R&E × Wharton · Elevate Programme

Does Emotional Culture
actually work?

Participants rated how their experience of work changed since beginning Emotional Culture work. Scale: 1 = Gotten worse · 3 = Improved some · 5 = Improved very much

4.14/5
Satisfaction with ECD work
3.86/5
Interest in doing more
3.57/5
Perceived effectiveness
Key insight

Connection comes before vulnerability. Team members felt more connected and seen first — the harder skills of sharing and managing difficult emotions take longer to shift. This is exactly how emotional culture change works in practice.

What changed · Improvement score (3.0 = improved some)
Score ≥ 3.0 · improved
Score < 3.0 · some movement
No change threshold
R&E × Wharton · Reset & Elevate Programme

What does Emotional Culture
actually change?

Participants self-reported how key aspects of their work and team experience changed. Food & Beverage · 35 employees.

85%
reported improved psychological safety
70%
feel more care from their manager
70%
reported stronger employee voice
65%
better understand others' emotions
Key insight

Psychological safety moved most. When teams build emotional literacy and leaders create permission to express feelings, connection and trust follow. The ECD work produced measurable shifts across every dimension measured.

% of participants who reported improvement
Self-reported improvement scale: 1 = No improvement · 3 = Improved some · 5 = Improved very much.
What else improved
R&E × Wharton · 6-Week Team Formation Programme · EX & CX

Building emotional culture
across continents — in 42 days.

A brand-new multi-region team across three continents. One ECD workshop to map desired emotional culture and stakeholder experience, then six weekly retros with behaviour experiments.

+20%
increase in psychological safety
+12%
increase in employee voice
+62%
increase in positive drive
42 days
to measurable culture change
Key insight

When teams map both how they want to feel internally and how they want stakeholders to feel, culture change accelerates. Tracking emotions weekly made the culture visible, adjustable, and owned by the team.

Employee Experience (EX)
&
Customer / Stakeholder Experience (CX)
Employee Experience
How the team felt working together
Stakeholder Experience
How they showed up for the people they served
Pre vs Post · Survey results (% agree)
Before (T1)
After (T2)
Weekly emotion tracker · Change Week 1 → Week 7
+62%
Rebellious (positive drive)
+27%
Connected
+22%
Valued & Seen
-30%
Paralysed
-25%
Overwhelmed
-29%
Incapable
R&E × Wharton · Change Readiness Programme

What does emotional readiness
look like before — and after?

A field experiment examining how ECD workshops impact employee engagement and collaboration. Pre and post measurements across 16 participants.

+7.3%
increase in overall engagement
+10.3%
increase in leader emotional support
+20.7%
increase in positive affect labelling
+16.4%
increase in negative affect labelling
Sector
Central Government
Team Size
20 employees
Design
Pre / Post Workshop
Overview
We measured how an ECD Change Programme impacts employee engagement. Pre and post measurements across 16 participants throughout a major change transformation inside their organisation.
% Change · Pre vs Post Workshop (Time 1 → Time 2)
Measurements on a 1–7 scale. Bars show the percentage change between pre and post workshop. Ordered by magnitude of improvement.
Baseline snapshot · % of team (top two boxes)
Key Findings
Naming emotions is a learnable skill. Both positive and negative affect labelling improved significantly — the biggest shifts in the entire dataset.
Leader emotional support increased by 10.3%. When leaders model affect labelling, their teams feel more supported emotionally — strengthening the leader-employee relationship.
Engagement rose 7.3% — driven by three factors. Voice solicitation, psychological safety, and leader support together account for 90% of engagement variance in this team.
Job demands dropped 6.3%. As emotional clarity improved, perceived workload pressure reduced — suggesting that emotional order creates cognitive space.
Key insight

Naming emotions — positive and negative — is a learnable skill. After the programme, participants labelled both positive and negative emotions significantly more. Voice, engagement, and leader emotional support all increased, while job demands fell. The biggest shift was in emotional expression itself.

R&E × Wharton · 4 Organisations · 75 Participants

What happens when you give people
permission to name how they feel?

The Unspoken Conversations Workshop tested whether naming and sharing an emotion before raising a concern with a leader changed the quality of the conversation — and the relationship itself.

100%
of leaders want to do it again
96%
of employees felt truly heard
94%
felt psychologically safe
4
sectors: not-for-profit, government, consulting & commercial
The Experiment
Treatment Group

Named their emotion on an ECD card and shared it aloud with their leader before raising a concern.

Control Group

Named their emotion on an ECD card but kept it private — did not share it with their leader.

When emotion was shared · Treatment outperformed control on all measures
Check-Out Survey Results · % Agree or Strongly Agree
Leaders (n=17)
What leaders experienced after the workshop
Employees (n=58)
What employees experienced after the workshop
"Naming how you feel isn't just emotional honesty. It's a cognitive tool. It changes everything that follows."
riders&elephants × The Wharton School · Unspoken Conversations Research · 2026