#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Running a successful organization requires lots of moving pieces running smoothly in tandem. At the heart of every organization are people just like you and me, whose performance can be influenced in a positive direction. Recently, companies like Google and Facebook have been redefining the standards of workplace culture, and in turn seeing improvements in employee satisfaction and company performance. Now, your company might not be large enough to have a dedicated HR (or “People Ops”) department, but there are some exciting takeaways from social psychology that you can apply to benefit your business.

Reciprocity Principle

Reciprocity is one of the famous “Six Principles of Persuasion” defined in Robert B. Cialdini, Ph.D.'s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The idea is that we feel pressure to repay others for what they have given us or done for us. We often even give back more than we were initially given to minimize any guilt associated with the initial favor.

Founders and CEOs can use this to their advantage. Internally, this can help improve or repair work relationships, win over co-workers and build consensus. As Dr. Cialdini writes, reciprocity is so powerful that it can overcome feelings of suspicion or dislike toward the person who gives the gift or favor. As a small business owner, how about giving gifts or bonuses on holidays or birthdays? You could also offer to bring back coffee for the office or surprise your colleagues with breakfast or lunch. A kind gesture can go a long way.

Outside the office, the reciprocity principle can help you succeed in negotiations, build valuable business partnerships and win over investors — or even customers! When we launched our product and were at our first trade show full of retail managers and buyers, we realized that people only stopped at our booth if we handed them a free sample. So we handed samples to everyone who walked by! In turn, they stopped, listened to our pitch, and 99% of the time they placed an order for their store. In those first few hours, we sold over 100 cases into 100 new stores.

When we find our work meaningful and worthwhile, we are more likely to enjoy it, to be more productive, and feel committed to our employers and satisfied with our jobs. For obvious reasons, then, work psychologists have been trying to find out what factors contribute to people finding more meaning in their work.

Top of the list is what they call “task significance”, which in plain English means believing that the work you do is of benefit to others. However, to date, most of the evidence for the importance of task significance has been correlational – workers who see how their work is beneficial to others are more likely to find it meaningful, but that doesn’t mean that task significance is causing the feelings of meaningfulness.

Now Blake Allan at Purdue University has provided some of the first longitudinal evidence that seeing our work as benefiting others really does lead to an increase in our finding it meaningful. “These results are important both for the wellbeing of individual workers and as a potential avenue to increase productivity,” he concludes in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour.

If you’re interested in behavioral economics, then you probably heard that Richard Thaler, one of the discipline’s founding fathers, was recently awarded the Nobel prize in economics. You might also be sold on how insights from behavioral science can make a big impact in your organization. You may even have piloted a couple of nudge-based interventions in your organization and are now asking yourself, “What’s next?”

You aren’t alone. Increasing numbers of companies are looking to build a behavioral science team — one that is located at the very center of their business and that the whole organization can benefit from. This makes sense, because the alternative is for behavioral insights to be tried out by individuals or specific departments, and their knowledge and skill are likely to vary: Someone in marketing might use their behavioral knowledge to develop more-effective campaigns, while at the same time someone in HR uses theirs to focus on employee engagement. Sales could be developing a behaviorally informed strategy, while operations looks for ways to cut costs.

More of us are now awakening to the fact that workplaces are not quite the places of productivity that we hoped them to be. But that they are actually rife with distraction. Not to mention the painful hours of commuting tacked onto long days at the office.

All this can be avoided with a flexible work arrangement, and that's an option that many are seeking nowadays.

According to a recent FlexJobs survey on remote work, 66% of professionals believed that they would be more productive if they worked remotely - instead of at a traditional office. The reasons cited in favor of remote work? 76% wanted "fewer interruptions from colleagues and fewer distractions," 70% sought to "reduce stress from commuting," and 69% preferred to avoid "office politics."