Government Executive - Authors - Anna Codrea-Rado

How to Get Better at Email: What Science Tells Us

Anna Codrea-Rado — Wed, 03 Jul 2013 12:35:05 -0400

Email is all-pervasive, and arguably one of the most important tools of modern business. But the fact is most of us are not particularly good at it, wasting time on messages we should ignore and losing track of those that we should be focusing on. Then there’s the base human instinct to cc: everyone in our address notebook whenever possible.

What are the best ways to take control and optimize your use of email? Quartz turned to academic research from around the world and other thoughtful sources to compile these insights and suggestions.

If you want a reply, ask simple questions

A group of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University sought to understand how people attend to incoming email. They found that people are more likely to respond to information requests—whether important or trivial—if they’re easy to address. Social messages also get a quick reply because they’re “fun.” By contrast, very important but complex messages that require a lot of work to answer often don’t get a response. (For a recent take on how to get important people to read your emails, you can read Adam Grant’s six-point checklist.)

Open-Plan Offices Are Terrible for Your Health

Anna Codrea-Rado , Quartz — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:30:00 -0400

A well-designed office is a happy office. As facilities managers strive to save space and cash, they’re reshuffling desks and fiddling with temperature gauges. All of which has an impact on workers’ performance. Open-plan offices may make some kinds of collaboration easier, but are they more conducive to productivity? What’s the most irritating workplace distraction? And are those state-of-the-art workstations actually more comfortable? Here’s the Quartz complete guide to open-plan offices:

Nearly three quarters of Americans work in open-plan offices

According to the International Management Facility Association, 70% of American employees work in open-plan offices.

The world’s largest open-plan office

Mark Zuckerberg hired Frank Gehry to design Facebook’s office expansion in Menlo Park in California. Once completed—its planning application has been approved and work is set to start imminently—the social network’s new digs will be the world’s largest open-plan office.

Workers in open-plan offices get sick more often

Workers who share an office take more sick days than those who work in their own closed spaces. A study in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment and Health found that open office setups reported 62% more sick days on average than one-occupant layouts. It was the first national population study conducted in Denmark to find such a linkage. One suggested explanation, unsurprisingly, was that viruses and bacteria spread more easily in open offices. Another was that open offices are more stressful to work in because of the lack of privacy, and that the stress makes sickness more likely.

7 Tips For Starting a New Job Off on the Right Foot

Anna Codrea-Rado , Quartz — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 14:29:00 -0400

Once the elation of securing a new job fades, the nail-biting nerves of starting it quickly set in. For one NBC news anchor, his first-day jitters got the better of him at the most unfortunate of moments. So how do you start a new job well? How many questions are too many? And is there really any point in going to the orientation session?

Quartz tells you everything you need to know about starting a new job on the right foot:

Ask lots of questions

Writing in the Western Journal of Communication, Erin Gallagher and Patricia Sias wanted to know what effect new hires have on the existing—or “veteran”—employees of an organization. The researchers from Washington State University and Edward R. Murrow College concluded that when new people join a company, veteran employees experience as much uncertainty as the newcomers do, albeit for different reasons. While new hires are anxious about making a good first impression, old hands worry how the newcomers will affect their work habits.

Gallagher and Sias found the veteran employees felt more relaxed when new hires asked plenty of questions. It made the existing employees feel more confident about their own abilities and less anxious about having to pick up the slack.

Don’t hoodwink your manager

In a study in the Academy of Management Journal (paywall) on workplace innovation, Eirong Yaun and Richard Woodman found that employees who do something innovative at work only because they want to get ahead tend to fall flat on their faces. Managers, according to the study, turn out to be very good at spotting the employees who try to innovate solely as a way to pursue their personal agendas.

Go to the orientation session

Howard Klein and Natasha Weaver from Ohio State University wanted to work outwhether orientation sessions had any effect (paywall) on how well new employees adapted. They found that staff who attended organization-wide, voluntary orientation sessions were significantly better adjusted to their company’s working culture. They had a better grasp of its values and history, which in turn made it easier for them to form commitments and goals, as well as working relationships.

Say yes to everyone

Generosity with your time could be the secret to skipping merrily up the career ladder. Susan Dominus recently wrote a lengthy profile of psychologist Adam Grant in the New York Times magazine. Drawing on his research and applying it to his own professional life, Grant believes that people who help their coworkers—by taking really big chunks out of their days to say yes to them—get the furthest. So in the early days of a new job, saying yes to all those seemingly piffling requests will pay off in the long run.

Learn from co-workers, not managers

Cornell professor John Bishop assessed what effect on-the-job training in the first three months of a new job had on productivity. Among the results, Bishop found productivity rose substantially in the first year on the job—more than would be expected if there had been no training.

Bishop also wanted to work out the effect of specific types of training. He found that informal teaching from co-workers yielded greater long-term productivity results, at a higher rate of return to the employer, than from managers.

