Hope at work
How hope can turn our place of work into a place of care.
Welcome. This is the first edition of the hope-based communications newsletter on substack, a place for our community of certified experts to share hope-based campaigning and messaging, along with strategic advice for anyone who wants to be more hope-based in their work.
Please share any issues you want us to address, or work you want us to elevate.
We will get the ball rolling with a project from hope-based expert Kerem Çiftçioğlu. After an excerpt from his new article about the Caring Workspaces project, I will show how we can all apply the five hope-based shifts to the challenge of interpersonal relations at work.
You can also scroll to the end for some short hopey, changey, brainy stuff we are into right now.
Keep well, and keep hope.
Thomas
Caring workspaces for human rights
Defending human rights workers’ working conditions based on an ethic of care is one of the best ways to foster resilience and well-being.
By: Ezgi Kan & Kerem Çiftçioğlu
The Covid-19 pandemic brought a new urgency to understanding care for our well-being as a fundamental part of our workspaces. This is an important call to action both because there are many problems that need addressing within workspaces and because our expertise as social change workers and activists is necessary to mainstream care into all workspaces.
The Caring Workspaces project was born out of these observations. It was developed as a pilot project to promote inclusive, diverse, and caring practices in civil society and the social enterprise sectors. The big lesson that this work has taught us is that, as agents of social change, we need to talk about our core values within our organisations just as much as we do externally in working to change the world.
Article continues here.
Caring at work, in 5 shifts
Going off Kerem’s lead, here is how we can put the five hope-based shifts to work in our own workspace.
Shift 1. From fear to hope
We can train our brain to stop writing angry emails
I doubt there is a single office worker on this planet who hasn’t at some point fired off an angry email only to regret it minutes, hours, days or even years later. Brain science can explain that. Spoiler alert: its fear.
When we are stressed, we are more likely to respond to new stresses with our “downstairs brain” - a fight-or-flight response. In a tense work environment, when that email pings into our inbox, we are already opening it with a sense of foreboding.
If our brain expects passive aggression, we have less ability to control our response. Our heart rate goes up, we are in defensive posture right away. In that moment, we lose control of how it makes us feel, and how we respond.
But we can train new responses.
Exploring brain science to improve my communication has also helped me understand our “email wars”. When I think back with shame to any of the petulant fights I started (usually without wanting to) during my career, I can trace most of them back to my own fear and insecurity.
When we bring a fear-based mindset to our workplace, we are more likely to misinterpret communications from our colleagues as slights and threats. That is what our brains were originally meant to do: identify threats and get the body ready to fight or flee them.
But knowing that evolution and brain chemistry are behind so much uncaring workplace behaviour can help us deal with it.
When we feel our own heartrate rise, we can tell ourselves: maybe this is not as bad as I think. We can step back, breathe, and try to activate our “upstairs brain” and see the situation from another person’s perspective.
Pause before hitting “reply” and take deep, long breaths. That tells our brain it is safe to relax. The brain can then divert energy back to the parts of our body that listens to others instead of those used for fighting or flight.
Empathy for colleagues becomes so much easier when we know the same thing is happening in their brains too, that have also evovled powerful tools for worrying - we might think another person’s worries are less pressing than our own, but the pain mechanisms in their brain can cause them the same amount of suffering as ours - that is just biology.
Take action: try to cultivate a hopeful mindset in your interactions with other. Meaning, take a moment to give them the benefit of the doubt before responding. And assume that your colleagues also have brains, nervous systems that might also be in fear mode.
Shift 2. From problem to solution
Words can hurt, and heal
The problem is that sometimes our colleagues trigger reactions that we cannot control.
In Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains how our words affect each other’s brains and nervous systems. Even from the other side of the world, your words can change your colleagues heart rate, their breathing, their metabolism:
“Humans are unique in the animal kingdom because we regulate each other with words. A kind word may calm you, as when a friend gives you a compliment at the end of a hard day. A hateful word from a bully may cause your brain to predict threat and flood your bloodstream with hormones”
Words, then, are tools for regulating human bodies. Other people’s words have a direct effect on your brain activity and your bodily systems, and your words have that same effect on other people. Whether you intend that effect is irrelevant. It’s how we’re wired.”
The more we have positive interactions with a colleague, the more our brain will expect positive interactions with them next time we meet: and it will prepare us accordingly. We are more likely to interpret the other person’s actions as friendly if we expect that behaviour from them.
This can be empowering. You can do so much good, just by being kind to your colleagues, you might make them more effective activists.
If your words have the beautiful and terrible power to change not just how your colleagues feel and act, but the very wiring of their brains, how will you use your words in future?
Shift 3. From against to for
When you act with care, you spread caring behaviour
You can actively start promoting good workplace habits yourself. Our brains can only have us do things that we have already experienced. Only by someone doing something caring that the rest of us can see and adopt that behaviour.
Do not wait for leadership, human resources or anyone else to make your workplace more caring. If you do not start, who will?
