The Experimenter Series: Wellbeing and hybrid work with Laura Giurge
The Experimenter Series is a collection of six interviews with people pioneering scientific experiments in large organisations. In the final version, we speak to Dr. Laura Giurge, a brilliant professor and our research advisor at MoreThanNow.
In this instalment, I talk to Dr. Laura Giurge, a rising scholar in the field of time, wellbeing, and the future of work and our superstar research advisor. Laura’s research has been published in top journals with international impact as well as prominent media outlets such as Harvard Business Review, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. In this part, Laura shares her insights on why research in the workplace is important and how experiments can make a positive impact.
“We keep seeing what I call the ‘paradox of modern life’. Despite technological advances giving us greater control over our way of working, we keep making suboptimal decisions about how we spend our time.”
Dr. Laura Giurge
Gus: Hi Laura! Lovely to talk with you – could you introduce yourself to our readers?
Laura: Sure! On the professional side, I hold a PhD in Management from Rotterdam School of Management and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Cornell University and London Business School, currently transitioning to a faculty position. I’m also a research lead at MTN and the Barnes Research Fellow at the Wellbeing Research Centre of the University of Oxford. Since moving to London, I have also been involved in teaching MBAs and Executive MBAs at London Business School. So, a lot of my training and thinking around research is rooted in management and organisational behaviour. It was during my postdoc at Cornell when I really connected with behavioural science and realised the value of applying insights from this field to management, in order to advance our understanding of the rapidly changing world of work and help shape the future of work. On the personal side, I love travelling and discovering new cultures and have lived in four different countries, thus far. I also enjoy photography and abstract art, and I’m a huge fan of animals and plants!
G: Such an amazing resume, it gets me every time [laughs]. Let’s get straight into experiments - what’s your experience and what is their value?
L: Throughout the years I’ve been involved in various experiments with organizations, but last year was the first time that I led an RCT with an organization from start to end. It’s been an amazing experience because the experiment resulted in the organization implementing the initiative we were testing at scale and turning it into a policy so that all employees could benefit from it.
Now in terms of the value of experiments in the workplace, the list is long! Experiments lead to decisions that are informed by data and grounded in scientific evidence, which improves ROI because you only roll out what’s effective! At the same time, an experimental approach can be part of a culture of learning, where employees feel empowered to bring their ideas forward and try them out in a safe space.
G: That makes perfect sense from a commercial point of view. What about your perspective as an academic, what is the value of workplace experiments for academia?
L: In short, because of external validity and direct impact. By external validity, and more specifically ecological validity, I mean that field experiments allow us to examine whether a study’s findings actually generalize to the real world. And by collaborating with organizations, I also get to see the impact of my work as it unfolds.
Over the years, I’ve been dissatisfied by the gap between research and practice because management research is meant to speak to leaders and employees and help improve the workplace. And yet, we seem to fail to speak with those individuals who ultimately benefit from our research. There is a lot of theory development in management, and that’s great, but we also need to put that theory to test and see what elements of the theory hold when, within which contexts, and for whom. And empirical research can help inform new theory as well.
“The workplace is my area of interest because work takes up so much of our lives and subspace. And it can add tremendous value to society. But so many of us are unhappy and disengaged at work.”
It is further relevant and personally motivating to work with an organisation that has a similar goal as mine: to improve the workplace through science. The workplace is my area of interest because work takes up so much of our lives and subspace. And it can add tremendous value to society. But so many of us are unhappy and disengaged at work. I value working with MoreThanNow because we have similar goals. My research background in management and employee well-being is supposed to improve the lives of employees, and through this kind of partnership, there is a more direct connection and immediate impact.
G: Within MoreThanNow, we’ve spoken a lot about the psychosocial experience of time recently. I wanted to ask you about this because I think it is gaining more traction in other organisations as well. Could you tell me a bit more about this? Why should we pay attention to it?
L: I could write a whole article about it! But the root cause of it is that for decades organisations have emphasised, and often relied on, what's known as clock-time measures such as punctuality, scheduling, financial growth, task efficiency, long term productivity, provenance, all those things that are driven by a linear understanding of time. To some extent, those elements matter for performance, e.g., the amount of time that people spend on a task. But they do overlook this huge aspect of the fact that people do not experience time in a linear clockwork fashion, they experience it subjectively. For example, there’s the well-known expression that time flies when you’re having fun. And that’s true, right? You could spend two hours completing a work task but depending on how engaging and meaningful that task is, the two hours could feel like they are going by really fast or really slow. To make it even more concrete, when I spend my time writing or mentoring others, which are two meaningful activities for me, 2 hours can feel like 2 minutes. But when I spend my time answering emails or submitting expense claims, 2 hours can feel like 4 hours. This is what we mean when we talk about the subjective experience of time, it is not all the same experience and because of that, we might feel more or less energized or motivated to persist in our work. What’s more, when time flies, people tend to experience a state of flow, which is simply put a state of peak enjoyment and focus that allows individuals to get fully absorbed in their work in the moment, which is both productive and fulfilling.
