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Time Poverty at Work: What It Costs and How to Reclaim Your Time | Ashley Whillans
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- [00:04]
Ashley Willins
When I'm thinking about time and what organizations can do, you can think about what are the ways that you want individuals to team together. You can think about the benefits that you're going to offer. You can think about where you want employees to work. All of those choices are going to influence how people feel about their time and their ability to get their work done and do it in a way that helps them feel like they're flourishing. So just the idea that you are offering work life benefits or extra PTO after a really hard sprint, that even if the employee doesn't use it, but they just know it's there, that's sending a signal that you are the kind of organization that cares about its workers, that you see people as individuals more than offering a few hundred extra dollars or a financial bonus.
- [00:56]
Dart Lindsley
Foreign welcome to the Work for Humans podcast. This is Dart Lindsley. Most of us are time poor. We rush through our days, race to keep up, and rarely feel like we have enough space to breathe, let alone thrive. We overfill our schedules, we undervalue our minutes, and we call it productivity. But what if the problem isn't just our calendars, it's our relationship to time itself? When work is a product, time and how we manage it is a design problem and a design opportunity. My guest today is Ashley Willins, a behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart. Her research shows that time poverty is more than a personal stressor, it's a leadership challenge. It's an organizational blind spot and one of the biggest barriers to, well, being at work. In this episode, Ashley and I talk about why traditional perks just miss the point, why more control over your time can matter more than a raise and what it looks like to build companies where people actually have time to think, rest and grow. We explore urgency, culture, the myth of work, life balance, and the trade offs we make without realizing it. And we ask a deeper question, what would it mean to design work around time rather than stuff time into work? If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to subscribe. Here is my conversation with Ashley Willins. Ashley Willins, welcome to Work for Humans.
- [02:41]
Ashley Willins
Thank you for having me today.
- [02:44]
Dart Lindsley
This is a show about the design of work. You've written a book about something that I don't think we have adequately taken into account in the design of work, and that is time. And your book Time Smart. And in particular, you bring forward two big ideas, which is time poverty and time affluence and what those mean and how time is a design attribute of work and so I'm really excited to dive into it. I want to start by asking, this is like a dumb sophomore question. When you say time, what are you talking about? Are you talking about hours? Are you talking about mental cycles? Are you talking about attention? Are you talking about the quality of the time? What are you talking about?
- [03:35]
Ashley Willins
So this is a really important question in relation to what you were talking about in terms of time poverty and time affluence. I'm going to describe it from that lens first. So I'm a social psychologist by training and I'm very interested in the subjective experience that people have in the workplace. And what has been so fascinating to me in my study of this topic over the last 10 years is, is that the impact of time for happiness and the impact of time for retention really matters so much in terms of how people psychologically feel about it. And this is really relevant for work design, right? So time poverty is defined in our research as the psychological experience of not having enough time to do everything that you want to do or have to do in a day. If you're laughing when I say that definition because it resonates, the majority of working Americans who are in full time employment report experiencing time poverty on a chronic, irregular basis. And the experience of not being in control over one's time has a stronger negative effect on outcomes like happiness, stress, divorce, manager rated creativity, productivity than objectively how much discretionary time you have available. So when I am talking about time, the center of gravity of my work is focused on the subjective or psychological experience of having control over one's time and schedule. Now that isn't to say what we're going to talk about today isn't going to be about time, benefits and policies and practices and how you team. Because we need to be managing time at the collective level. And we can get into that. But when I'm focused on what is time? I'm focused on how does it feel to you? And do you feel like you have enough of it to get everything done that you need to do?
- [05:47]
Dart Lindsley
I absolutely love that clarification. And you said it kind of two ways. And I want to see if they're both true or one of them. You said people feel that they have control over their time and then people feel that they have enough time. Are those different? The same?
- [06:05]
Ashley Willins
It's interesting that you caught me on this because the measure of time affluence includes measures both of how much control you feel like you have over your time and whether you feel like you have enough time. And both of those items are highly overlapping in terms of their correlation. So how associated people's responses are if you have a lot of control over your time, you're going to be more likely to feel like you have enough of it. If you don't have a lot of control over your time, you're going to feel like you have less of it. So people's responses tend to go in a similar direction on those items. They are not necessarily the same thing, but they're highly predictive of one another. And in workplaces where a lot of stress comes from is not necessarily work hours, but rather feeling like your schedule is unpredictable, uncontrollable, and that no matter how much you finish, you're going to get more work than you can handle, that you're drinking from a fire hose. My colleague Leslie Perlow has research on this. Management consultants, for example, do not mind and know they're going into a profession where they're going to work 60 to 80 hours a week. That's part of the contract of going into that profession. But where time starts to become unmanageable is when it becomes unpredictable outside of one's control. When I feel like I want to go to this yoga class at 8pm, when I want to finally sign out at the end of the day, and yet at any moment I could have to put out a fire, that's when those hours start to feel out of our control and unmanageable and becomes detrimental to our productivity, our attention, our well being.
- [07:51]
Dart Lindsley
I actually left an entire career in part because of time unpredictability. So that makes a lot of sense to me. I was a criminal defense investigator. And the thing is that you had to do research, you had to do all of the investigation ahead of the trial. But the trial schedules were all changeable and they were all pushing. Now, mostly they pushed out, but because you were under enormous pressure to deliver by a deadline, but the deadline wasn't certain, it was excruciating. And so I can see that. And I can see how control of your time overlaps probably with measures of autonomy in general. Is there a pattern to who experiences time affluence and who experiences time poverty? To some extent, you seem to have associated it with wealth. Is it inversely related?
