Focus On: Cassie Mogilner

Where Does Innovation Happen — at Home or at Work?

Posted on March 1, 2013

yahoo_buildingYahoo CEO Marissa Mayer touched off an intense nationwide debate on work-at-home policies last week when she announced that all employees who work remotely will have to move back to company offices beginning in June. Wharton experts say that Yahoo stands to both gain and lose from the new policy.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home…. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together,” Jackie Reses, who leads Yahoo’s human resources department, said in an internal memo to employees that was published on All Things D. Yahoo’s revenues are now trailing at an annual run rate of $4.9 billion, nearly a quarter short of its 2009 revenues of $6.46 billion. The New York Times noted that Yahoo’s move is part of Mayer’s strategy to get the company she has run since last summer “off its deathbed and make it an innovator once again.”

According to Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner, “Time is a personally meaningful and connecting resource, much more so than money.” Mogilner studies happiness, focusing on the role of time and money. “Yahoo is correct that having its employees spend face-to-face time with each other will foster greater camaraderie, and that more time at the office will make people more absorbed in their work.”

Yet, with its new policy,Yahoo is also communicating that it doesn’t value work-life balance, and is looking for employees “for whom the scale clearly tilts towards work,” notes Mogilner. “They are thus looking to attract and to retain employees who share this set of values, [and are] willing to pass up talent who value balance in their lives.” Being called back to the office also means Yahoo’s remote employees must now face a morning and evening commute, which causes mostly “negative emotions in people’s daily lives,” she adds.

Yahoo’s case that having all employees working from the office fosters greater speed and efficiency has some validity, but such decisions need careful consideration, says Ravi Aron, senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Center for Technological Innovation and a professor at Johns Hopkins University. He identifies three types of workplace encounters that could potentially result in innovation. One is the “serendipitous encounter” where workers run into each other at the water cooler or elsewhere, although Aron notes that those meetings are typically “very short and shallow.”

The second type of interaction arises out of “constant collaboration,” where workers need to “share the same context and have shared [objectives],” according to Aron. Those circumstances are not usually possible if people are working from home, he adds. The third type of interaction is through “intent and design,” where two or more people need to work together. “A lot of innovation happens this way,” he says. The flip side, however, is that workers in such settings tend to spend most of their time on autopilot, focusing on routine work like operations and maintenance. “Should everybody come to office when only a small group of people need to innovate?” he asks.

The Yahoo story touches on larger issues relating to how work is performed in the modern business landscape, Aron says. He notes that “fourth screen” devices like tablets — which incorporate the “display” feature of a television, the computing power of a desktop or laptop and the communication aspect of a smartphone — are enabling “near complete mobility and portability.”

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Ban Email? Mon Dieu!

Posted on December 8, 2011

Do internal emails make you more productive, or are they a big time-waster? Reports last week on the progress made by Atos — a Paris-based global information technology services company — in its efforts to prohibit internal emails have reignited the debate.

Few thought Atos CEO Thierry Breton would pull it off when he vowed last February to become a “zero-email company within three years.” After all, Atos is Europe’s largest IT services company with 78,500 employees across 42 countries. According to Breton, emails are a “pollution of the working environment.” Social media tools and online community networks would do the job just as well, he contended.

Last week, Atos claimed a 20% drop in the volume of its internal emails six months after Breton’s declaration, says a CNN report. Amid media flurry over the Atos move, The New York Times has featured it on its “Room for Debate” page.

The Case Against …

Email raises “efficiency concerns — like the amount of time spent using it — and is also is a less effective way of communicating,” says Wharton management professor Sigal Barsade, who specializes in emotional intelligence, among other areas. “Email can be dangerous, because it leads to miscommunication. We think we are saying one thing and think the other person understands it.” Indeed, Barsade preferred to give her comments in a phone interview rather than in an email.

Research shows that ambivalence is communicated primarily through facial expression and body language, to a lesser extent through vocal means, and only about 7% through the written word, says Barsade. “When you use email, by definition you are in a weakened position to really understand what the other person wants and how they will respond.” Also, with emails, people are more likely to “say or do things they would never do if the person was in front of them or on the phone,” she adds.

According to Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner, who studies happiness as it relates to time and money, email can have a detrimental effect on productivity. “The frequent distractions [of emails] keep individuals from entering the highly creative, productive and generative state of being ‘in flow.’” That state is when an individual gets “completely engaged and absorbed in the task at hand, where time seems to melt away,” she says. Yet, she disagrees with the idea of banning emails, suggesting instead that individuals could take more responsibility for how they spend their time.

In addition to being “a constant distracter,” emails hurt productivity because many contain unimportant, useless and obsolete information, adds Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations and information management. Furthermore, some emails contain harmful links that get past spam filters. “Worse, people often feel compelled to respond lest they risk offending others.”

