After greeting the former student, I described how Ron regularly came into my office to graze my books, ask about topics on which he was uninformed, and often would walk away with a book to read which, at a later date he would return, expecting a full conversation on the book’s contents. Ron’s choices often surprised me, I explained to the student since he was a hardcore empiricist and social scientist, and I was a lyrically inclined professor of humanities. Intrigued by my comments, the former student asked permission to take photos of my bookshelves and after he had done so, went into Ron’s office and methodically took photos of all the books his revered former professor had on his shelves. 

I can think of no greater tribute to a mentor than to explore his mind through what he had read or might read. This former student’s reverence for Ron’s library and Ron’s reverence for mine illustrates an important feature of how we approach management education—in for-profit, non-profit, and public sectors—at the University of San Francisco. We recognize that reading widely, especially outside of one’s field and in literary modes that stimulate creativity, benefits the practice of management and life, even to the highest levels of practice, as demonstrated by Barack Obama’s conversation about literature with Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times. 

The value of coming to the practice or study of management with a liberal arts education has been enthusiastically endorsed as preparation for leadership by recognized sources in the field, academic and popular. From the Harvard Business Review to Forbes, the Wall Street Journal to The Atlantic, educators are appreciating that exposure to the humanities provides students the skills necessary to succeed in managerial settings: 

• How to hone powers of observation and to reflect—to study and analyze events, objects, and people; 
• How to explore and manipulate big concepts and complex contexts but not get lost in the abstract; 
• How to apply new ways of thinking to difficult problems that can’t be analyzed in conventional ways; 
• How to communicate with diverse constituencies with persuasive and cogent arguments. 

Skilled cultural interpreters who are well-read across the humanities can also recognize traits necessary for a successful managerial point of view, including an ability to tolerate ambiguity, recognize multiple perspectives, and proceed with an open-ended vision; an interpretive posture that is crucial for facing a murky future or tricky problems in a managerial setting.

For example, when teaching a case study in ethics courses for both MBA and MPA students, I ask students to follow the same steps a reader would follow analyzing a narrative or lyric:

• Where and when did the event occur? How is the stage set and the action determined? (business environment, and other details/setting)
• What happened? (outline of the action/plot)
• Who was involved? How do their points of view differ? (roles/positions and attributes of those involved/character)
• Why were the key decisions made and what were those decisions? (problem-solving methods/plot development)
• Which ethical considerations were taken into account? What recurrent themes or values surface in dialogue or behavior? (interests of people affected by the decision, relevant professional standards, theories, principles/themes)
• What course of action was decided on, and why? (including any ethical justification that was given/resolution of conflict)

I would then ask students to provide a summary of their experience and to reflect on what they and/or others (including multiple stakeholders) learned from these events. Was the decision taken virtuous? Would different actions lead to different outcomes? Might the characters have acted differently if they had known what the outcome would be? Did the events lead to any changes in duties, policies, or procedures? 

In a September 2016 issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education, Christopher Michaelson supports the approach I take when he argues that those teaching ethics in business schools should consider using novels as required, indeed core reading for their students. He bases his recommendation on the premise that narrative pedagogy cultivates better businesspeople who have not only better skills but better characters and are employees who operate with more “enduring ethical effectiveness.” Michaelson characterizes the narrative approach to teaching ethics as shifting the primary question asked from “What should I do?” to “How should one live?” The question changes not just in direction but scope, from the immediate and individualistic request for a specific answer to a more general human consideration of moral conduct. 

