As an assistant professor of management at the Leavey School of Business, Hooria Jazaieri centers much of her research on the employee experience—specifically, how emotions can impact productivity and satisfaction in the workplace. She mixes ethnographic, qualitative, and quantitative research methods to study different organizations—from Silicon Valley tech companies and healthcare entities to professional sports teams—and apply her findings to recommend tools to build healthier, more successful work environments.
What questions or challenges are at the heart of your current work?
I study how employees express and regulate their emotions at work. One of the questions people are often curious about is why suffering at work is so prevalent—we spend about a third of our lives at work, and the workplace can often feel depleting rather than life-giving. So how do we help colleagues regulate some of their experiences of suffering?
The TV show Severance is so interesting because as employees and organizations, we don’t have the ability to cut off our experiences at work. When we have a challenging time at work, we will often bring that experience home with us, whether we’re commuting, walking our dogs, or interacting with our neighbors. It can have a profound impact on the people we care about. Because of this, it’s crucial that we address employees’ experiences at work. How do we help colleagues regulate some of their experiences of suffering?
Some of my research begins to address that question, and a lot of what we find is counterintuitive. People who are trying to help or think they’re helping are actually making a situation worse.
For example, when we experience suffering, we often assume that the most compassionate person will be someone who has been through something similar. Our research finds the opposite to be true. People who’ve had similar experiences tend to center their own past experiences (“Oh, let me tell you about when that happened to me…”) rather than focusing on the person sharing their suffering with them. They tend to invalidate that person’s experience because, to them, it no longer feels like a big deal because they already got through it. So we talk about how listening and asking questions can help the person get to the heart of their own suffering.
Another example deals with gratitude. We tend to think that gratitude should come after someone’s done something beneficial for us. Our research actually suggests otherwise—thanking employees in advance of them doing a difficult task makes them more likely to persist, be resilient, and bounce back from setbacks. My advice: don’t withhold gratitude until the task is completed. Thank someone in advance so they feel a sense of social worth (or feel like what they’re doing really matters) going into the task ahead.
The larger lesson is that seemingly small emotional choices, like what we say, when we say it, and whether we make room for someone else’s experience that might differ from our own, can really change the way employees feel and behave at work.
Why is this issue important for the world to address at this time?
We’re experiencing a genuine crisis of mental health and burnout at work, and organizations frankly weren’t designed to address these issues. Employees arrive at work every single day carrying heavy experiences, some work related and some not, and most organizations lack the language and practices to effectively respond. Instead, what happens is that teams and organizations often ignore employee suffering or push it under the rug, hoping it will disappear on its own. And it rarely does. Some of my research tries to give organizations and managers tools to address employees’ emotions and suffering, so they can help them regulate their emotions at work.
Why have you chosen to dedicate your career to this research?
I often say that I’m trying to close the gap between what science knows and what business does.
Small moments at work, such as an employee actually feeling seen or feeling a sense of belonging or, a colleague responding compassionately or sharing a genuine expression of gratitude, can really shift an employee’s experience, not only at work but outside of work as well, due to work-life spillover effects.
For me, it comes down to seeing each other as whole human beings—that everyone is doing their best, that people are not intentionally trying to mess up on projects or delay a deliverable, but rather that things come up. Giving each other grace and having an organizational culture that prioritizes people and their humanity before their work performance is important. There’s a lot of research that suggests that when we provide employees with a sense of dignity, they thrive and perform at a high level. For me, it comes down to organizational culture and those in formal positions of leadership. What are the emotions that our employees are experiencing, expressing, and suppressing at work?
Emotions can bring about happiness and joy, but they can also bring about suffering and mental illness. I hope that my research can influence organizations to be more humane and give leaders tools to help employees feel that the workplace is life-giving rather than life-depleting. If my work can move that needle even just a little bit, it is work worth dedicating a career to.
How have your students impacted your research?
My goal is for my research to influence how businesses operate, and one of the ways that I do that is through my students. They give my research a sense of urgency. I teach MBA students who come to class in the evening and are back at work the next morning, so I feel a real urgency to give them skills and tools that they can apply in their own workplaces. In class and office hours, my students tell me about their experiences of suffering at work—ineffective bosses, employees who are difficult to manage, products that don’t launch on time. At the heart of these experiences is the need to regulate their own emotions and the emotions of others.
Academic research moves slowly, but conversations with my students motivate me to keep chipping away at the work and to make it accessible beyond academic journals. Whenever possible, I try to move my findings along and publish them in articles for the Harvard Business Review, so that my students can read and share with their own managers and colleagues.
What is a book in your field that you think everyone should read?
My favorite book is “Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family” by Bob Chapman and Raj Sisodia. The main premise of the book is that business can be the most powerful source of good in society. The authors illustrate the common idea that people go to work for 40 or 50 hours a week, and oftentimes, the workplace depletes them and then sends them home, hoping they’ll recover and come back the next day as a better version of themselves. Instead, the authors ask: what if the workplace could send you home better than you arrived that morning instead? What if we created organizations where instead of TGIF, employees said “thank goodness it’s Monday” (TGIM) because they get to go back to an amazing organization and work with wonderful colleagues.
At the heart of this book is the idea that employees aren’t just workers who happen to have feelings—they are human beings who happen to be at work. That’s consistent with what we talk about here at Santa Clara in terms of cura personalis, care for the entire person. Chapman and Sisodia talk about how every employee is someone’s precious child, even the manager you dislike or the colleague who’s always late on a deliverable. If we see each other through that lens of humanity and dignity, we can create a workplace culture where employees thrive.
