Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies—and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom line
Today's ways of working are not working—even for ...professionals in good jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with less, even as new technologies normalize 24/7 job expectations. In Overload , Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document how this new intensification of work creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. Flexible work policies and corporate lip service about work-life balance don't come close to fixing the problem. But this unhealthy and unsustainable situation can be changed—and Overload shows how.
Drawing on five years of research, including hundreds of interviews with employees and managers, Kelly and Moen tell the story of a major experiment that they helped design and implement at a Fortune 500 firm. The company adopted creative and practical work redesigns that gave workers more control over how and where they worked and encouraged managers to evaluate performance in new ways. The result? Employees' health, well-being, and ability to manage their personal and work lives improved, while the company benefited from higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. And, as Kelly and Moen show, such changes can—and should—be made on a wide scale.
Complete with advice about ways that employees, managers, and corporate leaders can begin to question and fix one of today's most serious workplace problems, Overload is an inspiring account about how rethinking and redesigning work could transform our lives and companies.
"Work-family conflicts are common and consequential for employees, their families, and work organizations. Can workplaces be changed to reduce work-family conflict? Previous research has not been ...able to assess whether workplace policies or initiatives succeed in reducing work-family conflict or increasing work-family fit. Using longitudinal data collected from 608 employees of a white-collar organization before and after a workplace initiative was implemented, we investigate whether the initiative affects work-family conflict and fit, whether schedule control mediates these effects, and whether work demands, including long hours, moderate the initiative's effects on work-family outcomes. Analyses clearly demonstrate that the workplace initiative positively affects the work-family interface, primarily by increasing employees' schedule control. This study points to the importance of schedule control for our understanding of job quality and for management policies and practices." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku). Die Untersuchung enthält quantitative Daten. Forschungsmethode: empirisch-quantitativ; empirisch; Längsschnitt.
This study tests a central theoretical assumption of stress process and job strain models, namely that increases in employees' control and support at work should promote well-being. To do so, we use ...a group-randomized field trial with longitudinal data from 867 information technology (IT) workers to investigate the well-being effects of STAR, an organizational intervention designed to promote greater employee control over work time and greater supervisor support for workers' personal lives. We also offer a unique analysis of an unexpected field effect— a company merger—among workers surveyed earlier versus later in the study period, before or after the merger announcement. We find few STAR effects for the latter group, but over 12 months, STAR reduced burnout, perceived stress, and psychological distress, and increased job satisfaction, for the early survey group. STAR effects are partially mediated by increases in schedule control and declines in family-to-work conflict and burnout (an outcome and mediator) by six months. Moderating effects show that STAR benefits women in reducing psychological distress and perceived stress, and increases non-supervisory employees' job satisfaction. This study demonstrates, with a rigorous design, that organizational-level initiatives can promote employee well-being.
In the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, social distancing has been necessary to help prevent disease transmission. As a result, medical practices have limited access to in-person ...visits. This poses a challenge to maintain appropriate patient care while preventing a substantial backlog of patients once stay-at-home restrictions are lifted. In practices that are naïve to telehealth as an alternative option, providers and staff are experiencing challenges with telemedicine implementation. We aim to provide a comprehensive guide on how to rapidly integrate telemedicine into practice during a pandemic.
We built a toolkit that details the following 8 essential components to successful implementation of a telemedicine platform: provider and staff training, patient education, an existing electronic medical record system, patient and provider investment in hardware, billing and coding integration, information technology support, audiovisual platforms, and patient and caregiver participation.
Rapid integration of telemedicine in our practice was required to be compliant with our institution’s COVID-19 task force. Within 3 days of this declaration, our large specialty-care clinic converted to a telemedicine platform and we completed 638 visits within the first month of implementation.
Effective and efficient integration of a telemedicine program requires extensive staff and patient education, accessory platforms to facilitate video and audio communication, and adoption of new billing codes that are outlined in this toolkit.
Schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life may help employees manage the work-family interface. Existing data and research designs, however, have made it difficult to ...conclusively identify the effects of these work resources. This analysis utilizes a group-randomized trial in which some units in an information technology workplace were randomly assigned to participate in an initiative, called STAR, that targeted work practices, interactions, and expectations by (1) training supervisors on the value of demonstrating support for employees' personal lives and (2) prompting employees to reconsider when and where they work. We find statistically significant, although modest, improvements in employees' work-family conflict and family time adequacy, and larger changes in schedule control and supervisor support for family and personal life. We find no evidence that this intervention increased work hours or perceived job demands, as might have happened with increased permeability of work across time and space. Subgroup analyses suggest the intervention brought greater benefits to employees more vulnerable to work-family conflict. This study uses a rigorous design to investigate deliberate organizational changes and their effects on work resources and the work-family interface, advancing our understanding of the impact of social structures on individual lives.