Schweitzer contends that many people would do well to meet face-to-face, pick-up the phone or send a letter. “If issues are complicated or if emotions might run high, face-to-face meetings are the way to go,” he says. “Similarly, if confidentiality is important, email is a poor choice.” Face-to-face meetings are possible across the world with video chats, video conferencing and products like Skype, Mogilner adds.

The Case For …

Mogilner says the benefit of email is that it is a “very efficient form of communication because it allows people to convey information quickly to multiple people without having to synchronize the exchange.” It is helpful especially when all parties to a conversation cannot find a time that works for everyone, she adds.

Email’s big plus is it offers “a great vehicle for asynchronous communication,” according to Schweitzer. “I can send you a message now, and you can respond when you have time.” He describes it as “a fantastic vehicle” for reaching groups of people, plus it helps build a record or trail, is inexpensive and is great for sending documents, he adds.

Barsade acknowledges that emails help connect people and organizations in different geographic locations. “However, that’s not an excuse for avoiding phone calls or face-to-face conversations because we rely on these more immediate cues and thus, miscommunications are still going to be more likely to happen,” she says. “It could make companies less competitive.” In a globalized world, people still need to figure out new ways to communicate in real time, she adds. “Fundamentally, we are human beings, and the way that we most effectively and emotionally communicate is with body language, facial expressions and voice, none of which are in emails.”

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The Discontented Thirties

Posted on December 5, 2011

According to a new research study by the Sloan Center on Aging & Work at Boston College, the people who are most satisfied with their jobs are older employees – those age 50 and up. The most dissatisfied? Those between the ages of 30 and 39.

Furthermore,employees age 40 and older are the most engaged and show the highest level of organizational commitment,according to the study,while those under 30 are almost as satisfied as the most satisfied group of 50 and older.

The study based its conclusions on work experience data from 11,298 individuals working for seven multinational companies at 24 worksites in 11 countries. 

So why is the 30-39 group so dissatisfied?

“That is the stage of life where people typically start a family and have young kids at home,” says Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner. “Therefore, these people are more likely to feel the strains of balancing work and life, thus pulling their minds away from being fully engaged” on the job. In addition, notes management professor Nancy Rothbard, this age group “is in an intense career stage where they are often engaged in continued on-the-job learning, with greater responsibilities.”

Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources, notes that “life satisfaction seems to hit bottom [right around] age 30,” and may be related to the fact that these employees’ “expectations are not being met.”

But as employees’ children get older,says Mogilner, “those who are career oriented can get their minds back in the game and enjoy greater satisfaction from their work. Jobs provide a great source of self-definition,particularly when people are young and starting out their careers — and identifying what careers they want to pursue — and then again when they have fulfilled the toughest years of parenting.

“Employees who are working later [in life] and who are most satisfied with their jobs may reflect a case of self-selection,” she adds. “Usually by one’s 50s,if [a person] is working,she has likely climbed up the ladder to be successful in her profession. This group is likely to continue to work if they like what they do.”

As for Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell, he is “a bit surprised by the results. My impression was that generally workers got more satisfied as they got older, and that the main reason for this was that they were generally moving into more rewarding jobs with higher pay and more responsibility. So I would expect job satisfaction to be lower for those under 30. In fact, if you look at the study, there doesn’t appear to be a statistical difference between the under 30s and the 30-39 year olds. So the results are consistent with the standard finding of job satisfaction increasing over time.”

Does the survey’s finding – that those over 50 are the most satisfied,and those over 40 the most engaged and committed – go against conventional wisdom that older workers are not as valuable as younger ones? What can be inferred from the study’s conclusions depends on what measure of engagement the authors used, says Rothbard. “It sounds like they used commitment as a proxy for engagement. So I think this more reflects the fact that those over 40 are more satisfied and committed to the organization,which can lead to greater workforce stability as it is negatively related to whether people leave.”

Bidwell says he wouldn’t “draw too much of a straight line between the commitment and value to the firm. Workers can be highly committed but also bad at their jobs, and vice versa. I’m not sure on the conventional wisdom about age. There are concerns that older workers will be less flexible than younger ones,but along many other dimensions including maturity, stability,knowledge, etc., you would expect them to outperform younger workers.”

Does the stalled economy affect these results, by, for example, creating a need for older workers to stay in their jobs longer,even as companies cut back on pay and promotions? Or is the 30 to 39 cohort always pretty dissatisfied with their lot? “I don’t think this is related to the stalled economy per se,” says Cappelli. ”After all, it’s stalled for everyone.”

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Black Thursday, Anyone?

