7 Years Ago, Google Set Out To Find What Makes The 'Perfect' Team - And What They Found Shocked Other Researchers

Put five, eight, 12 or more people together in a room, and it’s a crapshoot as to how well they’ll function as a team. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes.

It’s a lot like dining out with a bunch of friends. Where to go? Italian? Vegetarian? Steakhouse? Each person has their own appetite, which can make creating a “shared-interest” extremely challenging.

Shared-interest is the lifeblood of teams, and only the most successful companies know how to foster it. But how?

That’s exactly what Google wanted to learn in 2012, when it embarked on a quest to discover how to build the “perfect team.” The experiment, led by Abeer Dubey, a manager in Google’s People Analytics division, was called “Project Aristotle.”

The key characteristics of ‘enhanced teams’

After years of analyzing data and interviews from more than 180 teams across the company, Google found that the kinds of people (a.k.a. the individual personalities) in a team are not so relevant.

“We had lots of data, but there was nothing showing that a mix of specific personality types or skills or backgrounds made any difference. The ‘who’ part of the equation didn’t seem to matter,” Dubey said in an interview with The New York Times.

Instead, the researchers found that found that there were five key characteristics of enhanced teams:

1. Psychological safety: Everyone feels safe in taking risks around their team members, and that they won’t be embarrassed or punished for doing so.
2. Dependability: Everyone completes quality work on time.
3. Structure and clarity: Everyone knows their specific expectations are. These expectations must be challenging yet attainable.
4. Meaning: Everyone has a sense of purpose in their work (i.e., financial security, supporting family, helping the team succeed, etc.).
5. Impact: Everyone sees that the result of their work actually contributes to the organization’s overall goals.

Not All Researchers Agree

While Google’s findings may be true to some extent, a large number of scientific studies have caused researchers (outside of Google’s lab) to shockingly disagree. They claim the exact opposite — that personality, not just skills, is indeed a significant factor in what makes a team successful.

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at Columbia University and author of the book “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (and How to Fix It), ” and psychologist Dave Winsborough, former VP at Hogan Assessment Systems, argue personality, in particular, heavily affects the role of an individual within a team.

Researchers found that the poorest-performing teams were 100 percent ‘pragmatic’ and had 0 percent ‘relationship-building’ traits.

Gary Burnison

“Too often, organizations focus merely on the functional role and hope that good team performance somehow follows,” Chamorro-Premuzic and Winsborough co-wrote in a Harvard Business Review article. “This is why even the most expensive professional sports teams often fail to perform according to the individual talents of each player: There is no psychological synergy. A more effective approach focuses as much on people’s personalities as on their skills.”

One study, conducted at Hogan X, adds an alternative lens to Google’s findings. Researchers found that individuals within poor-performing teams are generally 100 percent “pragmatic” and have 0 percent “relationship-building” traits.

Left Brained Vs. Right Brained Personalities

A simple way to look at this is through the “left brain vs. right brain” theory, which goes that everyone has a dominant side of the brain (the right or the left), and it determines their personality, thoughts and behavior.

Right brained people are said to be more intuitive, creative, free-thinking and have the ability to collaborate and connect. They are the relationship-builders, and they are vital to a team’s success.

Left brained people, by contrast, are more logical, analytical and objective. Unlike right brained people, who tend to think in visuals, left brains are detail- and fact-oriented, and they prefer to think in words and numbers. They are more pragmatic. While left brain skills and traits may distinguish individual contributors, they are only table stakes (literally, as they can mostly earn you a seat at a team’s table).

Why pragmatism is a rarely desired trait

Employees in the medical field might not need a strong degree of creativity (a.k.a. those right brained personalities). But across the board in every business and industry, when teams come together, EQ (emotional intelligence) matters much more than IQ (intelligence quotient).

EQ, which reflects and strengthens a person’s right-brain skills, enhances self-awareness and increases humility. It is far more beneficial for the team — regardless of their skill set.

Keep in mind that pragmatism isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can lead to linear thinking. Technical skills are important early on in one’s career, but the higher you go, technical expertise is assumed, and you need more right-brain skills to help build meaningful and motivating relationships with others.

Put another way, while the left brain is what gets people hired, the right brain is what helps them advance.

