The Brain Science of Workplace Engagement
"Can I offer you some feedback?"
Scared you, didn’t we?
According to the SCARF model created by Dr. David Rock, this question can induce the exact same response in our nervous system as fast footsteps walking behind us at night in a dark alley. And we really do mean “exact.” In the first one-fifth of a second, your brain can’t tell the difference between physical danger and what we call “social danger.” In this case, it’s the “fear” that you’re about to be criticized.
Brain science shows us that we process everything as a threat or a reward and that our “avoid” (“It could hurt me!”) response is much, much stronger than our “approach” (“It’s good for me!”) response.
Rock explains that there's an overlap in brain regions controlling survival and social needs. Ten thousand years ago, a fight or flight response may have meant we were escaping the jaws of a sabretooth tiger. In modern times, the response could mean we're reacting to our condescending, micromanaging sabretooth boss. Our survival brain, or limbic system, has first dibs on interpreting the environment and reacts quickly to keep us safe. All of this is happening in the brain unconsciously and at lightning speed.
So why are we talking about this here at Nash Consulting? It is because when employees are in a work environment that consistently triggers threat responses, they will struggle to bring their most creative and motivated selves to work every day. This is where cultures can fail.
The SCARF model gives us insight on how to intentionally engineer the work environment so employees feel safe to bring their best, authentic selves to work every day. When this happens, cultures thrive.
The SCARF model describes five domains of social experience that activate a threat or reward experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness. It provides a roadmap for a proactive, collaborative, and engaged workforce.
STATUS
Status is the brain tracking your level of importance in a community. It is about pecking order and seniority. A perceived reduction in status - a feeling of being “less than” - activates a threat response in our survival brain. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, a reduction in status could mean a death sentence.
Much of the research on status threat/reward centers around feedback. When the status threat is activated, brain imaging shows inflammation in physical pain networks. Seriously! Even suggesting that someone is ineffective at a task can trigger the status threat. Add to this an authority figure in the workplace overreacting to a situation through tone of voice and body language, and you have an automatic fight/flight/freeze response.
Harvard professor of leadership and management, Dr. Amy Edmondson, states it quite simply: “People cannot do their best work when they are afraid.” In her book The Fearless Organization, she states that leaders can minimize the status threat through creating a climate of psychological safety where people aren’t punished or humiliated by peers or managers for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns or mistakes.
Increasing the status reward in your culture: Schedule consistent one-on-one meetings with your team members. (Check out our blog post on one-on-one meetings.) Employees want to know they are on your radar and that you care about and value them. This is your opportunity to proactively solve issues, build trust and reiterate that this is a safe place to express ideas. Additionally, status can increase when people are learning and improving and attention is being paid to this improvement. Reward circuitry is activated from a sense of being “better than” oneself in the past.
According to research done by the US Department of Labor, 64% of Americans who leave their jobs say they do so because they don't feel appreciated. By remembering to give your employees positive feedback, you are triggering a status reward response in their brains and building up your relational bank account with them, which will pay many dividends in terms of trust and respect.
How else can you, as a leader or individual contributor, behave in ways that increase the status reward in your work environment?
CERTAINTY
Our brains are pattern recognition machines trying to predict the near future, and ambiguity and uncertainty can generate a strong threat response. Even a small amount of uncertainty can activate an error response in the orbital frontal cortex (OFC), taking attention away from one's goals and forcing attention to the error. When something was rustling in the bushes thousands of years ago, our ancestors who prepared for the worst were able to survive and pass on their fearful genes to us. (Had they wrongly guessed it was a mouse and it turned out to be a tiger, their genes would have been in serious trouble!)
When a manager is acting incongruently or their actions are not aligned with their words, the resulting uncertainty can fire up errors in the OFC. Which boss is showing up today? An unpredictable boss can wreak havoc on the survival brain. Some other common uncertainties we hear from almost every group we work with are unclear expectations, indecision, unclear role/task clarity, outdated or unclear policy/procedures, changes in leadership, lack of vision, reorgs and unaddressed rumors; just to name a few.
