what colonoscopies teach us about boosting morale

In the “What’s the difference between morale and culture” post, I defined morale as follows: morale is about how people are feeling. It’s their global, all-things-considered judgment about how satisfied they are at work.

But that’s actually not quite right. Global? Yes. But all-things-considered? Hardly. 

To understand why not, consider some research by Nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman. In this (and related) research, Kahneman gave colonoscopy patients a handheld device with a dial on it for reporting the moment-to-moment discomfort they were experiencing. Half of the patients (“control”) had a normal colonoscopy experience while the other half (“treatment”) had the same experience plus an additional several minutes added on to the end of the procedure during which the colonoscopy was left in but there was no movement (a much less uncomfortable sensation compared to the rest of the time, when the doctors were constantly maneuvering it). Two important findings: First, overall ratings were not mere sums of the total discomfort of the moment-to-moment ratings. Instead, final ratings correlated much more highly with the “peaks” (i.e., the emotional extremes) of the procedure.

Patients who experienced a single shock of discomfort gave higher overall discomfort ratings compared to those who didn’t have these shocks even if they had more total minutes spent in greater discomfort. The second, and perhaps more interesting, finding was that the “treatment” experimental group gave overall lower discomfort ratings in their global evaluations. Despite having a longer procedure with more total minutes spent in discomfort, this group’s global judgment was apparently influenced by the relatively mild final few minutes of the procedure. In fact, these global evaluations predicted who showed up months later for their follow-up appointment. This appropriately named “peak-end rule” teaches us something important for leadership: 

People’s overall morale assessments aren’t perfect sums across all their experiences at work; morale is mostly informed by people’s emotional peaks (good or bad) and most recent experiences.

This is good news for leaders: You can’t control the emotional valence of every moment that every person will experience at work. But if people index their morale assessment mostly to memorable moments of extreme high and low, you can impact that. To boost overall morale, then, your job is to manufacture powerful moments and stamp lots of positive experiences. In other words, create positive emotional peaks on a regular basis. And don’t forget to do something positive and noteworthy before time away from work (e.g., winter break) when people will naturally be reflecting on how things are going.

(For advice on how to do this well, see The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.)

In sum, morale isn’t an all-things-considered judgment but a certain-things-considered-more-than-others judgment. (Not quite as pithy.) Good leaders are intentional about shaping those things that loom largest in people’s minds.

-Ben