Here’s the good news

You don’t have to be one or the other. Having both pragmatic and strong relationship-building traits can increase the value you bring to a team. So whether you’re left brained or right brained, it’s possible to adopt both traits. Here’s how:

If You’re Right Brained:

• Develop a strategic mindset. Know and understand what drives company to success.
• Be known for something. Do you have deep expertise in relevant areas? (i.e., financial acumen, scientific expertise or even highly specialized knowledge such as tax law or M&A accounting). Be proactive in mastering them.
• Practice tackling complex problems. This is especially helpful with those tricky interview questions that Google is famous for. Use those linear thinking skills to your advantage by diving deeply into issues.

If You’re Left Brained:

• Develop learning agility. Instead of defaulting to the “tried and true” (which pragmatists tend to do), be open to trying varied approaches and new ideas.
• Find joy in ambiguity. Practice coping with uncertainty and making decisions without having all the information beforehand.
• Put your social leadership skills to the test. When was the last time you motivated influenced others or deeply connected with your teammates? You might come to find that you actually enjoy it.

Teams don’t just happen by bringing people together in the same room or connecting them via Skype. When you understand yourself by taking a “good look in the mirror,” you can be the change you want to see in both your team and your company.

Gary Burnison is the CEO of Korn Ferry, a global consulting firm that helps companies select and hire the best talent. His latest book, a New York Times best-seller, ”Lose the Resume, Land the Job, ” shares the kind of straight talk that no one – not a spouse, partner, mentor or anyone else – will tell you. Follow him on LinkedIn here.

Thanks to Gary Burnison / CNBC / MakeIt / Science Of Success
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/28/what-google-learned-in-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html

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There's No Such Thing As A Dangerous Neighborhood

Most Serious Urban Violence Is Concentrated Among Less Than 1 Percent Of A City’s Population. So Why Are We Still Criminalizing Whole Areas?

In 1982, George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson told a story about a window, a story that changed the fates of entire neighborhoods for decades. Writing in the March issue of The Atlantic, Kelling and Wilson proposed that American policing needed to get back to the project of maintaining order if America wanted communities be safe from harm. “Disorder and crime are usually inextricably linked, in a kind of developmental sequence,” they argued. One broken window leads to scores of broken windows; broken windows signal the breakdown of neighborhood social control; neighborhoods become “vulnerable to criminal invasion,” communities ridden with destruction, drug dealing, prostitution, robbery, and ultimately, serious violence.

In essence, Kelling and Wilson argued that latent danger loomed everywhere, and everywhere people’s disorderly impulses needed to be repressed, or else. Their “broken windows theory” didn’t stay theoretical: Also known as order maintenance policing, this tactic propelled an entire generation of policing practice that sought to crack down on minor “quality-of-life” infractions as a way to stem violence.

As taken up by police in New York City, Los Angeles, and across the country, broken windows policing led to the aggressive use of stops, summons, and misdemeanor arrests in predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods. More than 30 years later, the evidence demonstrates that the broken windows paradigm does little to nothing to reduce serious crime but does tend to make people feel more unsafe, reduce trust in and cooperation with police, and could contribute to, in fact, producing and facilitating more violence.

While police departments often recognize that “we can’t arrest our way out of the problem,” the broken windows paradigm remains active throughout policing. Perhaps most significantly, it still colors how the public views violence and demands responses to it: both as a danger that characterizes entire poor communities of color, and as a menace that poses a constant threat.

This long-held view is, simply, wrong.

The knowledge that we’ve gained since 1982 unequivocally tells us something else: Serious violence is extremely concentrated in very particular places and, most importantly, among very particular people. Dispelling the notion of “dangerous neighborhoods,” extensive research on geographic concentration has consistently found that around half of all crime complaints or incidents of gun violence concentrated at about 5 percent of street segments or blocks in a given city. Moving past “violent communities,” sophisticated analysis of social networks have demonstrated that homicides and shootings are strongly concentrated within small social networks within cities—and that there is even further concentration of violence within these social networks.

For example: In Chicago, a city often used in the media and elsewhere as an example of the worst of American urban violence, researchers found that a social network with only 6 percent of the city’s population accounted for 70 percent of nonfatal gunshot victimizations. Violent crime isn’t waiting to happen on any given block of a poorer neighborhood, nor is it likely to arise from just anyone who happens to live in one.

