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Is the TED Radio Hour? Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes.
Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manouche Zamorode.
Back in the late 90s and early aughts, companies that were churning out new software and internet tools had to start making business decisions just as quickly. And so a new ethos for business was born. You've probably heard of it. Move fast and break things. The mandate being handed to entrepreneurs
was to sprint and if you hit some things with your tail along the way, that's just the cost of doing business. This is leadership coach Ann Morris. Ann saw this at times reckless strategy play out again and again. This ethos of move fast and break things was encouraged and rewarded by the people writing the checks.
So the venture capital community at this time was very clear that it was growth that mattered, speed of growth that mattered, and everything else was secondary. And your job as a company builder was to deal with the collateral damage later. And later eventually arrived about five years ago.
Yeah, I mean, the moment was when the phone started to ring. Anne and her wife, Harvard Business Professor Francis Frye, started getting these calls. You know, Uber called, Riot Games called. We work called too. Anne and Francis, can you help us clean up the wreckage here? That's when we got involved. CEOs were imploding. Their rash methods stopped working once their companies were established. They'd built businesses, but no sense of trust.
And so Anne and Frances started studying how successful CEOs were approaching the changing market. The most effective change leaders were not moving fast and breaking things. They were moving fast and fixing things. And they were moving with urgency and building trust at the same time. Anne decided to turn their approach into a method, one she could teach to CEOs or anyone who was struggling at work.
If this is really for anyone who wants to solve problems and has them, which describes most of the people on the planet. We spend so much of our lives working. In the US, the average person will put in about 90,000 hours during their lifetime. And most of us would like to make all that time at work better.
So on this episode, Monday through Friday, ideas from the front lines of work, from how we structure the work week, why we valorize work, and what we can do to give our work meaning.
So let's get back to Ann Morris and the method she developed. It's a playbook for fixing problems quickly. She frames it around the work week. Each day, a step towards a big change. It's Monday through Friday. Each day has a distinct agenda that builds on itself. And the headline is that you earn the right to move fast by Friday by moving through these steps and the payoff is speed.
So let's start with Monday. Good morning. It's Monday. Your job today is to identify your real problem, which may not be the problem that you thought you had just a minute ago. Here's Anne Morris on the TED stage. As human beings, we tend to be overconfident in the quality of our thoughts, particularly when it comes to diagnosing our own problems. My investors don't get it. My Gen Z employees are entitled. My dog is mad at me.
The thing that's gonna help you out most today is your own curiosity. So turn that original diagnosis. My Gen Z employees are entitled into a question rather than a statement. What's going on with my Gen Z employees? Now your next move sounds obvious, but you might be surprised to learn how infrequently people actually do it. Talk directly to the other people who have a stake in your problem. Ask some things you might not normally ask and polite company. Things that require a little courage on your part.
Sometimes just a single brave conversation can reveal an entirely new structure to your problem. Some of you will discover, for example, that you have a role to play in creating the problem that you're now solving this week. You might discover it's you who feels entitled to burn them out and pay them less than what they're worth, simply because that was the broken work contract that you put up with at their age.
Whatever it is you learned today, you're gonna be closer to understanding what's really getting in the way of the relationship or the organization or the life you want. All right, excellent first, everyone. Get some rest. It's Tuesday, Em.
Oh, it's Tuesday. All right. What do we do today? Tuesday, we're solving for trust. The mission of today is really to create a good enough plan to strengthen the relationship at the center of your problem. So we call it learning day or experiments day. We really want you to be in a learning mindset on Tuesday. Can we apply this to an example? Like, let's say someone wanted to figure out why they were passed over for a promotion.
Yeah, so ideally on Monday, they would have learned the reason they were passed over for promotion. And that probably took a brave conversation because it's easier to conclude. Someone knew the hiring manager, it was political. That's an easier conclusion than the harder work of figuring out, okay, well, what was my role in the outcome here?
So let's say you have a conversation with your boss and she's pretty direct. I wasn't convinced you could do the job. And so then on Tuesday, you need to do some brainstorming. Come up with the plan. Absolutely.
Here's a stretch assignment I think I could do. Let's try it. Let me show you what I'm capable of. Let me lead the next staff meeting. Let me go out and bring in a new customer. Why don't you come with me on the next sales call and I'll show you what I can do. Literally set up experiments that have the potential to solve the problem.
