A Downside of Human Resource Management Devolution

Why It’s Important to Thank Helpful Coworkers

By Daniel Butcher

Even top performers can get into a funk a work, and workers who usually are willing to help coworkers can stop collaborating. Beyond standard strategies such as promotions and raises, cultivating a collaborative culture that gives credit where credit is due is crucial for motivating such talented, helpful employees.

Academy of Management Scholar Abbie Shipp of Texas Christian University, who coauthored an Academy of Management Review article on how “organizational citizenship behavior” changes over time with Jessica Methot of Rutgers University, David Lepak of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Wendy Boswell of Texas A&M University, said that people continuously craft identity narratives to tell evolving stories about themselves.

“The research on organizational citizenship behavior took this approach of ‘People either help colleagues or they don’t,’ not really viewing a longer-term perspective or asking questions such as, ‘What happens if I help all the time and then I get burnt out?’ or ‘What if something happens at work and changes my identity to where I help colleagues more or less often?’” Shipp said.

“We looked at the ways in which some different situations or life cues could change your trajectory of helping over time, and why,” she said. “In terms of practical takeaways, talk to people about their identities and why they help at work and what’s meaningful to them—but also assume that these will change, so keep those conversations going.

“If somebody is one of your top performers today, don’t assume that that would stick.”

There could be ebbs and flows and different events that could—and likely will—impact performance and citizenship behavior.

“When you take that temporal lens, you start to really ask a lot of different questions about, ‘When do people help? How does it change? Is that temporary or permanent?’ etc.,” Shipp said.

“This allows leaders to explore ways to boost the morale of top performers and helpers and encourage them to remain at the organization, continue performing well, and continue to help others, even when things change over time,” she said.

A sample of Shipp’sAOM research findings:

• Subjective Time: What It Is and Why It Matters at Work
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Shadow Networks Foster Collaboration

By Daniel Butcher

People often collaborate with colleagues across departments in ways that benefit their organization, sometimes sparking inter-team creativity and productivity. Human resources (HR) can either kindle or pour cold water on those fires.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said that managers routinely search for ways to foster collaboration and break down silos by rotating employees or creating cross-functional teams. Other effective tactics include fostering networks through company retreats or company-sponsored volunteer service among employees across departments.

“I’m really interested in the interactions and communication among employees in a way that is outside the formal organizational chart,” Methot said. “The functioning of the informal organization is often a shadow network behind the official organizational chart.

“We know that there’s a lot of dynamics that occur in the ways that people interact and communicate and build trust and develop friendships and gossip in organizations, and organizational leaders often try to prioritize building a climate or a culture where people are creating these types of networks, where they feel a sense of psychological safety and are comfortable sharing information and asking questions,” she said. “But they don’t often know exactly what HR policies are going are going to affect those networks, and how they’re going to affect those networks.

“It’s crucial to track and analyze how a formal HR policy impacts the informal infrastructure in an organization, how people are interacting with each other, whether they form mentoring relationships or developmental relationships with each other, and whether they form close friendships, even when they traditionally had only worked together as team members.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Why Small Talk Is Social Glue at Work

By Daniel Butcher

Small talk is crucial for employees to bond with each other and form a cohesive organizational culture—and hybrid and even fully remote work arrangements don’t change that.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who coauthored an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that they collected the data about why and how small talk can be an effective method for employee bonding before the COVID-19 pandemic.

“A lot of the conclusions that we drew about the impact of small talk on employees were seemingly turned on their head when everyone started working remotely,” Methot said. “The questions people asked us were, ‘How do we do this if we’re working remotely? How do we reconstruct these work relationships if we can’t just bump into each other in the hallway?

“It was a great challenge for us to think through, “How did small talk change during Covid, and what does this look like now in the post-Covid age?” she said. “It is so prevalent that we wanted to understand what was happening in organizations: Was it good? Was it bad? Is this something that we should be encouraging? Do we have any control over it whatsoever?”

Small talk can be a polarizing topic. Some people love it, while others hate it.

“It’s also sometimes cultural, where having chit-chat feels superficial and condescending and unnecessary, where others feel as though, if you don’t chit-chat with them, you’re not even acknowledging their presence, and it’s rude,” Methot said. “It makes up a really large chunk—about one-third—of our conversations, and it’s the social glue of the workplace.

“Small talk with our colleagues is a social ritual that many of us had built into our days,” she said. “We come into the office; we greet people in the morning; we chat with coworkers to pass the time; we take a break to grab a coffee; we reenergize before getting back to work.

