“Vibrant” Expressionists are essential to Australia’s corporate culture

With reports suggesting return-to-work mandates are challenging morale at Australian workplaces, one expert recommends that every workplace must tap the positivity of its ‘Expressionists’ to lift the overall mood.

New research conducted by productivity platform Slack and market research firm YouGov, surveyed 15,492 desk workers worldwide to better understand the diversity of psychological traits in contemporary workplaces. Connection-focused Expressionists were found to be the rarest of the five workplace personas with just one in ten workers identifying with its characteristics.

The Expressionist punches above their weight when it comes to shaping workplace culture and “creates a lot of the visible culture within our teams,” Slack APAC technology evangelist Derek Laney observed.  He notes that this persona – which values using visual communication to express personality and believes workplace communication should be fun and lighthearted – is critical in creating an inclusive and engaging culture that can span the physical boundaries of the office.

“They’re the kind of person who has the perfect GIF for everything,” Laney explained, “who flips the perfect image into a group channel that just encapsulates the way everyone is feeling, and brings the team together.”

Expressionists’ ability to unify teams – which also feature workplace personas including The Detective, The Problem Solver, The Networker, and The Road Warrior – has become even more valuable in the face of recent Gartner findings in which just 27% of 853 surveyed Australian workers approved of their organisation’s cultural awareness and behaviour, down 3.1% over the previous quarter.

Extending office culture outside the four walls

These new figures highlight the challenges organisations face in re-normalising office work and building collaboration environments that reach every corner of the hybrid enterprise.

With teams now spanning such large distances, investments in the right technology are crucial to overcoming these distances, Gartner HR practice vice president Aaron McEwan noted in advising business leaders to “consider implementing technologies of choice as part of their employee value proposition.”

That means working with staff “to test, trial and embrace new solutions” such as generative AI – adoption of which, McEwan said, “has been heavily led by employees seeking tools that have a positive impact on their productivity and personal performance.”

With or without generative AI, however, real-time collaboration tools have proven invaluable for building and maintaining morale across widely distributed teams – whose workplace culture often revolves around online interactions with colleagues they may have never been in the same room with.

Such platforms well support the preferences of Expressionists, who are most likely to prefer to communicate using collaboration tools that are universally available across the team.

Expressionists capitalise upon the opportunities of messaging platforms, using emojis and GIFs as outward expressions of their fun, witty, clever, and social personalities – and enhancing messages with semantic and emotional clues that, recent Slack research found, make two-thirds of respondents feel closer and more bonded to those they are communicating with.

Unsurprisingly, colleagues describe Expressionists as being the best at creating connections with colleagues virtually – highlighting the importance of engagement in maintaining an effective and collaborative corporate culture.

Ultimately, each workplace persona will thrive based on different combinations of business processes and technological tools - such as Slack collaboration features like huddles, canvas, clips and Slack Connect complementing information services like Slack Atlas, and business process tools like Workflow Builder, alongside over 2,600 app integrations.

As managers struggle to rebuild the traditional office culture for the post-pandemic working environment, embracing and enabling Expressionists will be invaluable for bringing the rest of the team along for the ride.

“Our culture is starting to come more from communication – the things we see day to day – because that’s what holds us constant,” Laney said, “whether we’re in the office, or remote, or on different floors.”

“We need those people to make our environment vibrant in a situation where we can’t just make nice banners and plaster them on the walls.”

To learn more about how Slack supports a collaborative business culture, click here.