And, despite claims to the contrary about upticks in violence associated with the “Ferguson Effect” or “ACLU Effect”—reductions in street stops when police have opted to, or have been forced to, change enforcement practices—massive levels of low-level enforcement does not produce public safety. In fact, such policing can make communities less safe by pushing people away from formal means of resolving disputes and towards private forms of violence. So how can we explain the nature of serious urban violence?

At the American Society of Criminology’s annual conference, my colleagues and I at the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College recently presented evidence of what many in the violence prevention field have known for a long time, but has yet to become the public common sense. In our forthcoming study of serious violence in over 20 cities, we found that less than 1 percent of a city’s population—the share involved in what we call “street groups” (gangs, sets, and crews)—is generally connected to over 50 percent of the city’s shootings and homicides. We use “group” as a term inclusive of any social network involved in violence, whether they are hierarchical, formal gangs, or loose neighborhood crews. In city after city, the very small number of people involved in these groups consistently perpetrated and were victimized by the most serious violence.

To be clear: The number of group-involved people actually committing homicides or shootings is still far smaller than the less-than-1-percent of a city’s population in these groups.

(National Network for Safe Communities/John Jay College)

This held true even in areas considered chronically “dangerous,” like parts of East Baltimore. There, the group member population totaled only three quarters of a percentage point, even as they were connected to 58.43 percent of homicides. Shootings tend to be even more concentrated than homicides. In Minneapolis, we found that 0.15 percent of the population was determined to be involved in groups, but this population was connected to 53.96 percent of shootings—a proportion over 350 times higher than their population representation.

More than geography or social networks, this evidence offers the most focused lens yet in to what violence really looks like in American cities. Crucially, focusing on groups offers an explanation for homicides and shootings in ways that other theories have not. Broken windows theory posits that public disorder encourages lawlessness of all sorts. But it’s not clear why exactly someone who has started breaking the windows of abandoned cars—or someone simply observing petty acts of vandalism—would conclude from this that it’s also acceptable to shoot other human beings. While violence is concentrated in very particular places, it’s not the places themselves that are committing homicides.

Rather, to understand violence, our research points again to the context, norms, and dynamics of street groups. Street groups involved in violence are generally composed of young men of color living in communities with long histories of structural discrimination and alienation from state institutions, particularly law enforcement. These areas have generally suffered from both over-enforcement and under-protection. Intrusive, broken-windows-style policing means mass stop-and-frisk interactions, along with tickets and arrests for minor offenses—but it doesn’t come with an equivalent investment in preventing or solving offenses like homicide. Indeed, it often makes it harder to do so, thanks to the cycle of mistrust between police and community members. The near-total impunity for homicides and shootings in distressed communities signals that the state can’t or won’t actually protect people from the most significant harm.

Where that’s true, people feel the need to protect themselves and settle disputes through other means, including private violence. Street groups offer the perception of safety, but tend to embed norms and behaviors that produce violence and put group members at even more risk. Those norms include the use of violence to defend status and solve disputes, the presence of gun carrying, and cycles of retaliation. Being involved with a street group makes people more likely to be both a perpetrator and a victim of serious violence. It’s not a surprise that groups are disproportionately connected to the total violence in a city—violence is acted out by people within a context of alienation from formal public safety systems and who face a very real fear of victimization.

If we recognize how violence actually transpires in our cities, we can reorient how we try to stop it. Less than 1 percent of the population is involved in groups connected to half of homicides and shootings—but there is, in fact, a far smaller number of people within those groups directly involved in committing that violence. We should direct public safety approaches at this tiny subset of the population, and recognize the concentration of trauma and violence around them. For example, hospital intervention, street outreach, and focused deterrence strategies all focus resources on the people at highest risk of being involved in violence. The strategies that focus specifically on groups offer a more effective, and less damaging, approach to preventing violence than surveilling a vast number of unknown perpetrators across entire areas of a city.

Changing public consciousness about the nature of violent crime is crucial to undermining the appeal of the broken windows paradigm. The notion that public disorder drives criminality can seem an intuitive approach to public safety. But if people understand that most serious violence circles specific interpersonal group dynamics in structurally disadvantaged communities, order maintenance policing seems more like what study after study shows it is: an unnecessary evil.

That doesn’t mean there’s no connection between the condition of the built environment and crime: Some kinds of place-based interventions, such as cleaning and converting vacant land, for example, do appear to increase public safety. But those projects don’t use arrests or stops to fix broken windows. Stopping violent crime means addressing the risks and needs of those most likely to be involved in it. Now that we have clear evidence of the extraordinary concentration of that risk in American cities, we can and should follow those facts, not a theory that’s only ever been just that.

