June 2024 - on the impact of hybrid WFH on performance and quitting, overlooked skills, profanity, and getting people to drive the process
Issue 65
Welcome to what “crossed my desk” in this month of Flags, Fathers, and my birthday.
New Nature paper on hybrid working from home. Four key findings:
Hybrid WFH 2-days a week has no impact on employee or firm performance. No effect on employee grading, promotions, innovation, development, leadership, lines of code or other business metrics.
Hybrid WFH reduced quit rates by one third. Given each quit cost the firm about $20,000, this saved millions a year, making hybrid very profitable.
Quit rate reductions were largest for female employees, non-managers and those with the longest commutes. In industries struggling with gender diversity - like finance and tech - this is another benefit.
Managers pre-experiment estimated hybrid would reduce productivity by -2.6%. After the 6-month experiment they updated this to estimating it increased productivity by +1%.
Morgan Housel has a short article about useful and overlooked skills. Among others,
Respecting luck as much as you respect risk;
Respectfully interacting with people you disagree with; and
Calibrating how much you wanting something to be true affects how true you think it is.
Deborah Gruenfeld on leadership behavior:
Intelligence is not a strong predictor of leadership. Other research indicates the pitch, volume, and pace of your voice affect what people think you say about five times as much as the actual words you use.
Claire Lew on 4 ways to promote that people themselves choose to do the work in a certain way, at a certain pace, in a certain order. :
Clear expectations > Quick directives.
Curiosity > Fear
Context > Deadlines
Self-Sufficiency > Dependency
Bob Marshall is looking at ways to facilitate performance in organizations. All of them are worth (re)considering. I love the label of one in particular: “Connecting with What’s Alive in People”, that is, tapping into people’s needs and inspirations.
A study finds that the platitude that failure leads to success is inaccurate and might be damaging to society.
Matthew B. Crawford has an excellent piece on salvaging humanity in the use of AI. He talks about a person he met who called upon ChatGPT to prepare his toast at his daughter’s wedding. “He said he gave a few prompts to ChatGPT, facts about her life, and sure enough it came back with a pretty good wedding toast. Maybe better than what he would have written. But in the end, he didn’t use it, and composed his own.”
Why not? Here’s what Matthew surmises:
To use the machine-generated speech would have been to absent himself from this significant moment in the life of his daughter, and in his own life. It would have been to not show up for her wedding, in some sense.
A few things from my blog:
Unemployment benefits in OECD countries (2024)
Large Language Models — LLMs: it’s technology, not intelligent agents
And now for something different
A research paper highlights the cathartic role of profanity in stress, anxiety, and depression. There’s no telling if anyone
gives acares.