Increasing the certainty reward in your culture: Perhaps the biggest bang for the buck in increasing certainty is to be consistent with clear expectations. Sad but true, we often hear, “I’d rather have a predictable boss who’s a jerk than someone who is a moving target,” and “She was ok with the decision last week and angry about it this week.” You can also minimize the certainty threat by being transparent. Share as much as you can without violating confidentiality or ethics and share the ‘why’ behind the what whenever possible.
Oh, and don’t forget to follow through. As Stephen M.R. Covey says, declare your intent: state it, signal it, clarify it, and discuss it. Choose the intent that best serves everyone, including yourself. Then act accordingly. Do what you say you are going to do.
Take a few minutes and think of other ways you can minimize certainty threats while increasing rewards in a workplace (or virtual workplace) context.
[Want more on SCARF? Check out our podcast Episode #27 on the social neuroscience of leadership. It doesn’t suck. Available on all major podcast platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and Stitcher.]
AUTONOMY
Autonomy is the perception of exerting control over one’s environment and a sensation of having choices.
As human beings, we are all “control freaks.” The brain likes to have a sense of control. Inescapable stress can be highly destructive, whereas the same stress interpreted as escapable is significantly less destructive (Donny et al, 2006). The feeling of not being in control of your environment creates a threat response, and every time you perceive that there is a choice in a situation, you get a reward response.
The most common autonomy threats we hear in group discussions are micromanaging, hovering (often referred to as “snoopervising”), responsibility without authority, lack of trust, lack of resources, being penalized for mistakes, lack of role/task clarity, and bureaucracy.
Increasing the autonomy reward in your work environment: One of the greatest areas of opportunity for increasing autonomy is in participatory decision-making. When we train leaders on the six ways of making a decision, we start out with the following question: What are the results in an organization or a department when the leaders and managers make all the decisions without seeking input from the group? We hear answers like frustration, resentment, bad decisions, lots of “re-deciding”, apathy and, of course, a lack of autonomy. Employees want to know whether they are influencing, deciding or neither. Here are a few decision styles leaders can adopt to increase autonomy:
Genuinely seek input, recommendations and ideas from employees and then decide. (We call this a Style 3 decision. Team members are influencing, but not deciding.)
Look for opportunities for team consensus decisions. (This is a Style 5 – the team, with your help, is making the decision.)
Delegate the decision to an individual or a group. (Style 6) Delegate as much as possible! Let go of control. Empower. Do not punish when things go off the rails. Instead, make it a learning experience.
How else can you activate the autonomy reward in your workplace?
RELATEDNESS
Relatedness is the sense of being connected to a social group - a feeling of inclusion. The sense that you have a place around the campfire with everyone else, as opposed to feeling permanently outside the circle. In the absence of safe social interactions, the body generates a threat response. It is about friend or foe, trust or distrust, safe or not safe, ‘in’ group or ‘out’ group. Humans have a fundamental need to belong and feel accepted in a group. In our distant past, not being accepted by our group could result in fewer opportunities for sex, food, and shelter, which meant that being disenfranchised from your tribe was a death sentence.
Social rejection hurts. In one experiment done by researcher Naomi Eisenburger, experimenters scanned the brain regions involved in pain while subjects played a virtual game of catch. At some point, the digital ball stopped getting thrown to a subject from the other two people. When this happened, the fMRI scans showed a very strong activation of the physical pain network. When people feel socially rejected or left out, the same thing happens in the brain as if they are experiencing physical pain. In fact, they found that giving people Tylenol actually reduced the felt sense of rejection. It’s literally true that rejection hurts (and triggers a major threat response).
Relatedness is strongly linked to trust. In a low-trust work environment, the relatedness threat manifests itself as individual silos, cliques, lack of information distribution, suspicion, unhealthy competitiveness and a lot of other nasty behaviors.