About The Author :- Stephen Lurie is a writer and former research and policy advisor at the National Network for Safe Communities. He is based in Brooklyn.

Thanks to Stephen Lurie / CityLab
https://www.citylab.com/perspective/2019/02/broken-windows-theory-policing-urban-violence-crime-data/583030/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

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There's An Optimal Way To Structure Your Day-And It's Not The 8-Hour Workday

The eight-hour workday is an outdated and ineffective approach to work. If you want to be as productive as possible, you need to let go of this relic and find a new approach.

The eight-hour workday was created during the industrial revolution as an effort to cut down on the number of hours of manual labor that workers were forced to endure on the factory floor. This breakthrough was a more humane approach to work two hundred years ago, yet it possesses little relevance for us today.

Like our ancestors, we’re expected to put in eight-hour days, working in long, continuous blocks of time, with few or no breaks. Heck, most people even work right through their lunch hour!

This antiquated approach to work isn’t helping us; it’s holding us back.

The Best Way To Structure Your Day

A study recently conducted by the Draugiem Group used a computer application to track employees’ work habits. Specifically, the application measured how much time people spent on various tasks and compared this to their productivity levels.

In the process of measuring people’s activity, they stumbled upon a fascinating finding: the length of the workday didn’t matter much; what mattered was how people structured their day. In particular, people who were religious about taking short breaks were far more productive than those who worked longer hours.

The ideal work-to-break ratio was 52 minutes of work, followed by 17 minutes of rest. People who maintained this schedule had a unique level of focus in their work. For roughly an hour at a time, they were 100% dedicated to the task they needed to accomplish. They didn’t check Facebook “real quick” or get distracted by e-mails. When they felt fatigue (again, after about an hour), they took short breaks, during which they completely separated themselves from their work. This helped them to dive back in refreshed for another productive hour of work.

Your Brain Wants An Hour On, 15 Minutes Off

People who have discovered this magic productivity ratio crush their competition because they tap into a fundamental need of the human mind: the brain naturally functions in spurts of high energy (roughly an hour) followed by spurts of low energy (15–20 minutes).

For most of us, this natural ebb and flow of energy leaves us wavering between focused periods of high energy followed by far less productive periods, when we tire and succumb to distractions.

The best way to beat exhaustion and frustrating distractions is to get intentional about your workday. Instead of working for an hour or more and then trying to battle through distractions and fatigue, when your productivity begins to dip, take this as a sign that it’s time for a break.

Real breaks are easier to take when you know they’re going to make your day more productive. We often let fatigue win because we continue working through it (long after we’ve lost energy and focus), and the breaks we take aren’t real breaks (checking your e-mail and watching YouTube doesn’t recharge you the same way as taking a walk does).

Take Charge Of Your Workday

The eight-hour workday can work for you if you break your time into strategic intervals. Once you align your natural energy with your effort, things begin to run much more smoothly. Here are four tips that will get you into that perfect rhythm.

Break Your Day Into Hourly Intervals. We naturally plan what we need to accomplish by the end of the day, the week, or the month, but we’re far more effective when we focus on what we can accomplish right now. Beyond getting you into the right rhythm, planning your day around hour-long intervals simplifies daunting tasks by breaking them into manageable pieces. If you want to be a literalist, you can plan your day around 52-minute intervals if you like, but an hour works just as well.

Respect Your Hour. The interval strategy only works because we use our peak energy levels to reach an extremely high level of focus for a relatively short amount of time. When you disrespect your hour by texting, checking e-mails, or doing a quick Facebook check, you defeat the entire purpose of the approach.

Take Real Rest. In the study at Draugiem, they found that employees who took more frequent rests than the hourly optimum were more productive than those who didn’t rest at all. Likewise, those who took deliberately relaxing breaks were better off than those who, when “resting,” had trouble separating themselves from their work. Getting away from your computer, your phone, and your to-do list is essential to boosting your productivity. Breaks such as walking, reading, and chatting are the most effective forms of recharging because they take you away from your work. On a busy day, it might be tempting to think of dealing with emails or making phone calls as breaks, but they aren’t, so don’t give in to this line of thought.