Okay, so we've identified the problem. We've come up with a plan. Now it's on to Wednesday. On Wednesday, your job is to do something that adults generally don't like to do. It's to make new friends. But the research is really clear that whatever problem you're trying to solve this week, you're going to be better at solving it with people who don't already think like you do.
So describe your good enough plan, the one you came up with yesterday, to someone whose life experience has been materially different from yours. If you've been at the company for a decade, talk to someone who started last week. If you're a white partner, talk to a black partner. If you're queer like me, talk to the straightest person you can find. Contrary to what you may have heard recently, they're everywhere.
And when you're done with that conversation, have another conversation. With someone else who's different from you on some other gorgeous dimension of the human experience, this is gonna take you all day. And some of you are gonna be surprised to discover that it's your favorite day of the week. At the end of the day, you're gonna be smiling and your good enough plan is gonna be an even better plan. Good morning, it's Thursday, you're so close. Your job today is to tell a good story.
Why is that important? Who am I telling a story makes it sound like I'm making something up? But that's not what you're asking us to do. No, I think there's two levels. I think when we're working in systems like an organization, stories, they help us make sense of change. They help us find our place in what we say is the script of it. But they also help you to activate and focus all the other people you're going to need to help you with that change.
At the individual level, stories also give you a really strong why as to why are you going to go to all this trouble to change your behavior. It's not easy for humans to do, so it helps a lot for us to get in touch with the payoff. We did some work with Uber when it was going through its very public crisis and leadership.
And when the new guy came in, the new CEO, and hosted his first all hands meeting, he committed to retain the edge that had made Uber a force of nature. Now this line was met with thunderous applause, the applause of relief. Listen, Uber had serious problems to solve if anyone reading the news could figure out, but the people in that room had built something extraordinary, and they had something real to lose in an uncertain future.
Instead of setting himself up as some kind of company savior, the new guy honored that complicated truth. Honor the complicated truth of the people around you, the ones who aren't so sure about all your big plans. Then tell us why you want to change things.
Finally, tell us about the future in vivid and specific language. Tell us what it's going to feel like when your story becomes our reality. OK, TGIF. TGIF. This is the payoff day, Manush.
Now you get to do stuff. Now you get to go as fast as you can. You've earned the right to go fast because you're far more likely to succeed and you're far less likely to break things. Can we go back to the example you gave about a boss who's trying to figure out why their Gen Z employees aren't happy? What is that boss doing on Friday? Yeah. So, you know, maybe one of the things that surfaced in your conversation with your Gen Z employees is that their
in patient to make progress in their careers. What they're saying is, I came here to get real skills, I came here to get in touch with my ability to make a contribution, and I don't want to wait. And after doing the hard work,
You got in touch with, I don't want to wait on Monday. You came up with a plan on Tuesday. You've got some great ideas on Wednesday from maybe people who weren't at the table, at the brainstorming table on Tuesday. You told a whole story to the company about why this is important and also helpful to the business. And now you do it.
These are projects that matter enough that we're going to speed them up and they're going to move past all the other projects because they matter. And I think that's really an opportunity to signal, this is a priority. It's a priority for me as a leader, it's a priority for the business. I've heard you and we're going to make this happen.
I can imagine someone also saying, this sounds great. I really need to clear my calendar for Monday through Friday approach sometime very soon. But gosh, not now. We're so busy. My calendar's packed. I can't take the time to do this. We hear that all the time. People ask us all the time what the right time to start is.
The answer is always, you know, what about now? Now seems like a pretty good time. I mean, but you're saying clear your calendar because none of that work matters. Is that what you're saying? No, no, no, no. Listen, you have my blessing to take longer than a week, Minush. Oh, okay. What I don't want you to do is to take months and even years, which tends to be our timeline for solving hard problems.
That's Ann Morris. She's a leadership coach and author. Her new book is called Move Fast and Fix Things. The Trusted Leaders Guide to Solving Hard Problems. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, Monday through Friday. I'm Anush Zamorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.
It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Minush Zamorodi. And today on the show, Monday through Friday, making the most of the work week. But what if that meant working Monday through Thursday? Exactly. The five day week is less sensible. It's seen as something
that is antiquated, that we need to move beyond. This is economist Juliet Shor. And I am the lead researcher for the four-day-week trials being organized around the world by four-day-week global. You may have heard about companies experimenting with a four-day work week, some by trying to pack 40 hours into four days. Juliet's model is a bit different.
