Whether you want to call it employee “climate,” “culture,” “satisfaction,” “or engagement,” I think we all know the difference between a vibrant and a corrosive working environment. A vibrant work environment can make it feel like you love every minute on the job (believe it or not, that is actually possible!). A corrosive work culture makes it feel like you can’t get out the door fast enough. Even though we’d probably all like to think otherwise, if we’re honest I suspect we can all remember experiencing both kinds of workplace vibes in our professional lives, maybe even here at Augustana.

You might remember that last spring we conducted two surveys of Augustana employees to better understand the nature of our workplace culture and employee engagement. Although those of us who are here during the summer started mulling over the wide array of findings right away, now that everyone is back on campus the Employee Engagement Taskforce (full disclosure: I’m the chair of this Taskforce) has officially begun to delve deeper into the results of those surveys. Our charge from President Bahls is two-fold. First, we need to learn about the underlying factors that produced our employee’s responses by talking with people across all of the functional areas of the college. Second, after triangulating the data from our surveys with the insights gathered from these conversations, we need to identify a set of changes (recommendations that will almost certainly vary based on local circumstances) that we can make in ourselves, our policies, or our organizational structure that will help us improve the culture in which we all work, ultimately improving our overall level of employee engagement.

Yet while the Employee Engagement Taskforce is doing its work, it seems strange to me that we might all simply “keep calm and carry on” while waiting for some edict from on high. In fact, a wealth of research on the nature of organizations has found that it is the collective “we” that plays the dominant role in shaping employee culture, not the amorphous “they” (no matter how badly I’d love to blame some else for my annoyances du jour). So if there were something that I could do right away, I wouldn’t want to wait to read it in a report.

It turns out that an influential predictor of a healthy work environment that repeatedly pops up in our own analyses is something that we could all plug into our work right away. Consistently, how often we thought that our co-workers tried to understand the perspectives of others on campus predicted higher perceptions of transparency and trust. In turn, higher perceptions of transparency and trust predicted workplace satisfaction. Even more specifically, while perceptions of the degree to which co-workers tried to understand the perspectives of others on campus mattered regardless of the role of the co-worker, this effect was most pronounced when respondents perceived that administrators exhibited this trait.

Both findings are important. First, all of us can make our campus a better place by purposefully trying to understand issues from the perspectives of others. This doesn’t mean that you have to change your mind about something or acquiesce to someone else’s wishes. It just means that it needs to be apparent to others that you’ve recognized a measure of legitimacy in their perspective. Second, if you are someone in an administrative role, the impact of adopting this behavior is potentially transformative. With referent capital (the power that comes from a position of authority), the choice to genuinely show others that you want to understand their perspective – even if you ultimately choose to take a different course – goes a long way toward cultivating an environment that increases employee engagement across the board.

But in order to adopt this behavior, we all have to own up to our own blind spots. We’ve all got them, even if we aren’t so good at admitting it. In my case, I’ve got more than a few potential blind spots. For example, I can be overly (bordering on naively) optimistic. In addition, although I know something about student learning, I don’t have nearly the direct experience in the classroom like that of a seasoned faculty member. In fact, because I don’t interact with students nearly as much as most of you I am susceptible to confusing what I see in our quantitative data with the true breadth of our student population. Finally, I don’t know what it’s like to work in any other place at Augustana than Academic Affairs. So even though I’ve held plenty of other jobs in my life, I could assume that I know more than I do about the working lives of our non-academic employees.

These are just a few of my blind spots. My perpetual challenge is to make sure that I own up to them and seek to understand how the world looks through the lens of others before starting to dream up possible solutions. One of the early exercises of the Employee Engagement Taskforce was to collectively own up to each of our potential blind spots and to realize that others on the committee can help shine a light for each other. Furthermore, to a person we recognized that we will have to go outside of our group often if we are to fully understand the nature of the employee experience at Augustana and to identify the right set of recommendations to improve our work culture and employee engagement.

What are your blind spots? If you can own up to them, you are that much closer to making Augustana a better place to work. If we can all do that together, hmmm . . . .

Uh, oh – I think my optimism might be kicking into overdrive!

Make it a good day,

Mark