What Can Deep Listening Offer the Workplace Occupancy Crisis?
Authored By
Laurie Goodman, Strategy Director
What Can Deep Listening Offer the Workplace Occupancy Crisis?
The impact that the hybrid experience is having on employees is mixed. According to Gallup, 59% of employees globally are not engaged with their work, feeling lost, and disconnected from their workplaces. Fifty-six percent of employees in the US feel that they are struggling to maintain their well-being, and recent evidence shows that well-being interventions such as mindfulness or stress reduction programs are having little impact. The flexibility offered by hybrid work has instilled a greater sense of belonging as employees start to feel that their needs are being respected and that they can integrate work into the rest of their lives. Yet against this backdrop, over half of USA employees do not feel a sense of community at work, and this has steadily declined since the pandemic. These findings paint a picture of a diluted workplace experience that, despite having created greater freedoms for many, is failing to live up to the promises of connection, community, and collaboration made during the pandemic.
These realities are signals to approach the design of workspaces with a sense of curiosity about the lived experience of employees, and a concern for how things can be improved. Neuroscience has shown that our behavior and seemingly rational decisions, such as a reluctance to return to the workplace, are always informed by an emotional aspect of our experience, and yet, in workplace strategy, there is very little space for individual experiences to come to the fore.
In a landscape saturated with quantitative metrics from surveys and occupancy statistics, what is seen less are deeper explorations into how employees have been impacted by hybrid working and how they are responding to the conditions they have found themselves in. This pattern arises from a perceived gap between the value of personal stories in contributing towards solving complex organizational issues, which raises the question: is it possible to see the big picture without the individual narratives?
Historically, the field of qualitative research has sought to understand the complexities of human experience and how this is shaped by the environmental context in which we find ourselves. As the field has developed, it has drawn heavily on learnings from the world of humanistic psychotherapy, a discipline that uses person-to-person listening to surface the emotional experiences of subjects. This methodological confluence was shaped by an understanding that the relationship between the researcher and the subject greatly impacts the outcomes—when the right conditions are met, the researcher is able to enter into the lifeworld of the subject and get closer to their needs. In the context of employee resistance to returning to the workplace, these parallels present an opportunity to practice a different way of acquiring knowledge: How can we draw from the act of deep listening to create more workplace experiences that are more attuned to employees' needs?
"Stories turn into knowledge, and knowledge transforms into matter. Narrative is the matter from which we build our worldview, which in turn becomes physical objects: books, buildings, borders ..." — Minna Salami, Sensuous Knowledge
What are the key lessons we can learn from listening to professionals in the pursuit of creating more attuned workplace experiences?
Back to Basics — In the practice of therapy, empathy requires a dialogue to directly take place between just two people. Empathy is considered a state or an end goal rather than a personality trait or an intrinsic quality in a person. The criteria for this process are simple: achieving an empathetic state requires one person in the pairing to assume the role of the listener, who is attempting to guide the subject towards their own needs and desires. When the subject feels that the listener truly understands them, empathy has been successful.
The founder of person-centered therapy, Carl Rogers, argued that this state of understanding is very difficult to achieve without the listener checking their understanding of the subject to ensure that the interpretation is accurate. Referencing Rogers, If you don’t check, how can you know? This interpretation of empathy asks that, as researchers, we temporarily resist the temptation to bring answers and solutions to the table to help solve our subjects' issues. For true empathy with subjects to take place, as researchers we also need to try to see our subjects as equals, as much as possible, and to adopt what is known as a beginner’s mind, approaching our subjects’ lives with a sense of novelty and curiosity.
“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
Roger’s definition of empathy also asks us to accept that in design we will not get it right consistently. As researchers and designers, how we respond to getting it wrong has a lot of influence over the relational dynamic between the spaces we design and the people who will be using them. This process of failing to understand, adjusting, and trying again is known in therapy as rupture and repair: we listen, we define needs, we design in response, and then we check to make sure that our solutions are based on an accurate understanding of the underlying issues at play. Design itself can play a reparative role when the workplace starts to reflect a vision of an organization that is aligned with its values, and the space begins to represent a process of dialogue and exchange.
Reflecting on employees' experiences, evidence suggests that research activities such as semi-structured interviews and focus groups can have therapeutic qualities, with participants describing their experiences as enriching. The origins of these experiences lie in what happens in human bodies when attuned listening takes place. Neuroscience shows that when we connect to the emotional experiences of our subjects, the right side of the brain activates: this is the side of the brain that is home to emotion, creativity, and intuition. What is even more striking is that when empathy has been achieved, the same areas in the right side of the brain activate in each person in the listening pair. These attuned interactions and exchanges have therapeutic potential because when others accept our experiences, neural networks in the brain can become more accepting of them too. Over time, our brains learn to allow for our experiences to be felt and not shut down by our defenses.
Conclusion
It is both an exciting and daunting prospect to consider that design could contribute to the developmental process when the right conditions are met. On the one hand, there are significant ethical considerations at play: unlike therapy, the purpose of design research is never directly to benefit the subjects of the research, and the role of the researcher and the purpose of the research always needs to be transparent. At the same time, when deep listening is employed in design, both designers and users can begin to shape and be shaped in turn by a world that is more reflective of inclusive values. When design teams can listen and allow that listening to transform their understanding, it can also be transformative for the person being listened to.