“Organisations continue to rely on clock-time assumptions and outdated performance and engagement metrics, such as face-time or responsiveness, that wrongly assume people’s behaviours are driven by objective notions of time, when in fact they rarely are. ”
Aside from motivation and performance, the subjective experience of time is also incredibly important for our well-being. This is because our experience of time can colour how we feel about our days, how we feel about our work, how we feel about our interactions, and so forth. For example, research has found that when we feel pressed for time, we are more likely to feel more stressed, less engaged, more emotionally exhausted, and even less satisfied with our lives. But the opposite is also true: having too much time on our hands can be equally aversive for our well-being because we feel less productive.
Coming back to the workplace, there seems to be a disconnect between research and practice: organisations continue to rely on clock-time assumptions and outdated performance and engagement metrics, such as face-time or responsiveness, that wrongly assume people's behaviours are driven by objective notions of time, when in fact they rarely are.
G: It reminds me of Fordism and that kind of work-structure where I imagine this perception hails from. But as you mentioned as well, now with hybrid working we have the time to rethink things, right?
L: Yes, one potential positive outcome of the pandemic is that it shocked organizations into rethinking work practices. But it's going to be hard because it involves changing ingrained habits. For example, the five-day work week was introduced about five decades ago and it works in part because it allows effortless coordination of collective work and leisure time. But we must remember, it's a social construction. It's something that has to do with the clock, it's something that we created. So, we shouldn't treat it as something that can never be changed if conditions change. And we should move away from that if it doesn't help us. Changing culture and norms is one of the hardest things we can do. It starts with acknowledging that those norms are no longer serving the purpose that they were meant to serve. To that end, it’s encouraging to at least observe that the conversation around this topic has already begun with companies and scholars seriously considering trialling a 4-day work week, remote working, or implementing sabbatical policies.
G: Fascinating! Finally, your expertise is in improving the workplace for employees. Throughout the last decade, we have gone through so many technological advances, yet not all of them have had a positive impact, like work-emails on our phones. How do we ensure these technological developments and initiatives do have a positive impact on employee well-being?
“Part of the problem is that we might think introducing a new technology or tool will immediately solve whatever challenge we experience at work”
L: That is a very multifaceted question! Let's unpack it a little bit. Technology and other workplace innovations, like email or remote working, are meant to help us live a better and more fulfilling life and achieve more with less effort. But we keep seeing what I call the ‘paradox of modern life’. Despite technological advances giving us greater control over our way of working, we keep making suboptimal decisions about how we spend our time. Both at work, but also outside of work. Take for example the autonomy paradox phenomenon according to which employees who wanted to use technology to have greater control over when they work ended up working all the time. And in my recent paper around this email urgency bias, we investigated how to make one of these technological innovations be more like an asset, and less like a barrier. Contrary to popular belief, this does not equate to fewer emails, but better email.
Can it be that simple? No. Part of the problem is that we might think introducing a new technology or tool will immediately solve whatever challenge we experience at work. But that approach will likely fail if we don’t also address and redefine the norms that are associated with that technology as well as any underlying unhealthy organisational and societal beliefs, such as busyness being a status symbol and leisure being a waste of time. Simply offering a new technology or alternative way of working is not enough. At the same, we also need to reassess our beliefs about what it means to be healthy and what it means to have a good work-life balance. And that takes time and experimentation. One size doesn’t fit all, especially not today as we see more and more diversity in how we work, why we work, or what kind of work we do. Experimentation allows us the flexibility to understand what works and what doesn’t with minimal cost and in a rigorous way. And it starts by first identifying why, why is it that we're failing to use workplace innovations as assets, and then designing ways that enable all of us to benefit from these innovations. As I often like to say: one of the most pressing issues that organizations and modern societies face is understanding how to support employees be productive during work hours but also disconnect from work outside of work hours. I hope that more and more organizations will come to realize the tremendous value of experiments and be eager to collaborate with us to positively shape the future of work.
“And that takes time and experimentation. One size doesn’t fit all, especially not today as we see more and more diversity in how we work, why we work, or what kind of work we do.”
A massive thank you to the brilliant Dr. Laura Giurge for being so kind and knowledgeable. It is fascinating to gain some insight into how the concept of time can have such an influence on employee well-being and how technological advances do not always have a positive impact.