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The work-from-home blues have a secret source: nostalgia

Jennifer Anzaldi — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 14:25:23 +0000

The work-from-home blues have a secret source: nostalgia Jennifer Anzaldi Thu, 09/19/2024 - 10:25

For at least two years, CEOs have been trying to bring employees back to the office, citing remote work’s supposed negative effects on productivity, morale, and creative collaboration. Managers, we’re told, are having a hard time monitoring and motivating dispersed teams. But what if bringing employees back to the office won’t put the genie back in the bottle?

Kevin Rockmann, professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at ��, argues that the furor over remote work masks deeper cultural issues at play in many organizations. This cultural malaise has employees pining for an imagined past where they felt grounded and connected with their colleagues. In short, remote workers aren’t unmanageable—they’re suffering from pangs of nostalgia.

Kevin Rockmann

Rockmann’s recently published research paper in Journal of Management (co-authored by Jessica Methot of Rutgers University and Emily Rosado-Solomon of Babson University) documents the results of surveys conducted during the height of Covid (September 2020). The thrice-daily surveys were delivered over a two-week period to 110 full-time professionals. Respondents were asked to report on their feelings of nostalgia, as well as emotional coping strategies, task performance, and counterproductive work behaviors (e.g. withholding support from colleagues and stealing time from their employer).

The overwhelming majority of participants (98 out of 110) admitted to experiencing nostalgia for life before Covid. And these feelings could have either positive or negative outcomes, depending on how the respondents dealt with them. Rockmann points to two pathways that showed up across the surveys as a whole, which he labels “approach” and “avoid.”

One way respondents reacted to nostalgia was to use so-called “cognitive change” strategies, which help regulate emotions through shifts in perspective. For example, someone feeling sad about being trapped at home during the pandemic could think to themselves, “It could be so much worse. At least I don’t have Covid like so many others.” These strategies seemed to evoke empathetic responses, leading the survey participants to reach out to colleagues to check in or offer assistance.

Equally prevalent in Rockmann’s results, however, was a much darker pathway. Instead of reaching out to others in response to nostalgia, respondents tended to turn inward in an attempt to minimize the emotional discomfort. Psychological researchers call this sort of reaction “attentional deployment.” “It’s a defense mechanism whereby you don’t feel you have the means to really connect with others, so you leverage your attention away from the source of pain,” Rockmann explains. This pathway led to incidents of “acting out”—the above-mentioned counterproductive work behaviors.

Rockmann says these Covid-era findings remain relevant for at least two reasons. First, survey respondents’ written comments sound like they could have been written yesterday, rather than four years ago. Common nostalgic themes revolved around co-workers, the structure of co-located work, etc.—all oft-heard plaints of remote workers in 2024. Second, the normalization of remote work well predated Covid—as Rockmann’s past research on the topic has documented. Covid accelerated an inevitable transition that was already well underway. Therefore, workers of a certain age would likely be feeling some nostalgia, even if there had never been a Covid pandemic.

“While return-to-office may make sense for some companies, I would emphasize that nostalgia cannot be fixed that way. Nostalgia is about longing for the past—or, more accurately, longing for a return to how we remember the past, usually through rose-colored lenses.”

How can organizations help employees conquer nostalgia, or at least encourage healthier ways of coping with nostalgia? The obvious answer might be what CEOs are trying to do—end remote work altogether. “While return-to-office may make sense for some companies, I would emphasize that nostalgia cannot be fixed that way. Nostalgia is about longing for the past—or, more accurately, longing for a return to how we remember the past, usually through rose-colored lenses,” Rockmann says.

Any political demagogue will tell you that people are most susceptible to nostalgia when they feel isolated and afraid. The fact that nostalgia is so widespread in today’s workplace would seem to confirm Rockmann’s past research showing how organizational cultures fail to promote positive relationships among employees.

Combating the nostalgia epidemic will require a cultural reset for many organizations. “Managers will need to engage much more closely with employees, asking sensitive questions (e.g. “What do you miss about working here before Covid?”) and co-creating individualized solutions to help employees fully adjust to the major changes in their working environment,” Rockmann says.

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When expressing gratitude, it’s all in the timing

Jennifer Anzaldi — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 14:42:32 +0000

When expressing gratitude, it’s all in the timing Jennifer Anzaldi Wed, 09/04/2024 - 10:42

Thanks so much for reading this article all the way to the end! No, that wasn’t an editorial error. It’s a savvy managerial motivation strategy lurking somewhere in almost every employee’s inbox or Slack channel.

