Science Friday - Grazing, Work-Life Imbalance. Aug. 7, 2018, Part 2

Episode Date: September 7, 2018

Each spring, animals move from their winter grazing grounds in search of greener pastures. For birds, where and when to start that journey is based on genetics, and signals from stars, and magnetic fields from the earth. But for some larger mammals like sheep and moose, they’re not born knowing where to go. They need to learn a mental migratory map—and it’s often passed down from other herd members. Ecologists Matthew Kauffman and Brett Jesmer join Ira to tell us more. Plus: Employers tend to design offices and other workspaces to maximize productivity and minimize costs—hence the rise of the open office plan. But a recent study of two large companies published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B found that open office plans reduced face-to-face contact and productivity, a counterintuitive effect. What else is changing work-life balance into an imbalance? Researchers Ethan Bernstein, Nancy Rothbard, and Sarah Andrea discuss the changing science of work. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. The end of the summer, it's back to school. But for wild animals, it's time for migration. How do animals know where to go? And to big and small animals, use the same sense of direction. For bigger animals like dear sheep and moose, there's a theory that the root is something that needs to be learned. These hooved animals need to develop a mental migratory map, kind of like your parents. showing you their favorite fishing hole.

Well, a team of scientists tested this idea out by following herds of sheep and moose all equipped with GPS collars. Their results were published this week in the journal Science. Let me introduce them to you. Matthew Kaufman is a USGS researcher, Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming and Laramie.

Welcome to Science Friday. Matthew, are you there? Yep. Welcome to the show. Thank you. You're welcome. Brett Jesmer is an ecology researcher also at the University of Wyoming, and they're both authors on this recent study. Welcome, Brett.

Thank you, Ira. Let me start out with you. I heard that this study was part of your Ph.D. dissertation that you defended yesterday. How did that go? It was fantastic. Absolutely. I'm feeling wonderful today.

That's great to hear. Matt, in your study, you looked at Big Horn, Sheep, and Moose. Can you give us a sort of thumbnail overview of the summer and winter migration these animals What do they do in Wyoming? What is their general pattern? Yeah, so Wyoming is, you know, a lot of people drive through Wyoming think it's a pretty flat state, but in fact, you know, this is where Yellowstone National Park is, where Grand Teton National Park is. This is a landscape of mountains and plains.

And so what most of the hooved animals, the ungulates in Wyoming, including big horn sheep and moose do in this state is they winter at low elevation, these valleys or sagebrush basins, and then in the spring they migrate up to the mountains for better forage, and in the fall they do a return journey back down to the low elevation valleys. And so that's what we call seasonal migration. And Brett, for this study, you introduced animals who were not from the area into a new location, and they did not immediately start to migrate. What did you find about this?

We found that when you took migratory sheep, big horn sheep, and you put them into landscapes where they had no purpose, prior experience and no knowledge of that landscape, they simply did not migrate, even though they were migratory in their previous landscape. And part of migration is following, as Matt said, these waves of forage across the landscape, and they also showed very little knowledge of how to do that on their new landscape. So does that say to you that someone has to teach them, their parents, their other siblings, so to speak, how to migrate?

Yes, that's what it does indicate. So we think that what happens is that over time, animals are learning about their landscapes and when and where to migrate. And with large herbivores like big horn sheep and moose, young individuals are literally following in the footsteps of their parents during their first year of life. And they follow them on these seasonal migrations. And we think that's when they learn how to migrate and how to track this food across the landscape.

So an animal that doesn't know how to migrate. and you had GPS collars on them to learn this. What are they doing instead? They're just hanging out? What's happening? Yeah, they're just hanging out. They move around not quite at random, but more or less like you would

if you were just wandering aimlessly on the landscape when they first arrive. Yeah, and that's one of the aspects of this research. Brett did this simulation where you basically, he created these random sheep, which had no information about the landscape, and they were just sort of moving around. like automaton on this simulated landscape,

and then he compared those to what the actual sheep did, and some of the sheep that were just newly translocated on completely new landscapes were no better than those simulated random movers. So does that mean if a sheep has no mental image, no mental map of where to go or any of these animals, they're going to starve to death? Well, they might not starve to death

because they also are able to perceive their local environment they can see and smell food, and they still forage and gain energy from their environment. But relative to the amount of energy and nutrients, they'd be gaining from their food, if they were in a landscape where they had a lot of knowledge about when and where to go to find the best food, they typically do poorer than animals who have lots of knowledge about their landscape. So what happens to a new herd of animals? That just happens to be, let's say your old migration route is wiped out. How do you learn a new one?

