Foundational Research

Inspired by this clarity, she delved into existing related literature on neurophysiology, human behavior, management, and business. She became keenly interested in complementing that research with insights from people’s experiences.

After all, anytime she spoke about love and fear at work, people had a lot to say and many stories to tell. She believed those stories offered an opportunity to surface collective patterns along with rich details to bring color, texture, and nuanced insights to add to the conversation, study, and direction of organizational culture, team, and leadership practices.

Research Interests

Specifically, she wanted to understand:

• What forms does fear take at work and what creates that fear? How do fearful experiences impact workers, team members, customers, and others? How does fear impact organizational results?

• What is love? How is love understood in the context of work? What creates love at work? How do loving experiences impact workers, their team members, customers, and others? How do these experiences impact organizational results?

• What does having these varied experiences mean to people?

• What are the consequences of fearful or loving cultures for organizations?

• And if specific behaviors and cultural practices are beneficial, can they be taught and sustained, and how?

Research Design

Trained as a social scientist, Smith designed a qualitative research project based on a simple but elegant interview protocol. She asked participants to share two stories:

First, she asked them to share a story about a time when they felt afraid at work. What happened? What did they do and what did others do? What impacts did this fearful experience have on them, their team, their customers and stakeholders, their outcomes, their personal life, and their physical well-being? And, what did having this experience mean to them?

Second, she asked them to share a story about a time when they felt loved at work. She did not define love for them but asked them to interpret that term for themselves. She asked them what happened in their loving experience. What did they do and what did others do? What impacts did this loving experience have on them, their team, their work, their customers and stakeholders, their outcomes, their personal life, and their physical well-being? And what did having this experience mean to them?

In 2017, she began to invite participants to engage in one-hour interviews, following practices that included informed consent.

Analysis

In the first 9 months of 2017, she collected 50 sets of stories. After each interview, she asked herself several key questions and developed a growing list of responses for each question: She noted the participant’s initial response to her question, the nature of the story they shared, the kind of experience they described, the impacts of those experiences, and the meaning they derived.

A schema emerged and was applied to subsequent stories as well as updated with further insights. In this way, she was continually discovering, learning, and making meaning. From the first 50 interviews, she identified a set of core insights about common fearful experiences at work and their harmful impacts, and typical loving experiences at work and their benefits. Stories and quotes were identified to illustrate themes. Since then she has added another 40 interviews. Her work research is ongoing and you can participate in this as described below. She continues to gather and analyze transcribed interviews and build abstractions, concepts, hypotheses, and theories from those details.

Summary of Results

Fear: Stories and Impacts of Fear

Smith identified six common “Fear Stories” that occur in workplaces. These describe the types of experiences people have at work that create fear:

1. Discomfort during a performance challenge. This is noted as a “helpful” fear, as long as the individual was not set up to fail. This fear experience was identified as a chance to learn and grow and often was ultimately associated with love in the form of courage and challenge.

2. Uncertainty during a change.

3. Betrayal of relationships, ethics, and integrity.

4. Public shaming and humiliation.

5. Lack of support in a personal crisis.

6. Harassment and discrimination.

When people experienced the latter five fears they reported serious negative personal and professional impacts as well as workplace impacts including distraction, an inability to perform, decreased trust, turnover, anxiety, stress, caution, hesitation, insecurity, withholding of effort, low energy, physical illness, weight gain, insomnia, impacts to diabetes, depression, stomach ailments, hearing loss, the need for therapy, general stress, distraction in off hours, and ruminating over and verbally processing the situation during personal time with negative impacts on personal relationships.

Love: It’s Mechanism, Loving Actions, Impacts, and Coherence

Smith describes these three phases of a loving experience based on existing literature and interview insights:

1. Empathy: An individual is open to emotions, observes another’s experiences, feels with them, and understands their experience. Research tells us that this empathy can result in pain.

2. Compassion: Based on their understanding, the individual takes wise, appropriate actions toward the other person. Research shows that this compassionate action resolves the pain of empathy, creates pleasure, and decreases stress.

3. Response: The other person receives the compassionate action, and feels acceptance and belonging. This creates a sense of safety, enabling trust, contribution, and ultimately meaning.

In Smith’s research, participant stories enumerate consistent types of compassionate (loving) actions taken by leaders and team members individually and collectively. These actions are specific, wise, and appropriate to the individual and the situation. These loving workplace actions include:

1. Welcoming wholeness, accepting.

2. Appreciating, recognizing, and valuing.

3. Trusting and respecting.

4. Apologizing and/or forgiving when needed.

5. Demonstrating compassion and kindness.

6. Investing in development; offering challenge.

These experiences happen in random “moments that matter” across the employee lifecycle from when they start, when it’s time to learn, when there is disagreement, when people are different, when change happens, when mistakes are made, when a life crisis happens, and when there is a success.

The impacts of loving workplace experiences include positive levels of trust, commitment, engagement, loyalty, effort, dedication, desire to make a difference, customer satisfaction, innovation, learning, problem-solving, improvement, quality, open communication, healthy conflict, energy, and excitement for the job.

Subsequent dialogues to explore the ramifications of the above schema reveal that for a workplace to be considered truly loving, these behaviors by leaders and teams must be complemented by the components of the organization. This means that the organization's design elements should be embedded with love in both how they are enacted and in their substance. In a workplace that holds love as a core value, love is embedded in its purpose, planning and budgeting, work processes, policies, culture, communication, management systems, and structures. If these are not loving but dehumanizing then the employee’s workplace experience will be incoherent and misaligned, even if their experience of their leader and team is loving.

Expanding Impact

Smith co-founded the Center for a Loving Workplace with Lili Boyanova Hugh to expand this research and spread its insights, creating more opportunities for demonstration projects, gathering thought-leaders to deepen knowledge, and extending the impact to more workplaces. She teaches and speaks at the Center and in organizations and events around the world on why and how we need to remove fear from the workplace and replace it with Love.

Her long-awaited whitepaper describing this research will be published by the Center for a Loving Workplace in April 2025. A book is in the works.