Too Many Meetings? But Are They The "Broccoli of Work?"

Source: Getty Images

Day after day, I read articles in which employees complain about too many meetings and writers offer advice for eliminating the unnecessary meetings that clog our schedules.  Yet, a new study offers strong empirical evidence of the value of meetings.  David Deming and his colleagues have authored a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that describes meetings as "the broccoli of work – widely disliked, but probably good for us anyway."  

Deming and his colleagues used a unique Norwegian dataset to study the value of meetings.  They collected data from administrative registers compiled by Statistics Norway.  This dataset contained information about employee careers, mobility, and wage growth from 2022-2024.  They also compiled survey data from approximately 10,000 individuals.  

The study finds that meetings do account for a substantial chunk of worker time.   Meetings most often involve planning, coordination, problem solving, and project updates.  While meetings are time consuming and come with opportunity costs, they provide critical value.  The scholars find that, 

"Meeting frequency and intensity are positively related to worker wage growth. Workers in meeting-intensive firms report greater on-the-job learning, and interactions with more senior colleagues are associated with stronger wage growth, suggesting that knowledge transmission within firms is an important mechanism."

Thus, the scholars conclude that meetings are similar to eating broccoli.  We may not enjoy them, but perhaps they are quite good for us.  Why?  They are critical sources of organizational and personal learning.  The human connection matters.  We learn when we interact with others, ask questions, listen to them, and share our ideas.  We cannot replace that source of learning with brief exchanges via technological platforms such as email, text, Slack, etc.   Therefore, perhaps we should complain less about how many meetings we must attend, and focus more on how to make them more productive.  

Training Your Team Members Boosts Your Productivity

How much does your company invest in training and development for your employees?   Is the ROI positive?  Many executives scrutinize training and development programs closely.  They want to know if the payoff justifies the investment.  Typically, people measure ROI by examining the impact on the employees undergoing the training.  We ask questions such as: Are they more productive?  Are they more engaged? Do they stay at the firm longer?  

A new study examines another potentially important impact of training and development programs.  Miguel Espinosa and Christopher T. Stanton studied 526 frontline workers and 129 managers in Columbia who had undergone a 120-hour, 16-week training program.  According to HBS Working Knowledge, the scholars concluded:

"Goal achievement among frontline workers increased by roughly 10% after training.  Managers completed 3% more of their goals related to strategic tasks.  Supervisors who worked most closely with trained workers benefited the most, boosting productivity by about 8%.  An examination of email data explains why: After the training, frontline workers sent fewer emails to their managers—an indication that the training had given them the knowledge and confidence to pursue their work independently.  Trained employees enjoyed additional benefits, including career stability and growth. For example, they were more likely than their non-trained counterparts to remain with the organization over the next three years. And they were about twice as likely as their untrained counterparts to receive promotions."

Now this study examined frontline workers.  Other research should examine development programs for employees at higher levels of the organization to examine the productivity benefits.  Perhaps the benefits will not be as widespread.  However, this study certainly provides food for thought.  Executives may be looking at ROI all wrong when it comes to leadership development programs at all levels. 

The Value of Companies with Many Occupational Options for Employees

Is it valuable for an employee to seek out employers that will offer the possibility of a variety of roles that they may fill over a period of years?  New research by Professors Inês Black and Ana Figueiredo suggests that role variety boosts wages, employee retention, and job satisfaction.  Duke Fuqua Insights recently summarized their research:

• workers starting their career at firms with more occupational variety switch occupations internally more often within the first 10 years;
• as a result, workers starting their career at firms that offer more job titles tend to have higher wages in 10 years;
• independently of firm size, the more occupations a firm offers, the more likely it is to retain their employees.

Professor Black goes on to comment on the impact that role variety can have on retention: "For every one more occupation that I offer to my workers, I'm 10% more likely to retain them 10 years from now," she explained.  

Can AI Enable Us To Focus More on the Work We Love to Do?

Source:  Doyenhub Software Solution

Most of the attention on AI these days seems to focus on how it can make us more productive, as well as how it may even displace some workers whose tasks can now be automated.   However, a new study examines a slightly different question.  It explores whether AI can change the nature of work.  Might we engage in different activities as a result of the impact of AI, and might we even have more time to do what we truly love to do? 