“We make small talk in transition periods—we have small talk before going into a meeting, before negotiations, before performance evaluations, and so we also use it to grease the wheels.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

For Candidates and New Hires, Fitting in Is as Crucial as Skills

By Daniel Butcher

It’s a best practice for organizations to identify both formal and informal employee networks, establish how networks could change, and identify the specific human-resources (HR) practices that could affect those different networks. All of that will affect employees’ collaboration, efficiency, and productivity.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said it’s important to analyze how different HR practices, including recruitment priorities and tactics, may affect employee relationships.

“We know that organizations focus on different types of recruitment strategies; if we home in on this one type of recruitment strategy, what does that mean for the composition of employees’ networks?” Methot said. “If we select candidates based on certain competencies, what does that mean for people’s network size or who’s in that network?

“A lot of this was grounded in the idea that human-resource management traditionally has been really deeply rooted in the idea of human capital—individuals’ knowledge, skills, abilities, expertise, functional areas, training, etc.—and trying to hire the best people based on their human capital, trying to train our employees so they have the knowledge and skills that they need to do that job well, and managing performance based on that human capital,” she said. “How are they demonstrating those competencies and using those skills?

“If we adopt this particular HR practice, what does that mean for the types of people and how they’re interacting in the organization?”

Methot and research colleagues identified three different dimensions to describe the composition of a network.

“This is who is in your personal network—as an employee, how many people are in my personal network, and who are those people?” Methot said. “The configuration of the network is the pattern of relationships and the structure of the network connecting them.

“Is everyone in my community connected? Do they all know each other? Do they all share information? Or are we siloed or disconnected? Are there bottlenecks?” she said.

“The content of those relationships refers to the properties or the definition of those relationships, from workplace collaborator to friend, how strong those relationships are, the degree of trust between employees in a given network, and what they’re communicating about, ranging from small talk and work tasks to personal information and gossip.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The Pros of Small Talk at Work Outweigh the Cons

By Daniel Butcher

While there is some evidence that employees who go overboard making small talk can be less productive, occasional nonwork chats with colleagues can boost workers’ sense of well-being, belonging, loyalty to their organization. It also improves teamwork.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that they found that small talk increases employees’ morale and improves bonding and collaboration.

“Small talk eases transitions—we rarely begin a meeting or pop into someone else’s office without a little small talk, just to grease the wheels and ease into the work-related conversation, and it helps us move from one activity to another,” Methot said. “We have small talk before meetings, interviews, performance evaluation, sales pitches, and negotiations.

“It is this social ritual that helps us transition from one activity to another and sets the stage for building relationships,” she said. “At a very basic level, it simply shows that we recognize someone else’s presence—it’s an acknowledgement.

“It makes us feel better when someone waves to us and smiles or says hello or chats with us, and so it sets a positive tone to a relationship, and as we continue to do that over time with colleagues, we start to build a stronger sense of trust and potentially things like friendships.”

Why does small talk have these effects?

Methot and her coauthors found that on days people made more small talk than they normally would, they experienced a boost in mood and positive energy, which, in turn, increased their positive social behaviors.

“Small talk boosted the extent to which they went out of their way to help their colleagues, and it increased their well-being,” Methot said.

“It had these great positive spillover effects where just simply having more small talk than they normally would on a given day really elevated their affect, their energy, and the extent to which they were willing to go out of their way for their coworkers,” she said.

Small talk, however, does have downsides, at least from a boss’s perspective.

“On the other hand, we found it was distracting, so it wasn’t all positive,” Methot said. “If someone you know comes into your office and starts chatting with you while you’re really in the flow and you were focused on doing your work, it pulls your attention away from that.

“And so, it does create this sense of a time famine where people who engage in too much small talk might not have enough time to then finish all of their work, which can create a little bit of anxiety,” she said. “But for the most part, it is really positive.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

How Remote Work Changes Employee Interactions

By Daniel Butcher

Working from home, whether it’s two, three, or five days a week, has a profound impact on the ways that colleagues communicate with each other. While it does present challenges, it doesn’t necessarily have to be negative, as many leaders advocating for a full return to the office assume.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who coauthored an Academy of Management Journal article on that topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College, Patrick Downes of the University of Kansas, and Allison Gabriel of Purdue University—said that small talk is a simple way to reenergize during the work day.

How does that translate to a remote work environment?

