 Welcome, everyone, to Crisis Conversations, live from the Better Life Lab. I'm Brigitte Schulte, the director of the Better Life Lab, and I am so excited to welcome our panelists today and to all the participants who are here. Today, we are going to be talking about a subject near and dear to probably all of our hearts, which is work-life balance. Is it even possible in a pandemic? You know, even before the pandemic, there have been surveys that have found that people think that work-life balance is a luxury. It's an impossibility that, you know, don't even, don't even bother talking about it. And yet, the research shows that work-life conflict leads to incredible stress to actually not doing very good work. It leads to ill health, things like lack of sleep and insomnia and obesity and cardiovascular disease. And, you know, not being able to have adequate time for work and adequate time for your life, it's really about the quality of your life. So we're going to be talking today about this really exciting project that we've been very lucky to be a part of with ideas 42. And we've got Lynn Curran from Axion who's been part of the pilots for the project. So let me just briefly introduce our guests and we'll dive right in. So we've got Matthew Darling, he's the vice president of ideas 42, which is a nonprofit design and consulting firm that uses insights from behavioral science to address complex social problems. He's also a teaching fellow in economic design at Harvard University. We've got Wihun Ong, sorry, Wihun Ong, who's a great friend and a senior associate at ideas 42, sorry, Wihun. We've also got Antonia Volante, she's a senior associate at ideas 42. And as I mentioned, we've got Lynn Curran who's a senior vice president for human resources at Axion, which is a global nonprofit committed to creating financially inclusive world. So welcome everyone. And so Matt, I'd love to start with you. You know, why behavioral science, you know what we know about behavioral sciences that's all about nudges and creating choice architecture and you want to stick to your diet so you put your fruits and vegetables where you can see them in your, you know, in your refrigerator. You want to make sure people save for 401ks, then you make it a default rather than making them choose. So why behavioral science for something that I think you all even call a wicked problem like work life balance. Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And I'll say, you know, you know, obviously a lot of the work that's been done in behavioral science is around that sort of nudges is about simple changes to context that you can make in order to change behavior. And also can of course be applied to much more complex interventions or complex problems. And in this case, particularly, you know, I think so much of the way we think about work is, you know, and so many other things is really almost like implicitly this this sort of classic economics rational actor model where people are going and they're making decisions based off of the best available information they're maximizing their incentives, things like that. And when you think about that, you know, we do a lot of work in that in terms of how people actually design policies and who they're designing it for. And when I think about the case of the hill science with work life is that, you know, I can think in my own life, you know, before pandemic and of course right now after it or during where I think about we hope it's after but we hope it's after yeah yeah it's not after for everybody. But like thinking about the cases where I'm making a decisions about how I'm going to work and I'll say, okay, I'm going to, you know, I got a bunch of stuff done today, but not everything I want to do so I'm going to get that done tomorrow, and it just stacks up and stacks up and stacks up. And I never really sort of do a good job of readjusting to the fact that I never quite meet my own expectations for how productive I'm going to be. Yeah, and every time I make a plan and say okay this is going to take me no four or five hours to do and then it takes 10 to 12 because there's so much that happens on the sort of way of getting from a to b. Yeah. So all those insights from behavioral economics, I think can really be applied to how we think about work, because so many times, you know, we're going out there we're designing our own work forces or we're designing our work life for our fellow employees. And we make the sort of persistent mistakes and how we do it. And what we're hoping that we can do through this project and other work is try to make that better make make so we're saying okay we're designing the policy or the actual people who are going to have to live through it. You know one thing that's really been so striking to me in this project is through behavioral science learning about the power of the environment. You know, and the, you know how you set up your environment can really lead you to even to the choices that you make or even the choices you think you have. So we have let me turn to you and talk more specifically about what this project, you know, talk about what you actually have been doing and how you've been using sort of that that idea of the power of environment to try to, you know, kind of shape cultures, you know, so often we think well work life balance it's it's all up to the individual if you just made better decisions if you were just more if you just had more willpower, you know it would be better. And I think one of the things that was so striking and you know in talking with you throughout this whole project is just how many patterns you found because of the environment can you can