In this Moir Group event our guest speaker Michael Leiter, Professor of Psychology at Deakin University shares his tips on how you can create a culture of respect and engagement in the workplace using the ‘SCORE’ process (Strengthening a Culture of Respect and Engagement).
Transcript
Your greatest resource at work is your collaborative relationships with other people. People need to know what is it what is the impact of their behaviour on other people. SCORE. Strengthening a Culture of Respect and Engagement. How this works is that it’s more like a fitness program. What you’ve got to build in are ways of keeping civility and respect as an active issue for the organisation. It’s these five sessions that just starts with acknowledging respect. The big part of this is laying out ground rules in the first session. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s how we interact in the meetings. Here’s how we interact outside of meetings. Promoting respect. What we want to do is increase that proportion of positive to negative. And then we work on how do you respond to disrespect when it happens and then elaborate on that in the next session, what if it just continues. And then the last one is how do you sustain these gains. We want to sustain these gains by monitoring what’s happening training people, developing policies that really say that this is the kind of culture and organisation that we’re going forward with. What we’re doing in these groups is we’re bringing rational problem solving for something that’s often an emotional kind of a thing. The trajectory of what we’re doing is starting with the fast slowing it down, getting some insight, bringing in new behaviours practising new behaviours and then getting it going fast again because that’s the only way you get the job done. You can’t spend all day having deep reflections on every social encounter you have at work or not much is going to get done. You really can get something by reflecting on what’s your impact on other people in a way that goes a bit more deeply than usual. Everybody’s accountable for their relationships to some degree. Everybody is accountable for their own behaviour but your relationships are a shared thing. If you want to change your relationships you’ve got to be part of the process. Even if you are quite convinced that you’ve never done anything wrong you still have a responsibility to help the group go forward. People want to belong to a social group and they want to be a respected member of the group. People look at every little gesture, facial expression use of space, choice of word, they’re analysing that to figure out where do I stand in relation to you.