Don’t Wait Until Your Body Tells You To Take A Break. If you wait until you feel tired to take a break, it’s too late—you’ve already missed the window of peak productivity. Keeping to your schedule ensures that you work when you’re the most productive and that you rest during times that would otherwise be unproductive. Remember, it’s far more productive to rest for short periods than it is to keep on working when you’re tired and distracted.

Thanks to Dr. Travis Bradberry / QZ / Quartz At Work
https://qz.com/work/1561830/why-the-eight-hour-workday-doesnt-work/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

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The 'Hidden Mechanisms' That Help Those Born Rich To Excel In Elite Jobs

When Two Sociologists Interviewed Highly Paid Architects, TV Producers, Actors, And Accountants, They Encountered Work Cultures That Favor The Already Affluent.

Over the past five years, the sociologists Daniel Laurison and Sam Friedman have uncovered a striking, consistent pattern in data about England’s workforce: Not only are people born into working-class families far less likely than those born wealthy to get an elite job—but they also, on average, earn 16 percent less in the same fields of work.

Laurison and Friedman dug further into the data, but statistical analyses could only get them so far. So they immersed themselves in the cultures of modern workplaces, speaking with workers—around 175 in all—in four prestigious professional settings: a TV-broadcasting company, a multinational accounting firm, an architecture firm, and the world of self-employed actors.

The result of this research is Laurison and Friedman’s new book, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged, which shows how the customs of elite workplaces can favor those who grew up wealthier. The authors describe a series of “hidden mechanisms”—such as unwritten codes of office behavior and informal systems of professional advancement—that benefit the already affluent while disadvantaging those with working-class backgrounds.

In January, shortly before the book’s U.K. release, I interviewed Laurison, a professor at Swarthmore College, who told me that while England’s class politics do differ from those of the U.S., his and Friedman’s findings about “money, connections, and culture” broadly apply to Americans as well. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe Pinsker: In the book, you write about a financial cushion available to certain college graduates that you refer to as “the bank of mom and dad.” How does this work, and what are its consequences for who gets a chance at certain jobs?

Daniel Laurison: I think the image that we have—or the ideology, if you want to be political about it—is once you’re 18 or so, you make your own way and your class origin is not an important part of how your career goes from there. But what my co-author Sam and I found was, that’s not at all true.

In the book, we talked about people pursuing acting, which is a very contingent, hard path to pursue. Most people, when they start, aren’t making most of their money from acting, and so people who are able to rely on their parents to help them are much more able to pursue acting fully, because they don’t have to worry about maintaining a regular, full-time job just to eat and live.

That’s the starkest example in the book, but there are lots of other ways that having money from your parents can make a difference in your career. In the U.K., if you work in London, you’re likely to earn a lot more, and you’re more likely to be at the center of your field. And living in London is very expensive. So a lot of people who are living in London got some help from their parents to make a down payment on a house or some help with the rent, which was the case in fields other than acting, too. And the other place I think parents’ help makes a big difference is in who can take unpaid or very low-paid internships, which are the entry points for lots of high-status, high-paid careers.

Pinsker: And once people get these sorts of jobs, you write about the importance of “sponsorship”—basically, when some senior employee informally takes someone younger under their wing and helps them advance through the company. What did you notice about how those systems of sponsorship worked?

Laurison: I think that a lot of people, on some level what they think they’re doing when they sponsor young co-workers is spotting talent—they called it “talent-mapping” in the accounting firm we studied. But a lot of people we talked to were also able to reflect and say, “Part of why I was excited about that person, probably, is because they reminded me of a younger version of myself.” The word we use in sociology is homophily—people like people who are like themselves.

One of the big ideas of the book, for me, is it’s really hard for any given individual in any given situation to fully parse what’s actual talent or intelligence or merit, and what’s, Gosh, that person reminds me of me, or I feel an affinity for them because we can talk about skiing or our trips to the Bahamas. Part of it is also that what your criteria are for a good worker often comes from what you think makes you a good worker.

Pinsker: In the workplaces you studied, who tended to lose out in these systems of sponsorship?

Laurison: In three of the four fields we studied, it was poor and working-class people, and also women and people of color. There are lots of axes along which homophily can cloud senior people’s judgment about who’s meritorious.

Pinsker: You also talk a lot about the unwritten codes of behavior that can shape who advances and who doesn’t at certain workplaces. What’s an example of how that played out?