you talk a little bit more about that and then about the actual work of the project. Yeah, so when we started the project we were really focused on trying to like decrease the instances where work life conflict was happening so moments where work was really clashing with other aspects of people's lives. And basically, when we were doing this research and trying to design solutions to help decrease those instances we were just noticing as you mentioned Bridget different subtle cues in our environment that lead us astray and one way or the other. So for example, if we were noticing just how, you know, different signals in our social environments, what who appears to be working later through, you know, subtle signals and emails or things from your boss, subtle cues like that were shaping people's behavior to maybe overestimate the degree other people were working and subsequently drive them to think that they need to work more as well. And so we tried to whether that was true or not. And so we were trying to pick up on those subtle environmental cues that drove people to maybe work a little bit more than they would have liked at times they would have rather not and see if we can tweak it a little bit to to minimize those instances. So if I could just kind of jump in here. So what we know from the from the data is that pre pandemic at any rate that Americans work really long hours, you know you have sort of overwork long hours and sort of white color fields. And you had a very different kind of overwork and kind of, you know, lower wage jobs where you didn't have enough work and so you would have to cobble together all sorts of different kind of unpredictable jobs that led to its own work life conflict and sort of long work hours. And you know so we've kind of got, you know, going back to the knowledge environment. We've got these overwork hours and are you saying that some of it is because we are misinterpreting cues that we think other people, particularly people in power are working more than they maybe are. And that's part of what's driving this overwork phenomenon. Totally. I definitely think that part of part of what's driving the overwork phenomenon is that but there are obviously other drivers of this challenge as well. So, you know, so talk a little bit more about what you, you know, kind of what you actually did in the project and, you know, not only talking about the power of the environment but you this really interesting concept of scarcity, and how feeling kind of like that scarce time or scarce resources can also drive work life conflict. Yeah, so for the for the most recent iteration of the project we were really focused we were partnering with other nonprofits to try to tackle some of the challenges that they were facing so some of the challenges they were facing are kind of unique to them and recognizing we wanted to start somewhere and not we boil the ocean we ended up zeroing in on a few different places where people were having some challenges so disconnecting on vacations. You know, trying to minimize the amount of time people are spending in meetings so they can actually do their solo work and log off for the day. So I think about how emails were kind of chasing people throughout all aspects of their lives and interrupting there. And so we, we did a few interventions to help people disconnect from emails and just remind them to kind of lock off at the end of the day and we'll get to that a little bit later and also a few different other solutions to help people to remember to take vacation and take the take certain steps so they can really disconnect before they hop into vacation rather than letting the work spill into it and constantly be kind of checking in case something happened. Yeah, you know, just on that point, I don't, I can't tell you how many years it's been, you know, that, you know, certainly that's been my personal experience and you look at research and survey data of Americans, either they don't take vacation, or they take work along with them when they do. So, and Tony, can we go to you now and talk very specific specifically about, you know, the work that you did with Lynn and Axione and Lynn we're going to get to you in just a minute. But since we're still kind of like, you know, laying out the sort of the contours of the project, you know, what did you, you know, kind of what did you come up with for for Axione. Yeah, I think that there's an anecdote that I want to share that I think lays the foundation well for what we did around vacation with Axione so my dad has this principle that he uses that's foolproof for when you have like a housework that you need to do like an apartment, like washing the windows or steaming the carpet, something that like, you never need to get it done, but it's like lingering on your to do list. And he calls this the party principle, and he says, if you have these things that you want to do when they build up, just plan a party, invite as many friends that you can think of for like a month later, and they will get done. He's like, I guarantee it, it will get done before it. My mom hates the party principle but like he swears by it. So I think what we were doing with vacation and Axione was trying to find a way to use that party principle. And so I can unpack that a little bit. So we learned when talking with employees and also looking at vacation data, where you're talking about Bridget where there are a lot of people that were like, Yeah, I would like to take vacation, but I just haven't. But when you dug into it a little more, it makes a lot of sense like going on vacation isn't just like you walk out the door you're on vacation, you have to like, think