Game Plan

Is there anything more annoying than coworkers who interrupt you? Research has shown that women get interrupted more than men. Author and Professor Chris Karpowitz talks to Francesca and Rebecca about how that affects the kinds of conversations and decisions that happen at companies, and what can be done about it.

A big part of our work lives takes place not in the office, but instead stuck in traffic or on a crowded train en route to and from our jobs. The average American spends 25 minutes getting to work, up from 21.7 minutes in 1980—and people living in major metropolitan areas have it much worse. We are spending a lot of time shuttling between work and home. These increasingly long rides to work are stressful, frustrating and bad for our health and the economy. Is there a way to make commuting tolerable again? Rebecca and Francesca talk to Richard Florida, an urban studies theorist and author of The New Urban Crisis about how traveling to our jobs got this bad and the piecemeal initiatives that are attempting to make our commutes to work a teeny bit better.

Among a certain set of companies competing for talent, there’s been a perks arms race. Health benefits and vacation days aren’t enough to sweeten a good salary anymore. Companies now offer to pay off student debt, subsidize egg-freezing services and provide cash stipends for employees to go on vacation. Francesca and Rebecca talk about the state of cushy workplaces and whether anything can compensate for a job you just don’t like. Jason Fried, chief executive officer and co-founder of Chicago-based software company Basecamp joins us to discuss all the things he’s done to keep employees happy (and keep them from departing for the coasts) and what is—and isn’t—working.

Each week on Game Plan, Francesca and Rebecca share their half-baked takes, a segment where they talk about their not super well thought out ideas and opinions on work and work related activities.  In the spirit of the summer slack off, this week Francesca and Rebecca outsourced that task to their colleagues to present the very first half-baked take marathon. In it, they talk about important office topics like office footwear, the case for coffee in the afternoon, and an innovative idea to make open offices more habitable.

Venture capitalist Keith Rabois set off a Silicon Valley firestorm earlier this month about what it takes to succeed. When another tech investor wrote on Twitter that working on the weekends and burning out isn’t cool—and doesn’t work—Rabois fired back. “Totally false,” he said, suggesting that dogged dedication (usually measured by long hours) was the only way to reach the top. Lots of people objected to his assessment. Francesca and Rebecca speak with one of Keith's critics, startup founder and engineer Sara Mauskopf, about why she thinks flexible hours and a healthy work-life balance can actually make your product better. Then we check in with Keith to see whether he has revised his opinion.

So, you want to move to Canada? Or New Zealand, or Australia or another English-speaking, culturally adjacent country to the U.S. that doesn’t have our current president. After every election, Americans threaten to get out of dodge—and 2016 was no different. Rebecca and Francesca talk about the realities of starting over in another country and what it takes to actually pick up and move your life to a new place. They talk to author Suketu Mehta, who grew up in India and came to America when his family immigrated to New York in the 1970s. In a recent piece for the New York Times, Mehta urged more Americans to consider the expat life, arguing that it’s not just a fantasy of the elite.

Letting employees occasionally work from home makes them happy, can save companies money and there's research to suggest it could help close the gender pay gap. But some companies, like IBM, say remote work encourages habits that hurt collaboration, innovation and productivity. Last month the company told hundreds of thousands of employees they had to report to headquarters. So what's the future of work? Guest Christopher Mims, a technology columnist and a 10-year veteran of working from home, explains why he believes companies can't curb the trend of working from a distance.

Fake it 'til you make it! That's the career advice many of us get upon first entering the workforce. Since you're a newbie, and won't understand lots of parts of your job, just pretend — and one day, all of a sudden, you'll be a bona fide expert. It's not bad advice, and research has even found that it works. But what happens when you still feel as if you're faking it, long after you've actually made it? Francesca and Rebecca discuss the phenomenon known as imposter syndrome. Many competent (often female) professionals go through their entire careers with the sneaking suspicion that they'll be revealed as frauds — even when they're more than qualified. Is there a way to combat this haunting feeling? Dr. Suzanne Koven, a primary care physician at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, explains how she recently got over her own imposter syndrome and helps Francesca and Rebecca deal with their own inner work demons.

Student debt doesn't only affect students and recent grads. It’s a burden that can follow people through their working life and influence every financial and career decision they make. It’s easy to feel panicked by doom-and-gloom news, so to separate worries from reality, Francesca and Becca talk with Bloomberg's Shahien Nasiripour, who covers student debt and education policy.

Workers used to leave their opinions and feelings at home. No talking at work about politics, religion or other personal stuff was the rule. Not anymore! Companies ask us to bring our whole selves to the office. But for those of us averse to sharing with our coworkers, the current political climate and social media have made it impossible to resist. These days, many of us talk to coworkers about Trump, our personal lives or something we just spotted on Facebook. But is putting it all out there necessarily a good thing? This week on Game Plan, Rebecca and Francesca discuss whether we need to revisit what's acceptable to say at work and how to say it. If we're going to talk about sensitive, divisive and uncomfortable topics at work, we need better rules and etiquette. To help us, we turn to Ijeoma Oluo, the author of “So You Want to Talk About Race." She provides practical tips for having productive conversations at work about a topic both political and personal: race.

Francesca and Rebecca talk about when listening to music out loud, and with your co-workers—becomes a job requirement. They report from various scenes of communal workplace listening, including retail chains, where employees have to listen to whatever somebody at headquarters decided fits a store's vibe, and a public relations firm that's experimenting with a cooperative DJ-ing environment. Even in operating rooms, many surgeons use music to focus on their high-stakes work, but one—Becca's dad—bans tunes except during the holidays. They look at the effect of music on our productivity and happiness at work, and ask whether forced-music regimes can make people's jobs better, or if jamming should remain a solo pursuit.