I should stress that this is a 32-hour work week, not a compress, not four tens, but four eights. But before we talk about working less than five days a week, let's go back to a time when workers were trying to work less than seven days a week. The movement actually started in the U.S.
The US was out front on work time reduction in comparison to other industrialized countries. That really started in the 1870s. We were the first to get to a six-day week, and then we were the first to get to a five-day week, which was originally passed in 1938. Now, over eight decades later, Juliet thinks American workers are at another breaking point.
Employers have pushed people too hard. They've paired back their staff, and that means more work for the people who remain. They've increased the levels of insecurity that people are operating with, the levels of distress, and what we call ill-being rather than well-being have really skyrocketed in many, many labor forces around the globe.
When you raise a four-day week with people today, it feels not only feasible to them, but it feels necessary. Here's Julia Chor on the TED stage. A growing number of companies are offering a four-day, 32-hour week, but with five days of pay. Sound pretty great?
But is it realistic? Well, actually, yes. In most cases, they are as productive in four days as they are in five. With colleagues, I'm studying four-day week trials now in progress in the United States and Ireland, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia. We have thousands of employees participating.
Now a key part of the model is that in return for the gift of a day off, people are willing to squeeze all their productivity into four days. So while they may be spending less time at work, they're not necessarily doing less work. The secret sauce is work reorganization, cutting out the least productive activities.
Meetings are a prime target. Most companies reduce their frequency and length and the number of attendees. People save time by messaging colleagues rather than making phone calls, which inevitably includes some social chatting. They shifted personal tasks like doctor's appointments to the off day. And yes, the pace of work at the office does go up.
But people have adapted and they prefer getting their downtime as a whole day off rather than in snippets. Okay, so you have all of these dozens of companies trying this out. Let's talk about your findings and how you measured whether they were successful or not. So let me start with the employee data first.
We have a large number of well-being outcomes. We ask about stress, burnout, positive emotions, negative emotions, anxiety,
So people are just much, much better off. They are also doing things like exercising more and they're sleeping better. Family conflict is reduced. And 97% of them want to continue with the four day week. I can also tell you how much it's worth to them, financially. Please. We ask people, if you were to think about your next job,
What would you need in terms of salary changes to go back to a five day week? We've got about somewhere between 11 and 13% who say no amount of money would ever induce them to go back. We've got a sort of similar number who say they need more than a 50% increase. So a huge increase. And then the biggest group are in the sort of 25 to 50% increase.
So it's worth a lot to them. Okay. So that's the employee perspective. What about the employers and their bottom line? Yeah. Employers have been really happy with this. Only a few companies out of all of these scores of companies that have gone through these trials have decided to go back to a five day week.
Companies are rating the trial slightly lower than the employees, more like about an 8.5, but still that's a very high rating. We are tracking revenue, which tends to increase over the trial. We're seeing absenteeism fall. We're seeing new hires go up and we're seeing resignations fall. So it's working.
What about jobs that are not based on the amount of work you get done, but are based on people who are paid for showing up? Yeah, these are what we would call really high intensity workplaces where there really isn't slack in the work process. But these are many of the professions where you see people burning out.
teachers, doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals, maybe social workers. I don't think you can increase the intensity of their work. I don't think you can squeeze out 20% and have them do as much in four days. You don't want to do that. They're already working too intensively. What you want to do is give them a break.
In 2014, the city of Gothenburg in Sweden gave nurses at one of its facilities a six-hour day. As expected, the nurses' health and overall well-being improved as did productivity and patient care. They hired new staff for the hours that weren't being covered. The striking finding was how much lower sick pay and unemployment benefits helped offset those additional salaries.
Now, the Swedish case raises a bigger, more existential question. How much time should we be dedicating to work? In many countries, jobs are getting more, not less demanding, and scarcity thinking. The idea that even rich countries need to tighten their belts has taken hold. But really, we should be heading in the opposite direction.
as digitization and artificial intelligence offer the chance to reduce work time. We should be doubling down on restoring the quality of life and our social fabric, especially in wealthy countries where we already produce enough for everyone to have a good standard of living. And yes, we're going to need government help if we're gonna move beyond the innovative companies that already see its virtues.
