Making the case for kindness

The benefits of kindness are truly impressive. On an individual level, kindness is associated with lower stress levels, enhanced mood, improved performance – even longer life! At an organisational level, kindness is associated with higher levels of workforce engagement, higher productivity, reduced errors and – in the context of health care – fewer deaths.

In fact, and the evidence on this is compelling, how we treat each other at work is the single biggest determinant affecting both individual and organisational performance. It underpins the successful delivery of every KPI on the dashboard.

So, if kindness creates so many positive benefits, why do we appear to be so bad at it?

Kindness – or lack of it – in the NHS

Almost 1 in 3 people working in the NHS say they don’t feel respected at work. Just under half suggest that relationships at work are strained and, perhaps most worryingly, nearly 1 in 5 people working in our NHS say that they have experienced bullying from colleagues in the past 12 months.

Studies show that nearly half of people exposed to rudeness or unkind behaviour will reduce the time they spend in work, 80% will spend time worrying about how they have been treated, and 38% will notice a deterioration in the quality of their performance.

We are literally robbing each other of time and potential by how we treat each other.

Dr Jia Wang, an academic studying civility in the workplace, calls this a silent epidemic. Like any epidemic, some of the factors influencing spread are societal. The prevalence of social media, for example, has enabled the practice of consequence-free unkindness in an online reality where people’s inhibitions are discarded under a cloak of anonymity.

Other extrinsic factors, like the cost of living, perceptions of social injustice and the sheer pace of modern life, all cause stress that can be a key factor affecting our behaviours.

Many of these factors sit outside any of our control to influence. For instance, try as organisations might to attempt to police and curb social media use of their employees, it can prove difficult to put that cat back in the bag.

Permission and awareness

But there are two factors that have a direct link to how kind our workplace cultures are, and they are totally influenceable at an organisational, team or individual level. They are permission and awareness.

• Permission – if people can be unkind and get away with it then we will never create kinder cultures at work.
• Awareness – if we don’t talk about how we are behaving towards each other then we will never improve.

Both are factors that are first influenced around the board table.

How leaders behave matters. Between 30 and 40% of variability in team performance can be attributed to what leaders do.

The behaviours that leaders display and, perhaps more importantly, the behaviours that they tolerate in others sets the cultural bar for the organisation. But what leaders choose to make important is also important. Dr. Ron Heifetz, founder of the Centre for Public Leadership at Harvard University famously wrote, “Attention is the currency of leadership.”

It follows logically, in that case, that for kindness to improve in any organisation, leaders first must pay attention to it. However, a quick search of Trust Board agendas across the NHS will show that conversations about kindness are very low down the agenda – if they make the cut at all.

There are agenda items for performance, finance, quality, safety, clinical effectiveness…and rightly so. But kindness – which remember is the single biggest determinant affecting our achievements across all those areas – is largely absent from our discussions.

There might be a nod to culture or staff engagement tucked away at the bottom of the agenda or some hand-wringing about how we increase the uptake on completing the staff survey but it usually feels disconnected from the real meat and drink of the agenda – a sideshow playing on one of the fringe stages in a smaller field – while the headline acts suck up all that, oh so important, leadership attention.

So, is all hope lost? Absolutely not! But we need to find a way of putting kindness on the main stage more.

Myron Rogers, an author and consultant with the Leadership Centre, coined six maxims for leading complex change. Each of these nuggets of wisdom is worthy of an article in its own right but the one that best fits here is Maxim no. 6, which elegantly states: “The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.”

The process you use to get to the future is the future you get.

In other words, if we don’t consciously pursue all our organisational objectives with kindness then we will not create a kinder organisation. This is where every member of the senior executive team has a responsibility. No matter what the agenda item or KPI, each member of an executive team should be asking themselves two questions:

1. How am I making sure we pursue this objective with kindness? – Give permission
2. How are we putting kindness at the centre of our approach? – Raise awareness.

This small shift in perspective will take kindness out of obscurity and thrust it into the limelight and it will unlock all of those positive benefits that creating kinder cultures brings, at both an individual and an organisational level. How else do you expect to make things better?

Dan Grimes is Director of Operations at the Royal Liverpool Hospital.