“Working from home” is a just a euphemism for higher productivity

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Watch high quality movies at ImovieSh.com, courtesy of Sil Silv
“Watch high quality movies at ImovieSh.com.”  Photo courtesy of Sil Silv.

When juggling your commitments, you may have spent time reflecting about what is truly important to you. Are your many hours at work meaningful for your personal growth and the home life you desire? Thankfully, there is a mixed blessing available for those who want better trade-offs: the option to work from home.

There is a lively debate about the virtues of working from home, and we all know why it’s controversial. You have the freedom to alternate between hard work and lazy selfishness in a manner that makes you feel guilty and sheepish. Am I the only one who washes bedsheets while I’m trying to figure out how to solve a work puzzle? I feel bad about the housework, but I forget to take credit that my brain is fully engaged in work.

The Case For Working From Home

The case in favour of working from home comes from a study that was summarized nicely in an article by Bill Murphy Jr. at Inc.com. Murphy reviewed a study of call centre employees in China who participated in a 9-month pilot. The employer randomly-selected one half of the pilot group to work from home while the others came into the office. Call centres have great tracking systems to measure productivity, so they were able to analyze the impact.

The gains from working from home were many. Employees who worked from home saved the company $2,000 per year in office space. They put 9% more time into productive work hours. They were 14% more efficient with their time, taking fewer breaks and less sick time. Their turnover was 50% lower.

The masters of productivity would be proud of them.

The Case Against Working From Home

Of course, working from home is not always the best way to collaborate. Over at the Atlantic, Jerry Useem advances evidence that working face-to-face is better for collaboration. He cites research by Judith Olson of UC Irvine who worked on an experiment with Ford in the late 1990s that put software developers in a war room. It was called “radical colocation.” The close-proximity teams completed their work in one third of the time relative to other groups. In another study, a simulated cockpit crew in a crammed space were able to able to communicate a major issue in 24 seconds through hand motions and non-verbal utterances. Face-time and direct communication can be critical for efficient teamwork and collaboration.

The Best Decisions are Sensitive to Context

What is notable is that the evidence twists and turns depending on context. Call centres are all about the dynamic between the employee and customer, so collaborations with work peers might be unimportant. By contrast, work that is built around face-to-face communication demands proximity. This would not be the first time that the research on optimal workforce practices concludes that it depends on the context of the business and the mindset of the individual employee.

That research Murphy cited was a paper entitled “Does Working from Home Work?  Evidence from a Chinese Experiment”, by Nicholas Bloom et al, a working paper from the NBER from March 2013. I gave it a closer read, and there was a lot of nuance not picked up by the business press.

For example, commuting distance had a big impact on productivity differences. Those whose commute time was more than two hours per day saw dramatic improvements in their productivity when working from home. This finding is consistent with a theory in labour economics called the labour-leisure model, that suggests people start with an endowment of weekly hours and make trade-offs between their personal life and work life. Commuting subtracts from the hours-endowment, and if you give those people the option to work from home, they will apply more hours to their work and also to themselves. The interests of work and home are not in dichotomy if both are sabotaged by commuting.

During the experiment, people had been assigned to work from home on a randomized basis. When employees were given the opportunity to choose, half of them chose to come to the office instead. They were rightly concerned they would be passed over for promotion. Employees working from home were 50% less likely to receive a performance-based promotion, which is outrageous when you consider they were more productive. They were “out-of-sight, out-of-mind.” I see a side-story about the social contract.  The employer figured out how to spend less money on office space and stop promoting their most productive people, and several employees said “no thanks” and started showing up at the office again.

About 10% of the people who had not volunteered for the experiment chose to work from home after the pilot was opened-up for wider participation. Once it became increasingly obvious who would benefit and who would be disadvantaged, several people still chose working from home. This outcome highlights the immense impact of giving people autonomy over how their work lives should be organized. Any two people could make decisions that go in opposite directions, based on their unique preferences.

May of the employees who chose to return to the office after the experiment rightly perceived that they were less productive when working from home. When those employees started working in the office again, this self-selection had a contrast-effect on the more-productive workers who continued to work from home. During the experiment home-workers were 14% more productive, but once self-selection was permitted home workers were 25% more productive. The impact was almost doubled.

