On workplace love and connection
A pre-covid Wharton study on love and what it means for our future
Welcome to all the new subscribers of “Showing Up!” You have arrived in the final chapter of our five-month “Season of Connectedness.” During the month of February, I will be writing about how we can rediscover joy in our work, as part of a team, even if we aren’t physically together. Joy is the last of our five power mindsets of strong hybrid, distributed and remote teams: Belonging, Meaning, Faith, Clarity and Joy.
For me, my emotional connections to my colleagues are a big part of what makes me feel joy. How they spend their lives, where they live, their families and pastimes all matter to me. It’s especially important to me if they are experiencing a milestone—either a happy one or a challenging one—and that they know I am there for them. This takes a higher level of energy as a leader and colleague but it’s always been worth it. When I look back on work, I will only ever remember the people, and my emotional connection to them is why. I would even say my feelings towards my colleagues approach a platonic love, a deep care.
There is a kind of love you probably haven’t heard much about. It’s called “companionate love.” It’s the most common form of love, a love defined by affection, caring, compassion and tenderness.
When I started to research the emotions surrounding the experience of remote work—and what could possibly connect us across vast distances—I was so intrigued by the connective power of “companionate love.”
The late management scholar Sigal Barsade, who taught me at the Yale School of Management and later went on to teach at the Wharton School, and her colleague, George Mason University assistant professor of management Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill, established in their research the importance of “companionate love” at work. They developed a methodology to measure this kind of love in the workplace and surveyed over 3,000 people in seven different industries including pharmaceuticals and engineering.
What their research showed was that where companionate love was expressed in the workplace, the employees in that organization had greater job satisfaction, greater commitment to their organization and greater personal accountability.
As remote employees, feeling an authentic sense of care from our colleagues and our leaders can enable a higher level of commitment, accountability and job satisfaction no matter where we are.
Isn’t that the true beauty of it? Companionate love is borderless, limitless, it can transmit through any mode of communication, it does not require the four walls of a building. It is everywhere. It is even a kind of “emotional contagion,” something else that Dr. Barsade studied in the workplace.
In an age when distances separate us more often than ever before, we need to grasp the potential of companionate love, of this connective, contagious emotion. We need to be intentional about collecting information that can be a foundation of companionate love, cementing our commitment to our work, our colleagues and our company culture. Sigal Barsade was fond of saying that “emotions are data,” they let us know what people need. And they become even more important data points when we aren’t physically together.
You can read Dr Barsade and Dr O’Neill’s research here and see Dr Barsade talk about companionate love in this YouTube video: “All You Need Is Love…at Work?”
Whatever you do at work today, do it with companionate love.
[This content is adapted from my book for hybrid and remote leaders and teams, “Your Resource Is Human: How empathetic leadership can help remote teams rise above,” available now. Find out more and read a free sample.