Manuel Hoffmann and his colleagues have published a new working paper titled "Generative AI and the Nature of Work."  They examined the results of a natural experiment associated with the use of GitHub Copilot, a generative AI tool for software developers.  The findings illustrate an interesting shift in the work that developers were doing.  First, the generative AI tool enabled software developers to spend more time coding and less time on administrative tasks related to project management.  Second, they found that developers engaged in more exploratory work with the introduction of this AI tool.  In other words, developers conducted more experiments and spent less time on established projects.  The scholars summarize the key results as follows:

Copliot eligible developers engage with an additional 15 new repositories on average relative to ineligible peers. Beyond simply interacting with a new set of repositories, we also find evidence that generative AI enables developers to gain exposure to a wider range of technologies. In Panel B, we can see that eligible developers increase their cumulative exposure to new programming languages by 21.79% relative to the baseline. We also estimate a version of this cumulative programming language exposure measure weighted by the median salary reported by software developers who use that language.21 Access to Copilot induces developers to experiment with programming languages that command a 1.41% higher salary relative to a baseline of $119,371 (an increase of $1,683).

I found this paper to be quite thought provoking.  It makes perfect sense to me.  If AI is making us more productive, then what are doing with that new time have on our hands? Are we just doing more work in a given period of time, or are we sometimes using that "new time on our hands" to engage in innovation work?  Are we learning new skills, trying out new ideas, creating new products and services, and inventing better work processes?   These outcomes may not only be beneficial for the organization, but rewarding and fulfilling for us personally.  

Calculating the Cost of Meetings

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Kaz Nejatian, Chief Operating Officer of Canadian e-commerce company Shopify, has created a meeting cost calculator for his organization. Nejatian developed the software program to calculate the cost of meetings during a company hack-a-thon. According to Nejatian, meetings per worker have declined by 14% this year, and productivity has risen.  Bloomberg's Matthew Boyle describes this innovative new approach to curtailing excessive meetings:

The Canadian e-commerce company has rolled out a calculator embedded in employees’ calendar app that estimates the cost of any meeting with three or more people. The tool uses average compensation data across roles and disciplines, along with meeting length and attendee count, to put a price tag on the event.

A typical 30 minute endeavor with three employees can run from $700 up to $1,600. Adding an executive — like Chief Operating Officer Kaz Nejatian, who built the program during a company-wide hack day — can shoot the cost above $2,000.

As I read about this article, I contemplated why excessive meetings sometimes take place.  Many reasons exist - positive and negative.  For example, sometimes leaders really are trying to give a range of people an opportunity to provide input, and they are involving others to build buy-in for a course of action.  On other occasions, though, leaders are simply engaging in what Michael Watkins calls the "charade of consultation." In other words, they hold the meeting to make it seem as though they are soliciting input, but in fact, they have already made up their mind.  It's all a show.  Another reason we have excessive meetings in many organizations is that managers want to avoid accountability and responsibility.   They call others to meetings so as to avoid being put on the spot if a plan goes awry.  They intentionally create a "when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible" culture.  Without a doubt, many unnecessary or unproductive meetings take place every day in organizations.  

Is there any danger though in trying to reduce the number of meetings?  First and foremost, some issues are better hashed out as a group, rather than in one-on-one conversations or email threads.   If we eliminate meetings, but simply replace them with a long set of email threads, we may not truly be increasing productivity.  In fact, we just be shifting our time from one form of communication to another, and one that is perhaps more inefficient.  Second, successful implementation of key initiatives requires a great deal of coordination.  Moreover, it requires a strong shared understanding of the plan, something that may not be achievable without critical meetings.  Third, employees may come to feel as though decision-making processes are not fair, if they are left out of the deliberation process.  If they don't feel as though they have been given voice, then they may not commit and buy into the plans being enacted.   Finally, plenty of learning can take place in meetings, as junior employees soak in knowledge from discussions and analysis undertaken.  Moreover, they watch how others conduct themselves, make presentations, and answer hard questions.  This on-the-spot learning may be lost if too many meetings are eliminated.  

In sum, the goal is admirable.  We all can identify many unproductive meetings we have attended.  However, we need to remember that most things we do require input, support, and collaboration with others.  We do few things alone in organizations.  Meetings serve as important coordination mechanisms in many cases. 

