Could We Ever…Get Smart About Work?

[Ricardo] We’re recording? Okay. Welcome to could we ever part, of the [mumbling]… okay.

[Danyelle] Welcome to Could We Ever, part of the UT Dallas CometCast network.

[Ricardo] Could We Ever shines a light on our experts and ask them to tackle questions you never knew you needed answered.

[Danyelle] From science to art and more.

[Leslie Knope] We need to remember what’s important in life: friends, waffles, and work. Or waffles, friends, work. Doesn’t matter. But work is third.

[Ricardo] That was Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation. Sadly, today’s episode isn’t about waffles. Nope, we’re talking about the 9 to 5 grind, a mainstay of life – work.

[Danyelle] Today we’re talking to Dr. Doug Kiel, a professor of public and nonprofit management in the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences. We asked him the question, “Could we ever get smart about work?” How did you get into studying leadership, specifically?

[Dr. Kiel] At the beginning I studied complexity sciences and I was very much interested in how we human beings handle complex problems, how we handle complex organizations. The simple answer there is, we don’t do it very well. So we simplify a complex reality and those simplifying routines can be very dangerous at times. Then as I got a little bit older I realized leadership is really important because leaders affect the quality of everyone’s life.

[Danyelle] So starting off we wanted to know, when did we go from working to make a living, to living for our work?

[Dr. Kiel] So if you think about most of human history, your work was where your house was. You were a farmer, okay, and so you got up and you farmed and if you didn’t farm then you wouldn’t eat and you wouldn’t survive. Okay? So you know the reality is most of human history, about 390,000 years of it, we were hunter-gatherers on the savanna. Okay? So, you had to move,you had to hunt, and you had to gather to survive. Right? So only about for the last ten thousand years have we organized ourselves into stationary human communities where the agricultural period then started up. Okay? And the agricultural period was then really based on your life, your family, your extended family, all lived in one place, and it was all about the fundamental resource of the land. Now as human communities evolved and we became more specialized, then you might have things like blacksmith or people who were potters or coopers who made barrels, so you started to see some specialization. You then get the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s, early 1800s, and that really starts to change the nature of work. Okay? Where instead of working simply from my home as an agriculture worker I now leave the confines of my home and I go to a different place to work. I go to a factory, for example, to work. Okay? So in short then my life isn’t surrounded simply by that domicile and the needs of the immediate family. I now have to leave the immediate family and go out and make this thing called a living. Okay? Now the really good book – it’s pretty deep and it’s pretty intense but if anybody wants to read it, its by – a classic work in social sciences by Karl Polanyi, P-O-L-A-N-Y-I, called “The Great Transformation,” and he talks about, particularly during the 1800s, as instead of kind of focusing just on self and the survival of the self, we start thinking about this grandiose thing called the economy where we all become part of this larger economy. We all become kind of the cog in this GDP machine. All right? Now in that sense then if I’ve left the confines of my home and family where I got all the nurturing that I really needed – being a farmer was enough, that was adequate, I was okay, I could feed my family. We start then to move in to this new kind of industrial modality where I’ve left the family and during eight hours of the day at least I have to find a way to make myself seem valuable. And the way that generally occurs then is through this monkey troop status-seeking behavior that goes on in human organizations. All right? So in many ways it helps build the economy, it helps drive the ambition, in many ways, that’s made the American economy so great. The downside, however, then is that we all risk being just this little cog in this larger machine where if we can’t find our status in that big machine, then I’m left out. What do I do?

[Ricardo] It’s not a surprise that good leadership is a key to an effective workplace, and Doug had some thoughts on how we choose those people in charge.