Thus, changing along with curricula supported by emerging research is the growing recognition that reading great works in the humanities can promote one’s ability to imagine and understand things from someone else’s perspective and, in turn, to grow in one’s career and personal life. Several Wall Street Journal items highlight the benefits of reading literature for managers. In “Why Good Storytellers are Happier in Life and Love,” a contributor writes that, “research shows that the way people construct their individual stories has a large impact on their physical and mental health. People who frame their personal narratives in a positive way have more life satisfaction.” Another item focuses on how one acquires those storytelling techniques, building basic social skills that reading fiction develops as outlined in a study published online in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 

Beyond the benefit in terms of enhanced “social skills,” however, reading creative writing can lead to deeper, more empathetic engagement with others that do not simply avoid the awkward (in the way that obeying the external control of the law is the mere minimum for moral conduct), but actively seeks to understand people, to develop empathy. As explained by David Brendel, in a survey where business executives rated empathy and intellectual curiosity as among the five most important skills for success in a digitized and global economy, in which many of our business partners are never in our physical presence. “In order to serve the needs of clients and colleagues around the world,” Brendel writes, “we must be adept at understanding their feelings, thoughts, and points of view” that is promoted by “reading the humanities.” 

Taking a cue from the poet Mary Oliver who observed, “Attention without feeling is only a report,” let me walk you through some of the virtues of reading Gabriel Marquez’s story, “The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World,” as part of a management curriculum. This simple but potent tale illustrates how a community uses imagination to resolve a potentially fearful mystery and the multiple ways those imaginative responses manifest in their lives. What is undeniable in the plot trajectory is how the characters’ capacity for moral conduct grows as they exercise the ability to tolerate mystery, to choose the good, and to create beauty while explaining an actual event and imagining a better life. 

“The Most Handsome Drowned Man in the World,” tells the tale of a small, coastal fishing village interrupted by the arrival of a dead body washed up by the waves. This drowned man has a huge impact on the village, which is changed forever by his arrival. Characters move from a resigned complacency to an irritated curiosity and eventually to a creative vision inspired by an over-sized, exotic, washed-up corpse. As we watch the transformation in the townspeople, we are led to consider our own communities and how we lead our life, who inspires us, and how we handle the challenges of forces society and nature. 

“The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” opens with a group of children playing on the beach of a small fishing village. In the waves, a “dark and slinky” bulge is approaching and creating a tone of doom. It turns out to be a drowned man, covered in seaweed, stones, and dead marine creatures. The men head to neighboring villages to see if the dead man belongs to one of them, while the women clean off the body and prepare it for a funeral. “They didn’t have to clean his face to know that he was from elsewhere,” they live so remotely. The coastal, cliff-side town was a “desert-like cape” “with no flowers,” and so little land that the inhabitants have to throw their dead over the cliffs and into the sea rather than bury them in the ground, thus the curiosity arises more out of the identity of the body than its presence. While the women work on the drowned man’s body, as they imagine the “far-off seas and deep waters,” from which he came, they quickly assert, breathlessly, that he is the biggest, strongest-looking, most virile, and handsomest man they have ever seen in their lives, so remarkable “he didn’t even fit in their imaginations.” But his arrival triggers their imaginative capacity and they conclude that he died a “death with dignity,” is named Esteban, and when the men return with the news that no neighboring towns can claim him, the women weep with joy that he is now “theirs.” 

The men don’t understand what all the fuss is about until the women show them the drowned man’s face. Then they, too, are in awe at his handsomeness, his masculinity, and his size. While they admire the drowned man, they think that he must have been ashamed of his size in life and must have felt awkward on account of it. “Fascinated by his disproportion and beauty,” the men respect him; but more than that, they become empathetic to his challenges and join the women and care for Esteban, attention that triggers care for each other as “the first cracks of tears opened in their hearts.” As Esteban comes alive to the villagers, so do they come alive to each other. 

Together, the villagers prepare a splendid funeral for the drowned man. When they finally let his body go over the cliff and back to the waves below, they all know that their lives have been permanently changed and that they “were not complete, nor would they ever be again,” with Esteban gone. As they “shuddered to the marrow with the sincerity of Esteban,” his spirit remains an inspiration to expand their vision and improve their lives. The villagers know that they will build their houses stronger and bigger, to be big enough for a man like Esteban. They will paint their walls brighter and plant flowers, so that someday, when the ships pass by their town, they will look at the bright, beautiful, fragrant town and say, “yes, there, is the village of Esteban.” 

