"The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter"

The Russian author and playwright Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich, better known by his pen name  Sholem Aleichem (the musical Fiddler on the Roof was based on several of his short stories) reportedly once said, "The worm in the radish doesn't think there is anything sweeter."  I don't know about you, but I happen to like radishes.  However, I also know that not everyone agrees with me!  As a matter of fact, radishes were used specifically for their poor taste (in this case relative to chocolate chip cookies) in a set of now classic experiments(see my post "What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes") on ego depletion by the psychologist Roy Baumeister.

Baumeister's study was originally published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1998.  Basically, college students were told to fast for at least 3 hours before coming to Baumeister's psychology laboratory.  Upon entering the laboratory, the students immediately detected the aroma of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.  Each student was told to sit at a table on which was placed two plates - a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a plate of radishes.  The laboratory team explained that the study was designed to test subjects' taste perception.  Each student was assigned to either the "cookie group" or the "radish group."  Students in the "cookie group" were told to eat at least 2-3 cookies but no radishes, while students in the "radish group" were told to eat at least 2-3 radishes but no cookies.  The laboratory staff then left the room and observed what happened through a one-way mirror.  After about 5 minutes, the laboratory staff re-entered the room and asked the student to complete a nearly impossible puzzle.  Students in the "cookie group" spent, on average, a total of 19 minutes on the puzzle before quitting.  Students in the "radish group", on the other hand, spent only 8 minutes on the puzzle before quitting.

Baumeister used these results in support of a concept he called ego depletion.  He believed that we all have a finite amount of self-control or willpower that we can rely upon in any situation.  Once we use up that self-control, we are more susceptible to a loss of control or willpower in a later situation.  Here, subjects that were told to eat the radishes and refrain from eating the cookies were using their willpower to follow the laboratory staff's admonition NOT to eat the cookie (they could have easily done so - no one was stopping them, right?).  Most of the students did, in fact, refrain from eating the cookies.  However, the mere act of refraining from eating the cookie used up all of their willpower.  So when they were faced with a more difficult cognitive task, they simply gave up.  It really doesn't take a lot of willpower to refrain from eating radishes, especially when you are told to eat the cookies.  Therefore, the students in the "cookie  group" still had enough willpower to persist for a longer period of time on the impossible puzzle.

Why am I talking about ego depletion and radishes?  As it turns out, a team of investigators from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina applied this concept to hand hygiene (handwashing) in the hospital setting.  Their study, which was published in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2015, collecting hand hygiene compliance data from 4,157 clinical staff (physicians, nurses, allied health professionals) working in 56 different inpatient units at 35 hospitals for a total of 13,772,922 unique hand hygiene opportunities.  Compliance was measured using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology on both entry and exit to and from a patient's room.  Overall hand hygiene compliance was poor (38%), consistent with other studies.  However, hand hygiene compliance dropped from 42.6% in the first hour to 34.8% during the last hour of a typical 12-hour shift.  The drop was even worse on higher intensity units (i.e., units with either more patients or sicker patients, where the workload was higher).  Longer breaks between shifts mitigated at least some of this decrease.  In other words, if clinicians were better rested at the start of their shifts, they were more likely to continue to maintain the same level of hand hygiene compliance from the start to the end of their shift.

What does all of this have to do with radishes?  As the investigators suggest in their paper, "Just as the repeated exercise of muscle leads to physical fatigue, repeated use of executive resources (cognitive resources that allow people to control their behaviors, desires, and emotions) produce a decline in an individual's self-regulatory capacity."  Similar to the concept of ego depletion, we all have a finite amount of capacity to follow standards, policies, and best practices.  If we are fatigued (say, towards the end of a busy shift with a lot of sick patients), we are less likely to be compliant with these standards and policies.  Given the importance of hand hygiene compliance in minimizing the spread of infections, these findings are of great interest to those of us in health care.  It would be interesting to see if compliance with other standards and policies similarly deteriorated over the course of a single shift in the hospital.  More importantly, it would be interesting to see if longer or more frequent breaks during a shift had any effect on maintaining compliance.  

Better, stronger, faster, and flatter?

Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote a company-wide email in March 2023 in which he claimed, "It's well understood that every layer of a hierarchy adds latency and risk aversion in information flow and decision-making."  While that makes some intuitive sense, is there data to back-up Zuckerberg's statement?  Eric Anicich, Michael Lee, and Juan Pablo Sánchez Celi attempt to answer that question in their article published this past March in Harvard Business Review ("The Challenges of Becoming a Less Hierarchical Company").  Importantly, they highlight the results of a meta-analysis of 54 published studies involving over 13,000 teams that showed that hierarchical structures negatively impact team effectiveness, which only gets worse when there is the inevitable intra-group conflict.

An article ("Fitter, flatter, faster: How unstructuring your organization can unlock massive value") by Sarah Kleinman, Patrick Simon, and Kirsten Weerda for the consulting firm McKinsey & Company suggested that leaders can take five actions to position an organization for success in the future:

1. Radically flatten the structure to minimize layers and increase speed: 

Particularly in today's digital work environment, the old rules about the most effective ratio for spans and layers no longer apply.  Rigid hierarchies with multiple layers create inefficiency and delays.  Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda suggest that even the largest organizations shouldn't have more than six layers, and the organizations that are most agile typically only have three!

2. Build a flexible, dynamic network of teams to tackle rapidly evolving problems:

In today's VUCAT environment, agility and flexibility are essential to organizational success.  If you haven't read General Stanley McChrystal's fabulous book, Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World, you should!  He discusses the network of teams structure that he developed for the U.S. military's special forces during the Iraq War.  

3. Provide a stable home base for employees to ensure long-term career development:

Here, Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda reference McKinsey's helical model, which is in essence, a hybrid of a matrixed organization built around a network of teams concept.  Here, the typical management structure is split into two arms, a capability line organized based upon skill-sets where managers are responsible for the professional growth and development of employees and a value creation line, where the managers work with employees on day-to-day operations.  

4. Empower the "edges" to ensure leaders have access to the best information and rapid innovation:

While not explicitly mentioned by Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda, the concept of psychological safety is an important one here.  Individuals who are closest to the action (whether the action involves a product, a customer, or something else) should be free to speak up and take action (see the next point below).

5. Delegate clear decision rights to lowest possible levels:

Here is yet another great recommendation to incorporate the High Reliability Organization principle of "Deference to Expertise" into an organization.  Kleinman, Simon, and Weerda state, "The flattened structure can accelerate decision making by minimizing unnecessary management layers; ensuring people are clear about their roles, responsibilities, and decision rights; and empowering the front lines to make decisions with guardrails (Where have I heard that before?).

Importantly, there are some additional points that need to be made regarding some of the challenges to a flatter hierarchy.  I'll save that discussion for a future post.  

"The evolution of working from home"

Working from home ("remote work") has been around for much longer than perhaps we all realize.  If you follow the trends since the early 1990's, the number of remote workers doubled approximately every 15 years, as technology began to catch up and provide more options to facilitate working from home (remember, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex, and cloud file-sharing applications like Dropbox didn't even exist until relatively recently).   Without a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends, and remote work increased five-fold from 2019 to 2023 (equivalent to about 35 years of pre-pandemic growth), with 40% of employees in the U.S. working remotely at least one day a week. 

Many of the aforementioned statistics came from a working paper by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis "The evolution of working from home" (now published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives under the same title).  There are a number of key findings reported in this paper.  First, there are three distinct groups of employees in most organizations (and more generally, in the U.S. workforce) based upon their current working arrangements.  Fully on-site employees represent the largest group (60% of all employees in the U.S.) and are, on average, the lowest paid employees due to the types of jobs that require fully on-site work (e.g. front-line retail, food service, cleaning, security, etc).  Even during the pandemic, the vast majority of these employees still worked on-site (during the 2020 lockdown, they may not have worked at all).  "Hybrid working from home" employees typically work from home 2 or 3 days per week and comprise about 30% of the U.S. workforce.  These employees are, on average, the highest paid and include professional jobs, including middle and senior management.  Of note, the most common pattern of hybrid work is to work from the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday and remotely from home on Mondays and Fridays.  The last group of employees are "fully remote" and comprise about 10% of the U.S. workforce.  These typically include IT-support, call-center, payroll, or HR jobs that require limited on-site work.  