Mandy O’Neill, an associate professor of management at the Donald G. Costello College of Business at ��, has discovered a potential new addition to the annals of managerial motivation techniques: anticipatory gratitude.

Mandy O'Neill

We all know that thanking people for a job well-done, or a much-needed favor, is an effective form of positive reinforcement. Psychology researchers classify gratitude as a “socially engaging emotion” that promotes prosocial behavior and strong interpersonal relationships. In the course of exploring how employees cope with high-stress or frustrating work situations, O’Neill and her co-author Hooria Jazaieri of Santa Clara University discovered an interesting wrinkle in what we thought we knew about this popular emotion: Gratitude can be used as a form of emotion regulation and, when expressed ahead of time instead of after the fact, can produce that extra “oomph” when it comes to employee resilience and persistence.

Their paper is in press at Academy of Management Discoveries.

The researchers stumbled upon the power of anticipatory gratitude while researching organizational culture and change within the intensive care units of a leading U.S. hospital. It’s difficult to imagine a more gut-wrenching, high-stakes work environment: The ICU units in question receive what one employee called “the sickest of the sickest” from throughout the region. To decompress and process their emotions after especially difficult shifts, employees routinely emailed the group using an internal listserv. O’Neill and Jazaieri were forwarded four years’ worth of messages, which they analyzed with the help of direct experience gained from extensive site visits to the hospital.

In addition to writing heartfelt outpourings of post facto gratitude, ICU colleagues thanked one another for rising to occasions that had not yet occurred. Some of these emails were pre-emptively apologetic (“I may have to take a day or two off from time to time…Thank you for your patience and understanding”). Others seemed to function as pep talks, inspiring teams to keep up the good work (“Thank you…for bringing your a-game to work every day”).

As O’Neill describes it, “The ‘thanks in advance’ phenomenon involves an awareness that you’re going to be annoyed or upset by what I’m asking you to do, so I infuse you with the positivity of that feeling you get when someone expresses gratitude to you. Think about it as an emotional buffer. It helps with the inevitable distress of the task that’s going to happen later. It makes those negative emotions less salient, less powerful, and less insidious.”

The researchers launched several follow-up studies to learn more about the effects of anticipatory gratitude. They chose a context—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) gig-work platform—that was in many ways the polar opposite of the ICU. “You go from the ultimate interdependent work environment to the ultimate transactional work environment,” O’Neill explains.

“The ‘thanks in advance’ phenomenon involves an awareness that you’re going to be annoyed or upset by what I’m asking you to do, so I infuse you with the positivity of that feeling you get when someone expresses gratitude to you. Think about it as an emotional buffer."

The MTurk workers were assigned to solve extremely difficult puzzles. After completing the paid task, they received negative feedback about their performance and were offered the opportunity to do additional puzzles without being paid. MTurkers who had seen a message of gratitude before the main task voluntarily took on significantly more unpaid work than those who received a similar message after the paid exercise.

“What’s so compelling and surprising for us is that anyone who does work with experienced online gig worker populations knows it’s nearly impossible to induce workers to go beyond their assignment, even by 30 extra seconds, which is about what we were asking for,” O’Neill says.

Questionnaires administered during the study revealed that anticipatory gratitude enhanced feelings of communal self-worth, which contributed to the participant’s resilience, that is, their ability to “bounce back” after the initial failure. In a third study, the researchers found anticipatory gratitude was better than a related positive affect—anticipatory hope—at motivating MTurkers to persevere at (i.e., spend more time on) a different set of challenging puzzles.

At this point, the potential for managerial manipulation should be crystal clear. Indeed, it was evident even to some of the gig workers, who wrote private messages such as, “It may be partial trickery for academic purposes but it was still nice to hear.”

"Gratitude can’t be a substitute for fair pay and decent work conditions...But our findings are clear: anticipatory gratitude works; it is effective.”

For O’Neill, these findings show that gratitude is more complicated than we previously thought. “This paper is one of the very few to show that gratitude isn’t always authentic and prosocial. It can be used strategically, especially for managers,” she says.

Sincerity and strategy are not mutually exclusive. Empathic managers whose feelings of gratitude are so strong that they have to be expressed beforehand could still be taking advantage of the “thanks in advance” phenomenon.

“In all organizations, you need people to stick with difficult or thankless or boring tasks. The challenge, of course, is how to do so ethically. Gratitude can’t be a substitute for fair pay and decent work conditions, for example. But our findings are clear: anticipatory gratitude works; it is effective,” O’Neill says.

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