A Four Day (32 Hour) Work Week With Same Pay: Will It Work?
Potential benefits and challenges of a 32 hour work week for U.S. workers and employers
In this episode, Professors Alex and Kayla offer a balanced and critical examination of the idea of a 32-hour workweek. We explore potential benefits, like improved work-life balance and better mental health, while acknowledging the challenges, such as decreased productivity. We delve into why a 4 day workweek with the same pay may not be feasible or effective, touching on issues of compensation, productivity, and industry-specific challenges. Whether you are an employee, employer, or just interested in the future of work, this episode provides a thought-provoking analysis of a timely and important topic.
What is Confidence?
How does Core Confidence differ from Self-Efficacy?
This episode is based on Alex’s interview with The New York Times. Alex is an academic expert on the topic confidence. He developed and tested a theory of core confidence published in Journal of Applied Psychology. Core confidence is observed in someone who displays hope, optimism, self-efficacy, and resilience. We dive into the differences between core confidence and self-efficacy.
HR vs. People Analytics
What’s the difference?
What distinguishes HR Analytics from People Analytics? HR Analytics is focused on the past; people Analytics focuses on the future impact. It seeks to answer questions such as, what can we do to impact the future with our employees? It helps organizations embark on a journey in value creation with people as main actors, creating endless enablement during the employee lifecycle.
Work from Home Experiment: What if it Works?
Episode 4: Health vs. Wealth
In this episode, we discuss the really hard philosophical issue in science, which is to make decisions on the basis of comparing things that are not naturally comparable. So, how many lives are comparable to how many dollars? How do we develop interventions that both maximize lives saved and minimize the economic cost?
Episode 3: Implications for Anxiety, Depression, and Nostalgia
Humans long to belong. Thus, we predict increase in depression and break-ups during the pandemic, which will then negatively affect work beyond normal. Can you think of a theory in psychology that would predict a decrease in depression caused by increased social isolation? Depression will skyrocket, whether that gets recorded/reported is a separate question. What if a source of your depression is family and now you are stuck with them all the time? The pandemic means there is no meeting others, taking a break outside, or going to a show.
Regarding relationships, remember the differences between dating and living together. Dating is the “best of” edition, i.e., meeting each other when you both feel like it and have time to get to your best edition. Living together during a pandemic means you are stuck together. Now, you get to hear the songs that were left for the B side of the album, to say nothing of working together in the same place.
Let’s face the compounded consequences. The more you are engulfed by depression the more you are impervious to reason. Living and working together, especially in confined apartment of the big cities, will make you feel more exhausted by the quirks of your significant other than invigorated by their occasional (when seen less) charm. Hot-button issues, including increased domestic violence, emerge naturally out of these circumstances and the downstream problems will defuse to work.
Episode 2: Algorithmic Management vs. People Leadership
If there are less people present physically at work, should managers increase the use of algorithms? Automation could be effective in scheduling operations, tracking deliveries, and automatically obfuscating laws (e.g., set the algorithm to flag workforce levels at which we lay less/more in payroll tax). Isn’t it a simple arithmetic to surmise that if there are less people at work, leading them becomes less numerically pressing? Said differently, if there are less people around your work setting, why would you increase attention dedicated to leading them if they are decreasing in numbers? Thus, would you not want to dedicate most of your attention to the growing pressures directly on you, not diminishing, and see if algorithms can help?
This sounds logical. However, what will that do to other human qualities such as altruism? If we become more algorithm-centered, then will we turn more selfish? What will the quick stress relief valve, like occasional humor, be? Will algorithmic management increase compliance or commitment? How would that affect your feelings of belonging to an organization? How would you make employees feel that you are concerned about their well-being? If IT-based work and management prevails, we might learn that these “softer” sides of humans is not as important in organizations as we thought. Or, it might signal that IT-based work is not really workable. It would be incredibly informative to learn this during the present extraordinary set of work circumstances that cannot really be modeled in experiments.
Episode 1: Virtual Teamwork vs. Real Teamwork
Teamwork will morph gradually into virtual teamwork. It is technologically possible, cheaper, and whether teammates showered before coming to work is not as consequential. Our read of the current business press is that too much ink is spilled on pointing to obvious obstacles, e.g., aligning different hardware platforms, managing time-zones, discussing virtual dress-codes.
Much less clear are the following questions. Will the cognitive (e.g., quality of ideas tossed around in virtual space), emotional (e.g., on screen empathy for struggling teammates), motivational (e.g., electronically building esprit de corps) and social (e.g., support over the microphone) aspects of virtual teamwork be as effective as those of in-person teamwork? What about the virtual effects of quick-wit, sarcasm, good manners, affable personality, and flirting? Is there such a thing as digital social decorum? Is it different from ethics during in-person work? Are there significant differences in these preferences? How do we measure virtual disharmony? One conclusion is certain; it is harder to read body language, emotional cues, and other non-verbal information virtually than when you are in the same room with your teammates.
We have no answers but that we need more data. Said differently, do not take the purveyors of virtual teamwork seriously if they proclaim to have empirical answers to the above questions. They might have hunches (relabeled as actionable strategies) but there is little evidence on these aspects of virtual teamwork. Virtual teamwork is a present-day necessity but loosen, if not reset, expectations, i.e., do not get despondent if it is not as effective as real teamwork until we get more data. Until then, we have little to go on but to follow some deeper wisdom, such as Ernst Hemingway’s advice: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”