But as the three-day weekend spreads, we can realize everyone deserves a right to free time. The four-day week is a down payment on a new way to live and work. So what do you want to see happen with this study? What do you think happens next? If you prove that it's doable, that it works for both employees and employers, what's the goal?
So you use the word proof. We would like a stronger standard of proof than we have right now. We would love expanding beyond the kinds of companies that have been most likely to do this now. So yes, this is a disproportionately white collar sample. So we want to have more
companies that are in manufacturing and construction and that have more blue and pink color workers. And we would like to see a more diverse labor force in terms of race and ethnicity than we have and sort of more lower wage workers. We have those, we have hourly workers, we have lower wage workers in this sample, but they're not as many as they are present in the labor forces.
I think that every kind of job in the economy is compatible with a four-day work week, but there are sort of different pathways to get there for different kinds of jobs.
One kind of job that's notorious for long hours, low wages, and exhaustion is restaurant work. In this industry, burnout is real. Burnout is really real for chefs and salaried managers in particular. And when people burnout, you lose really talented, well-trained people.
Howie Kival manages a group of Italian restaurants in Albuquerque, New Mexico called Matuchis. The restaurants hit the mark of making people feel at home comfortable. It's the kind of place you can spend two, three, four hours with your friends at. So a few years ago, Matuchis decided they needed to make a change.
We did an internal measurement of our turnover, and we were at just over 40. Regular casual restaurants, 80% turnover. So we were already doing much better than most restaurants of our caliber, but still, 40% is a lot. Most were working five to six days, 60 hours a week. We were aiming to cut that down to 46 to 48.
So we didn't have the drop in hours that corporate America would typically experience. They decided to give the four-day work week a try, even though they knew it would be tough. There are going to be nights where managers have to stay super late. Chefs are going to have to prep over time. But what we wanted to do was guarantee three days off a week. And in our industry, that is really rare.
We hired one extra manager to handle this entire thing. And the results were really good. After our eight month trial, we had not lost a single manager in eight months. That's really unusual. Our retention rates were
Awesome, 100%. Managers would say, well, I finally get to plan like these road trips. New Mexico's a wonderful place within an hour of mountains and desert and it's gorgeous. So they're taking a lot more road trips, but they've also said, you know, just having that chill time on the couch with my kids, you know, an extra day every week is just made my commitment to my work so much stronger.
As it is, we're getting talent from all kinds of other restaurants. We have managers and chefs applying and saying, I want to be a part of what you're doing. Juliet, would you say that switching to a four day work week? Yes, it's about rethinking how work gets done. But also it's about getting people to rethink how they use the time when they're not at work. Absolutely.
The four day week touches everything. It touches what's happening in the workplace, of course, but it touches our health. It touches our relations with people outside the workplace. It gives people time to be active in their communities and to care for other people. We've also been looking at the climate benefits of a four day week. The reduced commuting that's involved reduced work time is a very potent climate policy.
So it's really something that has a big impact far beyond the workplace. It's a really positive social innovation. And I think that part of why people feel so excited about it now is that it feels feasible in a world in which the problem seems so big. Here's one solution that really matters that has a big impact and that it's pretty clear we can institute
right now today. Julia Chor is an economist and sociology professor at Boston College. You can see her full talk at TED.com on the show today, Monday through Friday.
So Juliet wants to prove that you don't need to work long hours to be a hard worker. But why is that so difficult for us to believe? We tend to see this automatic connection between effort and moral value. Azim Sharif is a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. And what I've been studying is the moral worth that people attach to work.
In other words, why do we see people who work hard at anything as better people? When we look at the work that people do, we're making a whole lot of assumptions about their character, about their moral character. People who work hard are seen as virtuous. To test how we judge people, Azim did a study where he asked participants about two hypothetical guys. So first you have Justin. Justin works in a factory making widgets.
Justin is able to produce approximately six widgets per hour. For Justin, making widgets requires minimal effort. While he works as quickly as possible, it is easy work. And then there's Mark, who also makes six widgets per hour. He also works as quickly as possible, but for him it's hard, it's hard, it's very effortful work. Zim and his team asked participants, what do you think of Justin versus Mark's approach?