Human Nature Out-Ranks The Logistics

I think it’s important to flag that autonomy in itself had a positive impact that was about as important as a comprehensive workplace redesign. That is, executive decision-making struggles to prove its worth against the impact of a positive workplace culture where people can self-select into higher productivity.

One of the main drivers for increased productivity was that people working from home worked when they were slightly ill. I have to confess, I have done this myself. Partially-sick work-from-home days are win-win for employee and employer. This practice reduces office contagion, gets a mostly productive work-day from the employee who might otherwise be doing nothing, and gives the employee some control over their guilt and workload.

When sick, people need the comforts of home to get well and stay well. Maybe a family member will bring them a nice bowl of chicken soup that gives them a sense that all is right in the world.

But there’s a catch.  Young people who live with their parents don’t want to work from home.  When people were free to choose, these young people came to the office in order to escape their family.  Thanks for the soup, mom, I love you dearly.  But would you please stop telling me how to format my presentations, deal with the workplace bully, and get along with my colleagues?  I need to choose my own life.

[This is a re-post of an article from May 14, 2018]

How to correctly work with bleach and unions

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Milwaukee Public School Teachers. Photo courtesy of Charles Edward Miller.

I know you’re terrified to use bleach on your clothing. You probably destroyed a cherished garment a decade ago. Never again, you said. But bleach damage is a result of using bleach incorrectly. And if you follow the instructions, bleach can overwhelmingly improve the value of your wardrobe. Let me explain.

Instructions say use one cup of bleach for a single full load of laundry in a large or high-efficiency washer. If washing a half-load of laundry, scale down to half a cup of bleach. You need a measuring cup that you only use on bleach. Pour the bleach into the receptacle that says “bleach only” at the beginning of the load. Do not throw it in on top of the dry clothes. Don’t use Oxy-Clean in the same load, as chlorine bleach and Oxy-Clean cancel each other out. Then add your other detergent, press go, and that’s it. Now you “know how to use bleach.”

People Fear Bleach For Nonsensical Reasons

The 400-page book Laundry by Cheryl Mendelson – which is a delightful read – spells out a number of misconceptions of bleach. Garment labels are required by law to give instructions on how to wash clothing while causing no damage to the garment whatsoever. To prevent lawsuits, instructions are overly-restrictive in a practice called over-labelling. The most common type of over-labelling is to prescribe non-chlorine bleach (e.g. Oxy-Clean) or that you use no bleach whatsoever. I only obey this instruction with dark garments. Loads of whites, greys, or colours are all made better by bleach.

Concern about damaging garments is misplaced even if it were true that garments are harmed. Consider if bleach damaged your garment by 1%, which is enough to mandate prohibitive labelling. If you only bleached the garment three times ever, you will have lost 3% of the garment’s quality. Compare this outcome to the effect of ugly stains that prevent you from wearing a garment. In that case, the damage is 100% because you are avoiding the use of bleach. Not using bleach is, in this case, far more damaging as using bleach regularly. If you destroy the garment, you are no further behind, because it was destined for the garbage in the first place. There is no downside to destroying a garment with bleach, if you were never going to wear the garment because of a stain. So move on with your life and put bleach to its proper use.

Bleach and Industrial Relations

A lot of managers and human resources professionals are perplexed and intimidated about how to deal with unions. This looks strange to those experienced with unions because, although some things are complex, the basics are extremely simple. When you are dealing with a labour relations puzzle the first question is almost always; “what does the collective agreement say?”

This is where things go completely sideways for a lot of people. First, there are people who did not personally sign the collective agreement, who wonder why they are bound by it. But they don’t question invoices from utility providers, contracts with clients, or precautions imposed by risk management. Only the contract with the union faces this faux-bewilderment for which the acting quality is well below community theatre. Questioning the basic legitimacy of the collective agreement says more about the questioner than it says about unions.

Admit it, you’re only pretending to dislike unions in order to curry favour with someone powerful. But real executives think that a deal is a deal and that unions are simply one of their many bargaining partners. Move on.

The second challenge is those collective agreements are a type of instruction manual. A large percentage of the population never reads instruction manuals. Consider how many times you retrieve a box from the garbage so you can read, then re-read, the instructions to heat a frozen meal. It ought to be embarrassing but instead, we have hip internet memes where we all get to laugh at ourselves, collectively, that we can’t read instructions. But it’s not ha-ha funny. We’re laughing at how stupid we are, collectively. Safety in numbers. But if you want to get the job done, stop laughing. The union isn’t laughing. Instruction manuals aren’t funny.