Be a social chameleon

The more aware you are of your public image, and the more you adapt it to your social surroundings, the further you’ll go. Writing in Administrative Science Quarterly, Ajay Mehra, Martin Kilduff and Daniel J. Brass wanted to understand how different personality types move within their social networks and how this affects their performance. The found that workers in a tech firm who were hyper-aware of themselves and how they come across to their peers did better in the workplace. They were at the center of their social networks and wielded more influence than co-workers who weren’t as adaptive.

Get your negotiations right

Starting out right starts at the negotiation table. Jared Curhan from MIT, along with Hillary Elfenbein and Gavin Kilduff from UC Berkley, asked to what degree job negotiations can predict employees’ subsequent attitudes to their work, as well as their likelihood to remain with the company in the long term. They were surprised to find that how employees perceived the negotiations mattered more than how much money they were able to wrangle. Employees who felt their voices had been heard and that they’d been treated fairly reported a high level of job satisfaction one year after they started their jobs. The economic result of the negotiation, by contrast, had almost no correlation with subsequent job satisfaction.

The Complete Guide to Procrastinating at Work

Anna Codrea-Rado , Quartz — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:41:00 -0400

Some research says the best way to spark creativity is to walk away and that the best ideas come from those least-expected “aha!” moments. So maybe procrastination isn’t such a bad thing after all. Or is time spent on those cat memes taking its toll? Can procrastinating ever be a source of productivity?

Here’s the complete guide to procrastinating at work:

Clever people procrastinate smartly

The Creativity Research Journal studied the working habits of a particularly intelligent group of people, winners of the Intel Science Talent competition. They found the group procrastinated productively. Some used procrastination as a trigger for a helpful amount of stress needed to ignite positive action. Others saw it as a “thought incubator”: They put off making a decision because they wanted to fully process it before finding a solution.

Procrastinate using your to-do list

The same study also found that the tasks the science competition winners were doing while avoiding work were helping in other areas of their life. They were procrastinating efficiently and taking care of other responsibilities. So don’t feel too guilty the next time you pause from that spreadsheet to pay your gas bill online.

Procrastination isn’t just poor time management

Professor Joseph R. Ferrari of DePaul University writes extensively on procrastination and has found that procrastinators aren’t simply managing their time poorly. It’s a tactic deployed by those with vulnerable self-esteem and has a lot to do with perceived notions of time.

There are two types of procrastinators out there

There are those who delay making decisions, and those who delay taking action. Ferrari found that the decision-avoiders are dependent on others, relying on them to make their minds up for them. They’re more submissive and prefer to pass the buck to someone else whom they can blame them if it all goes wrong.

The task-avoiders, on the other hand, are generally characterized by low self-esteem; they make a decision but don’t follow up on it. Of course a lot of people fall into both categories, but the findings go some way in explaining the different ways people procrastinate.

Nature versus nurture

Though procrastination might seem merely a personality quirk, scientific opinion is divided as to whether it can be put down to nature, or is the product of a person’s environment.

According to Ferrari and further research from Oklahoma State University, factors like “time perspective” affect someone’s likelihood to procrastinate. Time perspective is how people understand and interpret their past, present and future. For example, someone who focuses on the bad things in his past is more prone to bitterness and resentment. Although it’s possible to modify your time perspective, it’s thought to be rooted in personality and linked to procrastination.

Other research, though, has found that environment is also a contributing factor in procrastination. The American Psychological Association, for example, found that procrastination often starts at school, where a lack of rigor in curricula and not being punished for missed deadlines can breed time-wasting habits.

Procrastinators hate procrastinators

In one of his many studies into the behavioral habits of procrastinators, Ferrari found that they are hyper-critical of their fellow procrastinators. This is especially true of women. When asked to the evaluate the poor performance of a co-worker who has the same procrastinating tendencies and habits as themselves, workers were harsher on them than their non-procrastinating co-workers.

Those cat memes could be pretty bad for you

That trance you can go into when finding yourself scrolling through cat memes or chatting an afternoon away has a name. It’s called “flow”. The concept was coined by psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi and was originally considered a good thing because it’s a state of deep engagement and absorption, as he abstractly explains in a Wired interview.

Andrew Thatcher and his colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa wanted to understand more about flow in relation to two other online behaviors: procrastination and problematic internet use. They were trying figure out to what extent too much time online was psychologically and socially harmful.

Unsurprisingly, they found a strong link between procrastination and problematic internet use, as they wrote in the Journal of Computers in Human Behavior. But they also found that when someone was in a state of flow while engaged in a non-work related activity, she was more likely to end up with problematic internet use.

In a way, then, this frames procrastination not as a time-wasting phenomenon, but more as a disconnect between intent and action. Flow is a desirable state to be in when you’re working, but you misdirect it at something else, like avoiding a boring task or the pressure of an assessment, you fall down a rabbit hole.