When the villagers set their vision on a higher purpose and start creating a conscious culture of values supported by a mission; when they change their orientation away from their smallness and dreariness and embrace possibility, recognizing multiple stakeholders and responding to the unavoidable contingencies of the external world, they enact a preparation for embodied citizenship that changes the community. These are also traits that describe a successfully managed organization, or maybe what we might call not Esteban’s village but “Ron Harris’s” village.

 

In a column by David Brooks in the New York Times, he observed a trend in higher education that is heartening to a professor like me who has publicly advocated in Huffington Post and elsewhere for applying the humanities in professional education. Hoping to encourage a trend that resists a narrowed down focus on producing professionals rather than people, Brooks argues in “The Big University,” that a college education should “leave a mark on the full human being” by promoting conversations that educate the soul.

Yet academics trained in the humanities are often tentative about bringing their ideas to programs that train professionals; likewise, professional degree programs, like the MBA and MPA programs I teach in, can be equally reluctant to expand their offerings to include knowledge and skills acquired by a study in the humanities. My role as a professor trained in religious and literary studies, occupying a position in a school of management, was not a curricular choice but an administrative maneuver. Taking advantage of the circumstances, however, has become my chance to demonstrate what Brooks and others across the educational, policy, and professional spectrum are recognizing more and more: that turning to the fundamentals of education in the humanities is not merely an anachronistic act of desperation but a means of squarely addressing modern anxieties in a rapidly changing material and professional landscape.

While opinion writers across the media have begun supporting and expanding humanities offerings as preparation for work and life, most have neglected to consider those who seldom get past the academic threshold in the first place but whose journeys have taken them to the workplace. Books@Work (booksattwork.org) corrects that oversight. They recognize that only 60% of workers in the U.S. have access to higher education. Many front lines, blue-collar, and even middle management workers lack structured opportunities to engage in intellectual adventures by way of formal education and to benefit from the kinds of skill, knowledge, confidence, and empathy-building experiences that can be elicited from reading and discussing literature.

After talking to the founder and executive director, Ann Smith, about the goals and methods of Books@Work, I was reminded of the work of the Free Southern Theatre, established in 1963 to support the Civil Rights Movement. Although the Free Southern Theatre no longer exists, it established a model for how an organization can recognize the transformative potential of the arts and use literature to stimulate creative and reflective thought around community-based involvement. The program helped create more informed and engaged citizens and broke down social divisions just as Books@Work disrupts the hierarchical structure at many workplaces and promotes the development of skills that directly benefit both the employee and the employer.

 

While Books@Work may not be attached to a particular social movement, its modest goals to encourage employees to reflect on how they do their jobs and live daily has the potential for a wide-reaching effect. In addition to breaking down workplace divisions, the program also creates town-gown connections as faculty, especially adjuncts struggling to stay employed in their fields, find new inspiration to make connections between their scholarship and their communities. Teaching outside of a university setting challenges academics to demonstrate the relevance of their fields and to amplify the connections between literature and life. Rather than suggesting a displacement of higher education, programs like Books@Work creates not just better employees but prospective students.

Begun in 2010 by Smith, an art historian lawyer with a doctorate in organizational management, Books@Workis now active in 10 states and hopes to go national.  Participating companies and community groups reflect a broad spectrum of society. Companies pay the modest costs of the program, including materials and a stipend for the educator who leads three months of seminars. Employees read a book a month and participate with the instructor in selecting the texts to read and discuss in settings deliberately designed for the convenience of the employee. Selections include a wide variety of readings, from classics by Hemingway to short fiction by Dave Eggers, from non-fiction studies like Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns to YA novels.

