THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, February 22 - 23, 2020 |B
HUMAN CAPITAL
I
s it reasonable to expect to enjoy your job?
That’s a question many of us have wrestled with,
often as we lie awake with anxious thoughts about
our careers. A 2017 survey by the American Psycho-
logical Association found that 61% of respondents
chose work as their top source of anxiety.
Steve Jobs famously once argued, “You’ve got to love
what you do.” It’s one of those casual exhortations (most
easily made by a billionaire) that can leave anyone feel-
ing inadequate.
But work doesn’t have to be awful. We could bring
back satisfaction to our work by alleviating some of the
excess stresses of our professions.
Here are nine interventions backed by the latest find-
ings of workplace psychology.
Nine Easy
Steps to
A Better
DayatWork
Headphones, ‘monk mode’ and other
secrets to job satisfaction2
Celebrate Headphones
It has become popular to blame younger workers for
some of the things bosses don’t like, such as the use of
headphones. Some critics argue they are detrimental to
interactions with colleagues and a sense of collective pur-
pose. In reality, offices that allow headphones can be con-
siderably more productive—and workers feel happier
when they’re able to tune out and get work done. So
maybe rather than banning headphones, teams could be
allowed to set times when they want to be more focused.
Ben Waber, founder of workplace-analytics company
Humanyze, says office conversations tend to happen at
certain times of day, around lunch and the end of the day.
Those times could be designated as headphone-free zones.
3
Launch ‘Meeting-Free’ Days
The scientific investigation of Alex “Sandy” Pentland,
a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, fo-
cuses on what actions in offices genuinely lead to break-
throughs in creativity—or increases in output.
One of Mr. Pentland’s discoveries was that while
meetings contributed about 2% of what got done at
work, face-to-face conversation contributed almost 20
times as much.
So allowing the data to point the way, finding a way to
identify meetings that are unlikely to be productive and
cancel in favor of productive chatter could propel you to
better results.
“Meeting-Free Tuesday” starts here.1
Have a ‘Monk Mode’ Morning
Modern work is beset with interruptions—and experts
argue that it can take up to eight minutes to get back into a
concentrated state again after any distraction.
One study suggested that among software engineers
working on five projects concurrently, 75% of their time
was lost to switching mentally between projects—leaving
only 5% work attention per project amid the fog of
“attention residue.”When we can avoid distraction we can surprise ourselves
with the brain power we can unlock. Writer Cal Newport
calls this mental flow “Deep Work,” and says he is seeing
more entrepreneurs—especially CEOs of small startups—
use an hour or two at the start of the day for depth work.
To safeguard the time, they might say, ‘I’m reachable start-
ing at 11 a.m.” Even setting aside 90 minutes of focus once
or twice a week can be astonishingly productive.4
Go for a Walking Meeting
Sitting at a desk, or in meetings, can contribute to us
feeling drained. By contrast, going for a walk re-energizes
our weary bodies and gets our creative synapses pinging.
Marily Oppezzo and Daniel Schwartz from Stanford
University, who studied the effect of walking on creativity,
found that 81% of participants saw their scores for giving
creative suggestions go up when they were walking rather
than sitting.
Suggesting a “walking meeting” can be awkward and
some colleagues may be more receptive than others.
Where we walk also matters. Another study suggested
that a 50-minute walk out in the open could aid subse-
quent concentration as a sort of mind palate cleanser.8
Operate a No-Fly Zone for Weekend Email
More than they realize, bosses shape the lives of the
people they work with. Researchers from Microsoft found
that for every hour managers put in doing visible work out-
side normal hours (say, emailing on a Sunday or weekday
evening), their direct reports would clock 20 minutes each.
The evidence for benefits of being constantly connected
isn’t good: Half of all workers who check their email out-
side work hours show signs of being highly stressed.
Interestingly, the relationship between time spent
working and output isn’t linear. Stanford Professor John
Pencavel found that workers produced more in a 48-hour
week than they did in a 56-hour week. By taking more
breaks, workers were more productive.
Agreeing that everyone stays off weekend email can go a
long way against burnout.5
Grab a Coffee with a Colleague
We normally associate accountability
with strict, directive cultures in which a
sense of fear drives us to work to the high-
est standards. But Wharton Professor Sigal
Barsade has championed the notion that we
should talk more about friendship, belong-
ing—and (gulp) love—at work. Our stan-
dards are at their highest, she suggests,
when we feel a sense of close affiliation
with our group.
An empathetic connection with col-
leagues helps us feel more connected to our
jobs. And most of us, if asked about our fa-
vorite times in our careers, would recall
times of collective rapport and affection.
Workplace analytics firm Humanyze
found that when colleagues took 15-minute
coffee breaks together, team cohesion went
up by 18% and collective productivity of the
team rose by almost a quarter.9
Replace Presenting With Reading
Take it from Jeff Bezos: Big presentations are all
about bombast and bold fonts. At Amazon, meetings start
in silence as attendees read a document prepared for dis-
cussion. “We don’t do PowerPoint presentations...at Ama-
zon,” Mr. Bezos proclaimed in a letter to shareholders.
“Instead we write narratively structured six-page memos.”
At one level, this sounds horrific. But the science backs
Mr. Bezos’ instincts—the driving force of decision-making
and problem-solving at meetings is engaged discussion,
not someone bossing it at PowerPoint.
A team from Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Union College
that split nearly 700 people into groups and gave them
puzzles to solve found that the unsuccessful teams tended
to be dominated by one or two members, while in the suc-
cessful ones each person spoke in roughly equal measure.6
Ban Phones from Meetings
We all know that our phones demand
our attention, but it seems that even their
very presence is a terrible distraction.
One recent experiment involved getting
respondents about to do a test to either
place their phones facedown in front of
them, keep it in their bag, or leave it in a
different room. Those who left their de-
vices in another room performed substan-
tially better. As the lead researcher ex-plained, “Your conscious mind isn’t thinking
about your smartphone, but the process of
requiring yourself to not think about some-
thing uses up some of your limited cognitive
resources. It’s a brain drain.”
The cognitive drain is even more marked
when we’re switching between our screens
and the real people in the room. Banning
phones can help turn meetings into genuine
face-to-face interactions.7
Laugh
Mark de Rond, an ethnographer who spent six weeks em-
bedded in a field hospital in Afghanistan, said that despite an
onslaught of casualties, there was a morbid humor to the
surgery-team dynamic. Survival expert Laurence Gonzales
suggests that laughing cements a sense of resilience even in
the bleakest situation. While most of our workplaces don’t
feel like warzones, it’s clear humor helps us stay sane.
Professor Robert Provine says that just like birds sing
to each other, humans laugh to connect. “Laughter is the
quintessential human social signal,” he says.
Laughter allows us to be a bit freer with our ideas, be-
cause we’re not simultaneously worrying about how we
come across to others. Letting the postweekend chatter
play itself out for another moment on Monday and cele-
brating coffee breaks creates a safer space at work.
Mr. Daisley is a former European vice president for Twitter Inc. This essay is adapted from his “Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job,” to be published on Feb. 25
by HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. HarperCollins is a unit of News Corp, which also owns The Wall Street Journal. The book was first published in the U.K. last year by
Random House Business Books, an imprint of Cornerstone.
FEDERICA BORDONIBYBRUCEDAISLEY