How to Use Work Psychology to Make Your Workplace Suck Less

So work psychology is a thing. Hi there, reader. I’m Mike, a PhD student in Organizational Psychology (aka Work Psychology). Did you know that work psychology was a thing? Welp, it is! It’s one of the fastest-growing fields in psychology. And in this article, I’m going to show you how can use it to turn a crappy workplace into one where everybody is happier, more creative, and more productive (for reals) — thanks, science!

Organizational science can help you understand how to get more (or less) of these things and more…

Note: This is just a tiny sample of things we study in organizational science. There are hundreds of smart scientists and neurotic PhD students obsessing over just one of these issues for for years. Some people spend their entire careers just studying one or two areas or workplace functioning.

Finding a good, evidence-based, scientifically-sound solution to your work culture problem is the easy part. The hard part is actually convincing your workplace to implement it. Work scientists have identified the following barriers as the most common to implementing more evince-based decisions.

Don’t fixate too much on your existing frustrations. Write those down, but also look for new sticking points that you hadn’t thought about before. How do your favorite coworkers adapt to/resist change? What about yourself?

This isn’t about just breaking through to one person. It’s about adjusting the system to accommodate the changes you’re going to make.

Your goal is to radically change the trajectory of your organization in this one area.

In the workplaces who regularly use scientific evidence to improve their culture (e.g., Google), the term “evidence-based” is likely a common word in the everyday workplace vocabulary. You can start fertilizing your culture to be receptive to scientific evidence simply by saying the word evidence-based and starting to make that a thing in your office conversations.

Okay, enough prep work. Let’s start addressing your specific issue. Again, we’re going to use meaningfulness as your example goal.

You have your own experience and judgement, your boss has his/her own experience judgement, and your coworkers have their own experience/judgement. Organizational science doesn’t suggest ignoring these for the sake of hard findings. But try to think about your experiences and judgement as pieces of evidence, not as the end-all-be-all of this decision.

Good evidence-based decisions combine insights from every available source of knowledge, including scientific evidence and experience.

Now that you’re aware of the opportunities and challenges with attempting to change your organization, it’s time to put on your researcher hat and find the scientific evidence to help you understand what change you need to make to (for example) make your workplace more meaningful/whatever.

Here are some tips on finding articles that you’ll find helpful

Put all the evidence you’ve gathered in one place:

Make an initial decision about what probably needs to happen. Now comes the hard part: You actually have to implement the change.

Attention shifts between threats and rewards, so if you want people to pay attention to something, you have to make it threatening or rewarding. You can do this by playing-up (discussing, mentioning) either the threat presented by the issue, or the reward that your change might represent.

Talk to everybody you can about your planned change. Work friends, work enemies, executives, interns — everyone. This accomplishes two goals:

Remember that point about attention shifting between threats and rewards? Welp, now is the part where you use the reward lever. Give people a dream — an attainable vision to shoot for, and make it as tangible as possible for them. What does success look like? Does it look like everybody sticking around (not quitting) and loving the organization? Does it involve everybody feeling less stressed and having more fun at work?

Talk about your vision for change — a lot. You need to infect everybody else with the better answer. Help them see the contrast that you now see — between the ‘right’, evidence-based way to handle your issue, and the way you’re doing it now.

Have a manager or coworker who’s being a roadblock? Try using some social proof. Find another company who did what you’re proposing to do to great success, and tell their story.

If you’ve ever played a video game, you may have noticed that the first challenge you encounter in a game is often an easy one. You start with defeating a little enemy, and then you work your way up to the big boss fights. Game designers call this progressive difficulty, and it’s well supported in the psychology of organizational change.

There’s a good reason for this: little wins release two chemicals in your brain: testosterone and dopamine. Dopamine (as you probably know) makes this goal rewarding. The testosterone motivates you to keep going.

Figure out the smallest achievable win for your initiative, shoot for that, and celebrate it when it happens. Let other people share in the achievement. Use those easy, early wins to build momentum.

Remember: A single person doesn’t just resist change; entire cultures can resist change. Pay as much attention to your work environment as a system as you do to the individual people within it. The next step beyond just talking about making more evidence-based decisions is to reward evidence-based decisions.

If your workplace regularly punishes looking at evidence and weighing science over one person’s opinion or a clique’s opinion, then that’s the first problem you should address.

In the best workplace cultures, evidence-based decision making is highly encouraged and that type of thinking rewarded.

How will you know if your efforts are working? Don’t just rely on your own observations. Track your culture change with data! Not only will hard data help you prove that your ideas are good, it’ll help you sell them to management.

Warning: You might learn surprising things from your survey, so be ready to continuously improve based on feedback and data.

There’s an app for that. Several software packages exist that can help you quickly measure various aspects of your work culture (the most popular being employee engagement, which isn’t a bad metric to start with). Here’s an incomplete list…

Most of the advice from this article was drawn from these scientific journals…

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