Speaking of Psychology: The challenge of telework during COVID-19, with Kristen Shockley, PhD

Over the past several months, millions of newly remote workers have found themselves juggling work and family responsibilities from hastily improvised home offices. Kristen Shockley, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, discusses her research on how these new teleworkers are adapting and talks about what the pandemic may mean for the future of remote work.

Kristen Shockley’s main area of research focuses on understanding the intersection of employees’ work and family lives. Specifically, Shockley has conducted research aimed at understanding organizational initiatives to help employees managing competing life demands (i.e., flexible work arrangements); research that explores the relationship between work-family conflict and health outcomes, including eating behaviors and physiological indicators of health; research that addresses the theoretical foundations of work-family interactions; and research targeted at understanding how dual-earner couples balance work and family roles.

Kim Mills: Millions of Americans who once spent their days in offices are now entering their fourth month of full-time telework, commuting to their new desks in their basements or corners of living rooms, often while also trying to take care of children whose schools, summer camps and daycares are closed. Other workers, meanwhile, are outfitting themselves with masks and hand sanitizer, and cautiously returning to their long empty cubicles.

In addition to being a public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a forced unplanned experiment in mass telework and work-family conflict. How is it turning out for American office workers? Have we been more or less productive? What might be the effects on the future of work?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Kristen Shockley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia. Dr. Shockley has spent her career studying the intersection of work and family life. She's conducted research on how employees balance work and family demands, how work-family conflict affects people's health, and how dual-career couples navigate work and family roles. When the COVID-19 crisis hit, she realized that the upheaval caused by school and office closures made those questions even more pressing, and she set out to investigate how workers are adjusting.

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, Dr. Shockley.

Dr. Kristen Shockley: Thank you for having me.

Mills: You received a [Grant for Rapid Response Research (RAPID)] from the National Science Foundation to look at how workers are coping with the abrupt transition to telework during the COVID-19 shutdowns. Can you talk about why you thought it was important to do this research now, how you're doing it, and what questions are you asking?

Shockley: Yes, so when, I think it was March 13th, when we started realizing that a lot of people were going to be transitioning to remote work, I contacted one of my longtime collaborators at the University of South Florida, Tammy Allen, and said, "Should we try to get a rapid grant to study this? Just because this is a natural experiment like we've never seen before." It was so many people moving into remote work. We proposed a study to National Science Foundation, and I think we wrote it up within eight days and heard back seven days later that it was funded. The whole process has been very rapid, and we set out really to explore best practices in remote work because there's been a good amount of research on it, but it's largely cross-section of data comparing non-telecommuters to telecommuters.

What we want us to dig into is within a sample of people who are all telecommuting, where you don't have some of these selection effects like managers picking people they want to telecommute when everybody's in the same situation, what are factors that vary day to day that might impact people's wellbeing, as well as their productivity. We just thought it was really just an unprecedented time to study these important issues and then be able to say we have some evidence-based recommendations moving forward to disseminate broadly.

Mills: Do you have any results yet that you could talk about?

Shockley: We just wrapped the data collection up on Saturday. We haven't analyzed anything formally. I did dig into the data a little bit just to look at some descriptive things. A few interesting things I saw where we asked people, and I should say the entire sample, they're all working fully remote but were not working remote very much at all, 10% or less, before COVID. We asked them, "While COVID remains a public health threat, and what percent of the time would you want to stay working remote?" The vast majority said a hundred percent.

Mills: Wow.

Shockley: Yes. I think it was 90% of the sample said a hundred percent.

Mills: That's pretty amazing.

Shockley: Yes. That speaks to the fact that people are saying, "I don't want the risk. Even if this arrangement is not perfect, it's worth it to not expose potential exposure." We also asked once COVID is no longer as big of a threat, what percentage of the time would you like to work remote? There, we saw a very spread out distribution. The most common responses were a hundred and zero, but then it was really spread out, really spread out in between. The average was 46%. What that's telling me is, some people are liking it, some aren't. I think for most people, they're seeing working remote some at the time would be nice, but this a hundred percent has some downsides, probably largely in terms of social isolation, not feeling like you get out of the house ever.

Mills: Let's shift gears for a minute to talk about telework more broadly. Even before the pandemic, more than 26 million Americans were working remotely, at least part of the time, which is about 16% of the total US labor force of 165 million. How well was that working? There's an idea in the popular imagination that people slack off and they're less productive when they telework. Does the research back that up?

Shockley: Yes, there is that huge perception. Look at the headlines are all over the place with, is teleworking a good or a bad thing, pre COVID, and actually the data really don't suggest that people typically slack off. If anything, they show that people are the same or more productive. We don't have a lot of good experiments, which is the best way to really disentangle, is it teleworking that's causing you to be more or less productive, but there's one really solid experiment out there. They found is in a call center, and they found that the workers who worked from home made significantly more calls every day, they actually worked longer hours, but the quality of their calls were just as high as they were before. Suggesting people are more efficient, I think, from home, which is, in a lot of cases, I would say largely because you're not being interrupted by coworkers in the noisy environment of the office.

