- 4. How to make a gathering personal
- Intro
- Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report: 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, 50% higher productivity, 13% fewer sick days, 76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives, 40% less burnout.
- Tips
- Recognitation
- The neuroscience shows that recognition has the largest effect on trust when it occurs immediately after a goal has been met, when it comes from peers, and when it’s tangible, unexpected, personal, and public. Public recognition not only uses the power of the crowd to celebrate successes, but also inspires others to aim for excellence.
- Difficult but achievable job
- When a manager assigns a team a difficult but achievable job, the moderate stress of the task releases neurochemicals, including oxytocin and adrenocorticotropin, that intensify people’s focus and strengthen social connections.
- When team members need to work together to reach a goal, brain activity coordinates their behaviors efficiently. But this works only if challenges are attainable and have a concrete end point; vague or impossible goals cause people to give up before they even start. Leaders should check in frequently to assess progress and adjust goals that are too easy or out of reach.
- Build social ties
- [Neuroscience experiments by my lab](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3832785/) show that when people intentionally build social ties at work, their performance improves. [A Google study](/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-management) similarly found that managers who “express interest in and concern for team members’ success and personal well-being” outperform others in the quality and quantity of their work.
- Yes, even engineers need to socialize. [A study of software engineers](http://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986) in Silicon Valley found that those who connected with others and helped them with their projects not only earned the respect and trust of their peers but were also more productive themselves.
- It may sound like forced fun, but when people care about one another, they perform better because they don’t want to let their teammates down. Adding a moderate challenge to the mix (white-water rafting counts) will speed up the social-bonding process.
- Icebreakers
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