Create a culture of forgiveness in the workplace - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Create a culture of forgiveness in the workplace - The Chief Happiness Officer Blog The theme on the blog this week is forgiveness. I kicked it off on Monday with a tip to forgive someone at work, and followed up on Tuesday with fascinating research from Sarah Warner, which shows that companies with a culture of forgiveness are more productive than companies where people are prone to revenge. Ive since found even more reasons to avoid revenge at work: A tit-for-tat corporate culture can also lead to the loss of great workers, said Dr. Everett Worthington, a psychology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and Executive Director of the Campaign for Forgiveness Research. Worthington has been studying more than 100 workers in Virginia and Washington, D.C., who were asked to recall incidents of workplace transgressions. (After) conflicts, they no longer liked coming to work, Worthington said. They became sicker and missed more work days. In some cases, they even changed jobs. (source) But how exactly can a company foster a culture of forgiveness, rather than one of revenge? Here are my top three tips. 1: Teach leaders to forgive mistakes In one company, the CEO was told by a trembling employee, that the company website was down. This was a big deal this company made most of its sales online, and downtime cost them thousands of dollars an hour. The CEO asked what had happened, and was told that John in IT had bungled a system backup, and caused the problem. Well, then, says the CEO Lets go see John! When the CEO walked into the IT department everyone went quiet. They had a pretty good idea what wass coming, and were sure it wouldnt be pretty. The CEO walks up to Johns desk and asks You John? Yes he says meekly. John, says the CEO, I want to thank you for finding this weakness in our system. Thanks to your actions, we can now learn from this, and fix the system, so something like this cant happen in the future. Good work! Then he left a visibly baffled John and an astounded IT department. That particular mistake never happened again. The CEO might just as well have thrown the book at John and fired him for his mistake. This show of forgiveness, of acknowledging that mistakes happen and that we must learn from them, goes a long way to creating a culture of forgiveness. 2: Teach leaders to apologize Leaders make mistakes. Everyone does. But leaders who never apologize for their mistakes, create a sense of injustice and unfairness around them. Leaders who freely apologize when they screw up demonstrate that making mistakes is OK, and therefore make it easier for people to forgive others mistakes. 3: Make people happy at work And most of all, make people happy at work. Studies show, that when people are happy at work, they are much less prone to bad or petty workplace behavior, such as revenge. They are also more likely to think the best about others, and less likely to assume that others are out to get them and thus worthy of revenge. What do you think it takes to make people more inclined to forgiveness than revenge at work? Thanks for visiting my blog. If you're new here, you should check out this list of my 10 most popular articles. And if you want more great tips and ideas you should check out our newsletter about happiness at work. It's great and it's free :-)Share this:LinkedInFacebookTwitterRedditPinterest Related