Right. And in many cases, when migration routes are wiped out, it might be impossible for these animals to learn new migration routes because there might not be places for them to migrate too. But what happens nowadays, we're trying to restore a lot of these migration routes and get these connections on the landscape between their winter and summer range put back together. And what we think is going to happen is that it's going to take these animals decades to relearn how. to use the landscape and migrate from their winter to their summer range. Yeah, and that's actually something that was that we showed in the study. Not all the animals, some of these animals were translocated 30, 40, 50, even 70 years ago. And so we could go back in, capture these animals, put GPS collars on them,

and then ask how well they migrated and how well they track the green up. And so we could look at time since translocation and then the watch as the propensity to migrate increases in these herds. And what you see is that big horn sheep take anywhere from 40 or 50 years to become partially migratory. And moose might take up to a century before they become fully migratory. So it takes decades and decades and generations to learn how to do that. That's amazing.

Because, you know, we hear about the birds and the bees using magnetic particles or the sun or stuff like that. And these animals just basically have to learn it over decades of where to go. Yes, absolutely. Wow. And Matt, this information is passed on, and you called it culture. This is a culture. Yeah, I mean, that's so as opposed to, you know, with some migratory taxa like birds and fish and some insects,

they actually know how to migrate. It's hardwired into their genes. but this we refer to as cultural evolution because essentially you have an individual, you know, a new individual on the landscape. They learn how to do it. Then they pass that information onto their young. The next generation does it a little bit better, explores and finds new places, new patches on the landscape, makes a better migration.

They pass that onto their young. And over time, each subsequent migration has more knowledge about the landscape until ultimately you have a herd of individuals who all have sufficient knowledge to fully exploit with a migration, you know, from the mountains to the plains and make a great living on these landscapes. So to me that says that if we lose an animal, we're wiping away a migratory map. Yeah, in fact, we are. So if you lose one or two animals, you might decrease the amount of knowledge that these populations have about their landscape. but if you lose an entire population due to disease or some other reason,

or if you just cut their migration route off, after a few generations, that knowledge will be lost because animals won't be continuing to migrate and passing that information onto their young. So the loss of these populations is not only a loss of individuals, but it's a loss of knowledge and a loss of their culture. Matt, you have a project called Wyoming Migration Initiative. What's going on there?

Yeah, that's right. So we do a lot of migration research in our group in Wyoming. We still have these sort of vast landscapes and very few people. Mule deer, elk, moose, big horn, sheep, pronghorn, all these species migrate across the state. And we were doing a lot of research, but recognizing that that research wasn't getting into the hands of, you know, conservation groups and agency managers who want to work to keep these migrations connected

and on the landscape. And so the migration initiative is a research initiative at the University of Wyoming where we focus on developing conservation tools, basically better migration maps, and also public outreach to help people understand about these migrations. Well, Brett, now that you know and you've confirmed this idea about the maps, how should we think about conservation plans for these animals? Well, simply if we can conserve the landscapes that these animals use to connect. their winter ranges to their summer ranges,

then we're conserving their knowledge. So by conserving what we have on the landscape today, I think that's a much better way to go about conservation than trying to restore a lost migration, which again is going to take decades of time. And during these decades that it takes them to learn, their populations are going to suffer because they're using these migrations

to access this high quality forage that really underpins their reproduction and survival. And Matt, but these landscapes are changing all the time. Is climate change also involved in this, changing what the landscape is? Well, that's kind of a difficult question. So one of the things with climate change, what we've seen is that these animals, you know, so partly they do have this memory, they have this mental map of where they're going, but that's not all they use.

