Introduction

Flexibility, collaboration, and autonomy are workplace strategies intended to give workers more predictability and control over their work and home lives. Instead, they’re often extending the workday into an unpredictable, 24/7 everydayathon, crowding out time for meaningful, concentrated work with endless meetings and overflowing inboxes, and spurring ever greater work devotion in order to live up to the notion of the always on, work-devoted, indefatigable “ideal worker.” In short, the strategies designed to ease work-life conflict aren’t working.

Part of the reason why is not only that many workplaces adopt policies without devoting time or resources to adequately implement them, but that current systems fail to account for what science is beginning to unravel about what really drives human behavior.

A growing body of behavioral science research shows that change is hard for humans. We do things a certain way because they’ve always been done that way. We get stuck in unhealthy patterns, even when we know better. We make decisions that are easy in the present moment, but turn out to be short-sighted in the long run. We overestimate our own importance, fall prey to setting unrealistic expectations, and we tend to be influenced by what everyone else around us is doing, whether we consciously realize it or not.

An ideas42 study of three knowledge workplaces has found that, at the most fundamental level, flexibility, collaboration, and autonomy have all exponentially increased the number of choices knowledge workers face in a typical day. That taxes time, attention, and cognitive bandwidth and creates more opportunity for predictably flawed human decision making.

To be sure, there are bigger economic forces at work driving work-life conflict. In recent decades, a host of factors have profoundly changed the workforce, home life, and the very nature of work itself—technology, globalization, an influx of women and mothers entering the workforce, an aging population, and the rise of contract work in a gig economy. Worker productivity has more than tripled in the last 70 years and the economy grown richer,¹ yet workers haven’t shared in the fruits of that labor, as real wages have been flat or falling,² and benefits that are the norm in other advanced economies—like paid family leave, paid sick days, affordable childcare, and paid vacation days—remain rare.

Getting work right, and taking even small steps at the individual, team, and organizational levels to redesign the way flexibility, collaboration, and autonomy work, is of paramount importance. American knowledge workers log among the longest and most extreme hours of any advanced economy, with four in 10 working at least 50 hours a week.³ Busyness and long work hours have become badges of honor. New “efficient” scheduling technology to match labor with demand has created chaos in the schedules of many hourly workers. American families are feeling ever more harried, worried they aren’t spending enough time with family,⁴ and putting in 11 more hours of work a week than they did in the 1970s.⁵ More than half of American workers didn’t take all of their vacation in 2015, leaving 658 million days unused.⁶ Despite the fact that women have been graduating from college in greater numbers than men since the mid-1980s, women are overrepresented in low-wage work and stuck in middle-management.⁷ Levels of stress, anxiety, disengagement, and burnout at work are high.⁸ Today’s stressful workplace is the fifth leading cause of death in America. Workplace-associated health care costs as much as the $174 billion spent every year on diabetes care.⁹ “The workplace has become hazardous to our health,” said Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational psychology at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

The answer is not to jettison flexibility, collaboration, and autonomy, but rather, to use an understanding of human psychology to redesign work systems in order for individuals, teams and organizations to use them more skillfully. In this toolkit, we outline the challenges, best practices and promising new ideas to ease four particularly thorny choke points—reducing e-mail overload, inefficient meetings, and long work hours, and increasing restful time off—based on universal behavioral science principles.

“Human freedom is not in our ability to make decisions. It’s in our ability to put ourselves in an environment that will lead to better outcomes.” – Dan Ariely, behavioral economist, Duke University