Whatever the text, the outcomes are remarkably consistent across all settings where Books@Work has operated. Employees who participate, register greater interest in continuing education with corresponding confidence that they can be successful as students. Soft skills like collaboration, communication, decision-making, and critical thinking all improve and improve employee performance, no matter their task. The workplace becomes more trusting as hierarchies relax and more ethical as literature discussions help people to identify and respond thoughtfully to moral challenges both in and outside of the workplace. As Ann observed, they recognize in literary characters “that could be me” and are open to a reality that they “never knew,” encouraging them to extend their empathetic range and sensitivity to diversity and difference. These outcomes are supported by evidence gathered from three extensive surveys conducted at the beginning, middle, and end of the program.

Books@Work can be read two ways: as a description of what the program carries to the workplace—books—and as an articulation of what happens wherever one reads: books work!

 

As I continue in these blogs to reflect on the role the humanities can play in settings not traditionally seen as sites for creativity and reflection, I recalled an experience from a trip I took to El Salvador in 2012. Joining a delegation from the University of San Francisco, our trip was in part homage to the Jesuit martyrs from the University of Central America who were murdered by the Salvadoran military in 1989.  Part of our mission was to immerse ourselves in the setting and to explore the ongoing healing and reconciliation after the civil wars. We toured the country and learned from its citizens about the conditions that led to the murders and the subsequent problems with violence and corruption that continue to plague the country and make it among the most dangerous places in the world. (http://www.vox.com/2015/11/2/9646848/el-salvador-violence)

Yet despite all the fear and violence in the country, there are movements for change.  Among the voices struggling to be heard are those of youth incarcerated in the El Espino Reinsertion Center in Ahuachapan, El Salvador. We were introduced to these voices by a young American volunteer, Jenna Knapp, who understands the transformative power of language and who has used her creative and discursive writing skills to help Salvadoran youth imagine another kind of life. Their writing has also left us a testimony of a witness and, with Jenna’s persistent efforts, will soon result in a body of literature published in a volume that she can use to reach out to colleges, high schools, and other venues to use in curriculums aimed at introducing students to issues of social injustice.

As Jenna explained to us, the youth survive in deplorable conditions, having arrived at the detention center because of their ties to gang life, a relationship almost impossible to avoid or ignore in a country with few choices and many pressures on young people. Due to extreme poverty, structural violence, and broken family units, most of the young writers had been excluded from society long before they became gang members. Yet these energetic youths have “complex and painful stories” to tell and long to “be somebody in this life,” Jenna observed. “They hunger for society’s acceptance.”

Jenna’s way of helping these young people move from despair to hope and from rejection to acceptance was to facilitate a creative writing process that encouraged them to share their stories. She collected, transcribed, and returned to them in an ongoing process of editing and collaboration. Eventually, each author narrowed down to a theme and meticulously attended to their creative process, illustrating “their worlds and past experiences with shocking sincerity.” The program provides a safe space and an empathetic listener in an environment free of judgment and demonstrates how providing an intentional space and creative writing exercise, young people can begin the process of healing and transformation.

The transformation, however, is not felt by the authors alone. Readers, too, are encouraged by the writings to show the same creative courage the youth showed in writing that necessitated their taking off the masks they adopted for protection and survival. As readers encounter the writings—primarily narratives distilled into poetry—they are moved to take off their masks of judgment, bitterness, and fear and to read the stories with the openness and compassion that all humans, especially these incarcerated youth, deserve.

Currently, Jenna is compiling a volume of works by both male and female youth and hopes to publish them in Spanish and English. Beneath a Gangster’s Mask or Trás la máscara de un pandillero, she hopes, will prove the truth of the Salvadoran proverb: “por algo pasan las cosas,” everything happens for a reason. The authors, as one writes, invite us into their lives, and through language, we can make the same journey Frederick Douglass invited his readers to take when reading his narrative of enslavement: “to understand it one must need to experience it, or imagine himself in similar circumstances.”