They also are sampling the environment. you know, they're feeding on this fresh green grass and using that as a cue. And so as climate change advances spring, these animals can detect that and then move accordingly. So they use the mental map to move along that migration corridor, but they use the information about green up and snow melt and all those types of things, which climate change is influencing, to trigger the timing of their movement. So they're actually fairly adaptable to the effects of climate change. And this is precisely because they don't have a genetic code such as day length or something like that, that hardwires when they are to migrate. Do they use any sort of pheromones to follow each other, you know, or they're just pure memory of the map and being guided by where the vegetation is? I'll let Brett answer that one.

Or I should say Dr. Jesmer answer that one. Congratulations, Doctor. Thank you. That's actually an active area of research. We don't know what other types of potentially chemical cues, like you said, pheromones might be involved. But in some of these migrations, these are large groups of animals. We're talking groups in the size of hundreds that, you know, and over these groups, we're talking about thousands of animals moving on the landscape every year.

And these animals aren't, they're only together sometimes during this actual act of migration and other parts of the year, they're off in their own space. And so it's possible that as they come together, they could be following these pheromones or chemical cues that you're talking about, and that might add to their knowledge about where to migrate. I want to thank you both, Dr. Matthew Kaufman, Associate Professor at University of Wyoming and Laramie,

Dr. Brett Jesmer, Ecology Researcher, University of Wyoming, and you can see the Wyoming Migration Initiative maps up on our website at ScienceFriday.com slash migration. Thank you both for taking time to be with us today. We're going to take a break and talk about the open offices. Yeah, do you have an office without walls? How does it affect the way you work? We'll talk about it right after the break.

Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. Here at our SciFri offices, I have my own office. It's not bad. I have a window. I can close my door to hold a one-on-one meetings with my producers without bothering the rest of the team on these very stressful Friday mornings

before we go on the air. But everyone else is pretty much housed in the fishbow. You know what I'm talking about. Side-by-side desks, little barriers that you can see over if you stand up, and they try to warn each other when they have phone calls scheduled, so there aren't too many people talking at once. Sounds like a great place for a spontaneous collaboration and creativity, right? Well, that was the idea when the Open Plan Office started to get popular,

but how are Open Plan offices really working out? New research published in philosophical transactions, of the Royal Society this summer, takes another look at the claims about open offices, and it's not looking so good. Less productivity, greatly reduced face-to-face interaction, and more emailing and other indirect contact. What's going on there? Joining me is Ethan Bernstein, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business

School in Cambridge. He's a co-author on the research. Welcome, Dr. Bernstein. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. That's nice to have you. Let's track up, back up a little bit and say, how did open offices get so popular in the first place? Open office popularity has ebbed and flowed over really a century.

They partly got popular exactly for the reason you suggested. People believed that if you could see other people and be close to them, you would naturally interact with them. You collide with people in a way you wouldn't otherwise, and those collisions would turn into collaborations, would turn into ideas, innovations, and good things for companies. So that was part of it. And, of course, there was also the cost rationale. The more open our offices are, the more people you can sit in a small space, the lower the cost per square foot. So it was really an experiment from day one?

To some extent, yes, although I think the experiment made sense. Certainly, we lived in a world, well, 100 years ago, we lived in a world in which what you interacted with was what you saw. We didn't have the kind of technology we have today to allow interactions to take place. electronically, and so it made a lot of sense. Yeah. I want to invite our listeners if they are at an open office space or if they have in, you know, words they like to talk about, 844-724-8255. We'd like to hear your experiences. Also you can tweet us at SciFry and we'll take your Twitter.

They're right there. Now, tell us about what your research found. Maybe that they're not actually as good for collaboration. Give us some numbers. Fill in some data here. Yeah, so my co-author, Stephen Turbin and I, we found all the great things that are said about open offices and all the terrible things that are said about our open offices equally compelling. And so we set out to try and

study them in a way really no one had been able to do before. The past time, say 30 years ago, when open offices became really popular, we, you know, we, the academic community went out, we ran surveys, we asked people about their satisfaction with them, about their stress levels in them, and we used those self-reported data to try and understand people's responses to them. But that didn't really answer the question, do we collaborate more when we're put in open space with each other? Nowadays, you can use sociometric badges,

the sorts of badges you can wear around your neck that have all sorts of sensors in them. You can use all the digital red crumbs we leave when we send people emails than I am. You can actually see how much people interact with others at work before and after moved to open office, and that's what we did. And to your point, we found that,

face-to-face interaction, despite these vibrant arguments for open offices, actually were reduced in the open space by about 70% in two different Fortune 500 corporate headquarters. Let me just get that right. You said 7070% reduction? 7.0. It was surprising for us. We weren't necessarily surprised by the direction of the effect, but we were surprised by the degree. And much of that communication, it didn't just stop. It just moved online. and it actually moved into electronic forms in email and instant messaging. Would people actually email an instant message the person next to them in the cubicle? It sounds surprising, but then again, many of us expect these loud, vibrant environments.