In brief, if you are a manager in a unionized environment and there is nothing in the legislation or the collective agreement that inhibits your use of power, according to the rules you are allowed to do as you please. It’s called management rights and it’s biased towards the discretion of the manager. A manager even has the right under industrial relations law to do things that are contrary to the employer’s interest, disobedient to that manager’s superiors, and contrary to any measure of professionalism or competence.

But there’s one catch. If you don’t read the instructions, you might be barred from doing something incredibly basic. And that will make you look ridiculous.

As with the use of bleach, so-to with the use of authority in a unionized environment. Bleach and unions are both practical tools to achieve the desired outcome. They are to cause good where intended, act as a remedy to a precise problem, and have the side-effect of causing harm to those who are negligent. You are not being asked to apply high intelligence. Rather, you must take care that you follow the written instructions, be diligent and prudent in your handling of the active ingredient, and make regular use of this skill-set so that you don’t get sloppy.

Remember, when putting bleach in your wash basin you have the goal of getting the laundry done. So too, when interacting with a union you have the goal of achieving business goals by providing direction to staff. If you make the caustic agent something that you fear, neglect, and refuse to interact with, you will gradually lose the freedom to step out into the world looking your best. Stains will gradually destroy your favorite garments, while labour contempt erodes your confidence to advance brave and respectful leadership.

So get over your arrogance and fear, and read the instructions. It will make your willpower look bright and fluffy.

Waking up is not a competition

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Shadows. By Stuart Murray
Photo by author.

Do you have a strange pang of guilt about your wake-up time?  You shouldn’t. People have varied natural wake-up times, and the “best” time to wake up appears to be extremely personal.

One of the more important workplace numbers – and one that is rarely discussed – is the normal hours of work and the degree to which hours are flexible. Work hours are a big deal because people need to make a lot of trade-offs between family size, housing, commuting distance, and family care obligations. In an office environment, while it’s good to have a general sense of when we want people around for meetings, it also makes sense to ensure peoples’ work and home lives to be compatible.

Wake Time is Mostly Genetic

One item that complicates normal work hours is peoples’ sleep times.  While a lot of people have a typical sleep pattern of 11pm-7am, plenty of people tend to be early risers or night owls. The variety of sleep times are linked to something called chronotype. There are many news articles implying that waking early is virtuous, but there is little discussion of whether we can choose to change our sleep patterns. My reading of the research shows mixed results amongst those attempting to change their wake time.

There are several genetic variables that affect chronotype. The Wikipedia entry on the topic notes that “there are 22 genetic variants associated with chronotype.” The sleep cycle is related to our levels of melatonin and our variations in body temperature. Age has a major impact on sleep patterns. Children and those aged 40-60 are more likely to be early risers, while teens and young adults are more likely to be night owls.

In an HBR article from 2010, biology professor Christoph Randler was interviewed about an article he published on sleep cycles. He cited one study that found that “…about half of school pupils were able to shift their daily sleep-wake schedules by one hour. But significant change can be a challenge. About 50% of a person’s chronotype is due to genetics.”

Looking into people’s personal experiences in attempting to wake up earlier, they will often emphasize discipline and routine in waking up properly. Other articles identify wake-up technologies that oblige you get out of bed promptly. The best overview that I could find comes from lifehacker.org, which has a great infographic on why and how to become an early riser.

Dr. Randler notes that evening people tend to be smarter, more creative, have a better sense of humor, and be more outgoing. By contrast, morning people “hold the important cards” as they get better grades and the opportunities that arise from them. Morning people anticipate problems and minimize them, and are more proactive. “A number of studies have linked this trait, proactivity, with better job performance, greater career success, and higher wages.”

Team Productivity and Genetic Diversity

What is notable is that early risers have the traits that are most beneficial for their personal effectiveness and their personal career success.  This is troublesome. You see, if early risers are more likely to get into positions of power and status they are also more likely to end up with a captive audience through which they can imply that others should be more like them. This may be a factor in the early-rising hype.