It is such an exercise in imaginative empathy that Jenna’s work invites us all to experience, as one writer expressed “such a cruel life…living like an animal in the dark/disconnect from the world…”; but also, as another writer offered, “dreaming of one day getting away from this bitter pain,” and seizing on “a light of hope/to continue onward/the fight/ to one day be free,” to “see the glimmer of the stars/ to feel that gentle breeze/to feel the warmth of the people/I most love in this life.”

 

Over the last several years, parents, educators and policy makers have placed a heavy influence on STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), citing that the United States is falling behind in global competitiveness. While placing emphasis on STEM education will help meet the lack of advanced degrees to fill technology-related jobs, it has overshadowed the importance of degrees within the humanities. In a world where there is more emphasis placed on technology-related education, how do educators illustrate the value of the humanities?

As a resident of San Francisco, I experience the necessity of the humanities firsthand on a weekly basis. For instance, on Mondays, I lead field trips for public school students to 826 Valencia, a learning center in the Mission District of San Francisco, where volunteers support under-resourced students with their creative and expository writing skills. While the Mission was once known for its vibrant community, it’s visibly and rapidly gentrifying, losing the heart of its neighborhood. Our students appear increasingly out of place amid high-priced boutiques and bars catering to Silicon Valley’s wealthiest. 

Providing a strong contrast to 826 Valencia in the Mission District, my Thursdays end late at 101 Howard, where I teach ethics to working MBA and Master of Public Administration students in the historic Folger building in San Francisco’s financial district, home to management courses offered by the University of San Francisco. The building is wedged in the financial district that symbolizes wealth and the gears of economics, and while it’s also shaped by Silicon Valley affluence, this neighborhood is where many of the city’s homeless congregate, seen as a nuisance to the nominally tolerant citizens who move past them. 

But within these vastly different parts of San Francisco, where tech entrepreneurs and struggling students commingle with little interaction, exists the very need for the humanities: the ability to share and understand stories and build community. As San Francisco takes on a larger dichotomy between wealth and social status, a humanities education is more essential than ever. Students need to learn to share stories to create empathy in order to shape future business and society leaders who will sustain our community values. 

To promote the development of empathy, I teach literature to MBA and MPA students. Demonstrating empathy is an essential part of their job if they are to succeed, as managers and public administrators have to understand people from all different backgrounds in order to create a diverse office space and address pluralistic needs. The literary texts prompt my students to think about moral conduct and find creative ways to solve problems. Engaging with these texts promotes careful observation, thoughtful reflection and generous sharing. 

The texts I use range widely in form and content and change periodically to reflect current concerns relevant to their professions. Sometimes we will read an intimate poem like Yeats’ “To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing,” to explore the emotional dimensions of unrewarded effort and how a thoughtful leader will respond – “be secret and exult.” Or we will parse Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to observe how a carefully crafted argument grounded in history, philosophy and experience can influence meaningful personal and political change. We’ve read Arthur Miller’s “Death of A Salesman” and considered what it means to have “the wrong dreams”. 

Students, whether in grammar or grad school, are successful when their education has prepared them to see and respond to what they witness in their communities. When their empathy transfers from the characters in a story to their neighbors on the streets, they develop skills to observe, reflect and share. If education continually reinforces these skills, moments of empathy can become habits of being. 

Humanities educators agree that proficiency in these liberal arts-based standards is essential for success. Reading deeply into great narratives, students develop the ability to transcend local loyalties and to imagine the situations of others. Through narrative analysis and reflection:

We recognize that we arrive at our lives in the middle of the story and spend the rest of our lives understanding the narratives that came before us, imagining the stories that lie ahead.

Our human task is to build on others’ stories until we are ready to tell our own complex narrative derived from experience, supported by intelligent evidence and articulated with clarity that has, at its core, what is common to us all. 