- [08:46]
Ashley Willins
I'm going to talk through a few findings broadly and then more specifically to the workplace. So let me answer the more specific question first. Wealthier individuals tend to experience greater feelings of time stress. This feels counterintuitive and is very interesting. And we've written quite a bit on this, this is Hammer, Mish and Lee. These are economists who are looking at large scale time use data, looking at large scale panel data and showing that when people's incomes rise, their time becomes more scarce because it is more valuable. So we have a psychological predisposition to believe what is valuable is scarce and what is scarce is valuable. And the argument is that when our time literally becomes worth more money, we start to think of time like money. We start to feel more stressed when we have small wastes of time in our day and therefore we experience almost greater time frustration and therefore greater time stress. So it's interesting. I'm going to get to the lower end in a second because I've done a lot of work on the relationship between financial insecurity and time poverty and there's definitely relationship there. But at the high levels of income, as our time becomes worth more, the opportunity cost of our time go up and we feel more acutely small losses of time. My MBA students think that money is going to solve everything. And I'm like, money is going to exacerbate your problems. You're going to be in a profession like law or consulting, where you start billing by the hour. Researched by Samford Devoe and Jeff Pfeiffer and I have some work on this too. Shows that once you start seeing time like money, you don't enjoy your leisure as much because it's not producing economic gain. You're less likely to volunteer, which is important for happiness. We have a paper showing this billing mindset. This time is money mindset undermines your relationships with your spouse and with your social connections because you start viewing leisure and social ties through the lens of financial transactions and you start to apply that economic mindset to things that have no economic value but are important for a wellbeing perspective, like a casual run in with a colleague in the hallway, but also can be really important for business. Business innovation relies on informal connections between random individuals and spontaneity. And so when we get too obsessed with controlling the value or output of every second, then this can come at a cost, not only to our well being, but also, I would argue, to business success. It's part of the reason leaders are forcing employees back to the office for many reasons, but partially because they think that these bridging ties matter. When our time becomes more valuable because it's worth more, then we start to believe that these kinds of small interactions are not as valuable. So that's one piece. As we get wealthier, as we get busier, as our time becomes Worth more money. As we start to think about time like money, we can feel more stressed in part because small frictions seem more of a waste and seem to infringe on our now more money oriented goals.
- [12:20]
Dart Lindsley
Is there any correlation between hourly workers and salaried workers in terms of how they perceive time as money?
- [12:29]
Ashley Willins
Yeah. So what's interesting is this is not just for the wealthy. This billing mindset also does occur for hourly workers. There's some interesting research that if you're a consultant and you have this billing mindset, you see less volunteering. But also if you're a retail worker for whom your time is more fungible, you could spend an additional incremental hour working and then that would put more money into your kid's college account, you also see that same kind of behavior. So it's not just about how much that hour is worth. Simply the act of counting the financial value of your time can create the same psychological consequences. So to step back. People who are wealthier tend to feel more time stressed because the opportunity costs of small wastes of time feel more painful. But even less wealthy people who have that time is money mindset can also feel stressed in that same way and are less likely to want to waste their time when that time could be spent making money. And then at the very low end of the economic spectrum, people who are struggling to make ends meet, they tend to be extremely time poor as well, often for different reasons. So I've done a lot of research on this. People who are struggling to make ends meet are also temporally constrained and don't have as much control over their time either because they're in jobs where, you know, I used to serve in college, you wait and you wait and then you get told with an hour's notice you're going to work or not. So, so your time is controlled by your employer, you have less autonomy over your time in different ways. Or because you're working multiple jobs, commuting long distances to your place of employment, because you can't live in the city center and you don't have the ability to buy control over your time by outsourcing tasks to other people like a house cleaner or a nanny, because you don't have the financial means by which to delegate some of those day to day responsibilities that would give you more slightly lack in your personal lives. So you know, if I had to summarize at a high level, I like to think of it as that the very white collar jobs and then frontline workers have time stress often for different reasons. Right. So within the organizational context, looking more specifically at the jobs that we were talking about, law, medicine, maybe a little bit less relevant, but law, consulting, tech, those jobs have a lot of schedule autonomy. I can go work out in the middle of the day, but high expectations that mean I need to be working all the time to signal my commitment to the organization. So you might have place flexibility, but no schedule control, because you're constantly signaling, putting out fires. Your deadlines are constantly evolving. That can feel unpredictable and uncontrollable in an organizational setting. And then for frontline workers, you might not have a lot of schedule flexibility. You might get told where to be and exactly how to work. And so the infringement on your time and even your person is quite strong. And so there's been some research out of UVA showing that just providing the ability for frontline and retail workers to swap shifts with each other can significantly reduce turnover, because otherwise they typically don't have any schedule control. So if childcare falls through or they have an illness, they have no way of not showing up or getting someone else to do that job or moving their schedules around. So I like to think, overall, looking at how much money people have, wealthier people, less wealthy people, tend to experience more time stress. And then in the workplace, those at the highest and sort of the lowest rungs in an organizational ladder often tend to experience time stress and a lack of time control, albeit for different reasons.
- [16:25]
Dart Lindsley
Do pay for performance philosophies have an effect on time affluence and time poverty?
- [16:31]
Ashley Willins
Yes. So there is some research by Dana Carney and Jeff Pfeiffer showing that working under a pay for performance or variable pay model, where how much money you take home depends on performance, can increase feelings of stress, we have research suggesting it results in what an organization ultimately is using them for more commitment on the task, but at the expense of less commitment in one's personal life. So you're getting these trade offs. So from an organizational or firm perspective, performance incentives, because they're uncertain, people don't like uncertainty. People are going to try to control the uncontrollable. They're going to work harder, exert more effort on a task, and try to hit a goal at any cost, especially when there's high macroeconomic volatility like we're experiencing now. And so they're going to focus more on financial goals, less on relationships. And that because time, in the way that I see it, is not just about time at work, but feeling like you have time to do all of the things you want to do and have to do, work and non work included, by putting all of your eggs in the productivity basket, which we all feel the pressure of that, especially right now, but especially so if some of your pay is contingent and you need that money to live the lifestyle that you are used to or accustomed to, then you're going to put work even higher on a pedestal as compared to all of the other things you want to do or have to do. And then you're going to feel that constant hamster wheel of never getting ahead at these other areas that are constantly in the back of your mind that you care a lot about. Friends, family, exercise, pet, projects at work. But because financial goals loom large and some of that pay is variable, you're going to fixate. My colleague has research on this, Julia her. You're going to fixate more of your attentional resources on whatever the incentivized task is at the expense of other things. And then when you're asked to reflect back on your life, you're going to feel like you don't have time to do everything that you want because your attentional resources are focused on the incentivized dimension, the work output that has a financial implication that's quantifiable and trackable and not these other elements of work like the informal conversations in the hallway or that creative project that you want to do, or in life, investing that marginal hour into teaching your kid how to read or spending quality time in front of the TV with your spouse.
