Speaking of Psychology - The Challenge of Telework During COVID-19 with Kristen Shockley, PhD

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

Over the past several months, millions of newly remote workers have found themselves juggling work and family responsibilities from hastily improvised home offices. Kristen Shockley, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, discusses her research on how these new teleworkers are adapting and talks about what the pandemic may mean for the future of remote work. Join us online August 6-8 for APA 2020 Virtual. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're juggling a lot, but you can still squeeze in a financial plan. With the Northwestern Mutual Financial Advisor as your partner, it's not only possible, it's personalized. So if you're tying the knot, closing on a house, or welcoming a little one, you'll be ready for whatever life tosses your way. It's the right time to feel less stressed and more certain. That's a better way to money. Let's get started at nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Millions of Americans who once spent their days in offices are now entering their fourth month of full-time telework, commuting to their new desks in their basements or corners of living rooms, often while also trying to take care of children whose schools, summer camps, and daycares are closed.

Other workers, meanwhile, are outfitting themselves with masks and hand sanitizer and cautiously returning to their long empty cubicles. In addition to being a public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a forced, unplanned experiment in mass telework and work-family conflict. How is it turning out for American office workers? Have we been more or less productive? And what might be the effects on the future of work? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association.

I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. Dr. Shockley has spent her career studying the University of Georgia. intersection of work and family life. She's conducted research on how employees balance work and family demands, how work family conflict affects people's health, and how dual career couples navigate work and family roles. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, she realized that the upheaval caused by school and office closures made those questions even more pressing, and she set out to investigate how workers are adjusting. Welcome to speaking of psychology, Dr. Shockley. Thank you for having me.

You received a rapid response grant from the National Science Foundation to look at how workers are coping with the abrupt transition to telework during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Can you talk about why you thought it was important to do this research now, how you're doing it, and what questions are you asking? Yeah, so when, I think it was March 13th, when we started realizing that a lot of people were going to be transitioning to remote work, I contacted one of my longtime collaborators at the University of South Florida, Tammy Allen, and said, should we try to get a rapid grant to study this, just because this is sort of a natural experiment like we've never seen before with so many people moving into remote work. So we proposed a study to the National Science Foundation

and I think we wrote it up within eight days and heard back seven days later that it was funded. So the whole process has been very rapid. And we set out really to explore best practices in remote work because there's been a good amount of research on it, but it's largely cross-sectional data comparing non-telecommuters to telecommuters. So what we wanted to dig into is within a sample of people who are all telecommuting, where you don't have some of these selection effects like managers picking people they want to telecommute.

When everybody's in the kind of same situation, what are factors that vary day-to-day that might impact people's well-being as well as their productivity? So we just thought it was really just an unprecedented time to study these important issues and then be able to say we have some evidence-based recommendations moving forward to disseminate broadly. Do you have any results yet that you could talk about? So we just wrapped data collection up on Saturday. So we haven't analyzed anything formally. I did dig into the data a little bit just to look at some descriptive things. a few of the interesting things I saw where we asked people, and I should say the entire sample,

they're all working fully remote, but we're not working remote very much at all, 10% or less before COVID. So we asked them, while COVID remains a public health threat, and what percent at the time would you want to stay working remote? And the vast majority said 100%. Wow. Yeah. I mean, I think it was 90% of the samples said 100%. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, that speaks to the fact that people are saying, you know, I don't want the risk. And even if this arrangement's not perfect, it's worth it to not, you know, expose potential exposure. We also asked once COVID is no longer as big of a threat, what percentage of the time would you like to work remote?

And there we saw a very spread out distribution. So the most common responses were 100 and zero, but then it was really. out, really spread out in between, and the average was 46%. What that's telling me is, you know, some people are liking it, some aren't. I think for most people, they're seeing working remote some at the time would be nice, but this 100% has some downsides, probably largely in terms of, you know, social isolation, not feeling like you get out of a house ever. So let's shift gears for a minute to talk about telework more broadly.