At 826 Valencia and 101 Howard, students are learning to observe with passion and scrutiny the settings in which their stories are imagined and all the many ways they can twist their plots toward empathy. This is an essential skill as office places and government institutions are embracing change and diversity because, in order to run a successful meeting or even talk with an employee or client, students need to know how to empathize and relate. While STEM subjects are an important part of education, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the humanities and the growth of our communities. 

 

In an entry I previously wrote for HuffPost blog, I described how scientifically based mindfulness training can help improve employee performance by building the capacity to sustain compassion and promote happiness. The New York Times’ article, “The Happiness Code,” (http://nyti.ms/1SPQDz3) also explored the topic as a management principle and how a company offers to generate happiness for its employees by using evidence-based research to produce the outcome. The Center for Applied Rationality (CFAR) in Silicon Valley relies on its founders’ expertise in behavioral economics to promote employee satisfaction. The premise of the workshop is simple: to rid ourselves of bad mental habits like procrastination, avoiding problems, making poor choices, and wasting time to rationalize our unproductive behaviors. These ”cognitive errors”, CFAR argues, persist in our patterned conduct and keep us in a loop of feeling either harried or frustrated. Some of these problems are byproducts of our brain’s chemical reward systems—it’s more pleasurable to cash a check than pay a bill—but some of it is lazy and solipsistic thinking, like avoiding bad news as if that would keep it from being true. These kinds of logical errors, however, can be corrected by applying various tools derived from evidence-based research that can enable users to be more intellectually dynamic, nimble and, of course, happier.

Evidence-Based Management (EBMgt or EBM) is an emerging movement to explicitly use the current, best available evidence in management and decision-making to improve outcomes for the employer, employee, and customer. My colleague in the School of Management at the University of San Francisco, Neil Walshe, is a researcher committed to evidence-based practice, specifically in the realm of management. Neil, an academic council member at the Center for Evidence-Based Management (https://www.cebma.org) notes, “there is nothing new about evidence-based practice. Medicine, policing, education have all been advocates and practitioners of using the best available evidence in the course of their decision-making for several decades. However, it is only recently that management has started to recognize the need to change how management is studied and indeed, how it is practiced.” 

Evidence-Based Management promotes a relatively simple idea; that management decisions should be based upon a combination of critical thinking and the best available evidence.

“Evidence” can come from scientific research, professional experience, and internally sourced organizational data. With this in mind, it can be said that all managers use some form of evidence in their decision-making but there is a clear bias towards the value of experience and the opinions of external experts over all else – even when it contradicts organizational data and scientific findings. 

Evidence-Based Management, therefore, tries to place a value on the quality of evidence and encourages managers to look not only at what the research says about a given topic but also what their own organizational data suggests. “It is common for managers to assume a problem exists (e.g. absenteeism, low morale, limited employee-engagement, etc.) when they have absolutely no internal evidence to support this. When challenged on this, the rationalization often centers on their own experience of a given phenomenon and little else.” 

For many managers, evidence is perceived as a threat to the credibility of their own decision making, a sentiment perpetuated by the industry of management gurus and experts all of whom extol the importance of using a mix of “gut feeling” and “best practices” in the course of managerial decision making. Data, especially that derived from within the organization, rarely gets a voice. “It can be hard for managers to understand that their own employees are a potential source of quality evidence”.  

One company practicing and promoting as its product its version of EBM is TINYpulse, a company founded by entrepreneur David Niu in 2012 after returning from a long, global trip where he took the opportunity to interview entrepreneurs from various industries and companies. Focusing on one thing they all had in common — the challenges of managing and retaining employees — he created TINYpulse to give leaders a method to take the “pulse” on how happy, burnt out, and frustrated their employees are. Using anonymous surveys to take these tiny pulses, Niu and his team created TINYpulse Engage. The goal is not just to achieve individual employee satisfaction but also to build strong cultures. The company’s mission is to “make employees happier” because the evidence supports that when employees are happy, retention, customer service, and engagement all improve. In early 2016, TINYpulse expanded into the performance management space with Perform, a mobile-first app that helps managers and employees work together to meet performance goals.