I would assert that an employer must always look beyond individual performance and pay close attention to teamwork. It is common for some behaviours to cause one person get ahead to the detriment of the team, and part of good management is to nip this in the bud and put the team first. If there is a solid talent pool of night owls who bring smarts and creativity which is historically less recognized in grades or career advancement, their contribution might be strong and also under-appreciated. We must consider what is best for the entire workplace, and cultivate the best contributions from all sleep types.

If the purpose of our diversity and employment-equity efforts is to get the best out of all people regardless of how they were born, perhaps we should be open-minded about sleep patterns. The correct moral standard should be inclusiveness and team effectiveness.

Dr. Randler, who is from Germany, is quick to acknowledge that our bias towards early-rising is more circumstantial than fact-based:

“Positive attitudes toward morningness are deeply ingrained. In Germany, for example, Prussian and Calvinist beliefs about the value of rising early are still pervasive. Throughout the world, people who sleep late are too often assumed to be lazy. The result is that the vast majority of school and work schedules are tailored to morning types. Few people are even aware that morningness and eveningness have a powerful biological component.”

We can’t choose to be a morning type any more than we can choose to be tall, male, white, a baby boomer, or someone with executive-face. And for that matter, we can’t choose to be Prussian. Under what circumstances would we oblige everyone to fit a single standard of excellence that elevates one genetic type to be superior to the rest? Didn’t we sort this out already?

[The above is a repost of an article from January 2, 2018]

Is Lean In really gaslighting?

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Photo Courtesy of Drew Altizer.

Can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps to overcome an injustice you have faced? It really does depend. There’s a thriving debate about whether women should act as individuals or as part of a collective when fighting for equality. Quartz recently ran an insightful article about the impact of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In and her related TED talk. While Lean In has received a great deal of critique from all corners, the article in Quartz argues that Sandberg negated systematic discrimination and told women they can personally overcome discrimination by taking individual action.

The Quartz article is titled All Career Advice for Women is a Form of Gaslighting. Gaslighting is when an abuser contradicts your understanding of reality, perhaps telling you the opposite of what you know is true, in a persistent manner that causes you to question your sanity. The key moment is when the abuser says you’re making things up in your head, or that you’re going crazy. If you’re in good shape, you identify that the problem is the abuser and take action. Otherwise, you could endure mistreatment for years. This definition doesn’t really match Sheryl Sandberg’s critique. Sandberg rightfully describes structural issues about how women’s careers are held back by the system, and then proceeds to offer tips to get ahead. It’s individuals engaging with society, and her advice is fair game.

What the Research Says

The Quartz article and a similar overview in Harvard Business Review summarize fresh research from December 2018. (For the full study, see Kim, J. Y., Fitzsimons, G. M., & Kay, A. C. (2018). Lean In messages increase attributions of women’s responsibility for gender inequality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 115(6), 974-1001.)

The paper covers six large-sample studies that look at how people judge women’s inequality based on messages they are fed. The main variable is a polarized portrayal of Sheryl Sandberg’s critique. In one sample, researchers only quoted Sandberg’s analysis of systemic discrimination, and people who saw this message came away with the impression that sexism was society’s responsibility and that we need to band together to change the system. In the other sample, they only quoted Sandberg’s advice on what individual women can do to improve their lot in life and get past everyday sexism. In that case people perceived that it was women’s individual responsibility to overcome sexism, and that women themselves are the cause of the sexism.

This notion that women cause sexism is victim-blaming. The researchers attribute this thinking to a kind of mental gymnastics that people indulge in to get past the discomfort that there is injustice in the world. But logically, victim-blaming is malfunctioning thinking. If you take reality seriously you must perceive injustice as it occurs and contribute voice and effort to remedy it.

The academic article is most concerned that people can’t disentangle causation and solution in their own minds:

“Responsibility for the problem, in this model, describes responsibility for the origin of the problem, or causal responsibility. Responsibility for the solution, in contrast, describes responsibility for finding a solution, or control over outcomes. …the two forms of responsibility are conceptually distinct, but will often be correlated.” [Emphasis added]

And indeed the research did find that the two were mixed up together in peoples’ head such that people became individualists or collectivists based on what messages they were fed.