We asked people to rate the person on a number of synonyms to morality, so moral, responsible, principled, honest, these types of words. What we found is that people tend to think the guy who easily breezes through making these widgets is a more competent person. But they think that Mark, the guy who put in more effort, who found it hard to do, is the more moral person, the more trustworthy person. And do they tell you why they think that?
The idea is that what being a hard worker conveys is that that person would be a dependable partner if you were to cooperate with them. Or if you were to have them as your friend, you know that that person is willing to put an effort in some domains, and so they're likely to be putting effort into other domains, including the domains that'll help you out.
Yeah, I mean, I totally get that. When you see someone who has to try harder and they do it, you think like, all right, they can put their back into it. I bet if I asked them to help me move next weekend, they know what it's like to work hard. Is that basically what it is? That's basically what it is. Zim Sharif continues from the TED stage.
People see that harder working widget maker as more moral. And if you had to choose just one of those two as a cooperation partner, you would choose the one who struggles.
We call this effort moralization, and it doesn't appear to just be a North American thing. Work norms, of course, differ around the world, but we replicated our original American result in South Korea, which is known by the numbers to be one of the hardest-working countries in the OECD, and in France, which is known for other strengths.
In all of these places, the harder working person was seen as more moral and a better cooperation partner, even though they added no extra value. The theory that underpins all this is a theory called partner choice. So the idea of partner choice is that just as we are all searching for a romantic partner and we're competing to be the best romantic partner we can be so that we get chosen.
We also are in a market for friends and for co-workers, and we're trying to find the friends and co-workers who are going to be the most dependable people, like we talked about. The people are going to help you move your couch. We are constantly evaluating people to figure out what that they're doing is signaling to me that they're a cooperative, a trustworthy partner. And we're trying to show that we're that person as well.
In a minute, the roots of our need to figure out who is a hard worker or not. And what can go wrong when we pass moral judgment on someone's work ethic? On the show today, Monday through Friday, I'm Anush Zumarodi and you're listening to The Ted Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.
It's the Ted Radio Hour from NPR, I'm Manouche Zamorodi, and on the show today, Monday through Friday, ideas about rethinking what so many of us do, eight hours a day, five days a week, at least. We work. It's a big part of our lives, so everybody feels some sort of love and hate towards their work.
We were just talking to psychologist Azim Shari, who studies how people attach moral value to work. I think this is pretty deep, right? Not necessarily some sort of evolved circuit in our brain, but maybe a very likely to develop cultural process. And some of the evidence that supports that there's this really great work by Christopher Smith and Corinne Appachella, where they did work with hunter gatherers themselves.
existing hunter-gatherers, the Hadza people in Tanzania. And what they did is they took 92 members of a particular Hadza camp, and they had them rate all the other members. So in Hadza terminology there, the closest thing they had to being a good person, a moral person, was this idea of having good heart. And they didn't agree on very much about what made somebody have good heart, but they did agree on two things. One is generosity.
And the other is hard work. The people who are the hardest workers were seen as most likely to have good heart.
And my response to that is like, that's great. We appreciate people who have a good heart, who are willing to work hard, humans for the win. But I guess that things get more complicated in the modern workplace. So let's talk about when our moral judgment of someone who works hard can cause problems. Like when you see that colleague who stays late because he wants to impress people.
Yes, or work culture has within it this veneration of just putting an effort. And then you get into this arms race of competitive effort signaling.
And so the guy who's staying late at work, somebody else is going to stay late at work, somebody else is going to be the first car in the office, so that the employers are going to say, you know, man, Johnny over there on the third floor, he's always in the office late, always just always working through those papers, you know, he's drenched and sweat by the end of the day.
Good man, hard worker. And so you keep those people around. You pay a lot of people for the effort that they're putting in, not for what they're producing. And so all the kind of zombie effort that sticks around in an economic system, simply because of effort or realization, that makes everything more expensive. And it ends up being attacks that we all pay. Here's Azim Sharif again on the TED stage.
Our intuition that effort is good for its own sake, regardless of what it produces, has created a work environment with perverse incentives. And how much of the effort we spend now is just wearing workaholism as a badge of honor, a way to reassure people that we are a good person. Even if the person that you're just trying to reassure is yourself.