Even before the pandemic, more than 26 million Americans, were working remotely, at least part of the time, which is about 16% of the total U.S. labor force of 165 million. How well was that working? There's kind of an idea in the popular imagination that people slack off and they're less productive when they telework. Does the research back that up? Yeah, there is that huge perception. And we look at the headlines are kind of all over the place with is teleworking a good or a bad thing, you know, pre-COVID. And actually the data really don't suggest that people typically slack off. If anything, they show that people are the same or more productive. We don't have a lot of good experiments, you know, which is the best way to really disentangle

is it teleworking that's causing you to be more or less productive. But there was one really solid experiment out there. And they found it was in a call center and they found that the workers who worked from home made significantly more calls every day. They actually worked longer hours. But the quality of their calls were just as high as they were before. So suggesting people are more efficient, I think, from home, which is, in a lot of cases, I would say largely because you're not being interrupted by coworkers in the noisy environment of the office. Now, of course, COVID's a little bit different because people have kids at home, so they may have interruptions if they wouldn't under a normal remote work arrangement where they would have child care.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some early adopters, including Best Buy, IBM and Yachter, were reversing policies that allowed employees to telecommute. They cited leadership changes in a growing need for a creative collaboration. Do you think that these companies will continue on that path once the emergency is over? Yeah, those are really interesting, especially Best Buy, because they had been really progressive, actually, in allowing people to work however or wherever. And then I was surprised to see them roll that back because the data actually, at least the data that was published suggested that was working. But I think moving forward, based on what I'm seeing, just in informal discussions as well as in headlines, I think a lot of companies are going to become much more open to remote work.

I think it's going to be important for recruitment and retaining people in the workforce now that a lot of people have gotten a taste for it. I think a lot of employees are going to sort of demand it and want a workforce to allow that. And there's also a lot of benefits from a cost-saving standpoint. You don't have to have as much office space so you can save on real estate. And you can also, if you have a fully remote workforce, you can recruit from anywhere in the world, which really puts you an advantage in trying to get top talent. So I'm projecting, you know, there's no way really to know, but I think we will see more of a shift to remote work moving forward. Is teleworking equally good for everyone? Is there some kind of a profile of the person who thrives and the person who really struggles?

Yeah, that's a great question. And that was one of the things we're trying to uncover in our grant and our rapid grant because there's hardly any research out there at all on the topic. I think there's one study that looked at personality. But other than that, there's a lot to be done. So we're exploring different personality variables in our dataset. We're also exploring things like family structure, the way that you like to manage work in family. Because if you're someone who really likes to keep them separate, obviously working from home, does not allow you to do that.

So we're predicting it's going to be more of a challenge for people like that. We're also exploring aspects of the physical office at home. I think that makes a really big difference in how well and comfortable people are telecommuting. If you have a setup where your chair's not quite right, you don't have the multiple monitors, you're just not comfortable. And I think it's hard to be productive and enjoy teleworking in that arrangement. So there's some basic ideas out there in the literature, but that's something we're hoping to really hone in on with this new data.

I remember hiring my first teleworking staff for more than 15 years ago, and the only ways we could stay connected were by email and the telephone. But now there are applications like Teams and Google Hangouts and Zoom. Was telework already on the upswing before the pandemic, notwithstanding the rollbacks that I mentioned just a minute ago? Yeah, so it seems to be that the trend is, you know, more and more people teleworking. and people starting to take advantage of some of these technologies you're talking about.

And what the academic literature was suggesting pre-COVID was it's best to use the most, what they call high fidelity technology that you can use. So that would be, you know, use Zoom or Skype or Teams over the phone. Because when you see people face-to-face, or not, I guess not face-face, but when you can see people's face while you're speaking, you know, that's supposed to mimic more of a face-to-face interaction. And so that was sort of the common advice that I had been giving to people. But what's been interesting during the pandemic is this concept of Zoom fatigue.