How the Story Evolved Beyond the Research

Then it gets sticky. There are individual reasons why some people thrive and others fail, much as there are systemic factors that change a person’s odds of doing well. Therefore, there is a combination of collective and individual strategies to pursue women’s equality. If a woman is born petite, she can take up kickboxing and stare down physical intimidation. Conversely, if a woman had chosen a career which streamed her into a lower-wage workplace, she could still sign a union card and participate in a group effort that improves her life chances.

Even if people agreed that inequality was societal, that does not prove that all solutions must be collective. Social justice advocates are quick to acknowledge that you need a diversity of tactics to achieve your goals. It is not authoritatively true that individualism and collectivism fall on some great divide, with one being good and the other being bad.   

We all need to aspire to a nuanced view, but that’s not where critics took things. The authors of the Quartz article and the study itself seize on the one-half of the research sample that deliberately skews Sandberg’s message as individualist, asserting that do-it-yourself (DIY) feminism is bad news.

These people are like those tourists that went around Europe taking snapshots of themselves at the locations of the fictional events in The Da Vinci Code. Although there are real individualists out there, in this study Sandberg’s self-loathing misogynistic individualism was an abstraction fabricated for research purposes only. Now, social critics are weighing-in that if choosing between two polar opposites – a fabricated individualism or a fabricated collectivism – women must favour collectivism as “correct.” But the problem is not that causation and solution are actually twinned and people must choose between individualism and collectivism. It’s that if we revert to polarized thinking, individualists tend to win.

How To Actually Become an Executive

There are better sources to turn to if you are trying to get promoted. Elsewhere in the TED Talks, Susan Colantuono delivers a talk entitled The Career Advice You Probably Didn’t Get. Women are already well-represented in middle-management, the question is why do they not get beyond that. Colantuono found that a good executive must be good at three things:

  1. Use the greatness in you (individual effectiveness)
  2. Engage the greatness in others (leadership)
  3. Achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes (business, strategic, and financial acumen)

The first two items are important for getting into middle management. When women are given career advice it is disproportionately in areas in the first two categories: self-promote, get a mentor, network, and speak up. Corporate talent and performance management systems are highly devoted to engaging the greatness in others, the second of the two competencies. That’s not going to make a difference for this problem.

That is because when assessing executive potential, the third item is valued twice as heavily as each of the other two. Women have truly been kept in the dark that they need to know more about finance and strategy in order to get an executive job. To clarify, society has withheld this information from women (i.e. the causation is collective). However, because each person’s best learning hinges on individual interest and personal goals, women need to determine that this advice is accurate and change their own course as individuals. That is, if becoming an executive is important to them.

The majority of executives (63%) perceive they do not have strategic alignment with everyone rowing in the same direction. Colantuono proposes that one of reasons why there is not strategic alignment is that those women who are half of middle management have not received clear messaging that they need to be “…focused on the business, where it’s headed, and their role in taking it there…” The culprit is not clever-and-efficient sexism, it’s incompetence but with a gendered filter. It’s squarely within the responsibility of men in power to remedy this issue, if they plan on being any good at their day jobs. Boards, CEOs, HR Executives, and individual managers must all change their mindsets in order to turn this around.

In this context it doesn’t seem at all like women have to choose between a collective or individual orientation. Women aspiring to executive roles need to have a clear sense of the collective vision of the organization and figure out how they’re going to lead their team towards that collective purpose. If anything is gaslighting, it is the deliberate misquoting of Sandberg’s work. In her TED talk, Sandberg spends a fair amount of time describing appropriate trade-offs between women’s household collective orientation and their workplace collective orientation. Indeed in May of 2016, a year after her husband died, Sandberg acknowledged that “Some people felt that I did not spend enough time writing about the difficulties women face when they have an unsupportive partner or no partner at all. They were right…” She acknowledged this two years before the research that polarized her comments.

Women with busy careers make frequent trade-offs about when they will take care of themselves and when they will take care of the group. It will ever be circumstantial which decisions are the right ones, and which tactics will actually work. Nobody knows this better than the very social justice leaders who foster individual agency when they encourage vulnerable populations to pick up a picket sign and protest.

Life hacks will not save your soul

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Texting, by Alexandra Zakharova

Do you feel put-upon to stay productive at work, and at home, and in friendships? It’s exhausting when you think about it. Everywhere you look there is a new tip to make your relationships super authentic, to make your career deeply meaningful, and for your morning routine to run like a seamless assembly line. If you feel boxed-in by unreasonable, self-imposed expectations, you are not alone. That is because we are universally immersed in values that are the rational extension of the passing whims of merchants.