- [19:09]
Dart Lindsley
I know that there's three aspects, at least of the design that we want to look at. One of them is going to be how we as people at work approach it and think about it. One of them might be how governments set policy. But before we get into those, how, I want to talk about what companies have done to design work better in regards to time. And so you have some examples. You have Atlassian, Kraft, Heinz, gh, Smart Turkey, ng. Which of those would you like to do you want to talk about?
- [19:41]
Ashley Willins
I'm like building some framework right now in some article. Who knows if, when it'll ever get published. But it's the daily level. What should a person's meeting schedule look like at a weekly level? Are there things, practices that we want teams to engage in, like KPI, check ins, or the number of days we want employees to come into the office. And then at the strategy level, do we care where employees work? Do we need offices? Are we going to be flexible on place and inflexible on practices? What are the policies that we're going to offer for child care, Are we going to have PTO as a negotiable benefit that people can choose between more PTO or more cash? And so there's really several levels at which I think we can think about architecting time in the workplace from days, weeks, quarters, real estate, benefits. How are all those things creating an ecosystem that's fulfilling our business goals? And so we can start wherever. I think those cases all fit at different levels. So when I'm thinking about time and what organizations can do, you can think about it from a lot of different dimensions. Right? You can think about what are the ways that you want individuals to team together. You can think about the benefits that you're going to offer. You can think about where you want employees to work. And really what my research is trying to do is to make people aware that all of those choices are going to influence how people feel about their time and their ability to get their work done and do it in a way that helps them feel like they're flourishing. So it's about being intentional about all of these choices with regard to how they influence time.
- [21:35]
Dart Lindsley
Okay, let's start with GH Smart.
- [21:37]
Ashley Willins
GH Smart. It started off as independent contractors who are working together under this umbrella organization. They do succession planning. Now they are about as flexible with regard to time as one could be. So their business model hinges on hiring top talent who's able to advise the top CEOs in the world. They're an executive leadership profile succession planning business. So they need top talent that can advise top of the house, the best of the best. They're a small bootstrap startup, less so now, but definitely when they started and they needed to try to attract the best consulting Talent from the McKinsey Top Performers of the world, they couldn't necessarily compete on salary. The salaries are good, but they're not going to have as high profile clients as McKinsey. And so they started to compete on time. What does this mean? Well, this case is interesting because it outlines several dimensions in which organizations can provide time flexibility, schedule control and autonomy. So unlike traditional management consultants, they don't have to go up for promotion. So you can move to this company and stay as a consultant without sales targets for your entire career, making about a million dollars, which for many of these individuals is sufficient since they've already gone and made a bunch of money at McKinsey for the last 10 years there. He's hiring or poaching partner level so you don't have to go up. So you have time and schedule control because you can shift how much you want to work and how much even you want to sell based on what else is going on in your life. The revenue per consultant floor is very low and achievable for all individuals in the organization. So one consultant admitted that he was only working three or four hours a day because he had recently had a child. He was still very well received by clients, but he didn't want to take on more client work than three to four hours. And so he didn't and he didn't have to hide it. In fact, the CEO said celebrated that. He said that's the whole point of this work as much as you want model. So they have a work as much as you want model. A go up for promotion whenever you want model A work from wherever model. So they've been remote before the COVID 19 pandemic for 20 years, long before this was on anyone's radar. And they also don't travel much for client work. They also allow consultants to choose their work. You can actively reject an offer of a project if you don't feel like working on it. And so you don't have to work with people or on projects or with clients that you don't like. You also get to choose your work. So as we're thinking about time control and time flexibility, they have flexibility of place, flexibility of work, the actual amount of work that they have to take on at any one time, flexibility of career progression and flexibility of who one works with and how one works. Now of course this sounds like utopia. All of these consultants still make a lot of money. And this is the evp, this is employee value proposition for these consultants is that this is how the CEO is able to attract and retain the best of the best management consultants who are going to take a bit of a pay cut to work there is they don't have selling pressure if they don't want that. They don't have to work with colleagues they don't like. They can fire clients if they think the clients aren't aligned with the kind of work that they want to do. And they also give a lot of Runway to start new offices, to start new innovative projects and to start tech projects or learn new things. So there's also a lot of flex time for innovation. Now this is great. All sounds great. Don't we all want to work there? What we have a case study about is how this also comes at the cost of firm strategy. It's harder for the company to get employees who are there because they're highly autonomous. They are motivated by autonomy, flexibility, time control, schedule flexibility to do anything that the firm needs that they don't want to do. So it can be hard to get these consultants to work on strategic projects for the firm or open offices in certain places. So a lot of their growth has been organic and spontaneous. They have random offices in random cities because that's where someone wanted to move, to be closer to an aging parent or for a spouse's profession. And so the flexibility at the individual level creates tension at the firm level and a coordination problem that has to be managed. So it's not utopia. Also, feedback isn't as readily available because there's no reason to give feedback. You need to get people to like you so that they'll staff you on projects. There's no real incentive to give negative feedback since you can just avoid working with people you don't like. And so there are definite gaps. But it is an example of a company that has been able to attract and retain top talent by providing flexibility along a lot of different dimensions. So I think that's an interesting place to start because it's about job design, how people are able to craft their careers in some way out of their own individual interests, needs and desires, as opposed to a firm telling you how many hours you work, what you work on, who you work with. The employees there have complete control and flexibility.
- [27:40]
Dart Lindsley
So there's this very simple thing that a lot of companies try for, which is discretionary effort. I've never loved it as a term, but that's not true. Once upon a time, I loved it as a term. It was just a long time ago. But it seems to me that discretionary effort is very linear. It's like you're going to put another hour in at the office, as opposed to something a lot more subtle, which is you're going to have more of yourself to be available and be able to bring more of yourself to what you're doing. And more of yourself doesn't mean another hour. And so what you just described to me sounds like a way in which people bring to the work what they want to bring to the work. And it seems like it would leave a lot of capacity for creativity or for relationship building, I don't know. But also for things that are outside of work.
