Beyond Inbox Zero

Tara Oakman knows what it’s like
to work in a high stress, adrenaline-fueled, always-on 21^st century
workplace. A few years back, she was up against tough deadlines, intense public
scrutiny, and the pressure of creating a massive new federal program from
scratch as director of a team overseeing implementation of some key elements of
the Affordable Care Act. “It was totally crazy,” she said. “Everyone was
working all the time, 24/7. It made sense in a lot of ways—there was a lot of
work to do—but our people were getting incredibly stressed out. We had a really
high level of turnover and morale issues that were, in part, related to the
fact that people were working like crazy.”

While Oakman understood the
maniacal pace—her team was on a tight turnaround to bring healthcare to
millions of Americans—she thought things would be different when she moved to a
nonprofit. In 2013, Oakman began to work on programs to improve lifelong
health, healthcare and well-being at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. She
expected a more reasonable pace. And for the most part, that’s what she got.
Except that she found herself in yet another work culture where everyone still
seemed to work. All. The. Time.

True, she and her coworkers are working
to solve some of the most complicated problems of our time. Their job
description is to make the world a better place—an undertaking that doesn’t
lend itself to easily identifying when one is “done” for the day. In fact, many
staffers come to work on Monday talking with relief about weekends filled with
mowing lawns, planting gardens, organizing closets—all tasks that, unlike their
day jobs, have a distinct ending. Research has even found that people who work
at nonprofits tend to put in longer hours–some
call them “hero hours”—than others, with higher rates of burnout and turnover, possibly because they’re driven by a higher purpose. But
it’s not like nonprofits are alone in the arms race toward constant overwork.
“Overwork is not new in this country,” said David Waldman, vice president for human resources at RWJF. ”But in some ways, it seems like it’s hitting critical
mass.”

Oakman began to wonder why there is
so much pressure to chronically overwork. Even ER docs, reporters in a war
zone, or first responders to natural disasters work long hours, but only for
short bursts of intensity. And she began to worry about what all those long work
hours, stress and the struggle to juggle work and home responsibilities was
doing to people’s health. She began to think that solving the interminable
problem of work-life balance, rather than being an employee perk, could instead
be central to her job.

Oakman was right to worry: Research
has shown that long work hours are associated with increased risks for
hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and depression. One longitudinal study found that men who don’t take
vacations are 30 percent more likely to have heart attacks. For women, that increased
risk goes up to 50 percent. Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational
behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and his colleagues found in
a meta-analysis of 228
studies that work-life conflict is worse for one’s health than second-hand
smoke, and that overwork increases the risk of death by 20 percent. Hardly
environments conducive to improving lifelong health.

And so Oakman, Waldman, and
others at RWJF decided to do something about it: to see if they could redesign their
own workplace culture to improve work-life balance and health. And if they
could, they could not only make their own lives better, but they could show
others the way, and fulfill their mission to make the world better.

But they weren’t sure what,
exactly, to do. Other organizations have turned to “wellness initiatives” like
free on-site yoga and meditation classes or anti-smoking campaigns to try to
change overwork culture and promote work-life balance. But the results are
mixed: Some studies have
found a 6-1 return on investment in improved health, others have
found little to no immediate effect on what employers spend on healthcare. And
they don’t get at the heart of the problem: Why
do people work so much?

Some companies have sought better
work-life balance through experiments with flexible work, results only work environments, rotating on-call nights so everyone has predictable time off, or family
supportive training for managers.

But RWJF already had a slew of such
policies with work-life balance in mind at their Princeton, NJ headquarters:
meeting-free Wednesday mornings, flexible work, generous paid vacation and sick
time, and managers who make clear they don’t expect a response if they send
emails on weekends.

“The policies aren’t really the
problem,” Oakman said. “It’s the culture. We decided we needed to figure out
how people really operate, understand how they think, and see if we could nudge
the culture.”

So the nonprofit decided to try
something new: behavioral science.

Far from using traditional—and
sometimes comically flawed—economic models that attempt to predict human
behavior on based on what a “rational actor” would do, behavioral science
recognizes that the way in which humans make decisions is complicated. There’s
so much more than rationality at play: Behavioral scientists have found, for
instance, that when we’re preoccupied with what we lack, whether it’s time, money
or relationships, our mental bandwidth gets used up. We get stupider—one study found
overtaxed bandwidth can cause one to lose 13 IQ points. And we tend to narrow
our focus and “tunnel” on what’s most immediate, losing the capacity to make
good decisions in the process. Good decisions such as what’s really the most
important thing to focus on at work, or when to call it a day.