Bourgeois Values and the Bourgeois Era

In an article in Quartz entitled Life hacks are part of a 200-year-old movement to destroy your humanity, Andrew Taggart puts our current middle-class lives into an historical context. There is constant speculation that we’re entering a different historic era. If we look at how we entered our current era we might learn how we will move onward.

Taggart cites economic historian Diedre McCloskey who describes the present as the “Bourgeois Era.” The Bourgeois Era was created 200 years ago when the industrial revolution took hold, merchants bloomed, and those merchants promptly overpowered aristocrats and religious leaders. Your ancestors were controlled by lord and cleric, but you have broken these chains and are now controlled by your boss, your clients, and advertisers. There has been progression, but you are not entirely free.

You are not free because your thinking is enveloped by prevailing values. I would note this is something that typically happens under hegemony: not only does the economic and political dominance of the elite control your life, but the values of the elite permeate the thinking of those under their sway. Long ago, aristocrats cherished the values of honour, leisureliness, and pride. Christian peasants valued charity and reverence. These are rare values today, to the point where you almost have to look them up.

When the Bourgeois Era came along, it came with “the bourgeois virtues of prudence, temperance, trustworthiness, and pride in fair dealing.” We now look up to visionary entrepreneurs who embody these values, abandoning wars of aristocratic honour, or the self-flagellation required to seek salvation. And the new(ish) bourgeois values bring their own problems, creating diseases of the soul and existential heartbreak. When you email that final-final draft at 3 p.m. on a Friday and imagine the weekend ahead of you, is your life truly more complete than those who have confessed their sins?

What Happens to Old Values When We Make Progress?

Taggart does not entirely suggest that we go back to the older values. The way I think of it is, there are places on this earth where the biggest problem is inadequate plumbing. If those regions achieved adequate plumbing that would be great, however, it would be foolish for them to continue to obsess about plumbing as their highest goal. You’re supposed to move on. Perhaps their next goals would be fair elections, clear title on land ownership, and universal K-12 education. And after that, their goals might be togetherness of communities, greater self-expression, and nicer clothing. But when the community comes together you don’t abandon plumbing. Rather, it fades into the background as important-yet-forgettable.

As such, we may hold onto a variant of aristocratic honour when we defend our prestige in the workplace. And we may still be advancing the Christian-peasant virtue of charity when we support social change movements by contributing time, money, or simply our voices. But we remain completely shackled to the bourgeois values of temperance and prudence when we count our calories, declutter our wardrobes, and try to get a better telco package. You cannot go home from work and adopt the aristocratic value of leisureliness because temperance and prudence have penetrated our homes. Look busy!

I don’t think the solution is to seek the opposite of bourgeois dominance. I get triggered by the word bourgeois because of my past exposure to the labour movement. I’ll always be in remission from polarizing Marxist patter. I always get that I-know-where-this-is-going feeling. If I allow tomorrow’s next Lenin to keep talking I’m going to have to eat rice and beans at a banquet hall where I am sucked into a bottomless pit of volunteerism and bad taste. But it’s not just the left who can lead you astray. You also can’t let clerics and aristocrats join in on the bourgeois-bashing, as they don’t even want you to have plumbing.

The mainstream has done an exceptional job at offering meaningful careers to those who are intelligent and hard-working. There used to be a crowd of people who were alienated from the mainstream, some of whom were intelligent leadership-types who could create a meaningful rebel resistance. But now that corporations are adopting corporate social responsibility, advancing transformational leadership styles, and increasingly promoting a diverse population into the professions and leadership, there’s not as much appeal to heckling from the margins. Who is going to lead the resistance? Not always the best people. Fifteen per cent of the population has a personality disorder, but in political crowds (on either side of the fence) it seems more like one-half. The negation of the current dominant class might not be a viable path forward.

What Values Will Take Us Forward?

If I were to name the cherished values of our next era, I would go with humility, introspection, and empathy. The reason why is that the data keeps revealing cognitive fallacies and implicit bias that make it clear that our brains only have the power of a 40-watt light bulb. In order to do well, we have to get over ourselves and ask us why we think the things we think. And this is done best by looking at the evidence and working with a team. We need to figure ourselves out while we help others do the same. This task is impossible if you think you have everything figured out, so humility is your first task.

