Extract from Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
 Daniel Coyle

WIPRO is the model of a successful call center. It is organized, it is highly efficient. The days consists of the same work that happens in call centers all over the world: a caller phones in with issues about a device or service, and WIPRO’s agents attempt to remedy it. WIPRO is by almost every measure a nice place to work. It features competitive salaries and high quality facilities. The company treats employees well, providing good food, transportation and social activities. But in the late 2000s WIPRO found itself facing a persistent problem: its employees were leaving in droves. As many as 50 to 70 percent each year. They left for the usual reasons - they were young or taking a different job - and for reasons they couldn't quite articulate. At bottom, they lacked a strong connection to the group.

WIPRO’s leaders initially tried to fix things by increasing incentives. They boosted salaries, added perks and touted their company award as one of India's best employers. All these moves made sense -but none of them helped. Employees kept leaving at precisely the same rate as before. And so in the fall of 2010, with the help of researchers Bradley Staats, Francisco Gino and Daniel Gable, they decided to embark on an experiment.

The experiment went like this: Several hundred new hires were divided into two groups, plus the usual control group. Group 1 received standard training plus an additional hour that focused on WIPRO’s identity. These trainees heard about the company's successes, met a “star performer” and answered questions about their first impressions of WIPRO. At the end of the hour, they received a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with the company's name.

Group 2 also received the standard training, plus an additional hour focused not on the company but on the employee. These trainees were asked questions like What is unique about you that leads you to your happiest time and best performance at work? In a brief exercise they were asked to imagine they were lost at sea and to consider what special skills they might bring to the situation. At the end of the hour they were given a fleece sweatshirt embroidered with their name, alongside the company's name. Staats didn't expect this experiment to show much. High attrition is the norm in the call center world, and WIPRO’s attrition rates were firmly in line with the industry average. And besides Staats wasn't inclined to believe a one hour intervention could make a long term impact. A former engineer who spent the first year of his career as an analyst at Goldman Sachs, he isn't some pie in the sky academic. He was known for how things work in the real world.

“I was pretty sure that our experiment was going to show a small effect, if any at all” Staats says. “I saw the onboarding process in rational, transactional and informational terms. You show up at a new job on the first day and there's a straightforward process where you learn how to act, how to behave, and that's all there is to it."

Seven months later the numbers came in and Staats was, as he put it, “completely shocked”. Trainees from Group 2 were 250% more likely than those from Group 1 and 157% more likely than those from the control group to still be working at WIPRO. The hour of training had transformed Group 2's relationship with the company. They went from being non committal to being engaged on a far deeper level. The question was why.

The answer is belonging cues. The trainees and Group 1 received zero signals that reduced the interpersonal distance between themselves and WIPRO. They received lots of information about WIPRO and star performers, plus a nice company sweatshirt, but nothing that altered that fundamental distance.

The Group 2 trainees on the other hand received a steady stream of individualized, future orientated, amygdala activating belonging cues. All these signals were small - a personal question about their best time at work, an exercise that revealed their individual skills and a sweatshirt embroidered with their name. These signals didn't take much to deliver but they made a huge difference because they created a foundation of psychological safety, that built connection and identity.

“My old ways of thinking about this issue was wrong” Staat says. It turns out that there are a whole bunch of effects that take place when we are pleased to be part of a group, when we are part of creating an authentic structure for us to be more ourselves. All sorts of beneficial things play out from these first interactions.”

I talked with one of the original WIPRO trainees who had taken part in the experiment. I expected him to share vivid memories of the session. But talking to him about his orientation, his sense of belonging was so strong that he’d basically forgotten the experiment had ever happened. “To be honest, I didn't remember much of the day but I remember it felt motivating,” He laughed. “I guess it must have worked because I'm still here and I definitely like it.”