Abstract This paper theorizes the interplay of public and organizational policies by investigating whether the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) shifted patterns of gender inequality within U.S. ...workplaces. Did this leave law increase women’s representation in positions of authority (moving more women into management jobs)? We argue that the impact of public policies will vary by organizational context, hypothesizing different effects by organizations’ points of departure—the corporate policies in place when public policy changes. Analyzing establishment-level panel data from approximately 800 U.S. private-sector establishments in 1990–1997, we found that women’s representation in managerial positions increased in the years immediately after the FMLA. Importantly, women’s representation in management increased the most in workplaces that provided more generous leave benefits even before the FMLA. The increase in managerial representation was most prominent for women of color. Consistent with relational inequality theory, these findings suggest that women may find it easier to make claims for leave and for career advancement when both legal and organizational policies lend legitimacy to their claims. More broadly, this study points to the need to explicitly evaluate how policy impacts vary by organizational norms and commitments.
This article integrates research on gendered organizations and the work-family interface to investigate an innovative workplace initiative. the Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), implemented in ...the corporate headquarters of Best Buy, Inc. While flexible work policies common in other organizations "accommodate" individuals, this initiative attempts a broader and deeper critique of the organizational culture. We address two research questions: How does this initiative attempt to change the masculinized ideal worker norm? And what do women's and men's responses reveal about the persistent ways that gender structures work and family life? Data demonstrate the ideal worker norm is pervasive and powerful, even as employees begin critically examining expectations regarding work time that have historically privileged men. Employees' responses to ROWE are also gendered. Women (especially mothers) are more enthusiastic, while men are more cautious. Ambivalence about and resistance to change is expressed in different ways depending on gender and occupational status.
The COVID-19 pandemic piqued interest in remote work, but research yields mixed findings on the impact of working from home on workers’ well-being and job attitudes. The authors develop a conceptual ...distinction between working from home that occurs during regular work hours (replacement work-from-home) and working from home that occurs outside of those hours (extension work-from-home). Using linked establishment-employee survey data from Germany, the authors find that extension work-from-home is associated with lower psychological well-being, higher turnover intentions, and higher work-to-family and family-to-work conflicts. By contrast, replacement work-from-home is associated with better well-being and higher job satisfaction, but higher work-to-family conflict. Extension work-from-home has more negative effects for women’s well-being and work-to-family conflict. This distinction clarifies the conditions under which remote work can have positive consequences for workers and for organizations.
Large-scale, high-severity wildfires are a major challenge to the future social-ecological sustainability of fire-adapted forest ecosystems in the American West. Managing forests to mitigate this ...risk is a collective action problem requiring landowners and stakeholders within multi-ownership landscapes to plan and implement coordinated restoration treatments. Our research question is: how can we promote collective action to reduce wildfire risk and restore fire-resilient forests in the American West? To address this question we draw on collective action theory to produce an environmental public good (fire-resilient forests), and empirical examples of collective action from six projects that are part of the US Forest Service-Natural Resources Conservation Service Joint Chiefs' Landscape Restoration Partnership. Our findings are based on qualitative, semi-structured interviews conducted with 104 individuals who were purposively selected to represent the diverse stakeholders involved in these projects. Fostering collective action to restore fire-resilient forests entails getting as many landowners (especially large landowners) to participate in wildfire risk reduction as possible to increase its areal extent; and landowner coordination in planning and implementing strategically-designed restoration treatments to optimize their effectiveness. We identify factors that enabled and constrained landowner participation and coordination in the Joint Chiefs' projects. Based on our findings and theory about when collective action will emerge, we specify a suite of practices to promote collective action for wildfire risk reduction across property boundaries, emphasizing incentives and enabling conditions. These include proactive education and outreach targeting landowners; multi-stakeholder processes with broad landowner representation to develop coordinated management approaches; financial and technical assistance to support fuels treatments on all ownerships within similar time frames; strong partnerships; and using common forestry professionals to plan and implement treatments on different ownerships (especially private lands). Our findings can inform cross-boundary management for landscape-scale conservation and restoration in other contexts.
PDF