We're used to seeing accessible bathrooms and wheelchair ramps at the office, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But in many ways, employers still don't go far enough to accommodate people with disabilities. The unemployment rate is two times higher for disabled people than the general population. Those who do find work get paid less, making 63 cents on the dollar, on average. And, of course, there's workplace bias. Francesca and Rebecca talk to Gideon Goldberg, a software developer at The Guardian with cerebral palsy about what it's like to work with a disability. He talks about all the small things he has to consider in his working life that most people don't. Like: How his limited spacial awareness makes navigating to job interviews slightly more difficult. But, thanks to accommodations he's entitled to by law in his native U.K., he doesn't have to worry too much about doing his job.

Families in America used to look pretty similar. Moms in the 1970s were far more likely to stay home with the kids, while dads went to the office and paid the bills. That paradigm has shifted dramatically. Now, more households have two working parents than ever. America also has more single-parent households — and more female breadwinners. Yet the rules and norms of office life — commuting to the office, spending most of the weekday there, and working late if you have to — haven’t adapted to the realities of modern families. In addition to running on a rigid 9-to-5 schedule, many offices don’t offer paid family leave and still punish working women. On this week's show, we discuss that disconnect. Guest Ashley Ford, a senior features writer at Refinery29, polled 130 millennial women to find out how they felt about making more money than their male partners. She talks to Francesca and Rebecca being a female breadwinner in a world that isn’t sure it's ready for that.

First days at a new job fall on a continuum. There are the days-long orientation with each minute planned out with activities, powerpoints, and trainings. And then, sometimes you get to work on day one and the manager has no idea what to do. He gives you 20 minutes of paperwork and the next eight hours are spent pretending to work on tasks that don't exist. What happens on a first day can color the rest of a worker's experience at a job -- so much so that companies spend an average of $4,000 per new hire. A good experience can keep new hires around long term, which saves companies money on retention. But what makes a good first day? Rebecca and Francesca find out by taking a field trip to Great Neck, New York, to visit Northwell Health, which prides itself on its orientation.

If throwing money at problems solved them, much of corporate America would look like a rainbow coalition by now. Companies have poured millions into diversity initiatives with the aim of recruiting and retaining more women, minorities and people from underrepresented groups. But a lot of what they’ve done hasn’t worked. On this week’s Game Plan, Francesca and Rebecca ask whether companies are doing enough—and doing the right things—to diversify their staffs. Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, joins to talk about Project Include, a diversity consultancy she co-founded, and how it is tackling the complex problems that keep many workforces largely male and white in a new (and maybe better?) way.

From smoking-cessation programs to step challenges, companies do all sorts of things to push employees toward getting healthy. Why? Sick workers are expensive. If companies can create healthier workforces, they save tons of money on health insurance costs. These efforts have helped spawn a $6 billion dollar corporate wellness industry, but they aren't really working. People don't care enough to participate, and many wellness initiatives don't have a good return on investment, studies have found. Is there a better way to stay healthy at work? Joanna Frank, the founding executive director of the Center for Active Design, joins Game Plan to talk about a growing movement to create workspaces that quietly manipulate workers into healthier behaviors. Sign us up!

Work friendships are a complicated dance. Research suggests we’re more inclined to undercut our colleagues than the people in our personal lives, and a big factor in what makes us feel close to work buddies is their sheer physical proximity. So are we all conniving frenemies on the job, or can we actually form meaningful bonds? Guest Jessica Methot, an expert on workplace relationships at Rutgers University, discusses the value of even surface-level work connections, and drops some surprising science about which coworkers exhaust us the most (hint: it’s not our enemies).

For many office workers, March means hours spent surreptitiously watching college basketball games and obsessively checking in on brackets. Even if you're not a March Madness fan, we all have our own workday distractions. (The Olympics, anyone?) Even when there’s nothing major going on, with Slack, an unrelenting news cycle, and open offices, getting through an entire workday without some kind of distraction is pretty much impossible. For the easily distracted—which is all of us, right?—we have some great news: not all distractions are bad. Gloria Mark, an informatics researcher at UC Irvine, studies workplace interruptions and her research has found that being distracted doesn’t necessarily destroy productivity. You’re welcome. (Corrects name in first sentence of second paragraph.)

Lots of us suffer from email overload, but few have taken such dramatic steps to address it as Dan Ariely. He’s a behavioral economist at Duke University who was so buried by emails he wrote software to help triage his messages, and uses a two-page auto-response to redirect all but the most important ones.\u0010\u0010Rebecca confesses this week that she has 2,026 unread emails. That number might send you into a cold sweat or sound kind of low, depending on what kind of email personality you have. Email is such a universal enemy that strict deletion regimes like Inbox Zero have gained cult-like followings, and office chat apps like Slack hope to make it obsolete. Despite these efforts, email isn’t going anywhere, so you may as well learn to deal with it. And there are some things about email you may come to like—or even love.

Everyone's heard the new mantra: Office life can be hazardous. Staring at a screen all day ruins your eyes. Poor air quality deprives your brains of energy. Worst of all, sitting is the new smoking. In an attempt be healthier and more productive in our cubicles, workers and workplaces have hacked the office to encourage better patterns of behavior. There's no more popular hack than the standing desk. But does it live up to the hype? Rebecca and Francesca seek answers from Mark Benden, director of the ergonomics center at Texas A&M, whose research has found that we're using standing desks wrong. With his help, we learn how to get the most out of standing (and sitting) at work.