kinds of social rewards that activate the brain’s reward circuitry.
As children, we are built to be sensitive to cues that we are liked, loved, and
cared for.
As we grow older, being respected and valued increasingly matter as well.
However, as parents and as adults more generally, we are reinforced by the actions we take to care for others.

This is probably the hardest social factor for our CEO to wrap his head around.
It is a bizarre-sounding incentive.

Adam Grant, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has done fascinating research, described in his book
Give and Take
, showing that
the chance to help others motivates people
to work harder in the workplace.
He has taken two different, but complementary, approaches.
In the first, he focused on meaningfulness in the workplace.
Ever since Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, people have suggested that we are more motivated to do things that are personally meaningful to us.
Grant’s big insight was that for most people in most lines of work, doing something meaningful means helping others.
It’s hard to find meaning in what we do if at some level it doesn’t help someone else or make someone happier.

Of course, we don’t all find meaning in what we do.
And because of mass production, it has become harder and harder to find meaning in our work; so many of us add only a tiny part or contribution to some overall process or output.
With the rise of the Internet, we are even less likely to come face-to-face with the people who eventually benefit from our work.

Grant’s studies introduced interventions that made employees more aware of how their work helped others.
In his first study,
he focused on people working at a university
making calls to alumni to try to raise money for undergraduate scholarships.
This is a hard job because people usually don’t want to be bothered for money over the phone; many are saying under their breath, “I gave you four years of tuition!
Isn’t that enough?”
Callers must be focused on how to keep prospective donors on the line long enough to make their pitch; they don’t have a lot of time to think about the ultimate beneficiaries of their efforts.
Grant gave some of these callers a surprise visit with a past scholarship recipient, someone who directly benefitted from the work the callers do.
The visits weren’t
long—just five minutes.
At the end of the five minutes, the manager came into the room and said, “Remember this when you’re on the phone—this is someone you’re supporting.”

You probably think this made the callers feel pretty good for a little while, maybe even the rest of the day, but that it likely had no lasting effect.
But you would be wrong.
To test the effects, Grant got access to the callers’ performance data from a week-long period before the meeting with the scholarship recipient and then again from a week-long period
a month after
the meeting.
The work performance of callers who hadn’t met a scholarship recipient was about the same in both time periods.
They spent roughly the same number of minutes on the phone trying to get donations and brought in roughly the same amount in donations.
The work performance of those who met the undergraduate was radically different in the two periods.
They increased their time on the phone 142 percent from the week before the meeting to the week-long period a month later.
And this led to much greater success.
Donations for these callers went up 171 percent across the two time periods!

Have you ever heard of such a brief intervention having such profound consequences for work performance?
All Grant had to do was remind people of how their work was helping others.
The job was the same, but clearly the callers’ psychological mind-set changed, and it remained changed for a long time.
Remember that the second measurement came a full month after the meeting with the scholarship recipient.

In follow-up studies,
Grant replaced the face-to-face meetings
with letters that described how the employees’ work benefitted the scholarship recipients.
He compared changes in the performance of these callers relative to the performance of callers who received letters describing how their work benefitted them personally.
Those who read the letters that described how their work benefitted them personally did not change their performance; but those reading about how their work helped others showed dramatic gains.
The number of donation pledges obtained increased 153 percent, and
the total value of their pledges increased 143 percent.
All this just from a letter.

Grant’s second approach to caring and workplace
success involved a very different kind of caring—giving support to fellow employees.
Many companies now have employee support programs designed to support employees in nontraditional ways.
These programs provide child or elder care and, for employees in need, direct financial assistance from the company.
In some companies, including Southwest Airlines and Domino’s Pizza, employees are also given the opportunity to
donate
to these programs in order to help their fellow employees in times of need.
Grant examined one of these programs at a major retail company.
Although he did not measure job performance directly
, he did examine employee engagement, which is a good proxy for job performance.
Those who helped out with the employee support programs, either donating money directly or volunteering time to help raise money for the program, reported feeling more engaged and committed to the company.