about what are your next week going to look like you have to tell people you're going to be on vacation you have to like, make sure everything gets done while you're out like there's a lot of prep, it's kind of, and so it makes sense that it's like a thing that people want to do it's like an ambient thought like that you do want to take vacation but it never feels urgent. And so then the more interesting question became so like then why do people take it like if it takes work it's never urgent like, you know when are people actually leaving and taking time off. And then, and that's when we realized like, people tend to take vacation. Like, it's almost like you take vacation as a consequence of something else that came up in your life. So like, you're going on a trip with someone, or you are going to a wedding, you know, when we talk to people, they kind of talked about their vacations around events that would happen. And then my own life that's totally true. I mean we literally called trips that we go on with other people vacations like we've almost thought about them interchangeably. It's like a forcing function so you don't actually go out and choose it it's sort of like it happens to you so you have to plan around it. So then you have to plan around it so yeah that's what I'm kind of saying it's like in behavioral science we have these things that are barriers that are like features the environment that we had was talking about that like, inhibit you from doing what you want to do and then there are channels that like, get you to do what you want to do and so it's almost like planning those trips and stuff that's like a channel for you to do all that admin work. And so what we're interested in figuring out is like, how do you create like a way to have that channel like to give people like an arbitrary form of an event or something that they can like plan around so that they do all of those steps in the meantime. And so at actually own, they had been doing a thing with that I think a lot of companies do where they'd send email reminders being like, Hey, Bridget, you have 10 days of vacation left. Your balance expires at this date like reminder to take vacation. And so we use that as an opportunity to enhance it a little bit and we had those emails sent out from a person on the HR team. We also paired the email with a calendar invite. And so she put it on people's calendars for like a Friday or a Monday, two weeks from the day it was sent and said, Hey, this. Hey, Bridget, I'm putting a tentative vacation day on your calendar. Use the time to go to a museum, like read a book, watch Netflix, and feel free to move it you know whatever works for you. And then really importantly, we copied their manager so that their manager was like aware and already started the process. And now it's like a little socially accountable to And so I don't know that's my thought of like the party principle of like creating that event for someone to like feel like okay yeah this is something I've committed to and then like all of those little tasks are are easier to do they can follow that after you know it's so interesting there are other countries where people do not have such a hard time taking vacation. And I wonder if it's some of it goes back to the environment again, we're in the United States we have these, you know what what sociologists and other researchers were called the ideal worker norm that the best workers are basically were either in the office all the time or are now in the pandemic online all the time and so it's difficult. Since we tend to reward people who never go on vacation. I imagine that's part of the environment that makes it difficult to make that choice. So, so Lynn, let me go to you. What was axion sort of experiencing when it came to work and work life issues and how, why did you want to get involved in this pilot project and then and then tell us, you know kind of what did what did you learn as a result. Thanks everybody. It was, it was really great and really exciting to be able to work with ideas 42. We had worked with them on some of our programs side work in terms of behavioral economics on our financial inclusion work. They were actually the ones that pointed us to this opportunity to work with them internally so the organization and we have always really work life balance is really important to axion. We have a culture where people travel all the time for work. We work in different time zones so people always, you know, are connected which is why the other intervention we did was also around email. But we felt like people weren't taking enough vacation they were just you know this the same thing that that we heard from Antonio and we have that people just weren't taking the time there's always so much work to do have to do this I have to do that I have to do the other thing. And so what we did it was we identified people that hadn't taken time off in three months I think it was and did as as Antonio said we called it vacation roulette. And we just took a random day a random Monday or Monday or Friday on the person's calendar and said, you know, take this day off, read a book, watch a movie, you don't have to do anything with this day, it's just take a day for yourself. And it was, it was, it was great we got some responses where people said, I have a vacation planned next week or next month. So thanks for the right mind or I'm going to pass on this, but really excited that you remind me medication is coming up. And we had a couple of other people who might have moved to the day. And one person in particular who's a senior member of the organization got the email we copied the CEO. And he, you know the