I spoke with Ketti Salemme, Senior Communications Manager of TINYpulse who also shared some of the founder’s principles and comments about my inquiry. As Ketti explained the company’s mission and processes, she kept returning to the concept of culture and how keeping track of employee satisfaction through small and frequent performance reviews contributed to the communal good of the company as well as the individual employee’s sense of self-worth and satisfaction. Although their methods vary depending on the company, essentially TINYpulse assists managers by developing weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly surveys that become part of a company’s ongoing activities. Some questions may be light or even open-ended, on topics as diverse as how clean everyone keeps the staff kitchen to opinions on leadership and product lines.  What all the surveys include is the question, to be rated on a 1-10 scale: “How happy are you at work?.” All the tiny surveys share the guarantee of anonymity, a feature that is essential to the success of the process because of the trust it builds and the candor it fosters. Their clients come from the for-profit, non-profit and public sectors.

When I asked Ketti whether or not the company worried about “the illusion of technique,” as philosopher William Barrett so memorably described the encroaching effects of a technological mind, she agreed that metric-based approaches could be perceived as instruments of exercising control rather than releasing happiness. To my question “is there ever such a thing as too much information?” the founder Nui provided this helpful reply:  “There definitely can be the case of too much information at one time. For example, when organizations first start TINYpulsing, they will often get a groundswell of feedback. If the organization is really large, the initial set of feedback can feel overwhelming. Thus it’s really important that the leaders and managers of the organization are ready to address the feedback.” 

Given this experience, the TINYpulse team has developed a set of best practices that are useful for any companies collecting and manipulating data. These practices include:

1. Acknowledge to the employees that management received the feedback and are reading through each one carefully (because everyone has participated in a survey without getting a response). 
2. Categorize the feedback into themes to share with the whole company. 
3. Schedule town hall or all-company meetings ahead of time to set expectations for respondents and administrators so they have a date to target to share the survey results.
4. Address the themes even if there is an issue that cannot be dealt with immediately. If there is something that the company can take positive action on, then set up the action plan and owner.
5. Remind respondents of the positive impact of their feedback so they will be encouraged to trust the process and continue to participate.
6. Empower functional heads or department leaders to use the surveys effectively and for the greatest impact. 

Ketti also acknowledged that the companies that benefit the most from the surveys are those who are seeking to be proactive in building or preserving a company culture and to develop sustainable problem-solving practices. Like with any therapy or treatment, trying to assess employee satisfaction amid a crisis isn’t as effective in addressing problems. The data that companies collect is only useful when it is applied and that process takes time. But for emerging businesses, evidence-based support and even their own way of doing business at TINYpulse can be an inspiration. As Ketti proclaimed, “our mission is to delight,” a word that also serves as an acronym for their company’s core values which read like a standard guide to management but as if communicated by a cheerleader: to Delight customers; Elect to spread positivity; Lead with solutions and embrace change; Increase communication with transparency; Go the extra mile with passion; Hold oneself accountable, and finally Treasure culture and freedom. 

TINYpulse, therefore, tries to walk its own talk. In addition to building a harmonious culture, the company gives away 1% of its product to deserving non-profits, and provides an additional 1% of its profit to the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a global non-profit organization whose stated mission is to “engage leading entrepreneurs to learn and grow.” And its employees volunteer 1% of their time to community-based and service organizations. Finally, TINYpulse shares its evidence-based practices and information gathered from surveys through the TINYpulse Institute and its open-source white papers and special reports. 

Where the data, the technique and the happy talk all come together are in a concept of culture the founder described for me in the following way: 

“Culture is the vibe you get from a company within 10 seconds of walking through the door. It’s the energy level one senses and the beliefs and values that we all share. So hopefully if you divided us into separate rooms, you’ll still get a common sense of how we act, treat others, and go about our day.”