I was somewhat surprised to see that remote work is highly concentrated in cities and suburbs with high population densities.  Given the fact that industries that typically have higher percentages of remote work (e.g. information and computer technology, business) are located in cities and suburbs, this shouldn't be all that surprising.  However, the cost of living in these areas is also higher, and I would have expected to see more of these remote workers living in rural and suburban areas with lower costs of living.  

The highest percentage of remote workers were college-educated employees in their 30's who have young children.  As a matter of fact, education was the single best predictor of whether someone worked remote or not.  Employees with a high school education spent less than 18% of their days working from home, while those with a college degree spent 37% of their days working remotely.  Some studies have suggested that college graduates greatly value the ability to work remotely, with the ability to work from home 2 to 3 days a week valued equivalently to an 8% increase in pay.  While the percentage of female employees who worked from home was significantly higher than the percentage of males, the difference was small (31.3% versus 29.6%).  Previous studies do suggest that female employees have a greater preference to work remotely than males.  Finally, workers in their early 20's and their 50's-60's spend fewer days working at home compared to employees in their 30's-40's.  Importantly, employees in their 30's-40's are more likely to have young children at home, which was also a factor in whether employees worked remotely.

As I've discussed in previous posts (see "Everyone's working for the weekend?", "The WFH Question" and "Remote work, again..."), there have been a number of studies that have tried to determine whether remote working arrangements improves or worsens productivity.  Of interest, Barrero, Bloom, and Davis surveyed both employees and their managers on what they thought - employees generally feel that working from home makes them more productive, while managers feel the converse is true.  Most of the studies strongly suggest that the impact on productivity depends upon whether employees are fully remote or hybrid.  Fully remote working appears to lower productivity by around 10% to 20%.  There are several reasons why this may be the case, though we can only speculate at this point.  One commonly cited reason is that fully remote workers are not as closely supervised and may "slack off" as a result.  Whether this is a legitimate concern or not requires further study, though it has led to the increased use of technology by supervisors to monitor productivity in real time (which is the subject of my next post).  Conversely, hybrid working arrangements, in which employees work remotely 2 to 3 days per week, is likely to have either no impact or a slightly positive one on productivity.'

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis end their paper with a prediction that the amount of working from home will continue to grow, primarily as a result of changing norms and continued technological improvements.  To this end, they cited another study that noted that new U.S. patent applications mentioning "working from home", "telework", "remote work", or similar language tripled since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.   They write, "In 10 to 20 years we could see 30% to 40% of working days being done from home, continuing the long run trend of growing levels of working from home...we expect the rate of technological change in remote work friendly innovations to fuel a new phase of work from home adoption in the coming decades."

Clean your room!

My office at work used to be an absolute mess.  For the longest time, I had stacks and stacks of papers literally everywhere (as I've said in the past - see "Today's word is Tsundoku" - I am addicted to printing out articles and saving them to read later, except most of the time it takes a very long time to actually read them).  A few months ago, I actually spent a few hours cleaning up my stacks.  Of course I found that in some cases, I had multiple copies of the same article!  I still have stacks of articles, but now they are at least hidden out of sight.  The question is whether I will forget about them now that they are hidden, but that's a question for another day.  I have to confess that I felt very good about finally having a clean desk.

Apparently, our brains are wired to like order.  As Libby Sander wrote in an online article for Harvard Business Review (see "The Case for Finally Cleaning Your Desk"), "When our space is a mess, so are we."  It's easy to understand how much time we can spend searching for a lost document on a cluttered desk.  As it turns out, the same is true if we've gone completely digital - one international survey (see Melissa Webster's white paper from 2012, "Bridging the information worker productivity gap: New challenges and opportunities for IT") found that workers lose up to 2 hours per week searching for lost digital documents!  But it goes much deeper than that.  What was news to me is that clutter can adversely effect our behavior and emotions.  Clutter has negative effects on stress and anxiety levels, our ability to focus, our eating choices, and our sleep!  It's no wonder that Marie Kondo is so popular these days!

Clutter is bad!  But as I learned from my own personal experience, de-cluttering your workspace is not only possible, it's refreshing and reinvigorating!  So, what are you waiting for?  Go clean your room!

