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Seal Team Six is known as the most prestigious unit of the USA’s armed forces — the best of the best of the best. But how do you think the members of this team are chosen?

Instantly, your mind might naturally go to performance on the battlefield. Like in any workplace, the person with the best performance, the person that hits their targets, the person that is more efficient, the person that can work longer hours, is usually promoted in an organisation.

However, the panel that select Seal Team Six also takes into account ‘trustworthiness’. When choosing this elite team, they take into account whether you could trust a person with your money, your house or your child. So much so that they would rather select someone who is higher on the ‘trustworthy’ scale and a medium ‘performer’ than someone who is a top ‘performer’ and scores medium-to-low on the ‘trustworthy’ scale.

Taking this example to the ‘real world’, notice how we have hundreds of metrics to measure someone’s performance and negligible to no metrics to measure someone’s trustworthiness. 

This oversight can often lead to promoting toxicity in our businesses, something which is highly counter-productive to an organisation’s overall performance in the long run.

It turns out having trust within a team and promoting people who are going to champion a trustworthy environment is one of the key ways a company is going to create a happy and mentally fit work culture.

But there are more components to all this than just promoting trust. Let’s delve in deeper.

What is a mentally fit work culture?

First of all, what we mean by a mentally fit culture is an environment where employees are not only looked after physically, but are also cared for financially and emotionally.

This means that they’re given a wage that represents the work they do, but also that they feel valued, safe and happy within the workplace.

If an employee feels good in these respects, then they are more likely to perform at a higher level, be more innovative and have more resilience when the working day becomes more stressful — ultimately the employee has more chance of performing at a higher level for the organisation.

How do we create a mentally fit work culture?

Trust

One of the reasons why Seal Team Six select more trustworthy candidates is because, to develop trust within an entire team, you not only need trustworthy individuals, but trustworthy leaders.

Trust involves an emotional response where employees know that their leaders are ‘on their side’ and will treat them fairly, with respect, and where setbacks will not be necessarily met with negative consequences. Once a leader is respected and trusted, they are more likely to inspire and motivate other employees around them.

Trust in leaders creates a ripple effect at every level that motivates employees to put forward the effort needed to make an organisation successful.

It’s important to understand that trust is not built overnight. It’s built on hard work and it must be earned. However, the following qualities can help induce a sense of trust amongst a team.

  1. Honesty and support
  2. The ability to listen and show understanding 
  3. Consistency 
  4. Model behaviour 
  5. Accountability

Working on these qualities and building trust is worth the effort because, once trust is lost, it can be very difficult to recover.

Gratitude

As well as promoting trust, encouraging gratitude is imperative to creating a mentally fit work culture.

According to Sodexo’s 2017 Global Workplace Trends, only 59% of Australian workers felt that their contribution to their workplace was valued. When employees feel unvalued, there is a cost. Australian HR think tank Reventure estimates that up to 92% of workers have disengaged from their work and the impact of this disengagement costs the Australian economy between $42 – $52.8 billion.

Practising gratitude at work drives real results. A recent study by email scheduling app Boomerang found that the best way to drive higher response rates to your emails lies in expressing gratitude in your sign off. Emails that were signed off “Thanks in advance”, “Thanks”, “Thank you”, “Cheers” or “Kind regards” received the highest response rates — as high as 66%! 

You could also apply this practice of gratitude to other interactions at work. For example, verbally expressing gratitude for a job well done to a colleague. Meanwhile, employers could be more flexible around hybrid working or holiday leave, or by creating spaces for staff recognition such as a bulletin board or a company email.

A safe and healthy workplace

If there are higher levels of trust and gratitude in the workplace, then it’s generally going to be a happier, nicer and less-toxic environment. 

Under these conditions, employees are more likely to feel safe to raise their opinions and are less likely to experience bullying, harassment or discrimination. Ultimately, employees feel accepted and respected in a psychologically safe workplace.

Safe and healthy workplaces are also ones that encourage collaboration and have established methods for conflict prevention and resolution. In fact, according to the founder of the Mediation Training Institute, Daniel Dana, 60-80% of all difficulties in organisations come from strained relationships (between staff), not from a lack of skill or motivation.

Managing conflicts and tensions between team members takes a lot of time and the longer it takes to get back to a more peaceful working environment, the greater the negative impacts on the team dynamics and organisational wellbeing. Unresolved conflict can also impact staff productivity and engagement at work.

Research has shown that those companies who actively try to promote a healthy workplace and experience low levels of conflict present the following characteristics:

  • Team members often share emotional and personal conversations 
  • Employees talk to each other as individuals rather than just colleagues 
  • Every employee is kept in the loop and team conversations place a greater focus on how members of the group are feeling
  • Conversations are monitored to ensure all team members participate in a roughly equal way to avoid a single person or a few people dominating the discussion
  • Employees say that they feel included and that they are seen, heard and validated

Take the quiz

The tech giant Google is regularly voted amongst the best places to work in the world. This hasn’t happened by accident — the multi-billion dollar company has conducted countless hours of research into the topic of workplace wellbeing to get the most out of their employees. 

Ultimately, Google discovered that happy and successful teams can positively answer a selection of 5 questions that reflect the feelings of trust, gratitude, job satisfaction and psychological safety:

Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? 

Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time?

Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear?

Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us?

Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters? 

So, what are the answers for your team? 

Care Anytime Anywhere

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