We are extraordinary creatures of God’s creation. By “we” I mean human beings. We have a complicated emotional sytem that has hardwired us for relationships with other humans – friendships, loving relationships, co-workers, spouses. Thre are very few creatures on Earth that have the desire and need to have relationships with other similar creatures.

We don’t like just having co-workers or acquaintances, or just people we come across on the street. We all need to have friends and more around us. Many other creatures live lives as loners,” other than a mate for children. But they don’t have “buddies” that they see on a regular basis at the nearest watering hole or creatures whom they see every day at the place where they do most of their hunting and gathering. No, it’s pretty much we humans who need and crave relationships. (And relationships and conversation have been the underlying theme in these blogs regarding drift. You can read previous posts here, here and here).

[Image courtesy of Ullsse Alblatl from Flickr via a Creative Commons license]Whether your relationship with others is professional or personal, applying SCARF when it gets a little chilly can help warm it up both in your life and at your workplace. Positive relationships at work tend to lead to safer workplaces and better worker morale.

We like talking, but we don’t like being talked to. We like conversation, not so much communication. Conversation leads to emotional attachment, and we desire that attachment with any human we meet. And that can even carry over to our work, including where we work, the work we do and the people with whom we work. After all, if we are working full-time and thus spending about 2,000 hours every year at work, we want to have a certain level of emotional attachmment, engagement and even investment in our work. And when you talk about emotional involvement at work, you often talk about having relationships with your co-workers. Maybe you don’t see them as co-workers but as friends. Or even enemies.

You can be emotionally engaged at work, or you can be disconnected. You can be joyous about the work you are doing, or you can be resentful. There are very few people who are ambivalent about their work – they either like it, love it, or despise it. And unless you are an astronaut on a solo flight into deep space, chances are you work around other people, and how you feel about your work will depend a lot on the people with whom you work and how you get along with them. There has been much study about relationships and their value at work, especially in terms of worker safety. And if you are having active conversations, rather than communication, with co-workers, managers and supervisors, that tends to improve workplace safety because it has been shown that better emotional involvement and interaction at work leads to better job satisfaction, and better job satisfaction tends to lead toward better worker safety and feewer incidents.

If a relationship has gotten a bit chilly, however, it might be time to put on the SCARF.

SCARF has to do with five attributes that are linked to a person’s emotional state regarding work. These five attributes have been found to have similar effects on the brain (and thus emotions of people) as either the reward of getting a financial bonus for a job well done, and the threat of being physically slapped in the face. SCARF represents each of the five attributes – status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness, which are what every person craves in a positive way in the workplace. Negative feelings can come if any of these five attributes are treated in a negative way.

Here is how each of the attributes might be addressed in real-life situations:

Status – Employees who get pats on the back, promotions, added responsibility and/or commendations as a valued member of the team, will often think and act positively. Those who have responsibilities taken away, or don’t get credit for good work, or are talked to in a condescending manner, will think and act negatively. This is the “fight or flight” mentality – will they fight against what goes on and try to improve it, or will they bail out and leave?

Certainty – Employees act positively when they know their jobs, know what is expected and know the safety procedures and they appreciate very few changes. A lot of change in schedule, rules, expectations will make an employee act negatively.

Autonomy – Employees who are micromanaged, or at least have the sense that they are always being looked over their shoulder, will tend to act negatively. Those who feel and know they are trusted to do their job and are given some freedom, wil be more positive.

Relatedness – Workers are mote positive when they are relating and getting along with co-workers and supervisors. If there is tension, stress, animosity or no real relationship at all – like employees working alone – then they will act negatively.

Fairness – As with most people, workers will be positive if they feel like they (and everyone else around them) are being treated fairly and there is no favoritism; if someone is not being treated fairly, a worker will tend to be negative emotionally.

So if you observe any relationships among workers, or supervisors, or between you and anyone in the company that have seemed to change one way or the other – but especially to the negative – you may want to undergo a SCARF audit of your relationship with that person (or between the parties involved) and see if you can get to the root of the issues and address them so conversations may continue and general safety can be ensured because of better emotional engagement by all.