“What are the implications of small talk when employees are working remotely? Maybe it doesn’t look the same in a remote work environment,” Methot said. “After interviewing people after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and running additional studies, we found that many characteristics of small talk, including its spontaneity or scriptedness, are really difficult to replicate in a virtual environment.

“Meetings conducted remotely are more transactional and intentional—they’re planned; they’re scheduled,” she said. “You’re not bumping into someone on Zoom, so you can’t recreate that spontaneous interaction like you would if you were collocated in an office; it feels more awkward.”

After many companies moved to a remote work arrangement, it took a while for people to adjust to interacting with people over video-conferencing platforms.

“When you join a Zoom call, you’ve got a group of people together all trying to have small talk,” Methot said. “People are interrupting each other, talking over each other, because it’s hard to create that same sense of being in the same place in the way that we would engage socially otherwise.

“Also, when we’re physically present in a conversation, it creates this sense of copresence, where people feel like they’re in the conversation together,” she said. “We’re in this bubble where we’re interacting together, and we can’t do that same thing on Zoom.

“We’re looking at our own reflection on the camera, and we’re thinking about things that are going on in the virtual meeting room with us, so it’s hard to focus in that same way.”

It’s also easier to read people when talking to them in person.

“When we’re talking to each other in the same place, there’s a natural transfer of energy,” Methot said. “We’re able to read each other’s emotions better, but that transfer of energy is eroded in a virtual environment.

“It’s harder to see how people are feeling, reacting, and thinking when we’re meeting remotely than when we’re talking face-to-face,” she said. “Also, when we’re on remote calls or virtual meetings, chit-chat just isn’t a priority.

“We’re all pressed for time; we’ve structured our workday and may be experiencing Zoom fatigue, so we’re not trying to drag out meetings for too long.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

The New World of Communication among Colleagues

By Daniel Butcher

Even though many companies require employees to be in the office two, three, or even five days a week, communication methods among coworkers haven’t gone back to the ways they were pre-pandemic … but that isn’t necessarily a negative.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter said that employees’ communication styles don’t have to go back to how they were five or 10 years ago to be effective.

“A lot of the more agile organizations and agile employees were able to essentially develop better, more efficient ways of working that they didn’t really know existed or that they didn’t have access to previously,” Methot said.

“They don’t have to come back to the office and talk to each other in person at the end of every day—maybe weekly, or maybe just monthly—and they can continue to communicate over Slack, Zoom, or Teams, where they felt more comfortable and it was more efficient for them to communicate more openly,” she said.

The first step is understanding the changes with professional communication. Ask whether technology-mediated communication can enable sustainable success over the long term.

“If we can be successful by communicating via various channels, not just face-to-face , maybe we react to that in a way that is a little more flexible, but being very strategic and thoughtful,” Methot said. “It does take an all-hands-on-deck attitude—let’s understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing this.”

Leaders and managers who fail to listen to and take into account employees’ preferences for communication, which ties in to where and how they prefer to work, are likely to hurt morale and encounter resistance. Insisting on being in the office five days a week and always conducting face-to-face meetings, just like before the pandemic, isn’t likely to be popular or help with retention.

“I do think the pushback comes when senior leaders are saying, ‘We don’t care if what you were doing was working; we’re all going to come back into the office five days a week anyway,” Methot said.

“The goal would be to take stock of all of the mechanisms and processes that we might have developed during that time that could be really successful, taking those into account and seeing how we might be able to integrate those into our work ecosystem in a way that helps support some of the new practices that we might develop,” she said.

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Building Work Relationships Remotely

By Daniel Butcher

Many organizations successfully transitioned from full-time office work to hybrid work schedules, but remote arrangements do have implications for team and department cohesiveness, bonding among colleagues, and organizational culture.

“When we consider how people build these relational identities with others, how they develop a way of interacting with someone else is crucial,” said Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter. “Say I know that my boss isn’t a morning person, and so I wait 30 minutes before he comes into the office before I approach him with a question; we might not know that information about a new person who comes into the organization, either into our team as a direct report or as someone I’m reporting to.

“We have to learn those things over time as we’re interacting with them, but we don’t necessarily get that opportunity as often when we’re working remotely,” she said. “It’s possible and even likely that it’s harder to develop these relational identities and to build these networks if we don’t have a great understanding of the norms and the expectations and the social rituals with these other individuals who we only potentially see virtually or interacting over Slack or email.”

Methot worked with a clinical organization as a consultant during the Covid-19 pandemic. Employees had to continue visiting their clients face-to-face in the field, but they ended up withholding their daily office debrief.