[Dr. Kiel] Well, we have to be a lot more thoughtful about who we’re selecting for leadership positions. There are some pretty good leadership development programs throughout the world. In the corporate world General Electric gets a lot of credence for what they do. The US military obviously does a lot. But I still think there’s a tendency in most organizations, especially organizations that are driven by the bottom line such as corporate organizations, to simply focus on whether the metrics are being met. Did you meet your sales quota and if you met your sales quota we could care less about the human detritus that you leave behind. We don’t care if people are leaving your organization and they’re walking out because they’re unhappy as long as you’re meeting your basic, your basic metrics. So in short we have to be much more thoughtful about assessing what a leader’s style is going to be, what their real strengths are, identifying what their strengths are and allowing them to use it, identifying their weaknesses and having them avoid it when necessary. And I think most importantly, understanding not only whether they’re curious or not, but how they handle change. Because if you think about the modern world, what is it really about? It’s about constant change. If you’re unable to adapt to that, you’re probably not going to lead very effectively. Now of course the other challenge, if you imagine the picture that I’ve been painting, is that we’re not going to have super women or super men. We’re all just human beings. Okay? But in many sense we kind of have to go back to the original thoughts of Plato and, and those who really want to lead a lot probably can’t be trusted to lead. Anybody who wants it that much, we need to be circumspect about. So we really kind of want the reluctant leaders who may not be all that passionate about power but may have better qualities that actually will lead to a more effective workplace. Because it’s not only about them.

[Ricardo] How does work environment change people’s moods and people’s overall happiness with their jobs?

[Dr. Kiel] Oh gosh, yeah, there’s a lot I can say about work environment. So we can, we can talk about everything from the physical setup of a work environment, to how people behave emotionally within the work environment. Um, we know a few things, um, like it’s really important to have windows in an office. It’s really important to have windows in an office. We know that people who can see nature outside their office or actually have living plants in their office tend to be more productive than those who don’t. Okay? Now the reality is is that we have probably millions and millions of cubicles in the United States. They’re not gonna go away anytime soon. So what we generally know is that people are going to be working in cubicles ,you at least have to allow that cubicle to be their space. If they want to put up family photos in there, or silly pictures or do anything that makes it their unique space where it’s their home at work, then that can really be important. That’s really essential. The other thing that I think is probably really, really important – sometimes we forget it and sometimes it seems perhaps a little bit shallow, but it’s validated by a tremendously large body of evidence – and that’s simply the power of positive affect. If you’re in a leadership position, I don’t even care if you’re not in a leadership position, when you walk into work in the morning. All right? Positive affect, feeling positive, expressing those positive notions to other people. All right? It works like a virus. Okay? It bleeds off to other people and it makes them feel good too, so it becomes really, really important. Creating that effect when everyone is at work – really essential.

[Danyelle] Does negative affect also work like a virus?

[Dr. Kiel] Sure, absolutely. There’s no doubt about it. And some, some leaders, unfortunately, lead that way. Those are basically insecure people who lead via fear, which is just exemplar of their own insecurity. So there’s a really interesting and growing body of literature from the field of positive psychology, human well-being studies – there’s also a field now called positive organizational studies – in which people are really trying to look at people’s kind of core strengths. All right? So if your core strengths is really, are really based on something like relationship-building and you find that your first job is sitting in a cubicle by yourself, the likelihood of you being happy and engaged in your work probably is getting pretty close to zero. People who simply take a job for the money and the money is the key variable that determines whether they take the job, tend to less happy than people who take a job because they find it meaningful. So my advice to people who are listening in today, especially you younger people, don’t just jump at the job because it’s the highest paying job. Jump at the job that you find meaningful, the job that’s going to allow you to use your strengths, and you need to know what those are. So we also know that if people aren’t using their strengths, they’re not gonna be happy. We’ve created lots of jobs that are routinized, some of that’s necessary. All right? But we’ve also created a lot of jobs that are boring, where people have very little flexibility, and those jobs basically train people to fit into a box and not really think outside that box and do it, a variety of different things, and in many ways we kind of de-skill people by asking them to do the same thing over and over again. So we have a lot of work to do to give people a greater sense of meaning in their work, and that’s really a job of leadership. That’s their responsibility.

[Danyelle] We wanted to know if these issues are prevalent in other countries or if they’re really only seen here in the States.