In the past, RWJF has supported
projects that use behavioral science to nudge healthier choices to combat
obesity—like color-coding healthy and not-so-healthy menu items in a hospital
cafeteria, or having people post their workout sessions to a public forum. For
this project, the first to use behavioral science to redesign work culture,
they recruited other nonprofits willing to experiment, and engaged ideas42, a
nonprofit firm founded by academics that seeks to use behavioral science to
solve real world problems. (Ideas42 is named, tongue-in-cheek, after the number
42, which was hailed as the answer to all questions about the meaning of life
in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

Ideas42 has spent the last few
months on the first two parts of their four-part methodology: making site
visits, interviewing workers and analyzing work hour data in an effort to define and diagnose the problem. They’ll move into designing interventions in the coming months, and then, in the
spring, are planning controlled trials to test
those interventions to see if they work. The Better Life Lab at New America,
where I serve as director, has partnered with ideas42 to follow the course of
the project and report and write about the results.

Defining the problem hasn’t been
difficult and, for many readers, may feel painfully familiar: For many, there
are work days of constant interruptions or back to back meetings. Then there’s
the pressure of “asynchronous communication”—e-mails flooding in from everyone
else not in those meetings. Workers reported racing through the day, only to
see at 5 or 6 o’clock that they hadn’t gotten to any of the big projects they’d
wanted tackle, so would often stay late or work late into the night–eating up
time for themselves or their families–just to have time to concentrate.

Much like anthropologists studying
tribes in the wild, ideas42 associates have been observing people at work at
RWJF and the other pilot sites to get a better sense of the often unspoken
social norms that shape behavior, said Josh Wright, executive director of
ideas42. A workplace may say they value work-life balance, but if the boss is
the first one in and last one out the door, that sets the tone for everyone
down the line. Do coworkers take all their vacation? Do they excitedly ask
where you’re going on yours, or sigh or give you snark for abandoning the team?
Does the workplace have a “face time” culture that values physical presence in
the office?

A recent study
published in Harvard Business Review found that even though a company may have
flexible work or teleworking policies to promote work-life balance, an unspoken
norm of valuing face time can keep workers from feeling they can use them
without penalty. The study quotes one worker’s explanation:

There seems to be a norm that anyone hoping to move up in the management ranks needs to be here late at night and on the weekends. If you’re not willing to do that, you’re not going be seen as dedicated enough to get promoted.

Judging “good” workers by the
amount of face
time the put
in in the office, Wright said, is “very appealing because the
norm is very observable. You can measure whether the person is at their desk or
not.” Even though, he added, research
has found that managers in such face time cultures can’t actually tell the
difference between people who are working hard and people who appear to be working hard.

A strong face time social norm
can actually lead to more work when
one works flexibly or telecommutes, Wright explained. Workers who want to
appear dedicated and committed end up creating a “virtual” face time culture,
rather than better work-life balance. “The measurement becomes how quickly do you
respond to email? How late in the evening are you responding to email?” he said.
“So even though we’re giving people more flexible schedules, we’re actually
creating the same face time/responsiveness culture.”

The way to change that, according
to Wright, is to reset social norms by designing very intentional policies and
systems that are clearly communicated. If the work culture wants to communicate
that giving workers time off to recharge is important, perhaps they could
design a technological fix—a message that pops up on any email about to be
sent after hours, asking if you really want to send it now, or whether you’d
like to schedule to send it the following day. To communicate that vacations
are really valued, Wright said, companies could perhaps design a more
intentional system to nudge workers to plan ahead and block time off their
calendars months in advance. Sometimes workers get so busy in their tunnels,
they simply fail to plan far enough ahead, Wright said. And by the time summer
comes, the calendar is packed and it feels too late or too impossible to take a
break. These are a handful of potential design solutions ideas42 managers and
associates have been brainstorming in order to design interventions to test.

“The thing that can’t be missed
in all of this is, when you don’t have work bleed over into your life, it will
not only help people feel better about their lives, it will actually help them
produce better stuff.”

That fact is not lost
on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The creativity of Tara and people like
her we hire to tackle big problems is fundamental,” Waldman said. “Without it,
we don’t have a chance. When you work too much or you’re too tired, you don’t
need books of evidence to show that, every once in awhile, you may get an
insight, but it largely isn’t going to be good. We want our people to stay
fresh and healthy and well balanced, because we’re in this for the long run.”