Don’t hire procrastinators

A study by Ritu Gupta and colleagues in the journal Current Psychology suggests a way for employers to screen applicants for their procrastination tendencies. People who believe in some form of fate or pre-destination—in a hopeless, “it’s out of my hands” kind of way—are more prone to procrastination, because such people tend to be more neurotic and anxious.

But more surprising, perhaps, is that the other main characteristic of the typical procrastinator is a relatively healthy life outlook. According to the study, people who have a glowing, nostalgic view of their past have a high tendency towards procrastination. This new finding (the study was conducted in 2012) runs opposite to previous research in the field, and scientists don’t yet have a concrete explanation for what seems rather counter-intutive.

Right, back to those cat memes.

Image via Pav197lin/Shutterstock.com

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11 Things You Didn't Know About Drinking Coffee at Work

Anna Codrea-Rado , Quartz — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 08:41:00 -0400

The cardinals who gathered at the Vatican last month took a very important daily pause during their deliberations to choose a new pope.

“There’s a coffee break for about 30 minutes at a special buffet area in the front part of the audience hall,” the Rev. Thomas Rosica told CNN. “Cardinals have an opportunity to go down and mix and mingle.”

Whether you’re a prince of the church or a cubicle-dwelling drone, there seems to be an unbreakable bond between work and coffee: The boss provides the java and the java fuels the workers, keeping them revved up, connected, and toiling away at their given tasks.

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about coffee at work, but were too over- or under-caffeinated to ask:

Surprise! Coffee keeps you alert

Caffeine, the most commonly consumed psychoactive drug in the world, is a stimulant. It blocks the adenosine receptors in the brain, which lets the neurotransmitters like epinephrine and dopamine that are associated with alertness run wild. There are many studies showing that ingesting caffeine helps workers perform better, especially if they’re working when their circadian clocks say they should be sleeping. Researchers studying night-shift workers found coffee is effective in counteracting any ”sleepy effect,” and caffeinated shift workers made fewer errors than their decaffeinated colleagues.

Coffee eases the pain of working at a desk

There’s a reason why computer programmers are so wired: Consuming caffeine has been found to ease pain in the neck, shoulders, forearms, and wrists that are often experienced by those of us who are chained to our keyboards.

Coffee is a social lubricant

Researchers from MIT found that employees who take coffee breaks together are more productive. The study tracked a group of workers in a call center and found that when coffee breaks where scheduled so that co-workers could take them at the same time, their performance improved.

Even without the coffee, coffee shops are good places to work

A study in the Journal of Consumer Research explored the effects noise has on creativity. They found that a low to moderate level of ambient sound, like the one found in your favorite coffee shop working spot, improves creativity. A tech startup in Virginia developed Coffitivity, a coffee shop noise simulator.

The best time for a coffee is around 2 p.m.

The UK’s National Health Service thinks energy levels are at their lowest at about 2:16 pm. The amount of time it takes for coffee to kick in depends on a number of factors–including age, weight, gender, and caffeine tolerance level–but 15 to 30 minutes is a pretty good window. Pro tip: Supercharge your rejuvenation with acaffeine nap. A cup of coffee followed by a 15-minute snoooze. By the time you wake up, the drug should be kicking in.

Coffee can make a stressful situation more stressful

Caffeine can “exaggerate sympathetic adrenal-medullary responses to the stressful events of normal daily life.” Translation: It makes your blood pressure rise and spikes levels of adrenaline, both of which are associated with higher levels of self-reported stress. The effect doesn’t diminish when you leave the office.

The coffee break is a 20th century invention

Several towns and companies claim to be the first to offer workers a pause during the workday to refuel on coffee, including Barcolo, a Buffalo, New York-based furniture manufacturer that later became known as Barcalounger (it madeemployees pay for their own coffee, however). After World War II, many unions made a coffee break part of their contracts.

It’s also an invention of Madison Ave, with an assist from a behavioral psychologist

The term “coffee break” was unknown before 1952, when the Pan-American Coffee Bureau ran the ad campaign “Give yourself a Coffee-Break — and Get What Coffee Gives to You.” It was later popularized by John Watson, a psychologist who was working for Maxwell House. (Fun fact: Watson once conditioned an infant to bedeathly afraid of rats—and neglected to uncondition him when the experiment ended.)

Coffee may be a life saver, especially for older workers.

The US National Institutes of Health found a link between coffee-drinking and lower risks of death. People in their 50s and 60s who drink three or more cups of coffee a day have a 10% lower risk of death compared to those who don’t don’t drink coffee at all.

It even works with decaf

The same NIH study found that removing caffeine didn’t change coffee’s life-extending aura.

