How to deal with discomfort of returning to work

As workers across the country return to offices at near pre-pandemic levels, we’ve all felt a certain awkwardness between getting used to commuting, in-office socializing, and group dynamics.

In their return-to-workplace emails, many leaders have touted the benefits of working in person, most notably the camaraderie and ability to bond around a shared mission.

But there’s also a challenge that’s harder to talk about: relearning how to contradict yourself personally. Years of Zoom meetings have trained employees to keep conversations short and free of disagreements so digression doesn’t lead to Zoom fatigue. And while the pandemic has spurred the adoption of tools that made scheduling and attending meetings smooth, those tools often had the effect of making the actual content of those meetings just as smooth.

In my new book When women lead, I discuss many ways in which female leadership traits are actually underappreciated benefits, and approaches that can be leveraged by anyone. One of these beneficial traits is women’s tendency to hire teams with diverse groups and lead them together, integrating different and sometimes competing perspectives.

It’s hard to measure the actual value of different perspectives, but three professors conducting a study at Northwestern University came pretty close. In 2009, they gathered dozens of fraternity sisters and fraternity brothers to solve a crime mystery — the kind of workplace team-building exercise that would fit right in with a corporate retreat.

Students from each fraternity or fraternity were divided into groups of three and told to begin trying to solve the murder mystery. Five minutes later, the researchers allowed a fourth student to join the trio and help them solve the puzzle. Half the time, the latecomer was a member of the same sorority or fraternity – if not a friend, then someone who shared the same culture and shorthand. The other half of the groups were joined by a member of another Greek house – a stranger.

As you can imagine, the trios joined by a stranger actually performed much better (getting the puzzle right 75% of the time) than the trios joined by a friend (54%). And it wasn’t just because the stranger offered a new and crucial perspective on the mystery.

The researchers found that the mere presence of a stranger caused the original group members to be more thoughtful about how they processed information. When a friend joined the students, the original trio tended to encourage this newcomer to confirm the theory they had already developed in their initial 55-minute discussion. The arrival of a stranger, on the other hand, prompted the original trio to develop what the researchers called social sensitivity. These groups had to work harder to explain their thinking to the stranger. They evaluated the evidence much more carefully and came to the solution with much greater accuracy.

What is most interesting, however, is how these teams actually felt about the experience of solving the mystery. The groups that friends had joined felt great – extremely confident in their solutions. The groups that a stranger had joined had far less confidence in their solutions—although they were far more likely to be right.

This is the kind of constructive discomfort we need to encourage rather than shy away from in redesigned personal work environments.

Build structures to free yourself from simple agreements

The same theory used in this study also applies in the workplace. Interacting with people who have a different perspective feels more difficult than nodding in agreement with your trusted team. Considering different perspectives can be uncomfortable, but it forces us to examine our own thinking. A number of companies where I have a presence When women lead work to make the worst clashes of ideas inevitable, and they align their teams to take advantage of them.

PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada conducts a weekly review where she and her team only discuss areas that are failing. When she joined the company in 2017, as a seasoned executive, she was an outsider of the code-centric culture of the engineering co-founders. “In the past, it was treated as if the developers were people in the boiler room who wrote the code under the product that the sales and marketing organization was bringing to market,” Tejada told me. “I thought there was this opportunity to unleash creativity in the power of design by putting developers first, rather than hearing second-hand what a company wants.” Tejada encouraged interaction between programmers and sales – and marketing departments of the company so they could all learn from each other on how to better serve their customers – even when interacting with people from different parts of the organization who spoke a different language was unfamiliar and challenging.

Deidre Paknad, CEO of WorkBoard, has developed software that shows individuals and teams’ goals and key deliverables, and highlights the areas where teams are struggling. This prompts workers to address these problem areas first. WorkBoard’s software is designed to encourage employees to aim high and aim for the highest possible. When teams (inevitably) fall short, WorkBoard software trains leaders to encourage everyone on the team to learn from what went wrong. With transparent goals and a language of how to learn from mistakes, employees get a structure that helps to destigmatize uncomfortable conversations.

Like Tejada, Paknad, and these Northwestern fraternity and sorority members, we can all benefit from a clash of perspectives and the productive disagreements that accompany them.

• Create environments that bring people from different parts of an organization together.

• Establish systems to destigmatize disagreement. Giving or receiving criticism can of course be stressful for employees. Structure meetings to pull off the Bband-Aid: Always tackle the hard stuff first and create an agenda for everyone to bring in constructive feedback to ensure all voices are heard.

• Acknowledge constructive discomfort as a good thing—both in the process of voicing disagreements and listening to other people’s feedback on your work. It’s not easy, but the harder it feels, the more productive it can be.

When it comes to leadership and innovation, experiencing discomfort in a group dynamic can be a trait, not a flaw. The more companies can bring together people with different approaches to discussions and disagreements, the better they can collaborate and solve problems.

Julia Boorstin is CNBC’s Senior Media & Tech Correspondent and author of When women lead: what they achieve, why they are successful and how we can learn from them.