Then when we look around when people actually move into open offices, what do we see? We see people wearing headphones, staring intently at their computer screens because everyone can see them. If I see someone across staring intently at their screen wearing headphones, I'm not going to interrupt them. but I'm going to know their computer. I'm saying, well, I might as well just send them an email. And to some extent, that's what our research data showed. And could you tell about productivity any changes in this? At one of the two contexts, we had hints that, at least in the estimation of the executives there, productivity had fallen.

But I'm very careful with that result. Many people seem to want to believe that this study suggests that open offices are bad. I don't think it's going to be a long time, at least before we can say bad or good. But at the very least, these were unintended consequences. These organizations wanted to use the open office to achieve more face-to-face collaboration because they believe that would be good for their business, and they ended up with the opposite. Wow, that is fascinating. You would think the people in an open place would be more interactive, but 70% decrease.

That's amazing. You know, we spend a lot of time at work with our coworkers, and it's natural to form friends. friendships, if you're in an open office or any kind of office. But what are the pitfalls? It turns out there are more than a few. And here with new research on where work and friendship can become uncomfortable is Nancy Rothbard, professor and chair in management at the Wharton School, famous Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Welcome, Dr. Rothbard. Thank you. So let's talk about workplace friendships. Why are workplace friendships so different from? other kinds of friendships or relationships, or are they? So workplace friendships are really interesting because they're like other friendships, but they have this added component, which is that we have a lot of constraints in organizations around, you know, what our expectations are, what our goals are, that are sometimes at odds

with some of the goals of friendship. So, for example, a lot of times with friendship, the primary goal is to, you know, to to support a friend or to have a relational goal around that relationship being positive. And in the workplace, that may be the case, but you also have additional goals of getting the work done or being instrumental about achieving a particular goal that may have nothing to do with the relationship.

And so it becomes challenging to navigate sometimes, these competing goals in ways that are both healthy for the friendship, but also good for the work. So it's really a challenge for the workers to figure out how to balance those two things. Absolutely. I think that it often falls to the individual worker to kind of navigate those waters and figure out how can I nurture my friendship without crossing a line. but it's also, I think, incumbent on managers to be aware that those are really challenging dynamics for people and that they really have to manage those as well as the work itself. Let's talk about some of the specific things that can go wrong. And, you know, to me, one of the most obvious is, you know, the form of romantic relationships between people in the office space.

What are some of the other things that could go wrong? Yeah, it's funny that you start there because I think that is where we all go, right? It's, you know, we go immediately to where we cross that line. But there are other even more mundane kinds of things about friendship that can also pose a problem. So, for example, just the very simple case of being distracted by a friend at work, right? So if you've got a friend who has a problem, it's a very natural to want to support them, to want to listen to them, to hear them out, to make sure they're okay. But that may conflict with your ability to get your own work done. or if you have a deadline, you know, to meet that deadline or what have you.

And so the very mundane aspect of just the pure distraction that it can provide can be really challenging. It's also a problem in the context of groups oftentimes. So not just between individual pairs of friends, but in larger groups. You can have some interesting dynamics that arise from friendship. and some of that has to do with, are there subgroups in a larger group where, you know, you have a clear divide where there are friends that you might see as being natural allies because of their friendship? And that can cause a lot of questions to arise.

Yeah. We have Ethan Bernstein on the line with us also from Harvard Business School who was telling us then in the open office environment, he found that there was 70% of, less face-to-face interaction. I'm amazing. You know, they thought there would be more interaction. Does an open office space change the dynamics of a friendship and how those friendships are formed? I mean, I'm familiar with Ethan's work, and I think it's terrific.