"Come on! You can do it!"

A few years ago, my wife and I were running together on a trail at a park near our house.  I was struggling some, and she was trying her best to help me.  She kept telling me, "Come on! You can do it!"  For a lot of people, these words of encouragement would motivate us to push harder, but for me it just made we want to quit.  I told her that she wasn't helping me, so she stopped encouraging me.  I started to wonder why her words of encouragement seemed to have the opposite of the intended effect.  I think I finally learned why only now, several years later.

I recently came across a "Defend Your Research" interview ("If you want to motivate someone, shut up already") in Harvard Business Review by Brandon Irwin, a faculty member in the Department of Kinesiology at Kansas State University.  Irwin actually studies what is known as the Köhler effect in psychology, named after the German psychologist Otto Köhler, who first studied motivation in groups in the 1920's.  Köhler asked several members of an amateur rowing club to do standing arm curls with a heavy barbell until they were so exhausted that they could not lift it anymore.  They performed the task alone or in two- and three-person groups.  When working in groups, all of the members held a single barbell that was twice as heavy for two-person groups and three times as heavy for three-person groups. In other words, if one person quit, the rest of the group would struggle to continue after a short time ("A chain is only as strong as the weakest link!").  Köhler found that the groups persisted longer than their weakest members had persisted as individuals.  The effect of being in a group on motivation was the largest when the members of the group were moderately different in ability. If the difference in ability was very small, or it if was very big, the effect of group participation on motivation was not as significant.

The Köhler effect suggests then that a person works harder when he or she is a member of a group or team compared to when working alone.  That makes intuitive sense, but we still don't know why I wasn't motivated by my wife's encouragement.  Irwin conducted a study in which college students performed a series of plank exercises, in which they were told to hold the plank for as long as possible.  The study participants performed the first series of plank exercises alone, and then they repeated the same exercise with an online partner (the online partner was always a fitness instructor who was able to hold the plank for longer than the study participants).  Half of the time, the partner remained quiet and just performed the plank.  However, the other half of the time, the partner would provide words of encouragement, such as "Come on", "You got this", or "You can do it".  

Consistent with the Köhler effect, study participants consistently performed better when they had partners compared to when they were alone.  Surprisingly however, participants were able to hold the plank position for longer when their partners were silent!  Those with silent partners performed 33% longer than when they were alone, while those with the active partner shouting words of encouragement only performed 22% longer than when they were alone.  

Based on questionnaires and interviews performed after the tests, Irwin speculated that study participants believed that they were just as good as their partners (despite evidence to the contrary).  In order to avoid being the "weakest link", they performed better when part of a team (consistent again with the Köhler effect).  However, when the partner was shouting words of encouragement, study participants thought that they were trying to motivate themselves, which made them believe that the partners were less capable (the partner was the "weakest link"), which decreased their motivation to push harder (i.e., the Köhler effect no longer applied).

Let me be clear.  When my wife and I were running, I didn't think that I was the superior runner and I knew she was trying to encourage me, not herself!  Regardless, I still find the results of this study to be of significant interest, even if they don't necessarily answer my original question.  Irwin mentioned a follow-up study in the "Defend Your Research" article (see "Aerobic exercise is promoted when individual performance affects the group").  The set-up in this study was similar to the plank study, except in this case participants rode a stationary bike over five sessions with and without a virtual partner.  Here, all of the virtual partners remained silent.  Half of the participants were told that they were on a team and contributing to the total team score, while the other half rode alone.  Again, participants performed better when they were with a partner.  However, participants who were on a team tripled their time on the stationary bikes!  These results are again highly consistent with the Köhler effect.

Okay, what's the take-home message here?  First (and perhaps most importantly), as leaders we should leverage the powerful motivational aspects of participating on a team (i.e., the Köhler effect).  If you want someone to perform better, put them in a group!  Second, if you want to motivate, encourage, and inspire someone to work harder, direct your words of encouragement to them specifically by using their first name (e.g., "Come on, Derek! You can do it!" instead of "Come on! You can do it!").  

