On World Kindess Day 2024 Halpin CEO, Founder of online festival Kindfest and kindness champion shares a few thoughts.
Kindness is contagious in all the best ways. Acts of kindness have been shown to inspire others to act with kindness. The popularity of ‘random acts of kindness’ bears this out.
Indeed, it goes one stage further… just seeing an act of kindness inspires the same feelings as acting kindly or receiving kindness. Research has shown that those who witness kindness had the same feelings as those who had acted kindly and they had a desire to emulate the acts they had seen because they felt elevated. Elevation leads to motivation to act.
So we have a ripple effect. Ripple effects have been well studied and its been shown that 1 act can ripple out to 64 people. And so we see that Kindness inspires kindness, it ripples out and inspires further acts of kindness. As Amelia Aerhart said, “a single act of Kindness throws out roots in all directions and the roots spring up and make new trees”. This means we really can build a culture of kindness one act at a time.
We also know that we can do things to increase the chances of people being kind. You can do things to increase the ability of those who work with you and for you yourself to be kind in their work. One step which has tremendous impact is to stop rushing and to stop pushing others to rush.
A study at Princeton University showed that when people are rushed they are less able to be kind. Two sets of students travelled across campus and met someone in need of help.
One set of students were told they had to rush across campus or they would be late, this group failed to stop and help the person in need. The other group were told they could take their time to get across campus, unsurprisingly this group stopped to help the person in need.
So if you rush at work or push others to rush then everyone is less likely to be kind in their work…. obvious really.
So the reality is that unkindness is contagious too – we can create environments where people are less likely to be kind to one another…
Let’s think about this a little more… for example take the damage we can do with emails.
Imagine this scenario. You send a short email after work when you have chance to do so, its not that important but you want to get it ‘out of your head’. The person you send it to receives it and starts worrying about work and emails two colleagues with a question that they want answered.
Your email has created a flurry of work-related anxiety in the evening – something you had no intention of doing
Your email sent out ‘unkind’ ripples without you even fully realising it. You could have taken the kind approach and scheduled send on that email so it went the next day, or you could have made a note for yourself as to the thing you needed to do and left it for the next day. You can be kind to yourself and ‘get it out of your head’ without creating a flurry of unkindness to those you work with. You can use emails differently to avoid causing unkind contagion.
To conclude both kindness and unkindness are contagious and we can chose to spread either through the way in which we work. Simple things such as slowing down so we are more aware of ourselves and those around us and taking care in the way in which we use communication tools such as email
We can build a kinder workplace one act at a time.
Halpin is the home of experts in Higher Education and Halpin CEO and co-Founder Susie Hills is available to give talks on kindness in leadership and regularly gives key note speeches at events and conferences. In 2019 Susie was named as one of the Financial Times ’50 Leading Lights in Kindness’ and in 2022 won a Positive Leadership Award. Susie is the kickstarter of the hugely successful Kindfest, which debuted in 2020 and is now an annual event (albeit having a well deserved rest in 2024). If you would like to learn more about the benefits of kindness for organisations contact susie@halpinpartnership.com.