Why the Decline in Labor Productivity?

Jane Thier reported last week for Fortune on the decline in labor productivity in the American economy.  She notes that the United States has experienced productivity declines for the past five quarters.  That hasn't happened since World War II.  Thier examines George Mason economist Tyler Cowen's commentary regarding the potential causes of this significant decline.   She notes that Cowen attributes much of the problem to "a serious crisis of morale" in the workplace.   I think there's no question that many employees are disengaged, and even disgruntled.  Organizations have been grappling with low engagement for years, but it does seem that the problem has become worse since the pandemic began.

Thier also writes that some experts have begun to question whether remote and hybrid work might be driving declines in labor productivity.   Cowen argues that more data are needed to draw definitive conclusions about the impact of remote work.   Fellow economist Gregory Daco of EY Parthenon argues that comments from various clients suggests that remote work might be causing a decline in productivity.  

Many companies reported high productivity of their employees during those early months of the pandemic.  I wonder, though, whether unique circumstances contributed to that efficiency boost, and if productivity might be falling as those conditions no longer hold.  Many employees and organizations rallied in those early days of the pandemic, working extremely hard to ensure that their firms would survive amidst a preciptious economic downturn.   Moreover, we all were stuck in our homes.  We had very little else to do, and so perhaps many were quite productive in those circumstances.  

Things have changed though.   Now, perhaps, we are seeing some of the limitations of remote work, and it may be having a deleterious impact.  It's not the popular thing to say these days.  People who try to argue for return to office often get pummeled by the press, and they potentially scare off talented employees who insist on working remotely.  Yet, the national productivity data should trouble us greatly.  We have to dig deeper into these data, and more rigorous empirical work must be done to understand the complete ramifications of remote/hybrid work.  

Not-so-Hidden Costs of Employee Turnover

Source:  Workstyle 

We all know that employee turnover can be very expensive.  Searching for, hiring, onboarding, and training new employees proves to be a costly endeavor for most firms.  If turnover increases, these costs can become quite burdensome.  A new study documents another significant cost of employee turnover - the decrease in product quality that can result from that loss of experienced and knowledgeable employees.  The paper is titled, "The Hidden Cost of Worker Turnover: Attributing Product Reliability to the Turnover of Factory Workers" by Ken Moon, Prashant Loyalka, Patrick Bergemann, and Joshua Cohen.  

The scholars studied the failure rates of 50 million cellphones produced by a major Chinese manufacturer and tracked the performance of those phones over four years of customer use.   Here's an excerpt from Knowledge@Wharton documenting the findings: 

• Each percentage-point increase in the weekly turnover rate for workers increased product failure by 0.74% to 0.79%.
• Failure was 10.2% more common for devices produced in the high-turnover weeks following payday, which was once a month, than for devices produced during the lowest-turnover weeks immediately before payday.
• In other weeks, the assembly lines experiencing higher turnover produced an estimated 2% to 3% more field failures on average.
• The associated costs amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.

How about Building a "To-Don't List" for Yourself?

Source: ideas.ted.com

Diana Shi has written an article for Fast Company in which she describes how she tried to craft a "to-don't list" as a means of improving her effectiveness while working remotely. She defines it as follows: "In essence, the list is a curated collection of activities that can derail your energy and motivation. They’re often alluring but end up creating a distracting spiral, sapping you of your most productive hours."   Shi began by reflecting on her daily activities and trying to identify those that derailed her and lowered her effectiveness and personal satisfaction.   Shi discovered that the list helped her in several important ways:

1.  The list offered helped her establish some personal accountability by providing a visible reminder of the actions that distracted her or prevented her from maintaining her energy and focus.  Her list included items such as not sitting in one place for more than an hour,  drinking too much caffeine, or engaging in a specific inefficient work practice to which she had become accustomed.  

2. The list helped her spot unhealthy patterns in her daily routine.  She identified the times and the activities during which she had high energy and productivity, as well as the practices that were not as effective. She quotes time management coach Elizabeth Grace Saunders: " “I think a to-don’t list is helpful if you’re working remotely.  A lot of times our minds wander because we’re simply bored and seeking stimulation. Knowing what your unhealthy patterns may be when you’re bored, and preemptively limiting them, can help you to make better choices in the moment."