[Dr. Kiel] These things tend to be country-specific in some ways. I have done some work with some northern European countries that although they tend to be bottom-line driven, tend to have less hierarchy and concern for power than we tend to have in the United States. I think we are still kind of driven, as I’ve said more than once already, by these bottom-line metrics, and so we forget about some of the other problems that accrue from that, especially the 0 long term. Right? So in a world, in the private sector where stock prices dominate for large corporations, then you’re gonna have short term behavior and you’re gonna have people who aren’t really thinking strategically, 5 to 7 years down the line. They’re gonna be thinking about what I can do tomorrow, and if I’m not thinking strategically then it doesn’t matter about the human detritus that I leave behind because I’ll meet my numbers and they’ll put me in the next position. I think the northern European countries have done a little bit better job, but in many ways they probably do a better job with everything. If you look at some of these indices now on human well-being, human happiness, the northern European countries are always at the top. Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark. The United States generally falls in the second tier – we’re usually about 13 or 14 on these kinds of lists. But they do have to do with the quality of work life for people. So the developing countries, unfortunately, tend to take on the modality of the dominant group and that’s the U.S., so they tend to be kind of hard-charging and thoughtless about these things in many ways, unfortunately. So you know, there’s another issue of how we have to think about modeling behavior. I think one of the things we have to think about in the United States is, is that you know, we’re the richest country in the world, but we have all these disengaged people. I’m working on a project right now with the City of McKinney here, on well-being within the city, and and one thing we find is that happiness among Americans has been dropping precipitously since the 1970s. So our economy is bigger than it’s ever been but we’re not happy. So what’s the point? What’s the point of having all this wealth and all this power if you’re basically unhappy?

[Ricardo] So let’s talk about the work day.

[Dr. Kiel] Here’s what the work day should look like. A couple of things we need to be cognizant of. One is that most people are not cognitively astute until about four hours after they wake. Now that then means that if most people are getting up about 6 o’clock then probably 10 o’clock in the morning is a good time to do things like hold meetings. Okay? Because most people are actually awake. Here’s what the day really should look like. It looks a lot like the European day. The day should not start until nine o’clock in the morning. That should be when we all get to work. That should also be when kids start school. There’s a large body of evidence that shows kids are not getting enough sleep and if you can start school at nine o’clock they’re more likely to get adequate sleep. The morning half of the workday goes from 9:00 to 1:00. It stops at 1:00. Why? Because we know everyone’s circadian rhythms are dipping between 1:00 and 3:00. That’s when we should be taking naps and lunches. Now this also helps solve another problem. It helps solve the problem for single parents. What do you do with your kid who’s in the third grade if you’re working eight to five? The standard 8 to noon, one-hour break at lunch, back at one, go to five. So that creates all these kind of opportunities for schools to take over, which can be a good thing, after school programs. But it might give parents a chance to even meet with their kids, to take them to another venue in that two-hour break. Then work should then start again at 3:00 and go to 7:00. Generally, and this is on average, another period of people’s peak cognition is about 5:00 p.m. Okay? So we would then have workers at work in the morning from 9:00 to 1:00, a peak period cognition, about 10:00. We’d have them at work from 3:00 to 7:00 in the evening – peak period of cognition about 5:00. You do tend to have another period of peak cognition as an adult about 9:00 p.m. in the evening. Right? So you’d have one period of peak cognition at home. But I think this workplace, if you think about it, if you finish work at 7:00, maybe that’s eating a little bit later for most people, it’s very much a European model, but I think you’re more likely to get adequate sleep. If you went to bed at even 11:00 at that point in time then you could sleep until about 7:00 and get your good eight hours of sleep. But we really need to rethink the workday. In one sense it may be resolving itself by these flexible work programs, I talked about telecommuting, things of that nature, that helps a little bit with us. But the eight to five work day, there’s really no good reason for it. If you look back in the literature, why is it 8 to 5? You can find something about coal miners in England going on strike in the late 1890s and they said we’re not going to work these 80 hour work weeks we’re working, we’re not going to work on Sunday, and so they just decided it would be 8 to 5. But there’s no good reason for that. So there’s a lot of good science out there that tells us we really need to be rethinking these kind of old modalities. It just maybe worked in the industrial world but just don’t make any sense at all in a knowledge-based economy.