A capitalistic system should root out those inefficiencies, but it doesn't. And the reason it doesn't is because alongside capitalism, we also operate under another system with the journalist Eric Thompson calls workism. Workism is about your job not just being the source of your paycheck, but the source of your identity and your pathway to self-actualization.
Now that works for some people, but what makes work as a culture is that we all get forced to participate. The culture punishes us for not keeping up, and so we end up putting more and more in, regardless of what comes out the other side. And the culture maintains the most laborious aspects of our jobs,
because it most appreciates us when it sees us putting in that labor. And as a consequence, every other aspect of our job and our lives, however great, is made just a little less important. Zim, I want to make a distinction here or ask you, what is the distinction? When we say work ethic, are we talking about moralizing effort that we put into our jobs or things outside of our jobs too?
Yeah, so it's not just in the realm of employment and work that virtue is signaled, nor that effort-related virtue is signaled. So one of the studies that we have looks at running. So this was actually inspired by the collaborator of mine on this project. A good friend of mine, Paul Piff. He's a social psychologist.
very well put together and he's a very confident, extroverted guy and he was running every morning and sometimes he finds those people kind of annoying. Totally. The people, the Mr. Perfect people, I think we roll our eyes at them. They're just confidently striding through life and then one day I saw him on one of his morning runs and he didn't look like this confident type A personality. He had this terrible look on his face. He was really struggling through his run
And that made me have more respect for him, because he's somebody who didn't find that easy, right? And so we had a study where I think it was also suggested in Mark, and one of them ran the same distance, but did it easily, and one of them ran the same distance every morning, but really struggled.
And again, you see that the person that is putting more effort into the run. That's the person you see as more virtuous. And in fact, in this case, we gave people a task to emulate this partner choice idea and asked people, well, okay, if you were to play a trust game with this person, who would you choose? Eight out of 10 times, they'll choose the person who finds it hard.
You're making me have some compassion for the person who things do come easily too, because maybe that's not their fault that they find things easier, but people won't trust them as much or want to work with them just because they don't look like they're trying hard enough. Yeah. Yeah. Poor, poor Mr. Perfect people.
Well, I have to say, I'm the daughter of immigrants, so I've totally drunk the Protestant work ethic Kool-Aid. But it does feel like there are some people moving in an opposite direction about appreciating all that life has to offer outside of work. I mean, there are all kinds of memes, right? There's...
quite quickly. Then there's lazy girl jobs. You have kind of this easy job that's extremely flexible and there's no like start or end time every day. This is when a young woman has a chill job, she gets paid a good salary, but she only does what's required of her and that is it.
It's an anti-hustle dig. Because the rest of her life is important to her. And I mean, she uses the term lazy, but I think you might say that this is what we should all be doing. We should do our jobs and live our lives. And it's that balance that's so important.
I don't want to convey that I'm anti-hard work by any means. I think that so much of what we enjoy and benefit from in civilization is the product of extremely hard work. And so I don't want to dissuade that or belittle it by any means. And maybe that's where we end up, right? You have this backlash moral norm and you have the original hard work moral norm and we come to some sort of balance. So as I mentioned, a psychology professor and
On Twitter, a lot of younger people in particular, so younger professors, graduate students, they would not just be talking about their work-life balance, how important it was to work-life balance, so I don't work on the weekends. They would be making seemingly moral claims about this. They would be showing their virtue by showing how well-balanced their lives are.
which I found really interesting. If you say, you know what, this is wrong. I'm going to not work weekends, I'm gonna not work evenings, but everybody else still does that, then you're going to be at a severe disadvantage for having done that. And so you wanna try to get everybody to disarm altogether. And one way of doing that is to create a new moral norm. In one of his more candid moments, one of my graduate students said that he noticed
I would send emails out at all hours of the day, 1 AM, 2 AM, 3 AM. Now, this was because being a professor allowed me to maintain an adolescent sleep schedule deep into my 30s. But what he then did was he got some app which scheduled his replies to come to me at 1 or 2 in the morning. So as to make it seem like he was also working all hours of the day.
I clearly sent the wrong message, so much so that my student was willing to delay the work to make it seem like he was more industrious.