Fire and Ice

I haven't always enjoyed poetry, but I have always admired the American poet Robert Frost.  I always felt that I could read and enjoy his poems without necessarily looking for a deeper, hidden meaning, even though the deeper meaning was always there.  One of Frost's most famous poems is one called "Fire and Ice".  It's a short poem (only 9 lines in length) that was first published in Harper's Magazine in December 1920.  Here it is:  

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

It's important to remember that the poem was written in the aftermath of World War I, one of the most tumultuous periods of time in history.  Chaos and revolution were the topics of the day and were frequent themes in a number of literary publications.  For example, the poet W.B. Yeats had written his poem "The Second Coming" just two years earlier with it famous line, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold."  Just five years after Frost wrote "Fire and Ice", the poet T.S. Eliot (see my post here) wrote his own apocalyptic poem "The Hollow Men" which declared, "This is the way the world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper."

Frost's poem also discusses the end of the world, using two of the four classical or Aristotelian elements (earth, air, fire, water) as symbols for the two emotions of desire (fire) and hate (ice).  Just think about how often we use "fire" to denote the emotion of desire ("burning with desire").  Similarly, when we say someone is "ice cold", we generally are referring to the emotion of hate (at least on some level).  Frost then is telling us that the world will either end because we all hate and kill each other or our passionate and insatiable desire (for power, money, etc) will eventually lead to our destruction.  

Frost was reportedly inspired by a passage in Canto 32 of Dante's Inferno, in which the worst offenders of hell (the traitors) are frozen in the ninth and lowest circle: "a lake so bound with ice, / It did not look like water, but like a glass...right clear / I saw, where sinners are preserved in ice."   The astronomer Harlow Shapley claimed that Frost had once asked him how the world would end, to which Shapley replied that either the Sun would explode and burn up the Earth or the Sun would burn up and the Earth would freeze, along with all of civilization as we know it.

If the phrase "Fire and Ice" sounds familiar, it's because it is frequently used in a similar context.  For example, the writer George R.R. Martin used the phrase in the title of one of the books in his "Game of Thrones" series ("A Song of Ice and Fire").  I would be remiss if I didn't also mention the great rock-n-roll tune by the artist Pat Benatar ("Fire and Ice").

In my opinion, "Fire and Ice" is one of Frost's great poems.  

Money, love, and happiness

I've posted about the relationship between wealth and happiness at least once in the past (see my post, "Money can't buy me love, but can it buy me happiness?").  The current research suggests that there is indeed a positive association between subjective wellbeing (i.e. happiness) and income, though that relationship peaks at a certain level of income, around $75,000-$95,000, depending on the particular study.  In other words, above that income threshold, more money isn't going to make you significantly happier.

With that in mind, I was intrigued by a recent article on CNN.com by Allison Morrow, entitled "We've been wrong about a key contributor to human happiness".  Morrow discusses a recent study (not yet published) by Matt Killingsworth, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, who found that the so-called "happiness plateau" is actually much higher than previously noted in other studies.  In his latest study (see "Money and Happiness" Extended Evidence Against Satiation"), Killingsworth analyzed a large U.S. database with over 33,000 individuals and found that (1) high net-income individuals were significantly happier than people earning $500,000 per year and (2) the difference in happiness between wealthy and middle-income participants was nearly three times larger than the difference between middle- and lower-income participants.  Killingsworth concluded that the positive association between wealth and happiness continues far above the previously documented income threshold.

There are a couple of really important caveats here.  First, the study has not been published, so it hasn't been subject to peer review (review by other experts in the field to determine if the results of the study are suitable for publication).  While I recognize that the peer review process isn't perfect, I hesitate to make any definitive statements in its absence.  Notably, Killingsworth published similar findings suggesting that happiness continues to rise above the previously identified income thresholds in 2021 ("Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year").  Second, this is only one study among several others that have previously identified an income threshold.  Again, I would expect that Killingsworth would discuss his findings in the context of other research findings in the Discussion section of a published manuscript.  Third, and perhaps most importantly of all, Killingsworth finds that there is a correlation between wealth and happiness, and establishing correlation between two observations isn't the same (it's actually far from it) as finding that one observation caused the other.  Killingsworth admits that there are other things that likely impact happiness, and when asked whether money can buy happiness, he responds, "There isn't one silver bullet - this one secret trick that the doctor is going to tell you is key."