McLean & Company highlights the importance of addressing employee emotions to create thriving workplaces
McLean & Company highlights that employee emotions are increasingly important in the future of work.
Their new resource, Demystifying Emotions in the Workplace, addresses how employees can no longer separate emotions from work due to blurred boundaries between work and home, world crises, AI concerns, economic uncertainty, and a charged political landscape.
Instead of avoiding emotions, the firm advises organizations to proactively enable workplaces where emotions and work coexist, ensuring everyone can thrive.
Grace Ewles, director of HR Research and Advisory Services at McLean & Company, states, “Creating an emotionally healthy culture founded on inclusion, psychological safety, and conflict resolution is critical to organizational performance and fostering employee engagement.”
Ewles emphasizes that a healthy emotional culture encourages appropriate expression and regulation of emotions aligned with organizational norms and values.
McLean & Company notes that many organizations struggle to address workplace emotions, impacting the success of wellbeing and mental health initiatives.
The firm suggests that every organization has an emotional culture, whether acknowledged or not. Prioritizing emotional wellbeing is essential for competing in the evolving landscape.
The firm categorizes emotional cultures into three types:
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Emotionally suppressive: Organizations with retributive behaviours, toxic positivity, burnout, and avoidance.
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Emotionally healthy: Workplaces that support psychological safety, effective conflict resolution, holistic wellbeing, and inclusion.
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Emotionally unregulated: Cultures marked by impulsive behaviours, gossip, disrespect, and lack of boundaries.
McLean & Company advises HR and people leaders to balance leadership behaviours, cultural norms and values, and organizational processes to create an emotionally healthy work environment. However, sustaining emotional health requires collective effort from all organizational levels, not just HR.
Ewles explains, “Understanding emotions reduces misinterpretation and negative reinforcement. Recognizing differences in emotions fosters empathy and understanding, contributing to a healthier emotional culture.”