CEO was very good with his senior director ports copy, you know when he was copied, he replied saying please take this day you need time for yourself. And this one senior member, he was like, I'm going to take that day. You know, and it was, it was really great to see you know it worked, not at all levels of the organization. You know, and the piece about management is super important, I think that people don't always know when your managers are taking vacation or what your managers expect you to do in terms of vacation. And often your manager is expecting you to figure that out yourself. And so when we copied in the manager it made a big difference. That's so interesting. Did it also matter that they're like you, like you mentioned that there were these messages of support like this is okay to do. And they're not sort of violating the culture in a way by by taking vacation. Absolutely. Absolutely. I do want to go to email, but before we do, let's let's really address the current moment because I know that this project has been going on for some time and, you know, sort of in a pre COVID environment. Lynn, let's stick with you, you know, the world is totally changed work is completely disrupted in the last, you know, four or five months. People who can are working remotely essential workers are out on the front lines. So many people are out of work. How has how has the this current COVID moment how has that changed the way that you work and then how about these interventions, can you take a vacation in the middle of a pandemic I mean, I speak for myself it's something that I've certainly struggled with you know it's like, you just feel like, you know, there's just so much at stake that you can't afford to take this time. You can't afford to take this time off and then then you get like I did this week where you just hit a pandemic wall, you know, it's like, I think the rain didn't help either but you know, it's really hard to function then. What are you finding with with your, you know, in your company and then how do these interventions sort of translate. It's been, it's been really hard, you know, we thought we had a hard time getting people to take vacation before and work life balance was so important to us when from one day to the next there was no such thing as work life balance. You know, you're, you're working surrounded by your family you're, you know, you're taking care of your family trying to pay attention to work and so you know work life balance kind of, you know, went out the window and so we really tried to work with staff you know, if, if you need to work on Saturday because you need to homeschool your kid on Wednesday, do it, block it on your calendar. So people know not to contact you on Wednesday. And also, if you're co parenting, and you know somebody you have a little kid somebody always needs to be with the kid, people started putting their, their spouses meeting on the on their calendar to so they would know not to get time scheduled there. Vacation became more and more challenging, and we, you know, would encourage and encourage and encourage it, and people would just put it off put it off put it off because where am I going to go I can't travel. And around June, I think it was we put we made a real push for it. And we push our management team again to make sure they took vacation in July or August, and make sure that they made that visible. Make sure people know that you're taking vacation if we can say every member of our senior management team has taken vacation during the pandemic. That's a big message to staff. So we've been we've been working on that. I was speaking with one of our senior managers this morning and who was supposed to be on vacation this week and was not He claims he's pushed it to next week. So I'm making sure that nobody tries to contact him next week. And we're thinking about how to use the vacation roulette again. We're going to look at vacation balances through July. And based on that we're we're really considering doing it again because, you know, especially as it starts to get colder in the US, you know, it's okay again to if you're going to stay inside to watch a movie to do this to do that. We're definitely thinking that it's something that that we can turn to again. So can you, Linda just ask the question, you know, again in this country where we value productivity so much. Why, why the focus on vacation. Why do you think that's important and why, why was it so important to your to your organization to actually come up with an intervention to to encourage it. I think it goes back to even what you said when when you hit a pandemic wall, you know, and I've done that myself so many times that if I don't take a vacation by like this time in August, I've hit a wall and I just shot disappear for three days without notice. I think we wanted to avoid a little of that. And as well as avoiding the people that don't recognize when it's time to take a break and just keep going going going and they get as you know we started it with people get sick. You know, you really worn out and burnt out and then you start to you know the, the senior person that I was talking about, we had been worried about his health. You know, over the past couple of years, that because he was working so hard we had real concerns about his health. And so, you know, it was, it was a great example to see that that person is particularly worked for. Especially during the pandemic, you know, if people aren't taking a break, they're, they're not going to be able to function at the same level if we're going to talk about productivity, you can't be as productive. If you're that exhausted and that stressed