3.  Finally, the list helped her feel a sense of accomplishment, just in a  different way that a traditional to-do list.  She writes, "Something can be said for being able to look over your list of “to-don’t’s” and not crossing them off, but congratulating yourself on the self-control needed to follow them. I felt less defeated, since I didn’t have an entire collection of tasks to address by late-afternoon. Moreover, my “to-don’t” bulletin made me aware of why it was I hit a wall."

Time to Write a Thank You Note

Source: Bloomberg

During this crisis, we have an even greater need to express our gratitude to hard-working, dedicated employees in our organization.   Recognizing people's efforts and achievements can be instrumental to cultivating high employee engagement, fostering their well-being, and increasing productivity.   Doug Conant, former CEO of Campbell's Soup, has been an ardent proponent of the handwritten thank-you note for years.   Here's an excerpt that he wrote for Harvard Business Review several years ago about the importance of acknowledging what people have done for the organization.  

Believe it or not, I have sent roughly 30,000 handwritten notes to employees like Patti over the last decade, from maintenance people to senior executives. I let them know that I am personally paying attention and celebrating their accomplishments. (I send handwritten notes too because well over half of our associates don’t use a computer). I also jump on any opportunities to write to people who partner with our company any time I meet with them. It’s the least you can do for people who do things to help your company and industry. On the face of it, writing handwritten notes may seem like a waste of time. But in my experience, they build goodwill and lead to higher productivity.

Don't Overestimate Your Multi-tasking Capabilities

Source: Pixabay

Given the COVID-19 situation, many of us find ourselves juggling a variety of unexpected tasks and obligations.   For many parents, working from home has become the norm.  In addition, parents have been asked to home school their children in conjunction with various online learning being faciliated by their children's teachers.  In our home, my spouse and I are both teaching online.  My oldest daughter is home from college taking classes online, and my other two children are engaging in online learning at the high school and middle school level.  The house is busy, and the schedule is complex.   

The natural tendency in these cases is to find ourselves multi-tasking often.  However, we have to be careful about overestimating our multi-tasking capabilities.  Research clearly shows that human beings struggle with trying to work on multiple streams of work simultaneously, yet we are overconfident in our abilities to juggle in this fashion.  Here's an excerpt from an article Kendra Cherry on the topic:

Take a moment and think about all of the things you are doing right now. Obviously, you are reading this article, but chances are good that you are also doing several things at once. Perhaps you're also listening to music, texting a friend, checking your email in another browser tab, or playing a computer game.

If you are doing several different things at once, then you may be what researchers refer to as a "heavy multitasker." And you probably think that you are fairly good at this balancing act. According to a number of different studies, however, you are probably not as effective at multitasking as you think you are.

In the past, many people believed that multitasking was a good way to increase productivity. After all, if you're working on several different tasks at once, you're bound to accomplish more, right?

Recent research, however, has demonstrated that that switching from one task to the next takes a serious toll on productivity. Multitaskers have more trouble tuning out distractions than people who focus on one task at a time. Also, doing so many different things at once can actually impair cognitive ability.

Ok, so how do we handle the current dynamic situation given these research findings?  Building a schedule is a start, as is dedicating particular spaces as quiet areas where people cannot enter and interrupt others.   Building in breaks is essential, so that you can step away and clear your head.   Research shows that "unfocusing" in this way can stimulate creativity and enhance productivity.   For us, we've started a family workout challenge.   That has been a nice diversion, and it addresses the issue of breaks and unfocus time.   Next, you need to find some time to step away from being connected so that you can get some of your work done without interruption by email, text, and the like.   Be sure to let others know when you are going to be focused on a task and not able to respond to messages.  Finally, you have to spend some time each day prioritizing tasks, so that you are focusing your efforts on the most essential duties.   Getting three things done very well is always better than doing a mediocre job at ten things.  