[Danyelle] As our conversation was winding down, we wanted to pick Dr. Keil’s brain about what he thought the future of workplaces and organizations will look like.

[Dr. Kiel] So I think what’s gonna happen, Danyelle, is there’s gonna be a lot more movement across organizational lines. You won’t find a lot of people like me anymore, hopefully, who stay at the same place for 33 years. That will kind of be an outmoded model, largely because I think people are likely to get bored, and if you’re really interested and curious then there’s kind of the magical number seven. We know generally that people tend to get bored with jobs after about seven years. Why is that? Because the learning curve flattens out, right, and once the learning curve is flattened out well, well on the beginning of the job and the learning curve is relatively steep you’re learning new things, you’re learning new things, it’s fun, it’s fun, it’s exciting, and then all the sudden it flattens out, and when things flatten out that’s called death or boredom. Right? Okay? So death or boredom. And what I think it’s, it’s going to require that in many ways is that people and organizations be flexible enough to say okay, everything tends to be project-based, what are the skills that we need for this particular project? Who can we hire at this point in 0 time? So in many ways we all become kind of virtual workers. So in one sense then buttressing your resume does become important in that sense but also knowing what you’re really good at becomes important in that sense, too. There’s so much going on. You know, some of its perhaps overblown. I’m old enough to remember when people first started talking about artificial intelligence and expert systems and all of this in the late 1970s, and by the time I was my age now we’d all be out of work. There would just be you know one professor for the UT System in each relevant field and he would be a talking head on, you know, eLearning and he would be teaching 200,000 students. Well that hasn’t happened, and we actually have, you know, almost more than full employment in the United States right now so everybody has jobs. So that tends to be overblown a lot, I think. But I do think that people will probably do more job shopping and more job movement and I think that’s probably a good thing. Because increasingly jobs aren’t all that complex in terms of the learning involved. Okay? We can train people to do anything but it’s really hard to train you to be curious and information seeking and open-minded if you’re not already that way.

[Ricardo] Doug…

[Dr. Kiel] Thank you.

[Ricardo] Guess I can call you that? [laughter] Could we ever get smart about work?

[Dr. Kiel] We are gradually, and I underline the word gradually, getting smart about work. So we do have, it’s not a critical mass yet, but a growing number of organizations, for example, that are really taking stress a lot more seriously. Okay? And really giving people good stress management programs and understanding that’s not a secondary element of work. That’s a primary element of how we think about work. There is a whole market out there now for people who are workplace nap consultants and they come in and they charge you ten thousand dollars to give your corporation a napping plan so that people will have adequate time during the day to nap and they structure it so different parts of the organization are always awake. All right? So again we do have examples of this going on. I would also say that in terms of really thinking about people’s strengths, organizations are getting smarter about this, okay, but we still have a long way to go before we really appreciate the fact that just because I’m an A+ student doesn’t mean I have the right strengths for your company. It simply may mean that I have the right subject matter knowledge. Okay? The problem is it’s a lot more difficult to move me psychologically and in terms of my psychological capital than it is to move me with my subject matter knowledge. So we have to get smarter there. In terms of leadership, gosh, there’s a whole body of literature on what we call toxic leadership. And in short, we tend to put people in leadership positions because they were successful in the last one. Probably not good practice. We really need to think about what’s best for the long-term viability of the organization. And after 40 years of studying organizations I’m still optimistic that we can get smarter, but it’s probably going to happen at a more glacial pace than those of us who would like the change to happen faster than it actually will.

[Danyelle] We just wanted to give one last shout out to Doug for being a guest on our episode. It was such a great time. For any additional plugs on the public and nonprofit management program in EPPS, check our show notes. We’ll link to their website, social media, and any studies that we discussed in this episode. So, bye!

[Ricardo] UT Dallas CometCast is a podcast network brought to you by the UTD Office of Communications.

[Danyelle] A special thanks to senior lecturer Roxanne Minnish for our music. Be sure to follow the university on social media and check out Could We Ever and our other shows at utdallas.edu/cometcast. So listen out for us next time.