out. So, really convincing people to take the risk of taking a vacation and see how much better you feel, yes, we know you'll get stressed when you get back we know, but you will feel better than you feel right now. That's so amazing, you know they get to you know that we're the only country that I know of where we actually run commercials or ads, encouraging people to take time off and that was before the pandemic. You know, if I could go back to we had, we didn't have a chance to kind of fully talk more about the idea of scarcity, you know, and Matt, you know, I'd love for you to chime in on this as well. You know, one of the things that really struck me, you know, kind of what what Lynn was saying is that they're really getting people to be very intentional about sharing their time and their calendar. And one of the other things that you said we Han is that you found that email was chasing people through the day or that meetings are kind of like running every which way. And that does strike me when I talked to a lot of people and I do reporting about this. It's almost universal you'll talk to people they'll be like I was busy all day long I was running emailing and you know going to meetings and then five or six o'clock hit when I should have ended the day and I realized I hadn't done that one thing I needed to do, you know, and that that can drive so much of the work spilling over into the evenings and stealing from your life or spilling into weekends and I am as guilty of that as anybody. So we can you talk about the, you know, kind of like again those those bigger patterns and how scarcity plays a role into that. Yeah, I think Lynn's notes on why it's important to take vacation actually plugs into kind of the scarcity conversation to because taking a vacation you you just in order to be innovative and creative and think big picture and longer term to see those things kind of have to have a little bit of space to think about those things you can't. It's really hard to do that when you're zeroed in in the day to day and trying to turn through all those emails or just running from one meeting to the next right. And so I think we started thinking about that scarcity frame after originally it was how do we keep these work from interrupting aspects of life. But what we kept hearing from people was, I don't have enough time, I don't have enough time I can't think bigger picture I, you know, get zeroed in and I tunnel in on these immediate deadlines that I forget something important. And so we were just noticing that, you know, when people were feeling short on time that they really zero in on the most immediate tasks, which is helpful when you have a deadline we having a deadline sometimes helps us focus. But when that's chronic, when all you can think about is your next meeting the next day, it really hurts people's ability to do some long term planning which we also know is important. Right. So, so what was the so what were what were some of the interventions that you that you were exploring around that like how do you try to protect time to to think big or to do that important work so you don't feel like you're chasing your tail through the day. Yeah. One of the things that we were really encouraging people to do were to to set up, and this is for a certain, you know, professional context, we were encouraging people to set up blocks on their calendar to just do that longer term thinking do that bigger picture thinking and to really take stock of what they're doing. Because what we found is that without those blocks on people's calendars people would have others schedule into them, which crowded out any time that they they had to really think bigger picture. But I think that, again, is in kind of the in a certain kind of work context and I think, thinking even bigger picture than that. I think the people to actually have time off right and even encouraging people for for other sorts of workers who might be doing should work, giving them some. Some folks are getting noticed for when they have to work, you know, just a day of or a couple days before and that really throws people's ability to to kind of think longer term and plan longer term as well. And so I think just a little bit bigger picture just trying to figure out when is kind of that scarcity situation important because it helps us focus. But when is it less helpful because maybe we've gone a little bit too far. And we need people to give people time to think bigger picture be creative be innovative and also just take care of other things in their life so they don't intrude and take Occupy mental space when when they are on the job. Yeah. So, Matt, but you know to pick up on something that we have said, you know, that a lot of this work was done sort of in the knowledge worker or the professional work setting. How does this translate to say the essential workers or hourly workers, you know, what what could sort of translate into that. Yeah, I mean, I think one of things and this occurred when Linda was talking as well you know one things we worked so hard on was, how do you get the management to sort of represent what they're looking for to management and how does management sort of represent what what they're comfortable with two workers and was sort of really interesting a lot of time is, is how often there's sort of people misrepresenting that, you know, in either direction right so management, who is thinking like oh we've really communicated to everyone that you can take vacation and never it's not a problem. So at the same time when someone takes vacation you might just grumble a little bit in that moment. And you know that, you know, that's that that's one thing