Dr. Jeffrey Pfeffer is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Dr. Pfeffer has authored or coauthored 15 books, including Power: Why Some People Have It and Others Don’t. In his latest book Dying for a Paycheck Dr. Pfeffer lays out a compelling case that we are being harmed by the way our work and workplace are set up today.
1) In the book “Dying for a Paycheck,” you outline a compelling case for how our modern work environment is harming us. What was your motivation in creating this book?
It is pretty clear that we are facing a healthcare cost crisis around the world. I sit on the Stanford committee for faculty and staff human resources. There is a great concern, because we’re self-insured, about our healthcare costs. The truth is the healthcare cost crisis is running through the workplace. The workplace is a very important environment for people; so if we are going to solve the healthcare cost crisis, we have to do something about our work environment.
Stanford, like everybody else, has our wellness initiatives and our wellness programs. One day as I was sitting there listening to all this, I said to myself, “You know, instead of having stress reduction, wouldn’t it make more sense to have stress prevention?” It struck me then that we were trying to do remediation as opposed to prevention.
We have come to accept the unacceptable. Organizations state things like, “We need to make workplaces healthier. What would that entail?” Well, number one, it might entail reducing work hours. “Well, we can’t do that.” It might entail giving people more discretion on how they do their work. “Well, we can’t do that.” People have defined the problems around work in ways that make it impossible to solve them, and then they wonder why workplaces are so screwed up.
2) You talk about environmental stressors and “social pollution” as being some of the root causes of ill-being in this country. As part of my doctoral research, I was introduced to Sheldon Cohen’s work on the role our environment plays regarding our well-being. Given the known impacts of environmental design, role clarity and explicit worker expectations, what are the roadblocks you have uncovered that have impeded progress in this area?
I think the quality movement has a lot to teach us. What the quality movement tells us is that what gets measured gets improved and that what does not get measured basically gets ignored and degraded. One of the reasons I wrote this book is that I don’t think many organizations and many leaders are actually conscious of the effects that they are having on their people’s health … on their work healthcare costs … on productivity … on turnover. I think many organizations are living in some kind of state of ignorance, creating a huge barrier to making a change.
The second thing that’s a huge barrier to making change is the power of social influence — “everybody does things this way.” You see this in the law, illustrated by Eilene Zimmerman’s fabulous article on the topic. She’s going to do a book now about her husband who died — attributed to some degree from social norms of practicing law.
So the combination of a lack of measurement and that we have come to normalize the unacceptable — these are the two big barriers to changing things.
3) Is America’s growing gig economy making things worse?
The gig economy, I think, has two consequences, particularly in the United States. Number one, since the United States ties health insurance (and therefore health care) to having a full-time job, the gig economy is going to make access to health insurance less likely than it has been in the past — and that’s undoubtedly going to have a negative impact on the health of gig workers.
Secondly, we know from tons of research that economic insecurity is a significant source of stress. Layoffs are hard on people, and not knowing what your schedule’s going to be from one minute to the next. Gig workers cannot plan what their income is going to be, and they cannot really plan how they are going to balance their family responsibilities — because they don’t know exactly when they will be working.
The move toward a gig economy makes economic insecurity worse. When your livelihood relies on gigs, you have to respond to your next gig. You are always looking for a gig. You don’t know how much money you’re going to make from one week to the next. This economic insecurity, I think, will certainly be experienced as stressful by many people and will worsen the issues I discuss in the book.
4) In his 2013 book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray lays a case that even though we are working harder than ever, data suggests that we really are not producing more. In other words, instead of becoming more efficient, we have achieved the opposite. Your book supplies more empirical evidence in this regard. Why do you believe it is so hard to fix the issue?
I actually had somebody say to me, “I know I’m working too many hours.” But then they said, “What gives me the right, with everybody else working all these hours, to go home at 6 o’clock?” It’s like, “What makes me so special?” I said, “You’re the only sane one.” There is this idea which we have come to take for granted that we have to put in long hours. Nobody really is effectively asking the question, “Is this the best way? Is this an effective way to work? What is the toll to maintain the status quo?”
Looking at both industry- and country-level analyses, we know that as work hours go up (after a certain point), productivity generally goes down. My friend Nuria Chinchilla at IESE [Business School] talks about social pollution. There is a parallel between social pollution and environmental pollution. I think it’s a very interesting and relevant parallel. Thirty, 40, 50 years ago, we understood the harm we were doing to the environment by putting stuff into the air, water and ground, but people did it anyway. Why? Because everybody else did it, too, and organizations couldn’t afford to stop doing it. Society has now finally said that environmental pollution is intolerable.
In the same way, the only thing that’s going to change people’s dying for a paycheck is when society says we are going to take human life and human well-being seriously. We are not going to permit companies to make people ill and kill them — and then externalize those costs on the larger society. In my opinion, it is going to require either a legal suit (which I don’t see happening) or government regulation.
5) You make a compelling case that we should not be connected all the time — for the betterment of the companies we work for and ourselves. Throughout your research for the book (or otherwise), what is one of the most powerful insights that stood out that there is a need for us to prioritize time for renewal?
There is the obvious need for sleep. There have been several books and many studies that clearly show we underperform when we are fatigued. Furthermore, studies show that sleep is much more important for the renewal of our immune system than we thought. Second, the amount of sleep we are getting as a society is going down. There are an astonishingly high fraction of human beings, particularly in the United States, who are not getting enough sleep. So sleep is something that we need to kind of highlight and talk about, and it does not happen when we cannot disengage from work.
There is a guy named Nir Eyal who wrote this fabulous book, “Hooked.” In it, he discusses the business model of most of these organizations building communication technology that keeps us “connected.” These products are premised on keeping you on their sites as long, and as much, as possible: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook … all these things. Again, their business model is premised on keeping you on their sites as long and as much as possible. These companies have made their apps addictive intentionally using all kinds of psychology to do that, so that is number one.
Number two, this connection thing plays to people’s egos. It plays to people’s sense of importance. “Wow, I’m so important, I have to be connected all the time. Nobody can live without me. Everybody has to be in touch with me every nanosecond.” There was an article written by Drake Baer about the status symbol of being busy. It used to be a status symbol to have a tan, because that showed that you probably took a vacation. And now, it is a status symbol to have markers that suggest you work all the time. Working is a status marker; it plays to our ego. Today’s priorities do not align well with being well, and that needs to change.