And I think it poses new questions for us about how friendship dynamics play out, as you suggest, Ira. I think that what's really interesting there is that. that friendships can exist either face to face or not face to face. A lot of my work has looked at online social media and how that's changing the nature of how we relate to one another, especially in terms of friendship types of dynamics. And I think it's really kind of fascinating that the open office space where things are really visible and transparent

can sometimes make us feel more inhibited. And I think the same goes, ironically, for online social media, where the transparency of seeing who's connected to who and what everybody's posting and are you in the in-group or are you not can make some of those dynamics even more challenging and difficult to navigate. Let's go to the phones 844-724-8255. Let's go first to Denver.

Hi, Julia. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, thank you for having me. Hi, go ahead. So, yeah, so I worked remotely for a solar manufacturer, and I was the only person in the Rocky Mountain region. And I found it really isolating and really, you know, that challenged my productivity. So I actually got an office space at the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, which was a co-working space, specifically for companies. in the realm of sustainability and for nonprofits. And I actually found that it really boosted my productivity to actually feel like I was part of a community

and to be able to take those occasional breaks and check in with other people. And I also found that, like, we actually, I ended up building a lot of really important relationships out of my time working there. And you had a lot of groups that were kind of working on different issues, like maybe like wild lands restoration. and then you had people working on solar, but they would end up collaborating on things greater than their specific industry as a result of all getting to know each other.

So you found out that, you know, because I was going to go into that direction eventually about what about people who work from home, or is that more productive versus, but you're saying, it's nice to hear from me, you're saying that you got more productive once you went into a sort of a co-lab situation where everybody shared stuff.

Nancy, what do you think about that? I think that that's really an, important point because I think one of the things that we want to emphasize in the work that we've done is that friendships are important and having relationships with the people can be incredibly energizing. And as you describe, you know, that the ability to occasionally take breaks and connect with people, that provides tremendous rejuvenation and recover for people. And also the relationships you form can be very helpful in terms of sharing knowledge. So I think that's actually really critical to acknowledge as a baseline. And then where our work goes is to say the problems can come

in when people overdo that or where things get out of hand or where the boundaries become less clear. And that's where it just becomes a little tricky to navigate. And what we're trying to do is to raise awareness about that. But I think that you raise a really important point. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Talking about working. an office space and how you deal with it. Ethan Bernstein, what's your reaction to whether it's better to work alone or from home or collaborating with others? I thought Julia had a great question that did a nice job of bringing together my research and Nancy's in this following way. I studied organizations.

I studied the ways in which people were working in a common open office space within an organization. So they all had interdependent work. My work was necessarily related to the work across the table from me and down the table from me, and we were all part of the same organization, which, by the way, the same organizational politics. When we go into spaces like co-working spaces, the kind of space that Julian mentioned, or we work, or other kinds of co-located co-working spaces, we're surrounded by people who look like us, who are probably doing work that's, to some extent, similar to us, and that's motivating.

It's actually very good, potentially, for, forming the kind of friendships that Nancy is studying. What it doesn't have is the politics of knowing that if the person across from me approaches me, I really have to respond. I can't focus on the work I'm doing because we're in the same organization. And for that matter, we probably have a very different relationship within a co-working space than I would within an open office within my organization. And so it's an important, actually, an important consideration for how you treat our results.

Our results are really focused on organizations, not those co-working spaces. spaces. A tweet from Sarah who says, when you're as social and chatty as I am, open office space is great for making friends but hard for productivity, especially when you're a writer like me. It sort of seems to reflect what you said. Ethan, in general, do we have less privacy in the workplace now? Oh, absolutely. It's a combination of physical space and technology. We have far less privacy. Once upon a time, I don't think we had too much privacy concerns. when we were at work. And these days, there's always some degree to which we're looking for sometimes individual-level privacy, like you mentioned, Ira, in your office, but sometimes just group level. We're looking for spaces where our group can work and talk and not bother others. And by the way, ask HR professionals about the move to open office, and nine out of ten them will probably tell you, the first thing that happens, people start, like Julia, working from

home because they're looking for privacy, and that's the easiest way for them to find it. And I've heard enough people say, that's when I get all my best work done, that this does, again, emphasize when we can create that privacy for ourselves. We might be creating good work, but perhaps Nancy's work, we're not getting the same opportunities to make friends at work. I just have time for a quick comment about something called hot desking where no one has a desk. You walk in with your laptop and that's your desk for the day, Ethan. What do you think of that? I haven't done research on it. There's some interesting evidence out there both for and again.