“They would usually come back together at the end of the day in the office and debrief about each one of the clients to ensure that everything was okay, that they had the resources and support that they needed during Covid,” Methot said. “They did away with the daily debriefings in person and ended up switching to Slack and Zoom.

“They became so comfortable communicating over Slack that once they started coming back to the office again, they were sitting in the same office space in the same room still chatting with each other over Slack,” she said. “Even face-to-face, they were still messaging each other, and they became so reliant on that form of communication.

“They developed a more informal way of communicating and became more comfortable with each other in that way—they hadn’t readapted to the pre-pandemic norm of being with colleagues in person, and also found this technology-mediated communication really efficient.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

Avoid Disruptions When Hiring, Downsizing, and Promoting

By Daniel Butcher

Adding or subtracting people from a team or department—or promoting someone within it—can enhance or detract from chemistry among colleagues, the effectiveness of teamwork, and the cohesiveness of organizational networks.

Academy of Management Scholar Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and the University of Exeter—who cowrote an Academy of Management Review article on this topic with Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson College and David Allen of Texas Christian University and University of Warwick—said that the ways that organizations function aren’t solely based on people’s skills.

“Our employees are connected to each other and they aren’t only using their own knowledge and skills to get their work done; they’re also relying on others,” Methot said. “They go to others for feedback, advice, guidance, information, or mentorship, and they’re using that, leveraging that information to do better, to do their work better.

“Working to understand what HR policies are going to impact those connections and those relationships between people will help us better understand how they then perform in their job,” she said. “Diving in a little more deeply also leads to understanding how some of these HR practices and decisions that organizations are making can break up those networks and disrupt those relationships.

“On the one hand, they can help their formation, but on the other hand, they can really mess things up.”

Managers who can better understand how different types of HR practices might change employees’ sense of how they interact with others are more effective. Employees who are aware of various organizational networks can focus their networking and relationship-building efforts more productively.

“People’s definition of their role, how they interact with other people, who they report to, and who are on their team get disrupted when different HR practices move those individuals to another team or department or a different role with more responsibilities,” Methot said. “Let’s say they make a promotion decision—I’ve been working with someone on a team; we have a really great working relationship.

“We’re also friends; we trust each other, and then that person gets promoted and a new person gets put in their place,” she said. “I now have to build a whole new identity for how I relate to this new person, and that takes a lot of mental effort to rebuild this relational identity, this way of interacting with other people with whom we work.”

A sample of Methot’s AOM research findings:

• Overlooked Benefits of Office Chit-Chat
• Paths to Retaining Employees Who Go the Extra Mile

“Just Add a Woman and Stir” Is Not Enough for Board Success

By Daniel Butcher

Even at organizations that have made strides in adding women and people of color to their governing boards, tokenism is all too common. Diverse board members can’t make a difference if their longer-tenured colleagues routinely disregard their suggestions.

Academy of Management Scholar Kris Byron of Georgia State University said that female board members and those representing an ethnic or racial minority are often sidelined, technically part of the board but to whom the other directors or trustees don’t really listen.

Byron and research colleague Corinne Post of Villanova published an article on this topic in Academy of Management Journal.

“There’s this idea that you just add women and stir and that’s enough, but that’s not enough,” Byron said. “If we’re saying that the ways in which a woman might add value is that she might have different perspectives or a different lens through which to look at an issue, or she might have information or knowledge or experience that maybe some of her male colleagues don’t have.

“That knowledge, experience, and perspectives mean nothing—they’re not going to have any effect—if people aren’t willing to acknowledge the usefulness of that perspective or knowledge or experience,” she said. “There’s probably lots of other things that are important to whether or not the woman on the board is a token, or whether or not there’s some kind of critical mass of female directors on the board.

“Do people think, ‘Oh, she’s just there on the board because we had to fill this quota—she wasn’t the best person to serve in this role; she’s just here for window dressing to make us look good.’”

Diversity is hollow if it isn’t accompanied by equity, inclusion, and fostering a sense of belonging among members of marginalized and minority groups. Actually listening to female board members’ ideas and suggestions and enacting the best of them are crucial for them to have a chance to improve an organization’s leadership.

“There has to be this real belief among the other board directors that these women, that all of the directors, have some value-add, and that isn’t a given,” Byron said. “So that’s what it means that you can’t just add women and stir.

“There has to be some other things that are in place in order for women to have a positive impact on an organization, especially on something that’s so distal or downstream like firm performance,” she said. “Board directors largely have an indirect effect on organizational performance.”