The axiom of self-interest suggests that a person who helps someone else out always does so with the expectation of getting something of equal or greater value in return.
When an employee contributes to the employee support program, he is helping both the company and another employee.
In return, the helpful employee might then feel entitled to slack off a bit (“the company owes me”) and perhaps even expect the employee who received help to pick up the slack (“he owes me”).
Instead, the employee who donates his time or money finds his engagement with the company goes up, meaning greater productivity, reduced absenteeism, and lower turnover.
Benjamin Franklin understood this long ago, writing,
“He that has once done you a kindness
will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.”

How are we to make sense of this?
There are several reasons why an employee who donates to an employee support program might become more productive.
The first reason is self-perception.
When we see ourselves doing something
, we tend to infer that it reflects on who we are in general (especially if it’s a good thing).
This makes us more likely to do additional things consistent with that view in the future.
Donating to an employee support program makes employees more likely to see themselves as good citizens of the company, and working hard is another behavior consistent with that self-view.
A second explanation is that helping others makes us feel good: it activates the brain’s reward circuitry, making it more likely that we will feel positively toward the organization that gave us the opportunity to experience those good feelings.

A third explanation is that we are motivated to help and we value others who demonstrate that they too like to help others.
We like to see others showing they care.
Employee support programs demonstrate that a company cares about its employees.
People who donate to these programs have probably spent more time than others thinking about the fact that the company is a caring organization.
As one of Grant’s participants said, “I do feel very attached to the company… .
I always feel proud that the company supports the employee support program.”
Just as in any family, people who are strongly attached will work harder to support the family and help it thrive.
This is no different in the organizational context.

Attachment, the kind Bowlby and Harlow talked about, matters in the workplace.
People often talk as if their company, job, or workplace is solely about getting a paycheck and helping the company increase profits.
This conversation is predicated on the norm of self-interest—the belief that material self-interest is the only thing that motivates people, individually and corporately.
We have been bombarded with this idea for so long that it’s the only conversation we know how to have about the workplace.
But it is the wrong conversation to be having because it misses so much of what actually makes us us.

Material self-interest is pervasive, and most people can’t afford to work for free.
However, most of us spend a quarter of our adult lives (40 hours in a 168-hour week) working, which means all of the
social motivations wired into our brains will be expressed at work too.
Knowing we are in an organization that cares for us, for other employees, and for the community creates attachments that are surprisingly effective at keeping us engaged and motivated.
Few of us know this about ourselves, but that doesn’t make it any less true.

Building a Better Boss

A recent poll asked employees which they would prefer, a raise or a better boss.
Two-thirds (65 percent) answered that
they would prefer a better boss to a higher salary
.
Some managers might feel that being disliked
by one’s employees is a necessary cost of squeezing maximum productivity out of people, but Gallup recently estimated that these poor manager-employee relations are costing the U.S.
economy $360 billion a year in lost productivity.
Employees who are unhappy at work slack off in hard-to-detect ways and are less likely to generate and share new ideas.

No one told me that I would someday be a boss, running my own small business, but that’s exactly what running a scientific laboratory is like.
Every year, thousands of psychology graduate students get their PhD, but only a small fraction of those are chosen to become bosses (that is, professors) who will run their own lab.
The odd thing is that the skill set that is essential for
becoming
the boss (that is, publishing high-quality research as a graduate student) has little to do with the skill set necessary for
being
the boss.

Graduate students study different psychological phenomena and hope that a few of their studies will work well enough and be interesting enough that a university will want to hire them to do more of that work.
Beyond luck, most of what helps a graduate student get ahead is being really smart, developing technical and content expertise, and working really hard—having the intellect and focus necessary to give luck a chance to do its thing.

Intellect, expertise, and focus are still essential parts of being
a professor, but a huge part of my job has become managing the folks in my lab.
I have had to solve countless social and motivational problems over the years.
Doing this requires appreciating the complex social dynamics going on between members of my lab and what being in the lab represents for them in terms of their current and future identities.
Getting my work done depends on them getting their work done.
Getting their work done depends on my understanding their needs, what motivates them, and how to create the best work environment.
No one ever discussed this with me in graduate school.
There were no classes on how to do this well.
When I interviewed for the job, being able to manage the social dynamics of a lab never came up.
And while I have muddled through, I wouldn’t necessarily give myself high marks for the social side of being a leader.