Your Professional Decline & Your Happiness

Source:  Wikipedia

Arthur Brooks has written a thought-provoking article for The Atlantic titled, "Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think."  Brooks reviews the literature regarding the age at which professional productivity peaks in various fields, as well as some of the research on personal happiness.  He closes with some thoughts about how he will approach his work and life moving forward (Brooks has just stepped down as President of the American Enterprise Institute and will be joining the Harvard faculty this summer).   Here's an excerpt from Brooks' terrific essay:

What’s the difference between (Johann Sebastian) Bach and (Charles) Darwin? Both were preternaturally gifted and widely known early in life. Both attained permanent fame posthumously. Where they differed was in their approach to the midlife fade. When Darwin fell behind as an innovator, he became despondent and depressed; his life ended in sad inactivity. When Bach fell behind, he reinvented himself as a master instructor. He died beloved, fulfilled, and—though less famous than he once had been—respected.

The lesson for you and me, especially after 50: Be Johann Sebastian Bach, not Charles Darwin.  How does one do that?  A potential answer lies in the work of the British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence. Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems—what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower. Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence. It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s. This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.

Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it. It is the essence of wisdom. Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.

Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later. For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets—highly fluid in their creativity—tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so. Historians—who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge—don’t reach this milestone until about 60.

Here’s a practical lesson we can extract from all this: No matter what mix of intelligence your field requires, you can always endeavor to weight your career away from innovation and toward the strengths that persist, or even increase, later in life.  Like what? As Bach demonstrated, teaching is an ability that decays very late in life, a principal exception to the general pattern of professional decline over time.

Later in the article, Brooks (now in his early 50s) articulates four commitments he has made to himself as he enters the next stage of his career and life.  

1.  Jump:  Be ready to leave something you love and shift to something new that fits your stage of life more appropriately.  

2. Serve:  Brooks notes that, "An effort to serve others can play to our strengths as we age."

3.  Worship:  Brooks notes the importance of his spiritual life and how it need not be detached from his work life.  He intends to focus on his spiritual life even more moving forward.  

4.  Connect:  Brooks explains that healthy relationships are key to happiness in life, and that one can make time for those relationships without necessarily sacrificing achievement altogether.  

I have not done justice to the fascinating article in this short blog post.  I hope that I have intrigued you, though, and that you will read the entire essay.   

Doing Less, Then Obsessing

My former colleague, Morten Hansen, has written a terrific new book titled, "Great at Work: How top Performers Work Less and Achieve More."   Hansen built a dataset of roughly 5,000 individuals from all levels of organizations, from the C-suite to the factory floor.  He examined their performance, as well as their habits, routines, and work practices.   In the book, Hansen describes seven principles that characterize the approach of top performers.

His first principle, and perhaps most interesting one, is "doing less, then obsessing." Hansen published an essay in the Wall Street Journal recently, in which he describes this principle. He writes, 

The common practice we found among the highest-ranked performers in our study wasn’t at all what we expected. It wasn’t a better ability to organize or delegate. Instead, top performers mastered selectivity. Whenever they could, they carefully selected which priorities, tasks, meetings, customers, ideas or steps to undertake and which to let go. They then applied intense, targeted effort on those few priorities in order to excel. We found that just a few key work practices related to such selectivity accounted for two-thirds of the variation in performance among our subjects. Talent, effort and luck undoubtedly mattered as well, but not nearly as much... In our data, people who focused on a narrow scope of work, and said no to maintain that strategy, outperformed others who didn’t. They placed an impressive 25 percentage points higher in the performance ranking—the difference between being a middling and an excellent performer.

Of course, setting priorities, and saying no to those things that are not priorities, can be extraordinarily difficult for many of us. We don't just work extra long hours to please our boss. We also take on too many tasks at times out of our desire to be collegial and to be viewed as a team player in the organization. We don't want to let our peers down. Sometimes we take on more work now, in hopes that our peers will reciprocrate when we ask for their help. The inability to focus can be costly though. It can diminish our productivity, increase our stress, and reduce the quality of the output that we create.

How Do We Deal (Dysfunctionally) with a Heavy Workload?

Diwas S. KC, Maryam Kouchaki, Bradley R. Staats, and Francesca Gino have written an HBS Working Paper titled "Task Selection and Workload: A Focus on Completing Easy Tasks Hurts Long-Term Performance." These scholars found that individuals choose to work on easier tasks when they experience heavy workloads. Why? People enjoy a positive feeling when they are able to complete a series of tasks in fairly short order. Thus, individuals choose to satisfy themselves by choosing to work on easier tasks when they have a ton of work to do. In the short run, that's a very productive strategy. They cross quite a few items off of their to-do list. However, the researchers find that this task selection strategy may have negative long term performance consequences. 