If we focus only on avoiing bad behaviour, the un-caring things will always dominate our thoughts - and how our brains prompt us to behave.
If we want a more caring workplace, try thinking about what the exact opposite things are of the things you are sick of seeing in your workplace, and then start doing them.
For example, expressing gratitude. Have you ever written to an underappreciated colleague to say how grateful you are for their help (with no other motive or request attached)? I’m guessing that if you did, you made their day and they told you so.
So when you start your work day, ask yourself what proactive action you will take to act on a value like cooperation, empathy or gratitude. Be the change you want to see in the workplace.
Here is a scenario:
A colleague does something you don’t like.
You would rather they did not do that.
Now pause, and think of the what you would like them to do instead.
What is the opposite of what they are doing wrong?
Then make that a shared goal not just for that individual, but for everyone.
Remember the golden rules of persuasion: people need to change their own minds, they are rarely shamed into it. And the best way for them to begin that change is to see others doing it.
It also helps if we see that we all value it enough to make it a target. That is what makes the Caring Workspaces Award so ground-breaking: we need to make our values tangible - something we do, something we celebrate and give awards for.
When we work for a cause, we can assume that we are in line with our values just by showing up for work. But we have to flex those values for real, they are muscles that get stronger with use. It is not enough to avoid harming others, we have to actively care for each other.
Take action: Because of the way our brains learn from the actions of others, we can all be leaders in this. Humans are group animals who learn behaviour from each other. Acting kindly will make other more likely to also do so. We can literally spread care and kindess across our workspace.
Shift 4. From threat to opportunity
Nurturing caring behaviour in colleagues
Very often, our effort to request accountability from a colleague can trigger their fear response, so that they misinterpret our request as a threat to their self - to their identity of themselves as a good person. Our request may be just, but that reaction could actually reinforce the bad behaviour.
The thing is, most often people being bullies do not realise they are being bullies. When confronted with their behaviour they are often the first to say they feel bullied themselves.
Think about the last unpleasant encounter you had: what if you were the bully, not them? You would reject that label, right?
Telling people what not to do, especially in activism where we all believe in our righteousness, tends to make people defensive. We are more likely to reinforce better behaviour by providing practical actions that offer an opportunity to act on our values.
Most people want to do “the right thing”, so if you give them a chance, they will. If you challenge their identity of themselves as good people, it will be very hard for them not to have a defensive response. Its natural to want to call out bad behaviour, but for most day-to-day issues and microaggressions, that calling out may not actually change the harmful behaviour.
Most bullies are not aware of the impact of their actions, and do not see themselves as bullies. Indeed, in my experience the worst bullies can be the first to see themselves as victims.
What will make spaces better for all of us? If those people behave better.
What drives good behaviour is habit.
And small habits can reinforce new values like respect for gender equality in people’s identity of themselves. Senior white man can learn to clean up the glasses left in the room after the meeting rather than rushing off and leaving it others. They can practice waiting until others have spoken before chiming in.
Of course, this needs to be done in the context of a formal unconscious bias training and mechanisms to deal with microaggressions, but the point is that they take the person down a path where they start to integrate the right behaviour into their habits. Crucially, if that behaviour becomes part of their own identity they will likely accept deeper changes in future.
As Lisa Feldman Barrett says,
“It’s impossible to change your past, but right now, with some effort, you can change how your brain will predict in the future. You can invest a little time and energy to learn new ideas. You can curate new experiences. You can try new activities. Everything you learn today seeds your brain to predict differently tomorrow.”
People are more likely to repeat things that they feel proud of. That is just how the reward system in our brains work.
So when we seek to expose, to shame or to punish, we have gotten to the scene of the crime too late. From the point of view of brain science, in the long-term pursuit of justice, neither “preventing” nor “punishing” are as effective as seeding alternative ways of behaving - the ones the society we want to see are built on.
Calling them out might give us short-term satisfaction and even medium-term relief, but long-term it reinforces shame (which is fear regarding our status) as the only way of regulating each other’s behaviour.
Take action: if we actually want caring behaviour, calling out the uncaring actions of colleagues may be less effective than giving them small opportunities to be more caring themselves.
Shift 5. From victim to hero
Hopeful teams perform better - and hope is a team effort
How does fear become the dominant mindset in the workplace? When our identity becomes so caught up in our work that mistakes and failure threaten our very self-worth.
One big factor is leadership. Being tough does not equal being a good leader. Don’t think that being more like businesses means being tough: most companies put more effort into staff well-being than NGOs!
Some might say that when we are dealing with human rights violations or humanitarian disasters, we do not have the “luxury” of care and hope. But care and hope is exactly what will make our responses more effective.
It is time to leave behind the idea that people on edge and under pressure perform better. This translates into blame-culture where people point fingers and risk avoidance - that constant stress so damaging for our brains and bodies.
Comfortable staff perform better: they are more likely to innovate, they are more likely to speak up when they see something going wrong or have made a mistake that needs to be corrected. One of the best bosses I ever had was always ready to say “That’s on me” to make their team feel safe.
