Despite the recession, the Great Resignation shows no signs of ending, with more than 4.27 million Americans quitting their jobs since May. Workers are overworked, burned-out, and underpaid, and they are finding that it's often not worth it to keep jobs that are sapping their energy. Companies, in turn, suffer from turnover, a lack of productivity, and difficulties finding and keeping top talent.


A new field of study called neuroleadership aims to address these issues by applying neuroscientific insights to the business world. In her new book, The Brain-Friendly Workplace, neuroscientist, author, and keynote speaker Friederike Fabritius aims to help companies understand why talented people quit and offers solutions for retaining employees. The book leverages scientific findings about human beings and the brain and applies them to businesses to help bosses better understand their employees and adopt techniques that will help improve the workplace.


Fabritius’s book serves as a guide for bosses and employees on forming better relationships and making more copacetic workplaces, where people are more productive and happier. One way to do this is to understand that the brain is social. “We're incredibly connected to other people, so it's very important to understand that in order to succeed, we need to build great relationships,” Fabritius says. “We need to know how to build trust, how to foster collaboration. In the brain, there are proven mechanisms for how you can do that and how you can improve the release of the neurochemical called oxytocin, which is the trust hormone.”


In The Brain-Friendly Workplace, Fabritius offers advice for improving trust and collaboration in the workplace, as well as how employees and leadership can strive for work-life balance. For example, she shares ideas on how to use the body to calm the brain. “There are body-based techniques that can really help you to have a better brain,” she says. “For example, sports, sleep, snacks, and sunlight, and they will help you to nurture your neurobalance.” Mindfulness, gratitude training, hypnosis, and emotional labeling are brain-based techniques she suggests in the book.


When writing this book, Fabritius discovered the neurogap, which leads to discrepancy in the kinds of personality profiles that are predominant at the top of organizations. “Not only do we have a lack of diversity when it comes to sex and gender and race,” she says, “but we also have a lack of diversity in the kind of personalities we put into leadership positions.”


The Brain-Friendly Workplace reveals that leadership is often filled by people, both men and women, who have a high dopamine or testosterone neurosignature. These ambitious bosses can tolerate a lot of stress and enjoy the energy of getting ahead, but, Fabritius says, “they create a work environment that may be detrimental to the performance of others, and this neurogap is driving talented individuals to leave the workforce.”


In the book, Fabritius also identifies neurosignatures—the unique activity pattern in a person’s brain that is shaped by dopamine, serotonin, testosterone, and estrogen. “We all have our individual mix of all four,” she says. “Those at the ‘top’ of their industries mostly have a high testosterone/dopamine neurosignature.” This leads to an imbalance in the workplace. “There's nothing wrong with being high dopamine, or high testosterone, but I think we also need people with high estrogen, and high serotonin neurosignatures as well,” she says. “These people bring empathy to the workplace. They bring attention to detail to the workplace. They take a second look at risks. They bring in more lateral thinking.”

These techniques, Fabritius says, when applied in a corporate setting, will help companies balance out these different skill sets and lead to more productive workplaces, giving organizations a competitive advantage.