I had to change my lab's culture. I had to convince my students that we weren't just about the show of work, but what we were actually producing. And it's not such a simple thing to do. The mental circuit that connects effort to morality can be a stubborn one. When I teach about psychological biases to my intro psych students, I tell them that you can't always learn to resist a bias. They can be very deeply ingrained.
but you can learn to notice them so that you can account for them when making important decisions. We may not be able to break that mental circuit, but we can learn to recognize our biases so that they don't run our lives. Okay, so we know we can't let our biases run our lives, but with all the uncertainty about what work will be in the future, it sounds like we need to be even more aware, actually, of these biases.
Yeah, we seem to be on the precipice of a big change. There's a lot of churn that happens, and a lot of people don't have stable work lives, and that leaves them out economically, and it could also leave them out in terms of a sense of meaning, especially if we're in a culture which really attaches meaning and value and moral worth to the work that people do.
So these psychological biases, I think they make sense at the individual level. But when you build an entire economic system on top of them, it's almost an understatement to call them inefficiencies because the cost is so much more than that. The cost is to health and happiness. But knowing that we do this knee jerk automatic moralization of effort,
Maybe you can not jump to those judgments so completely and confront those situations in which you are unnecessarily moralizing other people's effort or your own. That's Azim Sharif. He's a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. You can see his full talk at TED.com. And you also heard the voice of social media influencer Gabrielle Judge.
on the show today, Monday through Friday. So no episode about work would be complete without a look at how workforces get organized. Margaret Levy is a political scientist and a professor at Stanford University who's been studying labor unions for decades, how they formed in the US, why they declined, and why they're seeing a resurgence. Here she is on the TED stage in 2021.
It's easy to imagine a world without labor unions. We're essentially living in that world now. And we are worse off as a result. Few of you probably belong to unions, but almost all of you benefit from them. It was unions that brought us the weekend. More importantly, unions built the middle class by ensuring that workers had the incomes,
to support families to buy homes and cars and to dream that their children could do better than they could. It was union power and advocacy that helped us win social security and health insurance upon which almost all of us depend. So Margaret, if unions are so great,
Why are they in such serious decline? Because the odds are stacked against them. There are many employers and politicians who are preventing the reform of labor laws passed nearly a century ago in another era and another economy. These are laws that inhibit
Agriculture and domestic workers from organizing largely black and brown workers. They make it hard for workers in the gig economy to organize. There are employers and politicians who are pushing states to pass right to work laws.
Laws that abolish the requirement that those who are covered by union contracts have to pay union dues. This effectively kills the unions. But it's not just employers and politicians that are holding unions back. Unions are cause of some of their own problems. Some unions are extremely bureaucratic, stifling debate and innovation.
Some union leaders are corrupt. Rigging elections, paying themselves humongous salaries, even when they represent very low-income workers. Now, many critics, possibly some of you blame unions for inflation. When wages go up, consumer prices go up. True enough. But so does the standard of living for workers.
And we as taxpayers benefit from higher standards of living by workers. The pandemic gave us the term essential workers. If those in grocery, warehousing, food processing, delivery had strong unions, indeed any unions at all.
there would have been no need for federal programs for those who have jobs to feed their families and prevent evictions. Workers in gig professions, tech,
don't necessarily want a traditional union, but they do want influence over their wages, working conditions, and even the policies of their companies. And they are reimagining old approaches and coming up with new ones in order to build worker voice and power. Some are reconfiguring worker cooperatives, employee-owned businesses,
in which the workers determine wages, working conditions, and distribution of profits. In our global, hyper-connected, and socially isolating world, platforms such as co-worker.org or unit,
Recognize and address the fact that there is a mobile workforce that no longer has water coolers or lunchrooms around which to gather and strategize. These platforms provide workers with a way to share experiences, access organizing resources, and build networks at scale across geographies and employers.
If even some of these explorations succeed, workers will gain dignity, economic security, and the power to challenge employers and politicians. The result, the resuscitation of the middle class, and a far more equitable society.
Thank you. Margaret Levy is a political scientist and a professor at Stanford University. You can see her full talk at TED.com.
Thank you so much for listening to our episode Monday through Friday. It was produced by James Delahussi, Fiona Giron, Hersha Nahada, and Chloe Weiner. It was edited by Sanaaz Meshkin-Pour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Rachel Faulkner, Katie Montelione, and Matthew Clutier. Our audio engineers were Koe Takasugi, Jurnavan, and Gilly Moon.
Our theme music was written by Romtine Arab-Bluey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Bellarezzo. I'm Manush Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