I think it really, again, gets to this question of how do we want to use our open offices? Do we want to use them for affiliation? Do we want to use the open office space just for a place to get work done? And then when we want to affiliate with others, we go somewhere else. It depends on how we're going to use the space. All right. We'll come back and talk lots more about it. We have a lot of people who are tweeting and sending us a phone call,

the number 844-724-8255. Stephanie says, I work in an open office and call it debilitary. flu this year from the woman who sat 18 inches from me. They are terrible for spreading diseases. We haven't touched on that, but maybe there are. We'll talk all about this open space, closed offices, what your thoughts are. 844-724-8255. We'll be right back after this break.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We've been talking about what new research can tell us about friendship at work, the spaces we work in and are increasingly transparent and connected work on personal lives. But there are other kinds of challenges that have been around for a long time. Let's talk about the service industry. Working for tips. It means that customers decide your take-home pay.

And your economic security can also depend on last-minute scheduled changes or regular hours and putting up with some, well, let's just say, some bad behavior. Which means it might not surprise you to hear, Women who rely on tips are at a significantly greater risk of depression and other mental health problems, according to new research in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Here to talk about that new research is Sarah Andre, Master of Public Health and a PhD candidate Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Welcome, Sarah.

Thank you, Ira. It's a pleasure to be here. It's so nice to have you. Let's talk about why it seems important to look more closely at people who work. for tips and their mental health? So, you know, the workplace can be the source of a variety of stressors. And in the service industry in particular, you know, people are having to deal with things like irregular shifts, schedules that can change at the last minute, not having access to things like paid leave or health insurance.

And on top of that, they're having to sometimes deal with difficult or hostile customers. And if you're a tipped worker, which 4.3 million people in this country are, there's this added element where in many places you can, be paid as little as $2.13 per hour with this expectation that you'll make up the difference in tips. But customers can be very unpredictable and discriminatory in their tips. We know that people earn more on tips if they're attractive, if they're white, and even if they're men. If they're men. So you see you were studying how women were tipped less and what effect it might have on their mental health? So we don't have that level of information for our study. but other researchers that have looked into this have observed that women are tipped less than men.

That's interesting. Who were these workers in your study? How do we know women in tip jobs are more depressed? So in our study, we are looking at this nationally representative sample of adolescents that had been followed into adulthood, and they're in their late 20s, early 30s. And the bulk of the folks that were working in these tipped occupations were working as, you know, waitresses and bartenders. But there were other things like nail technicians, hair dressers, and so on in there as well. But the majority were waitresses and bartenders.

And how big a difference did tips versus other kinds of work making women's mental health? So for depression, we did see that women in these tips service occupations were, had 66% greater odds of reporting depression than women in these non-service occupations, like women working as secretaries and offices. Were you able to understand why women were affected so much more than men? So with our data, we are limited in making the assessment. However, we do know that women make up the bulk of the tipped workforce. And from other literature out there, we know that customers leave them smaller tips,

that women can experience sexual harassment, that they tend to end up in the lower-paying tipped occupations. And in our particular study, we did observe that a greater proportion of the men had access to things, sorry, a great proportion of the men that were in these tipped occupations, had access to things like paid leave and health insurance than the women did, and that they were paid more per hour on average. There is a lot of public health research out there looking at the health effects of shift work, irregular sleep and stress.

are there enough people looking at the effects of wages? I think we could definitely stand to have a few more folks join this investigation because people are definitely looking more at minimum wage, right? You know, we've got in this country the federal minimum wage is $7.25. But what has kind of been left out of the conversation in terms of health, it's been looked at in terms of people experiencing economic hardship, but the health implications of it for the tip. workers have been minimally assessed.

Tip workers in this country, the federal minimum wage for someone in a tipped occupation is $2.13 per hour. $2.13. Exactly. And this, of course, is something that different states, you know, the state has the ability to mandate a higher wage if they would like to. And some do, but still a majority of the country has this two-tiered minimum wage system in place, where tipped workers are earning less per hour from their employer. and reliant on the tips from the customers to make up the difference.