As artificial intelligence and robots take over the productivity race, those who pull ahead will do something human that artificial intelligence just can’t do. This kind of holistic thinking is deeply incompatible with the conformity and profit-maximizing focus of the promotable class of agreeable bourgeois leaders. Instead, the new leaders are those who look inside of themselves, build their story, and enmesh their own story with those of others. It’s not something that can be written by a public relations professional or a ghostwriter. You must become yourself, make it real, and show up as authentically human.

There’s no eye contact with any app anywhere that will give you a sense that your humanity resonates with your colleagues, friends, and family. Rather, you start with that which is human and tell the market and the technology what is required.

So when you get home on Friday and look at those dishes that need loading, try going deep on why you care. Are you allowed to do nothing? Is the person who loads the dishwasher committing a benevolent act? Or are you, in all honesty, trying to keep everything running smoothly? If you meditate long enough, you might just decide that it’s really about the ick factor. Then you’re in the future.

How to repurpose leftover turkey and leftover code

Posted on by Stuart Murray
Turkey
Turkey.  Photo courtesy of  Jeremy Keith.

As Christmas winds to an end, several households are struggling with a conundrum. What should you do with the leftover turkey?  There are downsides to having this carcass. It hogs fridge space, you will be eating turkey for days, and some people just hate leftovers. I know people who are tempted to throw the whole thing in the garbage. But don’t. Leftover turkey is a great opportunity to whip up some butter turkey or turkey noodle casserole.

When there’s nothing left but bones, it’s time to make turkey stock. Boiling down a turkey carcass into stock is one of the great wonders of household management. It’s so well-seasoned you don’t need to add any vegetables.  While the stock simmers, filling your home with great smells, you can accomplish something else, in a season when there’s some time to catch up with friends or wrap up loose ends.

With workforce analytics this kind of thing happens all the time.  Once you get on top of a major headcount puzzle, you will have spreadsheets and a few pages of code that are available for more than one purpose.  Like turkey leftovers, it’s worthwhile to be bold and repurpose them.

My favorite experience was when I built an entire hierarchy of jobs in order to identify when people had been promoted.  In large organizations it can be ambiguous which job movements are upward or downward.  Often, promotions are not categorized as promotions, especially if people change departments, leave and come back, or get a job temporarily prior to being made permanent.

To get past this obstacle we created a simple reference table that identified where someone was in a hierarchical career ladder, assigning a two-digit code to 1,200 job descriptions.  It was hard and tedious work that was entirely for the benefit of the back-engine of our promotions model.  But we eventually got the promotions model to work at a level of high accuracy, after which the client was able to use the information to influence high-level decisions.  That was the full turkey dinner.

Shortly after we finished this promotions model we got new demands for work which took advantage of the back-engine.  Our happiest client was the one who just needed the list of rank indicators for the 1,200 job descriptions.  They needed to send emails to a limited number of high-ranking people, so those people knew about breaking events before their subordinates and would know what to say.  With our organizational complexity and some turnover at the top, it was hard to identify who was senior.  What our client needed was a rules-based way of identifying who should get their emails.  Looking at our rank tables, they were able to choose a small number of rank categories and let the code do the work for them.  In the process they uncovered that one senior executive had been previously overlooked.  Now they were able to get the information out to the right people.

This client got the analytics equivalent of turkey soup.  They just needed the bones from inside the promotions query to be boiled down to create a new, skillfully-repurposed product that met their needs.

Do you have the opportunity to repurpose your own big wins?  That time you got on top of a major health concern, did you also develop healthy habits that improved other parts of your life?  If you overcame a difficult business relationship, did you also learn what your triggers are, and how to regulate them in future?  At the end of a big project, did you go for drinks afterward and end up with a few new friends?

Sometimes it seems like you’re just working hard to make other people happy.  But if you accomplished nothing in the last year except healthy habits, self-awareness, and more meaningful relationships, would you even recognize that this counts as success?

So put on your wool socks, turn the TV to your guilty pleasures, and curl up with that bowl of turkey soup.  It should feel good.  So take a deep breath and enjoy it.

[This is a re-post, with edits, of an article from October 10, 2017]