- [28:41]
Ashley Willins
Yes, I like this idea that creating Slack, and you see this a lot in tech companies where I work with the Slack people team, they have these maker weeks where they're like, we're just not going to have meetings for a week. And we don't care what you do, but maybe learn something, maybe talk to someone. Or they give employee sabbaticals and they encourage their employees to do fun and adventurous and unusual activities with that time. And they celebrate that. It doesn't need to be head in the books, head in code doing some optional master's program. It's actually meant to do the opposite, which is get outside of your comfort zone. Go camping, go on some excursion, have some spiritual retreat, go do meditating, do some silent workshop for seven days. Do some fun other things, fill in the blanks in the woods. And that, I think is what you're pushing on too is that if you allow people to be able to work within their capacity and even to work a little under their capacity, if that's what they feel is working for them at that particular moment or juncture in their professional personal lives, that that builds up resources, personal resilience, space, energy, call it whatever you want, that can then carry over into other solutions, longer term innovative projects. I think when you were talking, yes, discretionary effort, but you're right, it's usually measured in terms of concrete, objective things. Did they go to this optional lunch and learn? Did they put in this marginal hour? I think that is the wrong way to look at it. You know, GH Smart employees go and write New York Times bestselling books in their spare time because they feel like they can and they're excited to do it and their organization supports it. It's not some secret side project that they're not telling anyone they're doing out of fear of repercussions of their jobs. So some of what we're talking about and what we're having a conversation about is how do you also give employees that sense of empowerment? How do you protect their time enough that they feel energized, that they're resilient, and then that they feel empowered to work on something that doesn't have a direct line of sight into a KPI to a goal. That's going to be action this quarter.
- [31:13]
Dart Lindsley
Let's pick another one of the case studies. Let's pick one that's really different from GH Smart Foreign. We've been exploring the principles of multi sided management, which is the belief that work is a product that every company designs, builds and delivers to employees. Along the way, people started asking how they could put these ideas into practice. So I founded the work design firm Elevenfold to help your company create the kind of work that makes teams feel alive and engaged in instead of dead and dull. So you can reduce turnover and build commitment. We're doing something revolutionary here. Learn more@elevenfold.com that's 11f o l d dot com.
- [32:04]
Ashley Willins
So gsmart is about how to structure work. How much flexibility should someone have about where they work, how they work, who they work with, what they work on. So it's really about the structure of the job itself and what I, as the CEO, I'm going to control and what I'm going to give to an employee in terms of their decision rights. Another case study that is unique, I think is the Atlassian case study. They are actually completely flexible in terms of hours and place. You don't ever have to come into the office. This results oriented workplace. They are not very flexible about practices, but they are very mindful that those practices save time. So why I think they're. An interesting counterpoint is that Ghsmart has nothing to say about what should collaboration look like? What should your meeting schedule look like? I'm going to tell you what the shape of your job could or could not look like. You're going to fill in all of the detail and I'm going to give you a very large pasture to run around in in terms of what you want to make that job be. And at Atlassian, they're very prescriptive about what I want your time to look like on a daily basis to protect time and well being. And they take a data driven product approach to the employee experience related to time. So they use a lot of AI, they use experiments to tell you how much of your week as a team should be. Focus time, collaboration time, green light time where you can interrupt each other during focus time blocks, red light time where you can't interrupt each other and it's just heads down time. They do a lot of asynchronous meetings. So they say we're going to eliminate meetings. You're going to provide status updates vis a vis this video that you can like and comment on. They have very strict meeting policies. Every meeting needs to have a written document with a decision register. All of the decisions in the organization get made on paper. They have to have a page attached to it. That page is written by AI. And then all of those decisions create a system of information, a system of work that gets cascaded through the organization, becomes searchable, and then allows employees to use AI to ask questions about a decision that was made in a company without tapping someone on the shoulder. So they are taking this time protective approach through daily workplace practices, eliminating meetings, structuring time at the collective level and reducing the need for cross functional and geographically distributed teams to have to ever talk to each other if they don't need to or want to. And then they're very prescriptive about how often to get together once a quarter to maintain that human connection.
- [35:17]
Dart Lindsley
And there's an assumption in there, a part of it is sort of this defragmenting. And this goes to the idea that time affluence is not necessarily just free time. Time affluence can be that the quality of the time that I'm spending because I like being productive is productive. So this defragmenting of time so that I have larger blocks.
- [35:41]
Ashley Willins
Yes, thank you for linking it back to this broader concept of time affluence. Something that is extremely important for the psychological experience of time affluence is as we were talking about, the feeling of control over time, but also minimizing outside influence on your time. So minimizing disruption and distraction. Bridget Schulte has a term that I use in my own writing called time confetti, which is this idea that our constant connection to technology fragments our time into small pieces that easily go missing, get lost, so actually contracts our time, but it also psychologically makes us feel time poor. This task switching, this is Cal Newport's deep work, deep focus, time argument. And so this constant task switching that can be unpredictable, unexpected, and also is highly required in many knowledge work organizations. We expect constant responsivity, or at least we think we need to be constantly responsive to be a good worker. So some of Melissa Masmanian's work on what it means to be an ideal worker and the US Today is someone who's constantly responsive, always putting their hand up, immediately available all the time at any time. Going back to our conversation about why white collar workers feel a lot of time stress and time poverty in the workplace, even though they might have more schedule flexibility, is this expectation of constant responsivity and this fragmentation is interesting because it not only undermines productivity, it also makes us enjoy whatever we're doing less. So when you have your phone out on the desk in front of you, it sucks away some of your cognitive attention. When you have your phone on in a science museum on the weekend, when you're trying to spend time with your family, this is some of Costa Den's work and Elizabeth Dunn, then you enjoy that interaction less. Some of Jamil Zaki's work suggests that you remember fewer details of an experience. If you know that you're going to be constantly interrupted or can be constantly interrupted and so some of these practices that Atlassian is implementing is exactly what you're highlighting. They're trying to protect against one of the key predictors of time stress, which is this constant fragmentation of our calendars having to be in six different media channels, in our inbox, in our text messages, in our zoom and teams and slack all at the same time. And they're trying to say that doesn't work. That's making knowledge workers fragmented, feel unproductive, not able to get their work done. What can we do to take all of those distractions away so that workers can be as focused on the task as necessary?
