Switch

The numbers of employees who work from home, so-called teleworkers, has risen dramatically in the past decade or so, enabled by the internet and the availability of high-speed broadband in many areas of the country.

In the US it’s the same. According to Fortune Magazine this week, nearly half of U.S.-based companies currently have employees who telework, or work from outside the office. And President Obama has just signed into law the 2010 Telework Enhancement Act, which gives government agencies six months to establish a policy on working outside the office and create training programmes for teleworkers and their managers. It is estimated that the bill will affect approximately 1.2 million government workers.

On the one hand, if you’re fairly well-disciplined and not easily distracted by the lure of all those day-time chat shows discussing marital misdemeanors, last night’s washing-up piled up in the sink, or the possibility of cleaning out the rubbish bins (yes, for the easily tempted, even these can seem highly preferable to writing up that project report!), the ability to work from home is an absolute god-send.

On the other hand, when your home is also your workplace, does it become more difficult to switch off from work, to focus on the family instead of business, or to think about domestic issues rather than work issues? Do you need different skills in order to navigate a healthy  path between being effective when you’re working at home and effective when you’re at home and not working?

Interestingly, a recent piece of research from Charlotte Fritz at Portland State University and her colleagues Maya Yankelevich, Anna Zarubin and Patricia Barger at Bowling Green State University, has explored the relationship between switching off from work during non-work time (a.k.a. ‘psychological detachment’), well-being and productivity.

I think that most people would probably agree that being able to distance yourself mentally from work when you’ve left the workplace is a good thing because it helps you to recharge your mental, emotional and physical batteries. The research suggests that there is a linear relationship between psychological detachment and well-being (using the Oldenburg Burnout Inventory which measures emotional exhaustion, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale) which means the more you switch off, the higher your well-being, and vice versa.

In terms of productivity, the study asked the employees’ co-workers to rate their task performance and also their personal initiative over the past couple of weeks. The results suggest that medium levels of detachment are associated with the highest levels of job performance, whereas both very high and very low detachment are linked with lower levels of performance, in other words, the relationship is curvilinear. So whilst switching off completely is linked to a higher level of happiness, it is also linked with lower performance at work.

For more on the subject of working from home,  psychological detachment, well-being and productivity, read my posting to Positive Psychology News Daily.

Image courtesy of javez

Here’s a great animated video supporting Daniel Pink’s presentation on intrinsic motivation and why profit-related pay (PRP) doesn’t actually motivate people to work harder.

According to Pink, psychology research shows that economists have got it all wrong. If you want to motivate and engage people, and get them work harder, they need to experience the following 3 things at work:

1) AUTONOMY (i.e. being able to choose what you do and how you do it)
2) MASTERY (i.e. being able to get better at whatever you do – so there needs to be some challenge in the job), and
3) PURPOSE (i.e. being able to make a meaningful contribution. A profit motive is OK as long as it’s linked to a ‘purpose motive’).

Organisations which fit the bill include Skype (now owned by private investment company Silver Lake, and Ebay) and Apple.

Pink’s theory is that if we treat people like people, we can make organisations better off and make the world a better place.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ultimate Multi-tasking

Here’s a link to my post to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, on the subjects of happiness, busyness and holiday letters.

Please feel free to add your comments and thoughts here or on the PPND site.

Image: sha in LA

Working Together

Here’s a link to my posting to Positive Psychology News Daily this month, called      ‘Creating Strong Bonds in the Workplace’, which gives you some of the major theories and practical applications of positive psychology for developing positive relationships at work.

As usual, feel free to leave your thoughts and comment here, or on the PPND website.

Image: thanks to enfad

If you happen to be in London on Wednesday 21st October, the Employee Well-being Forum might be worth a visit. The programme boasts that “at this event you will hear a wealth of best practice case studies offering practical advice to improve wellness strategies and decrease absence and stress in the workplace through the recession”. Hmmmmmm…. That the Forum is taking place at Canary Wharf* is an irony that won’t be lost on many of the delegates, I’m sure…

I notice that Unilever is represented – you’ll remember we spoke about them in the last posting about costs and benefits of well-being. And Nic Marks from the fabulous New Economics Foundation,which gave us the (Un)Happy Planet Index (how efficiently we use resources to generate well-being) and the National Accounts of Well-being (personal and social well-being in 22 European countries). Apart from that I can’t see any connection between this forum and Positive Psychology….and you can’t talk seriously about well-being without talking about Positive Psychology, can you?

If anyone reading this is going to the forum I’d love to have your feedback.

*Venue:

CCT Venues-Canary Wharf
Isis Building – Thames Quay
193 Marsh Wall
London, E14 9SG

Thanks to garethr for the image