we'd like the knowledge workers, but I think it's something that's really sort of generally applicable. You know one of the things I've been seeing so much of and thinking about a lot during this time is, you know, reading about people, you know, trying to think about their working conditions right. You know, the nurses who don't have enough PPE, it could be people at the grocery store who are not, you know, confident that they're putting measures in place. It can be teachers who saying hey we really don't feel comfortable opening schools right now. And you'll obviously some of this is about economic power, a lot of it is, I'm not saying there's no bad actors in this sort of world, but I think a lot of it is is like how do you actually, you know, convey your mindset and convey your need to other people in your organization to other people that you're working with. And how do you actually get them to act on that how do you go and say, you know, hey, these are the things that we want out of this workplace. And you know one thing I keep on thinking about, you know, with especially essential workers is that they're the experts in the production processes that they're in you know that that they're the ones who say hey this is how I interact with our customers. This is either how I interact with our other staff. And because of that they're usually the people who are sort of best place to actually understand how to how to change things to make them more safe. And it's not clear to me that, you know, those needs and the that understanding that information is going to be heard by the management. You know, I'm thinking about locally owned places that I know that you know have basically said hey, we're not reopening but we've until now and we've actually completely like torn up the entire interior of it and everything's like a glass you know there's glass between you and the customers. And then you'll see other places where they're like oh we've installed these like shirt, you know shower curtain rods between you. And you're like well that's that's a big difference in how how are you being attentive to people and what their needs are. Well, you know, we're coming down on time so what I would like to do. Antonia if we could go back to you. Lynn bring you back in. You know, kind of final thoughts, you know, here we are in this pandemic you've gone through this experience. You know what should listeners, you know what can they, you know, what can they learn from this what can they begin to do themselves to survive through this through this period but potentially to to to thrive when when we go back to whenever new normal becomes our new normal. Antonio you want to start. Yeah, I mean, it's a big question but I think if there's one thing to take away it's that behavioral science just like provides a framework for thinking about how your situations that you're thinking and they aren't always set up for you to do what you want to do and what's healthy to you, but they are going to influence your behavior. And so it's important to try to be figured out like what what do you want to do, you know, like come up with like check in with yourself like do I want to take more vacation do I want to stop emailing late and try to think about what what here about like the way my situation is is like preventing me or making it harder for me to do that like do do I need to just like plan. I don't know some sort of go to a virtual museum on two Saturdays from two Fridays from now to get me to go on vacation. Just think about how you can like nudge yourself to do certain things because we can't we can expect our world to just be designed for us to take a better life balance unfortunately right now that's just not the case. Lynn, final thoughts will give you the last word. Oh, no pressure. Well I think, you know, again this was a really great experience and I think, you know, some of the key takeaways have already been mentioned and I think the, the importance of recognizing what signals management is sending to staff. What signals staff is really looking for. I think that was a key takeaway from the two interventions that we did one, we copied managers and one we didn't and without even trying we had a control group and the test group and we saw that copying managers and involving managers really made a big difference. You know, and as always the importance of taking a vacation one other piece that Antonia mentioned was so many companies send out the you have 10 days vacation and you're going to lose them this is the day you're going to lose them. And one thing we realized was that was pretty much all we were saying in the message and with the help of ideas 42 was, you know, we just had never even thought about it just to reward that. So that it's saying encouraging you to take that and the benefits of vacation and you know, being a little bit more friendly about it all, you know, made also made a big difference. Well, thank you all so much for being part of this conversation today. I want to thank all of our guests want to thank the participants we had some some lively chat and so we'll be following up online I'm sorry we didn't get to all of the questions. Thank you so much to the new America events team the better life lab team to David Shulman our producer. This week we'll be talking about so you've hung out your black lives matter sign. How do you build an anti racist organization will have folks from the army and project inclusion from Google the head of DEI and some other really great guests. So in the meantime, wash your hands, wear a mask, think about how you design your environment to help you make better choices. And we'll see you next week.