Understanding the Current Emotion Revolution in the Workplace – And What Employers Can Do to Embrace It

Andrew Faas, founder of the Faas Foundation, is pleased to announce a continuation of the Foundation’s partnership with the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence with “Emotion Revolution In The Workplace” – an initiative established in 2016 to share the benefits of emotional intelligence as a core competency.

In 2017 the partners polled 14,000 workers across all sectors asking both how they currently feel and how they want to feel. The result? Some 50 percent of the emotions that people report feeling each day at work are negative.

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In terms of what people want, respondents listed: (1) mutual trust and respect; (2) stability, security and safety; (3) a sense of purpose; (4) a sense of efficacy; and (5) the ability to speak truth to power. Very few people felt that they work under these conditions.

These findings have been validated through three annual polls conducted by Mental Health America and the Faas Foundation under the ‘Mind the Workplace’ initiative.

It’s clear that employers continue to rely on engagement surveys to gauge the mood of their employees.   The Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence/Faas Foundation initiative will delve deeper into understanding why those results continue to show disengagement on the part of employees.

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Whether organizations are truly committed to inclusive cultures will become clear as the workplace transitions to a post-pandemic world. Those organizations that fail to include employees in decision-making, to take their feelings into account, cannot claim to be inclusive.  They will lose the war for talent, which is emerging to be the biggest challenge for an economic recovery.

Marc Brackett, Director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence noted, “our first hypothesis is that it is not possible to have engagement, equity, and diversity without inclusion. Further, where emotional intelligence is a core competency, it is possible to create an inclusive culture. Finally, we expect that people make more rational decisions and choices in inclusive cultures.”

Note on the data: In addition to polling people in the United States and Canada, we include Norway because it is the top country in the World Economic Forum Inclusiveness Index. We also will be recruiting a number of organizations in these three countries to poll their employees.

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