Ted Audio Collective

Hello, everyone. You're listening to After Hours. I'm Felix. I'm Me here. And I'm Katie Milkman. I am a professor of Wharton and a former HBS PhD student. Oh, it's so great to have you, Katie. Yeah, welcome, Katie.

It's so great to be here. And also the author of this crazy best selling how to change, which has been all over the place and just a wonderful behavioral psychologist and researcher and we're delighted to have you, Katie.

Thank you for the kind words. How are you both feeling about the change to standard time? What'd you do with your bonus hour?

Oh, yes. I don't have like super regular sleeping hours anyway. So then maybe I notice it a little less.

I save it. I love that whole idea of falling back and I love the whole idea of the extra hour. I treasure it. Although I never do anything with it per se, but I'm sure I enjoy it.

So maybe that's a great first topic to talk about. Let's talk about it. That extra hour, what we do, what we don't do with it, but it means whether we should get rid of it. Yeah.

And why we should like fresh starts as well. That's a great topic. Felix, what did you bring?

I brought maybe something a little less light-hearted. I would like to talk about worker surveillance, which has just increased dramatically in the wake of the pandemic. And I'm curious what to make of it.

Wait, we're going from the light to the dark.

I was going to say, yeah, it's a great topic. And it's getting darker earlier and earlier.

By the minutes. Let's do it.

Okay, workplace surveillance. Felix, what's going on? I'm watching you me here. You're literally watching me.

In some sense, you might say it's nothing new. We've always took account of productivity, whether people showed up at work, we had time measurements on the factory floor.

But the estimate is that the number of firms that actively monitor their worker, and this is sort of keystroke by keystroke, taking snapshots of your screen and at particular intervals, the number of firms that engage in these kinds of activities has roughly doubled since the pandemic.

It's anywhere between 60 and 70% of companies. And so it feels like a big moment. And I was just curious, do you think this is only reasonable and particular now that we have so many hybrid work arrangements where people are at home and have maybe less control over what they do?

Is it even necessary in order to keep up everyone's motivation because we know motivation falters if you have only a few slackers who don't pull their weight?

Or is this now it's really just one step too far?

Well, I've been thinking how this relates to a couple of really interesting research papers. One is a paper. And I know we just got through election day.

But it looks at what happens when you get a piece of mail telling you that your voter records are public and that someone's going to check and see whether or not you vote it.

This single piece of junk mail is the most effective tool I have ever seen in a scientific experiment for increasing voter turnout.

The one that really works well it increases voter turnout by eight percentage points. What they did is they say here's the voting records of everyone in your neighborhood and who turned out.

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