- [38:27]
Dart Lindsley
When it comes to the design of the experience of work, there's one main argument which is design it better, people will be more productive. But there's another argument which is it's wrong to treat people badly. Another way to phrase that is if we can do good things for people fairly easily, we should. And so because you're coming at this from a sociological perspective as opposed to maybe a business perspective, which would be more narrow, is there an argument that is just an ethical argument for how we manage time?
- [39:02]
Ashley Willins
I would say 100%. So there's actually some research suggesting that offering time based rewards, this is not rocket science. Even just offering them sends a signal that you humanize workers, that you see them as a human being with needs and goals outside of profit maximization. And this increases perceptions that your organization is a good place to work and increases intentions to stay. So just the idea that you are offering egg freezing or work life benefits or extra PTO after a really hard sprint, that even if the employee doesn't use it, but they just know it's there, that's sending a signal that you are the kind of organization that cares about its workers, that you see people as individuals more than offering a few hundred extra dollars or a financial bonus.
- [40:01]
Dart Lindsley
That was still, however, a what's in it for me as a corporation argument, as opposed to it's wrong to make people miserable sort of argument.
- [40:12]
Ashley Willins
Yes. Okay. So, you know, I've been at HBS a long time, okay? So I'm always having to defend these arguments against students that are like, but so, so what? What is this going to do? Roi wise? What's the win? Win? Why should I care about a focus on time when this seems countercultural, when this seems against what most companies are doing or what my perception is of what a successful company requires, which is everyone, all in all the time, sleeping under their desk?
- [40:39]
Dart Lindsley
I've seen people sleep under their desk by the way.
- [40:41]
Ashley Willins
I have also heard my students tell me that they've slept under their desk for three days when working at a bank in New York. When we were talking about stress management, they're like, oh, so is chronic stress like that time that I slept under my desk for three days because I didn't know if it was okay to go home.
- [40:56]
Dart Lindsley
Oh my goodness.
- [40:57]
Ashley Willins
And then we all laugh and then kind of cry about the fact that that is not a workplace that humanizes workers. And yes, there is. Irregardless of the win win irregardless of anything that we're talking about moves a company up and to the right in terms of profit, that we should care about how workers feel because they're human beings. And when we protect workers, we give them rights, we give them freedoms and flexibility. They're able to show up in the world as a more present, embodied, connected person who can then use that energy and light either for your company or for themselves. I'm also part of humanistic management leadership groups and there we do talk about this and debate does it matter? I even have this conversation with my colleagues sometimes. Does it matter? If focusing on well being and time produces an roi, should it not just be an outcome that matters in and of itself? And there's a lot of legislation and policy that started to say we're going to get companies to publicly report the mental health and turnover of their workforce every year as part of their scorecard, as part of the reporting that they have to do. So there's more and more conversation about we need to be making sure that the policies that organizations have and the practices that they engage in protect worker well being full stop.
- [42:30]
Dart Lindsley
And that's a good segue. And by the way, Kim Clark came on the show, former Harvard Business School and spoke about morality in the workplace. And some of it came down to human freedom and trust. And so when I think of GH Smart, for instance, I think that would fall into the Clark family because it was more than Kim who wrote the book, it was also Jonathan and Aaron. But it would fall into the idea, at least GH Smart would, of what I think they would consider moral management. But now the segue is into policy and it's the sort of thing where pushing people into time, poverty and below the poverty line in terms of time, interestingly, both for the wealthy and the not the wealthy could potentially be government regulations. If companies are unable to get out of a mindset that causes harm to employees, that's where the government steps in. So what are some of the policy.
- [43:40]
Ashley Willins
Possibilities, I would definitely look for listeners that are interested. Bridget Schultz has a whole set of ideas around this. It's interesting because, yes, policy changes are hard to implement, right? So I'm like, okay, well, there's policies within a firm that companies can do. Can we offer and make sure that both men and women are taking paid leave so that it's not negatively impacting women's career trajectories that only the women are taking childcare leave and men aren't? Because there's a lot of academic research suggesting that even if you offer a policy like what we have in academia, where you have a child and you get an extra year on your contract, so you have an extra year to put your materials together to go up for your next promotion, because we're up and out in academia, much like consulting and law, then what happens if you don't either discriminate and give it to women only or you don't make sure that men actually don't work, that you're actually giving men who have less biological responsibilities and who from a gender perspective tend to take on less of the chores in childcare? Just overall, on average, not every household, but on average, the policy which looks equitable is creating unequal outcomes because the people who should be benefiting and the people who don't have as many constraints are reaping more of the rewards. So there's both a what policies should we be implementing Question, but also how should we be implementing them question. And I think both are really important. Right? You need to enforce these policies. A lot of companies have policies like PTO or cute communication. We're not going to email each other after 5pm, but they don't actually do it. There's no enforcement or accountability mechanism. And so what happens is the people for whom use that flexibility get penalized. So some examples of policies that could work and that other countries have seen be effective are regulations around out of office emails like in the European countries and France is a stark example. But startups have done it too. If you email outside of office hours, you are going to be fined. If you email when you're on pto, there's a startup that did this that I wrote about in my book. Then you are going to have to pay back your pto. We're going to start to penalize the behaviors that are countercultural to what we're trying to accomplish, which is helping everyone take a break and equalizing what happens to your performance when you go on vacation. Right. Because some people are going to be spending that Time taking care of their children or taking care of parents. And some of those people might spend that time working. And so by putting in more of these enforcement mechanisms, you are both helping people help themselves. And you're making sure that the implication of that policy is equal across your workforce. And that's really, I think, important, especially when it comes to time. So some policies then are requirements in legislation around communication more generous and required paid time off more generous and required parental leave guarantees that your job will be there for you when you come back from parental or bereavement or sick leave, which is not guaranteed. So we do see, we've done large scale surveys of the World Value Survey. We see that in countries with weaker social policies, you have a higher percentage of employees are focused on money over leisure, who feel stressed, who prioritize financial achievement because they have to. It's not necessarily people want to put again all of their attention on money and work and hours. But when you are your own social safety net, you really leave employees with no other choice except to work all the time so that they're the highest performer, et cetera. And so from a policy perspective, it is thinking within your own workplace. What are some policies that we have around pto, around leave? What are the outcomes of those who's taking them and what are people doing when they take them and is it resulting in unfair outcomes? Like if some individuals from some groups take those leave policies and others don't, is that creating inequality in your workplace and then just really more leave and more paid time off? I will say that another hill I will die on a little bit when it comes to time is I don't understand why these kind of HR benefits and time saving benefits or childcare benefits aren't a little bit more like 401k enrollment where you're just automatically enrolled and you have to opt out. What I hear a lot of from employees is they don't know about mental health services or childcare services or these different kinds of benefits that companies are always buying for employees until they're really stressed and then they're too stressed to use them or to benefit from them. And so I've been in a lot of discussions with Chros lately about how can we make time as a reward or these time saving services that organizations already offer, or PTO just a default and people have to opt out of them so that you are getting employees who are taking more of their vacation using more of their benefits in an automatic way as opposed to something where people have to sort through all this complicated information and might not know it exists or might not feel comfortable having a conversation with their manager about the leave that they want to take in the upcoming year.