Posted on November 14, 2011

Target, Best Buy and Macy’s, among others, are doing it; J.C Penney isn’t, and Walmart is doing it in spades.  

The “it” is the move by some stores on Black Friday to push the boundaries of consumerism farther than ever before. While retailers for years have opened their doors in the early hours (think 4 a.m.) on Friday,the day after the Thanksgiving holiday,this year they are opening at midnight Thursday,or,in the case of Walmart, at 10 p.m. that night.

According to an article in The New York Times, however, a number of shoppers are antagonized, rather than energized, by the earlier hours. Some resent the pressure to leave their Thanksgiving dinners in order to get in line for sales and special offers. Others, the article says, claim the early hours are exploiting employees who have no choice but to work the shifts that their bosses demand.

So why not just succumb to the inevitable and open stores all day on Thanksgiving?

“Certainly,it doesn’t take too much to get there,” says Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn. “One retailer opens at midnight, everyone copies; then they open at 11 p.m., everyone copies and before you know it, Thanksgiving Thursday becomes like other Thursdays – except presumably some of the ‘hot sales’ prevail that we don’t necessarily see on other Thursdays.”

And just how effective is this race to the early hours for retailers hoping that buyers spend enough on Black Friday to help them “get in the black” (hence the name “Black Friday”) for the holiday season? “Anything retailers can do to create excitement and get consumers into the stores to shop will be helpful,” says Kahn. “If retailers are able to get a jump on their competitors,and get the deal-prone shopper into their store rather than into [another's], it’s an advantage for that retailer. Unfortunately,however,if it’s a good idea that is gaining attention from the media and from shoppers,other competitors feel forced to copy – which is exactly what has happened. Then no retailer has a particular advantage. All that [means] is that the shopping time table has moved earlier for everyone.”

Marketing professor Stephen Hoch agrees. “I see no upside for anyone now that most retailers have matched competitors’ early — or is it late? — openings,” he says. “In total, all that this retailer arms race does is shift sales around a little bit with no aggregate effect. It’s a feeble attempt to try and ignite mass market spending. What is crazy to me is that there are good and bad deals all year round, but some people treat Black Friday as the one over-the-top bargain hunting event of the year. Why not be a smart shopper all year round?”

Kahn notes,however,that the midnight or early Friday morning openings “are generally promotional opportunities – which are different from regular sales…. Sometimes it is about innovative new ideas or brands,like Kohl’s with their very successful J-Lo/Mark Anthony promotions or Target’s Missoni [collection]. Other times, it is planned pricing promotions that often have a time limit, which provides a ‘scarcity’ incentive — i.e.,get to the stores on time,or miss out on the deal. These are all … a part of the season strategy which is reflected in pricing decisions,inventory decisions,merchandising decisions,etc.”

If retailers are doing a good job managing their inventory to forecasted demand,she adds,“then these scheduled planned promotions will be all that shoppers see. But,if the shopping trends are not living up to forecasted levels,there is excess inventory,and we might see ‘unplanned promotions’ very close to Christmas day as retailers try to get rid of excess inventory.”

As for the effect of Thanksgiving creep on store employees, Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner thinks that the trend towards earlier and earlier hours suggests “an unfortunate slide towards losing yet another holiday to gross consumerism. If many of the retailers open their doors on Thanksgiving, then yes, these stores will lose any competitive advantage. For the sake of their employees and for the expressed values of the company, I would recommend to stores that they differentiate themselves by not following the crowd, and that they be explicit about why they are not doing so.”

Consumers, Mogilner adds, appreciate brands that “share their values, connect to their emotions and are authentic. Caring about the well-being of employees and the preservation of this much loved, All-American holiday strongly conveys these sources of brand equity. If a store positions itself as wanting to foster the meaning of Thanksgiving … [including] spending time together with friends and family, I think there would be some value gained. This positioning should probably also convey a commitment to offering the same deals and access to those sought-after ‘steals’ the next day without cutting into precious family time.”

Kahn has a similar take. “Instead of joining in with other retailers racing to open earlier and earlier on Thanksgiving evening,the retailer could take the approach of saying,‘Let’s value family time and give thanks,’ and then say that in support of their employees and out of respect for the importance of giving thanks,they will not open at midnight Thursday, but will instead offer a special deal at noon on Friday. Something like that could differentiate a retailer in a positive way, and perhaps drive sales from other types of shoppers who might value this perspective.”

And what will Hoch be doing on Black Friday? “As an expert shopper,my rule is never go shopping on Black Friday unless it’s to buy groceries,” he says.  

A Seasonal Sales Shift: For Bargain Hunters, Retailers Make Every Day Feel like Christmas: Knowledge@Wharton

 

 

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