Laurison: Probably the best example of this is the television-production firm we studied. The name that we gave to the culture there was “studied informality”—nobody wore suits and ties, nobody even wore standard business casual. People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes. There was a sort of “right” way to do it and a “wrong” way to do it: A number of people talked about this one man—who was black and from a working-class background—who just stood out. He worked there for a while and eventually left. He wore tracksuits, and the ways he chose to be casual and fashionable were not the ways that everybody else did.

There were all kinds of things, like who puts their feet up on the table and when they do it, when they swear—things that don’t seem like what you might expect from a place full of high-prestige, powerful television producers. But that was in some ways, I think, more off-putting and harder to navigate for some of our working-class respondents than hearing “just wear a suit and tie every day” might have been. The rules weren’t obvious, but everybody else seemed to know them.

Pinsker: And trying to figure that out comes at an emotional and psychological cost, no?

Laurison: For a lot of people from poor and working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, being in these environments felt like you had to put on a performance all day. They didn’t feel at home and comfortable in their work environment—even people who had been quite successful, who had gotten toward the top of their occupations.

Part of that is because folks are comfortable in the culture, the class, the location, the people who they grew up with. And working in an occupation or professional culture that is radically different in some ways than what your family knows and does is challenging. But one way to address this is to change workplace cultures to be closer to what poor and working-class people—and women, racial and ethnic minorities, and other historically excluded groups—bring rather than just trying to teach those “others” how to adapt.

Pinsker: In the book, it was jarring to see over and over how invisible all of these processes tend to be, and how this obscures the way that people actually get and then excel in elite jobs. Some people you talked to clearly downplayed the help they’d gotten—what do you think was behind that?

Laurison: In both the U.S. and the U.K., there’s a really strong, widely shared implicit belief—in the U.S., it’s the American dream—that success and worth are nearly identical, that if you are really rich, you must be really smart and hardworking, and if you are poor, you must have messed up in some really big way. People want to believe that they got where they are because they’re smart and talented. And that’s often true to some extent, but it’s also true that there’s any number of people who are probably equally smart and talented who are not in their positions, because of the barriers that are erected. It’s hard to sit with the idea that maybe somebody else deserves to be where they are more than they do, and I think almost everybody wants to be able to tell a story of making it on their own.

A lot of the book is about the barriers that exist, but you can take that argument too far. I wouldn’t say that most of the really successful people we interviewed were bad at their jobs. But I think, for a lot of people, examining the ways that privileges you have are unearned is the same thing as saying “You are bad” or “You don’t deserve anything,” because we’ve got this deep connection between ideas of worth and ideas of success.

Pinsker: Having finished a research project like this, what do you think needs to change about the way these workplaces function? Do you think there are things that companies could do better?

Laurison: On one level, as long as access to education and jobs is unequal in terms of race, in terms of class, you’re not going to have equal representation of all the parts of society in many prestigious or exclusive occupations. So in a way, it’s about much bigger questions than a single company can deal with.

At the same time, I think there really are things that companies can do. You can affirmatively try to hire the people who don’t look like the people who are already there in terms of their race, gender, class origin, and other statuses. And you can try to think about what expectations or cultures at your firm are not really about the outcomes your firm needs to pay the most attention to.

To give an example from my own work, I know that in colleges and universities, students from poor and working-class backgrounds are much less likely to feel comfortable going to office hours than everybody else. So I require everybody, of any class background, to come talk to me, in an effort to make office hours open to everybody. I think there are analogies in other fields—there are unwritten rules where we can figure out what the norms are and then be explicit about them.

But still, there’s this larger question of how much inequality there is in the first place. If it wasn’t possible for somebody to make 10 times, 15 times what someone else does at the same organization, then it would matter a lot less how far people got in different organizations in terms of their earnings. And the broader context of the book is that part of what legitimizes big inequalities is the belief that outcomes are meritocratic.

Joe Pinsker is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers families and education.

Thanks to Joe Pinsker / TheAtlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/02/class-ceiling-laurison-friedman-elite-jobs/582175/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

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The Surprising Power Of Simply Asking Coworkers How They’re Doing

We humans have an innate need to belong — to one another, to our friends and families, and to our culture and country. The same is true when we're at work. When people feel like they belong at work, they are more productive, motivated, engaged and 3.5 times more likely to contribute to their fullest potential, according to our research at the Center for Talent Innovation.