Now, I know from being in restaurants that there are some that do not allow tips, and they just add the cost of paying their employees better to the price of the food. Is this the solution? I mean, it's possible. I think that it definitely warrants further investigation. Between, you know, looking at these different restaurants that have done this and seeing how, you know, their workers are doing both economically and in terms of their health, but also exploring options like doing away with this secondary sort of minimum wage standard for tip workers.

Is that where you're going to work next? Is that some more of your study? Yes, so we are, our research team at the OHSUPSU School of Public Health is currently investigating, you know, whether increasing the tipped worker wage could improve the health of women. So that is where our eyes are on right now. That's interesting. and we wish you good luck in your work and have you back when we learn some more about it. Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Sarah Andre is Master of Public Health and Ph.D. candidate at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. And we're still here with Nancy Rothbard, Professor and Chair in Management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Ethan Bernstein, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School in Cambridge. Ethan, Nancy, do you see any important changes coming to the service? service industry, the tipping people and any of your research? It's actually really fascinating because I've done some research on service workers, mainly in the call center space. But I think that the question around tipping is really a

fascinating one because it's a voluntary behavior. And, you know, the way that we interact with other people and the respect and the relationships we form with them really make a big difference in terms of that kind of interaction. And so I do think that there are different expectations of different folks with regard to the relationships. And I was just really fascinated by what she was describing with the implications for health. Let's go to the phones. 844-724-8255. Let's go to Alabama.

Michael, welcome to Science Friday. Good afternoon. Before I ask my question, oh, how I wish that I could have gotten into your conversations about robots as I'm a funny animal, humanoid memorabilia collector, and along with the other artwork that I do, I work in the MGM Warner Brothers Disney, Hannah Barbarra style, and I wanted to ask them about the possibility of humanoid robots in the future that are larger than robosapians, such as the Wow Wee Wee Toys brand. You'll just have to wait for the next show. Do you have a question for us on this topic? callers at the time on the phone bank.

Here's what I want to ask. I have a home-based business, home-based studio, although I do work in the service industry, in a sense, Christian social work volunteering, especially in art and music therapy. But that's partly because I was born with a very rare birth autism and contracted two mental. illnesses later on in my adolescence and college years. And yet, they mentioned creativity. Collaboration with others is extremely important, not just for those of us in fine arts, entertainment, journalism, advertising, religious, and educational media, such as you people in public broadcasting, but for other fields, science and engineering and technology and medicine, for instance. But what could be intimidating for co-workers to talk to one another is if one of

them, you just mentioned depression in our wonderful and too often undervalued service and female service employees, especially like at hotels and motels, have they studied the effects of speech, autism, or the less well-known social autism, like I was born with, or mental illness and their tendency to intimidate a person because that person's been criticized, made fun of far too often by peers and criticized, sometimes punished far too often by authority figures in their childhood and adolescent years. The kind I had, they hadn't even heard of in public schools down here in Alabama in the 70s. All right, Michael, I'm running out of time.

Let me get an answer for you. Thanks for the question. Nancy? So I'm trying to understand the, so I think that the crux of that question is, do you have, how do you deal with people in terms of social relationships in the workplace where the behavior may not be what is expected by others? And that's always a challenge for both coworkers and managers. and I think that it's something that is particularly important to manage as a boss if you do see people who are having trouble relating to others and are not not seeming to be included.

The other piece that I got out of that question was the question about collaboration. And I think that it's really important to distinguish collaboration from friendship. I think that we can collaborate a lot of times with people who we're not necessarily close friends with. And it's really important that we're able to do so. That's one of the aspects of friendship at work that I think is really different from friendship in other contexts. Because one of the pieces about what makes the workplace unique is that we often do have to collaborate with people who we're not friends with. and we have to be able to get along with them and respect them and treat them in professional ways. And I think that that links to what Ethan was saying earlier about office politics

and the difference between being in an organization where we're all playing by the same rules versus a co-working space where there's perhaps more informal interactions between people and there's not the same expectations around collaboration. And so I think that that's actually a really important piece for us to remember and keep in mind when we're thinking about social relationships at work. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. Ethan, how do you react to our caller and his concerns about how people react to him and other people who may, you know, might pass judgment on people who have some sort of mental challenges? I have two responses. The first is quick, there's just so much room for more research on mental health in the workplace.