Right. I mean, a lot of discussion about it. I'm experiencing it myself. So that had not been researched at all. So that's something else that we're exploring in our grant because we have daily reports of what technology people use and how much during, you know, how frequently they use the different technologies throughout each day. So we're going to try to predict sort of what's the opposite. level of using these technologies because I think in some cases they're really useful, but maybe we were starting to overuse them when things could have just been a quick phone call

and we started relying on on Zoom or teams. That's interesting. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what comes out there. In a recent review of the research, you talked about how some people are segmenters and others are blenders and that segmenters may find remote work more difficult. Can you explain what that all means? Yeah, so that's the concept of boundary management strategy. So individuals exist on this continuum.

So at one end, you have the segmenters. And these are the people who really like to keep work and family separate. So they're not talking about work when they get home. They're not talking about their personal life at work. They're not going to have pictures on their desk at work. They're just really think of them as two separate domains. And then the other end, you have the integrators. And they're the exact opposite.

You know, they're the people that are constantly while at work, juggling things from home. They might get home and be really likely to work later in the evening, checking emails all the time. And so it's just really a personal preference of what strategy people works best for them to manage working family. So when you're working from home, then you have this added challenge of if you're a segmenter, it's really hard to keep those things separate when they're occurring in the same location. So advice we give to people in that situation is try to have a separate room that's really designated as your workspace that's only used for that. And it's, which, you know, is easier set than done depending on where you live and the kind of

space you have. But that's the ideal situation. And to have a door so that you can close that so your family members know, okay, when that door is closed, that means this person is, I have to think of them as not here. So those are some kind of tricks to try to make it feel more segmented. What about differences between managers and line employees when it comes to teleworking? Is it, is it harder to be a remote manager? And how do employees react to having a boss who teleworks?

Yeah, that's another thing where there's not very much research on the topic at all. There's one study about bosses who telework and comparing them, their relationship with their subordinates who are in office and their subordinates who are also teleworking. And the other comparison is managers who are in the office. So you have kind of these four different quadrants. And not surprisingly, that the relationship. relationships are a bit more strained with the managers who are working remote. They don't explore why, but my hypothesis would be they're just not having as many

interactions with people. You don't have the chance just when you're walking by someone to kind of have that informal back and forth in the hallways. So I think there are some challenges there. And another thing we set out to explore in the grant was what are actually the best practices for managers who are telecommuting? because there's a lot of theoretical discussion of that sort of ideas put forth in the academic literature, but we don't have a lot of actual data to back it up.

So that was something, that was a core part of our study, was to say, well, you know, what kind of things are managers doing on a daily basis when people are having a good day and what kind of things are they doing that sort of contribute to people not having a great day? So that's another question, which I hope to have data to be able to speak more directly to it in the future. A lot of questions out there. They really are, and that's really why we did this grant because it's just amazing how little we have actual empirical evidence for. The American Psychological Association conducted a stress in America survey last month that found nearly half of parents with children under age 18 at home said their stress levels related to the coronavirus pandemic were high, with managing the kids online learning a significant source of stress for many. what can people do to make this work, life, family balancing act easier?

I feel like that's a million dollar question right now. Right? Yeah, I mean, it's such an unprecedented thing because most of what we know about teleworking comes from assuming people have kids in school or childcare during the time when they're working. So I can say I have another data set not related to my grant where we got data from couples who were both working and continuing to work during COVID, but had young kids who were at home and their child care,

either daycare or their nanny, was no longer coming. And we were exploring, what are people doing? What are the strategies to better manage this? And so we asked them a lot of open-ended questions. And I've been reading through those. Again, that data collection is just finished recently, so I don't have a full analysis. But as I'm reading through it,

I'm seeing a lot of people engaging in a lot of very detailed, detailed scheduling with their part. Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's thinking about, okay, let's take the day. Let's break it up into chunks. This is my portion of uninterrupted time. And then we switch off and I have primary responsibility for the kids.

And then we switch back to the other spouses and we are both working with their young kids when they're napping. And then some people, a lot of people were saying, you know, we're waking up earlier and going to bed later to try to make this work. But to the extent to which that's a long-term strategy, I'm guessing not. I'm assuming there's going to be a lot of burnout. And we have measured that in the data set. So I'm interested to see if these different strategies that people use link differently to that. But I think the best thing is really being proactive, not just winging it, but trying to see what you can do to feel like it's fair within your relationship to the extent if you both are able with flexible jobs to help with the child care. And your kids will cooperate.