Simon Sinek has written about the need for leaders to make their staff feel safe in order to work better in Leaders Eat Last (a great introduction to this book in this podcast):
“When we find ourselves inside a circle of safety, stress declines, fulfillment rises, our want to serve others increases, and our willingness to trust others to watch our backs skyrockets. When these social incentives are inhibited however, we become more selfish and more aggressive. Leadership falters, cooperation declines, stress increases. As do paranoia and mistrust.”
In the work context, hope means staff feel in control of their own destiny. They expect managers to support, not blame. They feel they have agency and impact. We can’t do that when afraid for our job prospects or beset by a deeper anxiety about our own status and self-worth.
Leaders need to cultivate hopeful staff, and that means two things:
Leading by example: acting with care and empathy, offering support not blame, making people feel safe not pressured,
Creating a shared sense of mission - that our work matters.
In these hard times for activism, this is more important than ever.
The difference between “I have been able to make a positive difference” and “I feel that my work is pointless” is not just a rational debate, it can make the difference in your own health.
In her wonderful book Evidence for Hope, Kathryn Sikkink cites a survey of human rights workers in which people who felt their work lacked impact were more prone to PTSD. She writes that:
“Both hope and the ability to see failure as helpful feedback may contribute to more resilient and less traumatised human rights workers.”
The hero of the office is the one who can turn failure into a necessary part of our mission, inoculating us against the fear that otherwise poisons our work relationships.
I think the positive impact that the “calm word” can have is particularly important in social change work. Because we so often focus on the world’s problems, rather than the long-term change that we have achieved, we can be nagged by a constant sense of failure. The problem is that when you work hard or face stress while feeling your work lacks meaning, you are more likely to get burned out.
So the call to action here is this: your colleagues and your allies need your praise and encouragement. We need to tell each other that our work matters and our effort has value. That is just human.
Being effectively hopeful in the world is bound up with our responsibility to care. It is hard to care for others if we do not feel hopeful ourselves, and it is hard to be hopeful if we feel nobody cares for us. So just as you work together with your colleagues to change the world, work together to be more caring!
Share your thoughts
The five-shift approach is designed for everyone to use in their own way. Maybe you have your own approach to promoting caring workspaces? Let us know what you think.
Go deeper
This article was inspired by Brene Brown, Simon Sinek and Adam Grant talking about “quiet quitting” in this podcast.
Hopey changey brainy stuff
There are two new books out that are absolutely crucial reading for social change makers.
Brainy book stuff: How Minds Change by David McRaney is a must-read. He writes about how deep canvassing changes minds by listening, not talking. So simple and yet such a contrast to most political communications.
This is something anyone who is familiar with the work of HeartWired or Freedom to Marry will be very familiar with.
We are also loving The Persuaders by Anand Giridharadas. I am only three chapters into this but I am already blown away by the behind-the-strategic-scences accounts from the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter. The story of Loretta Lynch (call in instead of calling out) is 🤯.
Also, the Guardian review called the chapter about my mentor, Anat Shenker-Osorio, “by far the most fascinating and potentially useful case study” so…
Hopeful novel alert: The surprise outsider of a “World Cup of Literature” would be Trinidad & Tobago, home to most of my favourite novelists, like Samuel Selvon and Earl Lovelace. The latest is Ayanna Lloyd Banwo. I am just loving the experience of reading her beautiful book When we were birds. Get this in the house before the winter holidays! (beautiful cover => nice present)
Brain stuff: if we want people to join our cause, we should make it as easy for them as possible, right? Perhaps not. New brain research suggests that making an effort might reinforce action. Maybe we should not be afraid of asking more of our supporters than petitions and donations?
“Researchers found that rewarding effort — and not the outcome — prompted people to seek out more difficult tasks later, even if they didn’t get additional rewards.”
Politics stuff: are you following the work of Million Moments for Democracy in the Czech Republic? You should? Big election coming up there in January. Last month they held a massive protest against fear. I was particularly inspired by the lady prepared to line her doors with fat to fight the cold winter.
More politics stuff: Lots of interesting learning from the mid-terms, including the power of younger voters. This article on new strategies for reaching those younger voters stood out to me, as it again reinforces the distinction between mobilising (telling people what to say/do) and organising (allowing supporters to find their own way to take part):
“We gave the influencers high-level talking points about issues and why they’re important, and then said, ‘Incorporate this into your content in whatever way you want’. “If you’re a comedian, make a joke about it. If you’re an actor, do a skit. We didn’t tell them what to say. We really leaned into their voice and genuine lived experience to drive the message home.“If an influencer is angry, frustrated, upset, we want them to use their voice and express it that way.”
That’s issue #1. Please let us know what you think. What should we talk about in future and in what format?
And please share this with someone else, so that we can grow the community of people who also care about “hopey changey stuff”.
Find an online version of this piece here. If this was forwarded to you and it gave you hope, subscribe to get your regular dose of hope-amine.