- [49:19]
Dart Lindsley
So I spent the last eight years at Google and Google has extraordinary time saving services. I think if we were to ask the benefits group about why people don't use them all, they'd say, oh my God, we've told you a thousand times, like how can you not know? But a lot of them are very simple and this is not a hard thing to do. But there's washers and dryers at work and so I love doing work while I'm washing and drying clothes. It's such a simple thing to do. It seems like a crazy perk, I think, if you're not around it. But it's a super simple thing to do and it gives people a way to free up time later in their lives.
- [50:00]
Ashley Willins
I don't know if you saw this, but when I was doing research on an incentives platform, we saw that when given the choice though between if you get a points reward incentive system and you can choose material goods or you can choose a time saving Service, employees only 4% of the time chose the time saving reward. And so this is what I mean is that some of this actually needs to be more automatic or by default. Because when given a choice, even people who can afford it, even people who would benefit from it because there's some upfront friction, costs maybe of signing up for a new meal delivery or trying to figure out where that laundry machine is in your workplace, or you have to feel a little bit weird about walking with your laundry on a Tuesday afternoon, that there are some of these pressures around some of these services and stigma that make people not want to take them or uptake them, that we are now actively working with a lot of benefits providers to try to overcome. But there's some behavioral barriers around if you provide employees with choice between time and cash, mostly they don't choose time over cash or other material rewards. They don't feel as worth it to them in the moment because cash has a present value in time is more valuable in the future. We're not very good at valuing our future time and so we just think that, well, if that's going to save me five hours tomorrow, it just seems like a little bit of a hassle right now and so I'm not going to do it.
- [51:25]
Dart Lindsley
As an aside, that HBR article I wrote entirely while waiting for the clothes to dry at work, great. It was a terrible dryer and it Kept just heating it up, but not making it dry. And so I spent like six hours waiting for my clothes to dry and wrote almost my whole part of the article. So I want to get onto our own mental attitudes. But before I get to that, there's one example of a government policy that I am not sure has the right effect, which is mandatory paid overtime. So now what's happened is I've worked my eight hours, I'm going to get one and a half times pay if I work more hours. And I can see on the one hand it's. That might be an example of incenting companies to schedule things differently so that they don't give people overtime all the time or force people into overtime all the time. Or it could really reinforce the idea that you should work 10 hours every day. And I don't know which way that's gone. And if any study's been done, I.
- [52:31]
Ashley Willins
Haven'T seen any research on it. But if I were to teach this in my motivation and incentives class, I would think that the result would be the latter as opposed to the former. So employees are going to try to push for longer work hours and potentially idle time and increase their workspan. Employees already increase their workspan to just seem like they're more committed workers. So there's all these conversations about employees delay sending emails to 8pm at night to look like they were working that whole time. And so the extent to which our organizations use work hours is a proxy of commitment, I would imagine. And the fact that it's tied to financial rewards is you're essentially incentivizing workers with an even stronger signal. If I put in more overtime, then I'm more committed. And I think if I'm recalling my conversations correctly, this has occurred in Japan. So they have a strong FaceTime culture. Long hours are the norm. And if I recall, I think they also had a change in some of their overtime pay policies and it did result in longer work hours. Now, were those hours more productive? Very unclear, but it did result in workers reporting, if I'm remembering this correctly, working more hours.
- [53:47]
Dart Lindsley
I'm curious about the national differences. I noticed your book was translated into Korean. Are there some countries that have worse time poverty than others?