So when it's mommy time, it's only mommy time. Yeah, right. That's the other layer of it. And also just thinking about the burnout aspect of it. So recognizing when you're at a point when you're about to break. So saying, okay, I've got to, we've got to switch something up because I need a day just to myself. I think that's a really big thing that's getting overlooked in this pandemic is just the loss of sort of me time and the loss of. of ability to practice self-care. And I think it's important for people to figure out the way that they can do that in the context of sheltering at home and the current pandemic. Yeah, are you looking at people taking vacation time as part of this study as well? That seems to be a real challenge for a lot of us. Like, why would I take time off?

I can't go anywhere. Yeah, so we did ask how many PTO days people had and how many they planned on using. And so we do have that data. But it was more in the context of using it. We just asked, are they going to use it? We didn't ask why. I've seen a lot of people talking about it in the open-ended reports, more about using it because they have no other option for child care and being really stressed about that.

Like, I don't know what we're going to do when these 10 days run up. But we didn't get anything about the vacation aspect, which is really, really interesting because usually people have that kind of break. And now it's tough to figure out what you would do with that time. There have been media reports about how the burden of balancing work and caregiving is disproportionately falling on women, and some have suggested that the pandemic might set women back in the workplace for years to come. I understand you have another study going on now looking at how dual career couples are navigating, I'm wondering what you think and what your research might suggest about how this time will affect women in particular and whether these fears are justified.

Yeah, so the data set that we have is all couples where both are working and both have young children at home and child care has been disrupted. And so we have these open-ended reports that people are about what they're doing to manage right now. And we haven't, we're still in the process of coding. Then we've gone through many iterations. We're almost finished with it. But I don't have actual frequencies to tell you at this point. But I can say just in my reading of these and we have 317 couples. So it's quite a bit of descriptions.

scenarios here. A lot of what I'm seeing is genderized. So a lot of it is in the heterosexual couples, which is the bulk of our sampler, you're seeing the woman is the one scaling back more. A lot of the comments say things like, well, I make less, so it makes more sense for me to scale back. And if you think about that from a bigger picture in society, we know we have this pay gap. Well, then when you're making decisions like this based on pay, then it's sort of this vicious cycle, right. So then women are, okay, well, I'm the one who makes less, so I'm the one who's scaling back more. And then that could have some long-term career repercussions. So I do think that the disproportionate division of labor that we see with child care and household labor is being

exacerbated right now by the pandemic. And as part of that, do you find that men and women experience work family conflict differently? Yeah, so that's a good question. And I had done a study that was published in the journal with Applied Psychology in 2017, it was a meta-analysis. So we aggregated the results of 350 primary studies. So we had this huge sample size of over 200,000 people. And we looked at gender differences in work-family conflict because people usually think women have more conflict. And we actually found no to very, very small gender differences, which was a pretty surprising finding, I think, to us and to a lot of people.

That's all based on the way that it's typically measured in the academic world. So that would be questions to measure work-family conflict. The questions would be things like, my work interferes with my family life more than I would like. And then you answer it on a like-ard scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. And we found no differences there. But what we couldn't speak to in that data set is maybe for men and women, you know, the anchors have different meanings.

Yeah. So it could, you know, women are so socialized to think about work family issues, I think much more than men. And so they kind of expect to have to deal with this issue. And so the same situation for a man and a woman might be appraised as just an agree on the scale for a woman where it's a strongly agree for a man. And you really speak to that with the nature of our data. But we're doing some follow-up research to try to disentangle it more. One study we're doing is a lab study where we brought men and women not going to. couples, but just separately men and women that were all parents into our lab. And they read

these stories about work family conflict situations that we had based off of actual real stories we got from people in a previous study. And then we measured their physiological reactions. So we have this watch called the Empatica Watch, which measures your galvanic skin response and your heart rate and a couple other things, which are indications of stress. We also measured their cortisol levels to see if there's a physiological difference. And we didn't find anything with cortisol. We're still working on analyzing the other data. But then we asked, how do you think you would feel in this situation and a variety of different emotions like guilty, angry, irritated? And by a huge margin, the women reported much higher emotional reactions. Yeah. Right. Especially guilt.