To better understand the emotional impact of belonging — and its inverse, feeling excluded — we launched the EY Belonging Barometer study, which surveyed 1,000 employed American adults.

Our study substantiated existing evidence that exclusion is a growing issue. We found that more than 40% of those we surveyed are feeling physically and emotionally isolated in the workplace. This group spanned generations, genders, and ethnicities.

In fact, the majority of individuals look to their homes first (62%), before their workplaces (34%) when it comes to where they feel the greatest sense of belonging. While the workplace exceeds neighborhood communities (19%) and places of worship (17%), many individuals spend most of their time at work, and creating workplace communities where people feel like they belong is imperative.

This tells us that many people want more connection with those they work with. So how can companies connect more effectively with employees and help them feel like they belong within their workplace community? The results of our survey pointed to one simple solution: establish more opportunities for colleagues to check in with one another.

We found that 39% of respondents feel the greatest sense of belonging when their colleagues check in with them, both personally and professionally. This was true across genders and age groups, with checking in being the most popular tactic for establishing a sense of belonging across all generations. By reaching out and acknowledging their employees on a personal level, companies and leaders can significantly enhance the employee experience by making their people feel valued and connected.

What didn't seem to matter that much for belonging? Face time with senior leadership that wasn't personal. Being invited to big or external events or presentations by senior leaders, as well as being copied on their emails, was simply less meaningful to employees when it came to feeling a sense of belonging.

The Art Of The Check-In

Across EY, we've spent a lot of time considering the importance of check-ins with our people —as a way to build relationships regularly, as well as to provide support after significant news or events. Of course, people have different preferences about how they connect with each other at work. While some people may want to sit and talk, some may prefer a digital chat and others may not be open to engaging at all. Learning how to engage with employees in a way that they feel comfortable is key to creating a sense of community. Here are a few tips to consider as you find the right way to check in with colleagues:

Seize The Small Opportunities To Connect: Try to establish connections with your colleagues that communicate that you value, understand, and care about them. Be present, curious, and seize small daily opportunities to connect authentically. For example, a simple "How are you doing? How can I support you?" could go a long way in nearly every setting.

Check Bias At The Door: Check-ins are a time to listen to another person's perspectives, not to debate or persuade. If someone shares something that you don't understand or agree with, you might consider acknowledging their point of view or asking them to tell you more. You may be pleasantly surprised by their response. For instance, "Tell me more about it," or "I never thought about it from that perspective, but I do realize we can experience the same situation in different ways, so I appreciate you explaining that for me."

Assume Positive Intent: Start any conversation with your colleagues believing that those talking or listening mean well, especially when it comes to difficult issues. Sometimes you might fumble through these topics, but assuming positive intent will help you pause, ask clarifying questions, and connect in a more meaningful way. Sometimes, these pauses make a huge difference. It is fine to say, "I am pausing because I just don't know what to say," or "I am pausing because I want to learn more from you."

It's OK To Be Vulnerable: Seek feedback from your colleagues, especially those who are junior to you. Demonstrate your trust in them through the way you communicate and act on their feedback. For example, expressing vulnerability by acknowledging their views and talking openly about challenges you're facing humanizes the relationship you have with your peers and direct reports.

Be Consistent And Accountable: Be transparent and model consistent, inclusive behavior, even under pressure or during difficult conversations. Expect, reinforce, and reward the accountability of others. For example, offer a conversation to team members when a difficult event occurs, and model inclusive behavior in your own interactions to set an example for other team members.

These five tips may help guide the way, but the journey towards true inclusion is never ending. It is a continuous path that requires commitment from leadership, particularly as more people look to their work communities for validation, safety, fulfillment and happiness.

In turn, this yields tremendous benefits at scale —  from engaged employees, to client retention and better financial results. By starting with simple things like a check-in, we all have the power to make a difference in the lives of others and even on the bottom line.

Karyn Twaronite, EY Global Diversity & Inclusiveness Officer, is responsible for maximizing the diversity of EY professionals across the globe by striving to continually enhance EY's inclusive culture and she frequently consults with clients on diversity and inclusiveness matters. Karyn is a member of EY's Global Practice Group, Global Talent Executive and US Executive Committee.

Thanks to Karyn Twaronite / HBR / Harvard Business Review
https://hbr.org/2019/02/the-surprising-power-of-simply-asking-coworkers-how-theyre-doing?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

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