Increasing rewards from relatedness in your workplace: One of the best ways we know of to foster a sense of relatedness in a culture is by creating common commitments on your team. It is a powerful way to build a better sense of connectedness and foster trust. We teach a workshop that assists teams in learning some trust-building team behaviors and mutually agreeing on a list of commitments to practice and hold one other accountable to.
Here are some of the most common examples we see of team common commitments:
We will avoid badmouthing our coworkers behind their backs and will instead engage in problem-solving conversations and other healthy approaches to dealing with negativity.
Discussions will be authentic, honest, open, and respectful. People’s positions, wants, priorities, and opinions will be stated clearly.
Dissenting opinions, handled respectfully, will be expected and even encouraged.
We will spend time enjoying one another, having fun, and allowing more holistic relationships to develop.
FAIRNESS
The perception of an unfair exchange activates a threat response. The SCARF research states that people who perceive others as unfair don’t feel empathy for their pain, and in some instances will feel rewarded when those unfair others are punished. A sense of fairness is hardwired into our survival brain. It is our BS detector: “This just doesn’t feel right.”
One of the influential studies in social-cognitive neuroscience was done by Alan Sanfey. Lab subjects participated in the Ultimatum Game. MRI scans showed that people experienced the emotion of disgust when they felt unfairly treated in the game. Their actions followed suit. The feeling of being treated unfairly was so strong that participants would reject receiving money if it meant that someone they perceived as being unfair also got no money. They were literally passing up on free money to make sure the unfair person was punished. Some subjects even felt rewarded when the other participant was punished.
Fair treatment in the workplace mitigates uncertainty and creates in individuals a greater capacity to maintain positive emotions. However, when unfair treatment is coupled with uncertainty, the individual will engage in self-protective or negatively competitive actions. Pro-organizational actions are abandoned, and self-interest takes over.
Fairness in the workplace is tricky because subjective perception is different for everyone. Many times, employees have limited visibility into what’s actually going on behind the scenes, and it’s in our nature to fill in the gaps because we want to be certain. When we’re stressed and feel out of control, we tend to see patterns that don’t exist, and this can propagate perceived unfairness. For this reason, be proactive in sharing what you can share, be clear about what you can’t share, and provide as much context as possible.
Reducing the threat of unfairness and increasing the reward from fairness: Based on our experience teaching workshops on SCARF to hundreds of leaders across dozens of organizations, here are some of the most common discussion ideas in regard to reducing unfairness:
Trust is key. When trust goes up in an organization, perceived unfairness goes down.
Walk the talk. Be consistent and congruent in your behavior. Make sure your actions are aligned with your words.
Be consistent in providing recognition and appreciation.
Be predictable and declare your intentions. Seek mutual benefit. Genuinely want what’s in the best interest of everyone and then ACT accordingly. Share the why behind the what whenever possible.
Abolish favoritism and provide uniform treatment for all.
Have consistent one-on-ones. This ensures EQUAL face time with employees and provides an opportunity to build trust.
Be transparent and proactive with communication. Share what you can share and be clear about what you can’t share and why you can’t share it.
Don’t give responsibility without authority. Ensure there are clear expectations, clear understanding of obligations, role/task clarity, clear processes, and clear policies/procedures. Just be CLEAR.
Create a learning environment. Delegate, share control, and don’t punish when things go off the rails.
How else can you foster an environment of fairness with your team?
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We all have a personal SCARF order, meaning that one domain will have a stronger influence on our emotions than another. It is helpful to take some time of reflection to think about your SCARF order.
The bottom line is that the SCARF model provides leaders with insight to recognize, understand and manage emotional drivers in themselves and others to set the stage for a safe, collaborative work environment. If these concepts stay on your radar, you will be on the right path to creating an environment that fosters deep collaboration, creativity, and trust. Give it a shot.