That was the one that stood up the most. I was waiting for that. Yeah. To me, that suggests that there is, you know, maybe they are reporting the same level of conflict, but I think that women are internalizing it and letting it affect their well-being more so than men are. But we need to do a little bit more research before I firmly say that. But the follow-up stuff we're doing now is just to try to see, is this null effect, this no difference really true? Or is it sort of coming out the way we measure things? A few high-profile companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have announced that they're going to let employees continue to work at home permanently, even after the end of this emergency. Do you think we're going to see a significant permanent increase in the number of

companies that offer full-time telework from now on? I do. Yes, I think that tech companies, for sure, sort of at the forefront of this, but I think it's going to be the wave of the future. I think it's going to be the new normal, maybe not full-time remote work. I think some companies will do that, But I think a lot of companies will start to let people at least work some of the time remotely. There's a lot of benefits to that from the organization standpoint. I think about it from a real estate standpoint, right? If you have a full remote workforce, you can spend a lot less money on the real estate in your central office, right? You don't have to have space for everybody to work all the time.

And I think it can become a really nice recruiting tool. But the downsides to it are it does. there's some evidence to suggest when you have a full-time remote workforce. It does change the dynamic of the organization and that strong organizational culture and strong identification that people have within an organization is harder to get. So I think companies like Twitter and Facebook right now announcing that, they're so big, perhaps one won't hit them. But for smaller companies, I think you have to really consider how this is going to affect

your culture and your practices moving forward. Yeah, and I think the innovation question is probably legitimate as well. If you're not sort of rubbing elbows with people on a regular basis and bumping into them in the lunchroom or the bathrooms or wherever you might serendipitously run into somebody that you work with and you might just toss out an idea and then boom, here we go. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the big thing that's brought up a lot. That's why I think that a partial remote workforce is really the way to go thinking about, okay, so if I work, let's say, two days from home, then I can think about the tasks that are best done at home where I don't need an eruption. You know, I really just need to be focused for a period of time. And then the days when I am in the office, I can reserve for the times when we need to focus on innovation or other things like that. So I think there's some ways that you could combine remote work to still allow for that time of innovation. But I agree with the full-time remote work. It does out of challenge. Any other predictors for how this pandemic is going to change workplaces? One thing that I'm, I don't know if it's so much of a prediction as a hope, but I, as a work family scholar, I think that it's been interesting because of the ubiquitous use

of Zoom and other technologies like that, co-workers have gotten a glimpse into each other's homes in their lives in a way that they hadn't before. And in a lot of cases, I think they've seen children running around in the background. So what I hope this will do is make both managers and other employees a little bit more understanding of people with families. Sort of saying, okay, this person still managed to get their job done, but look at kind of the chaos they had running around behind them.

sort of recognizing like it is tough it is a tough balancing act and and and the notion that we the ideal worker is someone who has no family and puts everything into work hoping we'll start to see a little bit of the erosion of that would be understanding that hey people actually are their whole self there's a whole side of them outside of work that I think was exposed a little bit more yeah during time well this has been great really interesting stuff dr shockly I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the National Science Foundation study that you're doing. Yes, and we've made it, actually, as part of the grant, the first thing we're going to do is publish the results for a mass media audience, not academic results. So we're going to get those out as quick as we can, and they'll be hopefully very digestible and very actionable.

Great. Wow, that sounds wonderful. Well, thank you again. I want to say the American Psychological Association has resources and tipsheets available on our website for help in navigating work. telework and the pandemic. So visit us at APA.org. You can also find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.spokenof psychology.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're out there, please give us a rating. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Wyerson. Our sound editor and engineer is Chris Kondyyan.

For the American Psychological Association, thank you for listening. I'm Kim Mills.