Discomfort is a feature, not a flaw, of returning to the workplace

As workers around the country return to offices at near pre-pandemic levels, we have all felt some form of awkwardness, between getting reacclimated to commutes, in-office socializing, and group dynamics. 

In their return-to-work emails, many business leaders have extolled the benefits of in-person work, most importantly, the camaraderie and ability to connect around a shared mission. 

But there’s also a challenge that’s harder to talk about: re-learning how to disagree with each other in person. Years of zoom meetings trained workers to keep conversations brief and free of dissent lest a digression leads to Zoom fatigue. And while the pandemic drove the adoption of tools that made scheduling and attending meetings frictionless, those tools also often had the effect of making the actual content of these meetings just as frictionless.

In my new book When Women Lead, I discuss many ways in which characteristics of female leadership are in fact underappreciated advantages, and approaches that can be used by anyone. One of those advantageous characteristics is women’s tendency to hire diverse teams and lead them communally, integrating varied and sometimes-competing perspectives.

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

Students from each sorority or fraternity were split into groups of three and told to start trying to solve the murder mystery. Five minutes later, the researchers would allow a fourth student to join the trio and help them solve the mystery. Half the time, the late-comer was a member of the same sorority or fraternity—if not a friend, someone who shared the same culture and shorthand. The other half of the groups were joined by a member of a different Greek house—a stranger.

As you can guess, the trios who were joined by a stranger actually performed a lot better (solving the mystery correctly 75% of the time) than those joined by a friend (54%). And it was not simply because the stranger provided 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 the students were joined by a friend, the original trio tended to encourage this newcomer to confirm the theory they’d already developed in their initial five5-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 arrived at the solution with far more accuracy. 

Most interesting of all, however, is the way these teams actually felt about the experience of solving the murder mystery. The groups that had been joined by friends felt great–extremely confident in their solutions. The groups that had been joined by a stranger felt much less confidence in their solutions—–even though they were much more likely to be right about them.

This is the kind of constructive discomfort that we need to promote, rather than shrink from, in newly reconstituted in-person work environments.

Build structures to break free from easy agreement

The same theory that played out in that study holds true in the workplace. Interacting with people who have a different perspective feels harder than nodding in agreement with your familiar team. Considering diverse perspectives can be uncomfortable, but it forces us to examine our own thinking. A number of companies I feature inWhen Women Lead are working to make the most uncomfortable clash of ideas unavoidable, and they’re orienting their teams to benefit from them.

PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada conducts a weekly review in which she and her team discuss only areas that are failing. When she joined the company in 2017, as a veteran business executive she was an outsider to the coding-centric culture of its engineer co-founders. “Historically, it was sort of treated like the developers were people in the boiler room writing the code underneath the product that the sales and marketing organization took to market,” Tejada told me. “I thought, there’s this opportunity to unleash the creativity in the power of design in bringing developers to the center, as opposed to them hearing secondhand what a business wants.” Tejada fostered interaction between the company’s coders and sales and marketing divisions, so they could all learn from each other about how to better serve their customers–even if interacting with people from different parts of the organization who spoke a different language was unfamiliar and challenging.

WorkBoard’s CEO Deidre Paknad created software that lays out individuals’ and teams’ objectives and key results–and highlights the areas where teams are struggling. This causes workers to tackle those problem areas first. WorkBoard’s software is designed to encourage employees to aim high and set the highest possible goals. When teams (inevitably) fall short, leaders are trained by WorkBoard’s software to ask everyone on the team to learn from what went wrong. With transparent goals and a language about how to learn from failure, employees are given a structure that helps destigmatize uncomfortable conversations.

Like Tejada, Paknad, and those Northwestern fraternity and sorority members, we can all benefit from a clash of perspectives and the productive disagreement it brings.

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

• Institute systems to destigmatize disagreement. It can, naturally, be stressful for workers to give or receive criticism. Structure meetings to pull off the Bband-Aaid: always tackle the tough stuff first, and set up an agenda for everyone to contribute constructive feedback, to make sure all voices are heard.

• Recognize constructive discomfort as a good thing—–both in the process of speaking up in disagreement and also hearing others’ feedback on your work. It’s not easy, but the harder it feels, the more productive it can be.

When it comes to leading and innovating, the experience of discomfort in a group dynamic can be a feature, not a flaw. The more that companies can bring together employees with different approaches to discuss and disagree, the better they’ll be at collaborating and problem-solving.

Julia Boorstin is CNBC’s senior Media & Tech correspondent and the author of When Women Lead: What They Achieve, Why They Succeed, and How We Can Learn from Them.