The study took place in the emergency department of a hospital. They studied over 90,000 patient visits to the emergency room over a two-year period. They found that doctors choose to work on easier patient cases when the ER is very busy. Naturally, they see more patients as a result of this bias toward selecting easier cases. In other words, short term productivity increases. However, the doctors may not capitalize on as many powerful learning opportunities if they always choose the easier cases. The doctors may not be as effective at tackling complicated cases if they work with those patients much less frequently. Indeed, the scholars found a negative long term effect on productivity if doctors exhibit this bias toward selecting easier cases when the workloads are high. 

What's the implication for all of us? Be careful before you simply choose the short-term satisfaction of crossing many easy items off of your to-do list. Think carefully about the long term benefits of tackling tougher tasks. It's a balancing act, of course. You probably should go after some of the low-hanging fruit. You just have to be careful that you don't spend an inordinate amount of your time there, and thus miss key opportunities for learning and improvement that come with more challenging work.

Should You Sit Next to a High Performer at Work?

New research by Michael Housman and Dylan Minor examines the impact of sitting next to a high performer at work.  They discover important "spillover" effects.  In fact, these spillover effects can occur in both a positive and negative direction.  Here's an excerpt from Kellogg Insight about their research:

Researchers looked at the 25-foot radius around high-performers at a large technology firm and found that these workers boosted performance in coworkers by 15 percent. That “positive spillover” translated into an estimated $1 million in additional annual profits, according to new research from Dylan Minor, an assistant professor of managerial economics and decision sciences at the Kellogg School.

Of course, the flipside is that bad eggs impact their neighbors, too. Negative spillover from so-called toxic workers is even more pronounced—sometimes having twice the magnitude of impact on profits as positive spillover. Yet, while this toxic spillover happens very quickly, it also dissipates almost immediately once that worker is either fired or relegated to the far physical reaches of the company.

Time is Money: Does Thinking This Way Elevate Stress Levels?

Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Berkeley Professor Dana Carney have conducted some interesting new research on stress.  They examined the impact of thinking about the value of your time.   When we think of "time as money," we become significantly more stressed.  That's bad for us as individuals and bad for the organizations in which we work.  Stanford Insights summarizes the findings:  

Pfeffer’s most recent research, coauthored with Dana R. Carney from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates the physiological consequences of the economic evaluation of time. Their study concludes that people who are keenly aware of the economic value of their time — people who think of time as money — generally are more psychologically stressed and exhibit higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that do people for whom the economic value of time is less salient.

Why do stress levels matter?   Clearly, stress is not good for worker's health.  In turn, an individual's  health condition affects his or her productivity.   We don't want employees to experience burnout, both for their sake and for the benefit of the firm as a whole.  

Don't Eat Lunch at Your Desk: A Small Tip For Enhancing Creativity

Robin Camarote has a good article at Inc.com about a small change in our daily routine that can help boost our creativity and problem-solving effectiveness.   She argues against eating at your desk, and she notes that research supports her recommendation.  Here's an excerpt:  

Whether you run out and grab something from a restaurant or bring leftovers from home, about 40 percent of us eat lunch at our desks. Most of us do this because we believe we'll get more done. And if you're like me and often work from home, it might seem utterly ridiculous to sit down at the table to eat when there is no one to talk to and the computer and phone are just a couple feet away. I believe I'll get through more items on my to-do list if I multi-task.

But working through lunch only feels more productive. In fact, "...research shows that there are tremendous performance advantages to stepping away from your computer, and even more pluses if you can get outside. Taking a break from cognitively taxing work improves creative thinking," says Kimberly Elsbach, professor of management at the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Davis, "and everybody's job has a creative component, such as problem-solving, managing teams or finding creative solutions." Not to mention taking a break from that steady stream of emails helps reduce stress and, in turn, helps keep you be healthier.

How Do You Enhance Instrinsic Motivation?

Jane Porter has written an article this week for Fast Company on the topic of intrinsic motivation.  Porter writes:

It's easy to hustle through our daily tasks, head down, focused on what's next on the long list of to-dos. But taking a step back to evaluate what really motivates and drives us is critical, not just for our well-being, but also, as research has shown, for our productivity.  Social psychologists call this type of drive "intrinsic motivation," or the desire and urge inside ourselves that propels us to do the work we do and do it well. While we're often motivated by external factors like pay, approval, or recognition, research has shown that intrinsic motivation is fundamental not just for our long-term happiness, but also for the quality of our work.