- [53:57]
Ashley Willins
I can speak across a few cultural contexts and then also regionally. So my colleague George Ward at INSEAD and I have done a lot of work on with Gallup World poll data and just looking at unhappiness and stress with these large scale surveys, we see that in areas that have historically higher Protestant work ethic and where people work on average, more hours than their comparable peers in other areas. So the same age, same gender, same income as you, that that is associated with higher levels of time stress and you enjoy your leisure less. Why? Well, if you work in an area where everyone around you, let's say Boston, the Northeast, some of the coastal cities, where there's an expectation of long work hours and a strong historical Protestant work ethic, where it's morally good to work a lot, that's really what the Protestant work ethic is about, is you moralize long work hours, then you are going to have fewer opportunities for leisure because everyone around you is working, therefore you have less opportunity to enjoy it. You are also going to feel the opportunity cost of any leisure to a greater extent because you're going to believe that everyone around you is also going to be prioritizing work and so that you feel guilty and bad when you prioritize leisure. So we do see some coastal differences, some geographic differences based on historical levels of Protestant work ethic along the east coast and then worldwide, as I mentioned, we do see that, again, the countries with more supportive social policies, so Scandinavian countries, Australia, the Commonwealth countries, it's not time stress per se, but they value leisure more and they are happier, as opposed to places like the us, like China, that are more industrial, they have more of a work mindset. And so, yes, there are cross cultural differences. When I've talked to my colleagues in Asia, they have strong norms around prioritizing work. And so because of that, they do experience high levels of stress and this feeling that they're not able to focus on other areas of their life because it's not acceptable or normative. And so there's both a strong desire for some of these ideas around time flexibility and time prioritization and strong resistance to doing anything that would change the work culture. So I was recently at a faculty excursion in Japan and I was talking to the head of LinkedIn. I was talking to her about work life benefits and how important time benefits are in the United States as an employee value proposition. Especially right now, coming out of COVID when employees are desiring flexibility and companies are now more reticent to give it. And she said, we don't have that here. Companies are very traditional, they're very FaceTime and they're losing a lot of talent. Actually, these more traditional, think Mitsubishi type companies in Japan, where you get ushered in, you work long hours, you're a quote unquote salary person. Salaryman is technically what they call them, then they're losing A lot of their top innovative talent to startups or to the United States because the younger generation doesn't want to tolerate those long work norms. So there's both an interest and need and also a strong resistance because of the status quo bias. And we see that in the US too around banking and all these conversations about do we force people back to the office or not. Even in tech now there as you know, like forcing people back to the office. And so there is a status quo bias from many senior leaders to go back to the way things were because that's the way than they were when they were coming up. Of course it's control a little bit.
- [57:47]
Dart Lindsley
One you might like my three episode interview with Elizabeth Anderson on the history of the work ethic that's from the 1400s to the present day. The second thing is you assigned the article that Eric Andesich and I published together in the Harvard Business Review to your students. Have they had a chance to respond to it and do we have feedback? I was like looking for customer research here.
- [58:12]
Ashley Willins
Well, I was asking them to adopt a product mindset when it came to work and getting them to think about what that means. Because my class talks about policies and practices and something we push against in my class is that it should be thought of as a once and done decision. You have to implement workplace strategies and practices, test, implement, scale, try again, break it, try again, change it when the business changes. And so the turkey ing case that we haven't talked a lot about is exactly documenting how the flexible model has changed and evolved with growing needs and changes in the business. And I think something that I have some challenge with is a lot of these HR conversations are about policies and they need to be also like practices on a daily basis and very, I don't know, like experimental in their approaches. I think students are very bought into that idea and find it very hard to know how to do it. So when I have conversations, even the Atlassian case, they're like no meeting sounds great. Asynchronous meetings sound great. Page led meetings, that sounds great. Taking a product designer mindset about our people experience, constantly talking to people and refining processes. That sounds perfect. I love these ideas. I have no idea how I'm going to go to JP Morgan, McKinsey, BCG, Amazon and do any of these things from where I sit. So I heard a lot of these ideas are great on paper and will never work in the traditional organizations I'm going to go to in practice. So while this has been a fun time having these conversations, I Don't know if that's going to be at all relevant to me until I am in a position to change things in my vision. So I'd be curious how you would think about that because my students are totally bought into all of these ideas that we bring to them. These innovative ways of thinking about people strategy in an experimental frame, in a constant refinement lens, in a thinking about the workplace experience as a product. Great. They totally get it. They get why that's important for business and why it could help even just improve the employee experience. They don't see senior leaders in their companies talking in this way or acting in this way. And therefore they feel a little bit, from my perspective as an instructor, disempowered. And sure, people come into my class and they say, but you can be the change and you're an HBS student and it's up to you. But they're like, no, I still work within an organizational hierarchy and a social ecosystem. And so yeah, I can change things around the margin, but what am I going to do really practically from where I sit to make these changes a reality?
- [61:11]
Dart Lindsley
One, become a founder. True, but as a founder it's very difficult to hold on to those principles because of where you sit in the company and the pressures that you face as a founder. It's very challenging to recognize that your perspective is incomplete. So there's a lot to talk about on this. We probably don't have time to talk about it today, but one of the key ideas is that if you optimize any complex system for one output, like let's say profit, it will come at the cost of other outputs, but also in many cases of the output that you're trying to optimize. And so if we have a simple minded idea of what company health is, which is it's extractive, then we risk long term profits. But they're right. They're absolutely right, which is that the systems that they are going to go into, if they are not the founders, is a self reinforcing system that tends toward extraction. And so it doesn't help that probably everybody you're talking to has gotten there by sacrificing themselves into time poverty to get there 100%. There are a lot of people in the workforce who are not going to the Harvard Business School who might have an easier time knowing how they could do it. It's a hard question for me because I can't stop working and I don't have to and I'm a founder, I could stop, I don't know the answer to that question.