Baristas drink the most coffee

Duh. They are followed by food preparation/service workers, scientists, sales representatives, marketing/PR professionals, nurses, and editors/writers/media workers. Anecdotal evidence gathered by the Quartz staff suggests that last category of professionals deserves to be way higher on the list.

Image via Aleksey Troshin/Shutterstock.com

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The Complete Guide to Taking Notes Effectively at Work

Anna Codrea-Rado , Quartz — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 10:36:00 -0400

The value of note-taking—or notebooks at least—gets a stock market capitalization in the coming weeks with Moleskine’s planned IPO. The Italian stationery firm has boosted the profile of note-taking at companies around the world. But is all of the scribbling on nicely bound paper actually helping business people? And what are the best ways to use note-taking—in notebooks and on digital devices—to actually boost your productivity?

Here’s everything you need to know about taking notes at work, but never bothered to ask:

To have or to take?

Many of us take notes in meetings and never go back to read them again. Does that do enough to organize and cement our memory of the essential takeaways? Likely not on its own—re-reading notes later does make a difference, according to experts. Research published in the Teaching of Psychology Journal in the ’80s concluded that students were messing up on their tests not because they’d taken bad notes, but because they weren’t re-reading them before the exams. And researchers at Keele University in the UK found that three-quarters of academic studies on note-taking concluded its chief value was storing information so it could be consulted later. The takeaway: if you have a bunch of pads or notebooks filled with meeting notes that you never consult, your note-taking isn’t providing the most value over time.

Your boss might judge you if you turn up to a meeting with a paper pad

Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Alexandra Samuel said that if she turns up to a meeting and sees a paper notebook tucked under her colleague’s arm, she’s not impressed. Seriously not impressed. Samuel is a digital note-taking extremist. She believes electronic notes are vastly superior to their analog equivalents. She dismisses the argument that having laptops and tablets in meetings tempts distraction, saying it’s the meeting leader’s responsibility to keep his or her audience sufficiently hooked on their every word. Not everyone agrees with her.

Digital vs. analog notes

There’s little research into the benefits of digital note-taking over handwritten notes. The bulk of studies focus on whether typing out notes or copying and pasting them–taking whole chunks of text from pre-prepared digital materials and pasting them into notes–is better. A team from Carnegie Mellon looked at best practices for designing note-taking technologies and found that typing out notes improves later recall, while copy and pasting text into notes is actually detrimental to learning because it encourages wordiness.

The US Air Force Academy teamed up with West Virginia University to work out the art of electronic note-taking. They were particularly curious to learn whether scaffolding notes horizontally across a row of cells, or down a column made a difference in terms of subjects’ ability to recall the information. It didn’t.

And if you’re worried about the environment, Slate weighed the green implications of taking notes on an iPad. The bottom line is it’s complicated, but using recycled paper is better for the world under most scenarios than buying a battery-powered gadget.

Supercharge your notes

The more OCD you are about organizing your notes, the better. The Journal of Reading compared different note-taking methods and found that the most rigorously structured–those with hierarchal ordering and numbered subsections–were of the highest quality and accuracy. A two-column method came in a close second; these notes were arranged such that the left column contained the information from the given event (i.e. the meeting, lecture or talk) and the right column was used later to fill out follow-up points and highlight key themes. Although these notes were significantly more precise than freestyle note-taking, there was little difference in the ability of the note-taker to recall the material.

Doodling isn’t just for fun

The British Journal of Educational Technology found mind-mapping to be significantly more effective than just writing out notes. Mind-mapping brings visual structure to notes, usually involving writing one word in the center and drawing offshoots from it with related ideas and phrases. Researchers studying two groups of note-takers, those using the SmartWisdom method (a popular alternative mind-mapping system) and those writing traditional notes found that although there was no difference in the accuracy of the notes, the mind-mappers were able to present the information back with more clarity and coherence than their counterparts.

The bottom line in note-taking

Underling something makes it stand out against other words and that makes recalling that word easier. The scientific term for this is the Von Restorff effect.

Note breaking

The typical meeting format of continuous talking and simultaneous scribbling might not be ideal for optimum note-taking. It turns out that not everyone is all that good at listening and writing at the same time. The Journal of Educational Psychology researched lecture structures and found that incorporating periodic, short breaks greatly improved the quality of notes taken. One wat to approach this would be to have little moments of quiet writing reflection in between meeting agenda items. Wouldn’t that be pleasant?

Note-taking as a legal defense

Lawyers say it doesn’t matter whether your notes are digital or analog if you’re looking to use them as supporting evidence in any legal tussle. The legal stance is that notes will stand up as evidence in court, should you ever need to rely on them. Canadian human rights lawyer Donna Seale writes about this on her blog, emphasizing the need to basically write down every word said in the office.

It’s probably not a bad time to buy shares in Moleskine after all.

Read more at Quartz.

Image via Efired/Shutterstock.com

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