How can organizations enhance the intrinsic motivation of their employees?   I would urge managers to consider the lessons imparted by social psychologist J. Richard Hackman in his work on job design many years ago.  Hackman argues that five elements of job design have a strong impact on the intrinsic motivation of workers:  skill variety, whole task, task significance, autonomy, and clear and immediate feedback.   By skill variety, Hackman means that employees should not be performing the same monotonous task all day. They should able to use a range of their capabilities.   Whole task means that we cannot get carried away with the division of labor.  We should enable workers to be part of completing more than one minor step in a more complex task.  Third, workers need to understand the importance of their work.  What does it mean for the organization?  Sometimes we refer to this as establishing a line of sight.  Can workers see how what they are doing has impact throughout the firm, all the way to the customer?  Fourth, workers will be more intrinsically motivated if they have some autonomy in terms of how they do their work. Finally, employees need clear, constructive, and immediate feedback.  They need to know where they stand.   If you design the work in this way, you are likely to have workers who are more intrinsically motivated, and therefore, more engaged, satisfied, and productive. 

Does Variety Make Us Happier at Work?

Knowledge@Wharton reports on some interesting research by Wharton Professor Cassie Mogilner and Duke Professor Jordan Etkin.  They studied the effect that variety in your work affects your happiness.  In other words, do people prefer to work on many different things vs. focusing on one task?  Mogilner summarized their findings as follows:

It depends on the time frame. In [our research], we looked at the effect of variety of our activities on overall happiness. We found that over a day or a week or a month, variety — perhaps consistent with people’s perceptions — leads to greater happiness. However, over shorter periods of time than a day, such as an hour, 15 minutes [or a] half-hour, when variety actually does get experienced as multitasking, it actually becomes fairly stressful, and instead of variety increasing my happiness, it makes me less happy.

Does Working From Home Improve Productivity?

Stanford researchers Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying have conducted an interesting new study regarding the benefits and costs of working from home.  The scholars conducted an experiment at Ctrip, a Chinese travel agency.  They randomly assigned call center employees to either work from home or work in the office for a nine month period.  What did they find?  Those employees who worked from home experienced a 13% performance increase.  A portion of that increase came from working more minutes per shift (i.e. they took fewer breaks and fewer sick days).  The other portion derived from taking more calls per minute.   The attrition rate for home workers dropped significantly in this study.  These workers also appeared more satisfied with their jobs.   Did quality suffer though?  It did not.  The home workers appeared to be more productive, while not sacrificing the quality of their work. 

Does this mean that home workers always will be more productive?  Not necessarily.   We have to be careful about generalizing these findings.   This study pertained to call center workers.  We may find that other types of work do not experience the same increases in productivity.  For instance, perhaps some forms of work require much more intense coordination among members of a team.  In those instances, home working may bring more challenges and may not lead to productivity increases.  It would be terrific to see a new study examining a different type of work. 

Attracting and Retaining Better Workers: Higher Wages Alone Won't Do the Trick

We have heard a great deal of commentary about the low wages paid to front-line employees in some industries, particularly the retail and restaurant sectors.   While politicians debate the merits of raising the minimum wage, some people point to the companies paying higher wages as a model.  They argue that these companies attract and retain more productive workers because they pay higher-than-usual wages.   For instance, people point to firms such as Costco, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods as examples.   I think that we have to be very careful about these arguments though.  These firms attract and retain highly productive, engaged employees for reasons well beyond the wages that they pay.  Yes, they pay their employees more than some of their rivals.  However, these firms also have built an entire organizational system that supports an engaged, productive, and collaborative workforce.  They have developed a culture that attracts talented people.  They have embraced certain values and principles.  They have articulated a sense of purpose that people find compelling.  They have developed managers and supervisors who know how to engage employees.   I could go on.  The point is simple: they have built an entire system that attracts and retains these workers, and helps them produce great value for the firm.   Paying someone a few bucks more without doing these other things won't have any significant effect on engagement, customer satisfaction, employee retention, or profits.