- [62:48]
Ashley Willins
I have a couple of research based thoughts that I sometimes tell people. So I've walked myself into conversations with founders who sold businesses have more money in the bank and they know what to do with and they can't stop working and they feel still time stressed because they put themselves into that place. And we start to talk about leisure as a habit. It's not a habit that we're trained for or that we have any experience with, but if you want to retire or you want to scale back, you have to practice it. So I like to talk to founders, leaders, even my students about practicing time affluence in 5, 10, 15 minute intervals. You're not going to get to the hobby that's going to replace your career in a day. This is like a long term investment. It's something like the portfolio strategy of life. Arthur Brooks talks about this. You need a diverse leisure, you need a diverse portfolio of life experiences. And certainly time affluence is making room and time for all the pursuits that you care about in life. Not just professional, but also personal. I've gotten myself into some conversations about trying to make Martha Beck talks about this too. One degree shifts. Do you find yourself with time in between a meeting? Could you plan an upcoming trip, text a friend, look at the SPCA near your house or the local animal shelter near your house and see if they have any drop in programs that you might want to join. You don't have to commit to any of them. You can just start thinking about it. So it's much similar to any behavior change. You need to be first ideating and then you want to be thinking about making a plan and then you want to execute that plan. But we're never going to be able to downshift our professional ambitions if we don't put some time set aside to ask ourselves who are we? What do we care about? What's our North Star in life? And instead of getting attached to a specific way of getting that through professional achievement, thinking expansively about how we might be able to enact that value in our daily lives and then take the pressure off ourselves as a maximizer, which all of us are, to not have to do that in three hour increments or not do it at all, but think about doing it in the 5, 10, 15 minutes that we might have in between a meeting during idle time in the middle of a workday. And so that's something I advocate or think a little bit about together with my students as they're about to Embark on these big professional careers that are going to take every ounce of energy, attention and time if they allow it to that you want to start to cultivate moments or pockets of self reflection, self expansion, and trying and failing at things that are not necessarily going to result in professional pursuits. And then when it comes to time, I tell them, you can negotiate, that I used to teach negotiations and it baffled me that we talk 28 cases about salary and compensation and talk zero about negotiating for time and responsibility in the workplace. And I say you have a lot more power than you think. You get taught in business school to negotiate contracts, to negotiate your starting salary, to negotiate your title. We do a disservice to you by not teaching you the skills, tools, communication frameworks for negotiating, how much you're going to work, for negotiating difficult interpersonal situations with the manager who wants you to work all the time, when actually you could just say no or not respond back to them and it would probably be fine and nothing would happen that you can bend and shape your roles even in these traditional companies. So I also try to encourage my students to take responsibility for the autonomy that no one's going to give you, but that you can certainly ask for. And so on the topic of time, I have papers and studies looking at negotiation. And the majority of us believe that internal deadlines with no externally imposed deadlines are not negotiable, when in fact they are. And managers see value in you extending an adjustable deadline if the quality of the work improves. And we think we're going to be penalized, when in fact we're not. If anything, we're seen as a more committed worker for trying to get it right as opposed to just trying to check a box. And so I like to try to, on a more uplifting note, nudge my students a little bit to say, hey, you know how to negotiate salary and title. You also have to think about your negotiations on a day to day basis for resources, time and negotiating away, scope, creep and taking on someone else's role. So protecting time as a negotiation strategy.
- [67:20]
Dart Lindsley
That makes a lot of sense to me. I mean, one of those would be when you're taking a job to say, look, especially as a leader, I'm going to tell you, I spend this many hours a week looking beyond our company, for instance, and seeing what's happening outside of our company because it makes me a better leader. So I have a few closing questions, very product oriented, about your work. One of them is what job do you hire your job to do for you?
- [67:46]
Ashley Willins
I hire it to provide me with the opportunity to meet interesting people and share ideas and cross pollinate ideas across disciplines, across industries. My job affords me the ability to both have anyone knock on my door and me to knock on anyone's door. And I also try to remind myself of that. And I use my job in that way to expand my perspective and to deepen the work that I do.
- [68:18]
Dart Lindsley
I like that you hire your work partially as a lookout. It's a place to see farther and also to meet new people. And it's surprisingly, I do get that response. Sometimes it's not that frequent. So it's interesting to hear that again. What does your work cost you?
- [68:38]
Ashley Willins
My work does sometimes cost me time. So as someone who studies this, I have a personal investment in trying to make high performing workplaces more time smart because I find that my profession and many of the professions that my peers are in are time inefficient. They waste time in meetings, in large town halls that we could be spending in more productive ways, personally and professionally. So my job does absolutely cost me time. And I think also it costs me some connection with my colleagues. My job is very lone wolf. We are all our own islands of knowledge at this stage in my profession. So sometimes it affords me the ability to look out. It doesn't always afford me the catalyzing moments of looking across and working deeply together.
- [69:47]
Dart Lindsley
I will tell you that in my research it is absolutely one of the most common costs that people express is time. One of the most common. They say it different ways. Sometimes they say it costs me time with my family. They talk about time away from exercise, but it's a very, very common cost that people express. So first of all, where can people learn more about you and learn more about your work?
- [70:15]
Ashley Willins
On my HBS faculty website, I post all of my HBRs and professional academic articles. And so that's probably the best place to find me is hbs. Edu ashleywillins Great.
- [70:31]
Dart Lindsley
And people should know that we've talked a lot about time today, but your research goes beyond time. It goes into studies of employee ownership. It goes into studies of applied behavioral science and nudges. There is research into relationship satisfaction and often in relation to time. And I wanted to get into it, but we went deep on time. And that's the first priority here today, was to go into that. So thank you very much for coming on the show.
- [71:01]
Ashley Willins
Yes, thank you for having me. And I just encourage everyone listening to make a concerted effort to subtract, protect, negotiate, add time in any way that they can personally and professionally, even if it's in a five minute increment or not giving something thought. So as you were talking about what my job takes, it's not always hours. It's actually cognitive attention not being present in the moment. It's taking my present time with my family, my daughter, my husband. And I think that's really important to protect.
- [71:37]
Dart Lindsley
Yes. In fact, this is one of the things that we should talk about at another time is that one of the practices that my organization teaches companies how to do is to monitor how their attention is being spent. And so rather than doing it around time, we ask questions about, for every category of work in your environment, what proportion of your attention is going to that? And the reason that I like attention as opposed to time is that I can be out mountain biking and my attention is on a problem at work. And so no matter what my body's doing, even if I'm having dinner with my family, if my attention is being pulled into that thing, that's something that we monitor. And the question, one of the questions we ask is, is the thing you're spending attention to important? Is it important to the company? Is it what you provide the most value doing? Is that your unique value in the world and is it rewarding to you personally? And so it's something that, that I could show you more about, but it makes how we're allocating attention as a team into a mindfulness practice and awareness. So that's why we use attention instead of time. One of the reasons.
- [72:58]
Ashley Willins
I love that.
- [72:59]
Dart Lindsley
Well, again, thank you. Great to have you on the show.
- [73:03]
Ashley Willins
This was great. Thank you so much for having me.
- [73:07]
Dart Lindsley
Thanks for joining me for another episode of Work for Humans. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five star rating. Wherever you listen to podcasts and share the show with one person you think would get value from it, believe it or not, this really, really helps us grow the show and reach more people who want to build the kind of work that people really want. As always, thank you to my producer Jason Ames at ninthpath Audio for his insights into content and his high standard for quality. Final note, the opinions shared here are my own and not the views of Google or Cisco Systems. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.