and that may indeed be a place to go with some of this research on open offices going forward. Unfortunately, I don't have any evidence to share on that, but I do have on this topic of collaboration that he brought up and that Nancy's picked up on. Nancy identified difference between collaborating for productivity and creating friends at work. I've done another study with professors Jesse Shore and David Lazare up here in Boston on what makes for valuable collaboration. On the one hand, yes, we need to be interacting with people to be collaborating with them well. On the other hand, our research shows that intermittent collaboration is actually much more

valuable for problem solving, the kind of complex problem solving that most of us do at work, than constant interaction is. And so quality collaboration may actually not be constant interaction. It may be some degree of interaction and some degree of isolation. And that may actually be a difference between office spaces 50 years ago where we would have been struggling to get the interaction we want, and office spaces today where this gentleman and others might be trying to find ways to disengage for a little bit of time and then engage later.

In other words, if you give each other time to breathe and think independently, some idea may pop into your head. Well, if we're all collaborating or interacting all the time, then collaboration actually looks a lot like copying. If we're solving a problem, if somebody has a good idea, we just take that idea and run with it. Why create more? As opposed to if we actually give ourselves some time apart,

we'll spend a little bit more time generating new ideas, being a little bit more creative. When we come back together, we'll have more to share, and actually the best of us might learn more from the least lower performing of us, because the lower performing of us may have come up with some ideas that help the best of us, who gives them their solution to the problem. Let's go to see if we can get one more calling from Erin in Bay Area, California.

Hi, Erin. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, go ahead. Okay, so I love that last point about intermittent, you know, having both, because my point is that for introverts, open office spaces are really terrible for mental health and for productivity. and Susan Kane actually detailed some of the research in her book Quiet, talking about how we need that time to concentrate on our own to be productive. And then also, I mean, for an introvert, it's just completely over-stimulating to be in that kind of environment.

Yeah, we've had, I have a tweet from Catherine who says, was the open space designed done by an extrovert? As an extreme introvert, that kind of office space sounds awful. So you seem to be agreeing with that. Let me get a comment. What do you think about that, Ethan? I think we should go back and see if the original inventor of the open office was an extrovert to be MBTI and see where that goes. It's an interesting question.

Unfortunately, in our case, we weren't able to piece apart the different personality types of the people working in our spaces. I'm familiar with Susan Kane's work. It's fabulous. But obviously, what we do think is there is this degree to which giving people some option, of course, collectively, giving them the option to intermittently work in each. It would be valuable, at least for the collaboration and productivity side. Interesting question, I guess, perhaps for Nancy, is whether that's true on the friendship side as well. Do friendships also need time together and time apart to grow well?

Nancy, what do you say? I think that's a great point that Ethan makes because friendships are really, if we're together all the time, then there's no new information to bring. new experiences to share. And so that kind of alternating between, you know, togetherness and apartness, I think, is a really important rhythm of friendships. And, you know, one of the things that also is really interesting to me about this point about introversion and extroversion is that it's really important to understand, I think, to recognize that introverts have very deep friendships. It's just that they may develop and be nurtured in different ways.

than extroverts, right? And so it's really important to think about that. All right, Nancy, thank you. I'm sorry we've run out of time. Nancy Rothbard, Professor in Management at the Wharton School, Ethan Bernstein, Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard. That's all the time we have for today. One last thing before we go, Science Friday is pleased to announce the 2018 Science Friday Educator Collaborative.

Seven awesome teachers from around the country have come up with exciting new lessons, engineering challenges, and experiments for students, all inspired by the science stories you hear each week on the show. You can find all these new classroom resources, plus application information for the 2019 program. Go to ScienceFriiday.com slash educate. ScienceFriiday.com slash educate. Great new teaching materials from our 2018 Science Friday Educator Collaborative.

BJ Leadman and composed our theme music, and of course, every day is Science Friday now on social communities all during the week. Have a great weekend. I'm Ira Flato in New York.