Now, of course it's a little bit different because people have kids at home. They may have interruptions that they wouldn't under normal remote work arrangement, where they would have childcare.

Mills: Before the COVID-19 pandemic, some early adopters, including Best Buy, IBM and Yahoo, were reversing policies that allowed employees to telecommute. They cited leadership changes and a growing need for a creative collaboration. Do you think that these companies will continue on that path once the emergency is over?

Shockley: Yes, those are really interesting, especially Best Buy, because they have been really progressive actually in allowing people to work, however, wherever, and then I was surprised to see them roll that back because the data actually, at least the data that was published, suggested that was working. I think moving forward, based on what I'm seeing just in informal discussions, as well as in headlines, I think a lot of companies are going to become much more open to remote work. I think it's going to be important for recruitment and retaining people in the workforce. Now that a lot of people have gotten a taste for it, I think a lot of employees are going to demand it and want to workforce to allow that. There's also a lot of benefits from a cost saving standpoint. You don't have to have as much office space, so you can save on real estate, and you can also, if you have a fully remote workforce, you can recruit from anywhere in the world, which really puts you in an advantage in trying to get top talent.

I'm projecting here, there's no way really to know, but I think we will see more of a shift to remote work moving forward.

Mills: Is teleworking equally good for everyone? Is there some profile of the person who thrives and the person who really struggles?

Shockley: That's a great question. That was one of the things we're trying to uncover in our grant and our rapid grant, because there's hardly any research out there at all on the topic. I think there's one study that looked at personality. Other than that, there's a lot to be done. We were exploring different personality variables in our data set. We're also exploring things like family structure the way that you like to manage work and family, because if you're someone who really likes to keep them separate, obviously, working from home does not allow you to do that. We're predicting it's going to be more of a challenge for people like that.

We're also exploring aspects of the physical office at home, because I think that makes a really big difference in how well and comfortable people are telecommuting. If you have a setup where your chair's not quite right, you don't have the multiple monitors, you're just not comfortable. I think it's hard to be productive and enjoy teleworking in that arrangement.

There's some basic ideas out there in the literature, but that's something we're hoping to really hone in on with this new data.

Mills: I remember hiring my first teleworking staff for more than 15 years ago, and the only ways we could stay connected were by email and the telephone, but now there are applications like Teams and Google Hangouts and Zoom. Was telework already on the upswing before the pandemic, notwithstanding the rollbacks that I mentioned just a minute ago?

Shockley: Yes, it seems to be that the trend is, more and more people teleworking, and people starting to take advantage of some of these technologies you're talking about. What the academic literature was suggesting pre-COVID was, it's best to use the most, what they call high fidelity technology that you could use. That would be, use Zoom or Skype or Teams over the phone, because when you see people face to face-- or not, I guess not face-to-face, but when you can see people's face while you're speaking, that's supposed to mimic more of a face-to-face interaction.

That was the common advice that I had been giving to people. What's been interesting during the pandemic is this concept of Zoom fatigue. We've had a discussion about it. I'm experiencing it myself. That had not been researched at all. That's something else that we're exploring in our grant because we have daily reports of what technology people use and how much strain, how frequently they use the different technologies throughout each day. We're going to try to predict sort of what's the optimal level of using these technologies because I think in some cases they're really useful, but maybe we were starting to overuse them when things could have just been a quick phone call where you started relying on Zoom or Teams.

Mills: That's interesting.

Shockley: Yes, it'll be interesting to see what comes out there.

Mills: In a recent review of the research, you talked about how some people are segmenters, and others are blenders, and that segmenters may find remote work more difficult. Can you explain what that all means?

Shockley: That's the concept of boundary management strategies. Individuals exist on this continuum. On one end, you have the same methods. These are the people who really like to keep work and family separate. They're not talking about work when they get home. They're not talking about their personal life at work. They're not going to have pictures on their desk at work. They're just, really think of them as two separate domains.

Then the other end, you have the integrators. They're the exact opposite. They're the people that are constantly, while at work, juggling things from home. They might, you get home and be really likely to work later in the evening checking e-mails all the time. It's just really a personal preference on what strategy people works best for them to manage work and family.

When you're working from home, then you have this added challenge of if you're a segmenter, it's really hard to keep those things separate when they're occurring in the same location. Advice we give to people in that situation is, try to have a separate room that's really designated as your workspace that's only used for that, which is easier said than done depending on where you live and the kind of space you have. That's the ideal situation. To have a door so that you can close that so your family members know, okay, when that door is closed, that means this person is-- to think of them as not here. These are some kind of tricks to try to make it feel more segmented.

Mills: What about differences between managers and line employees when it comes to teleworking? Is it harder to be a remote manager? How do employees react to having a boss who teleworks?

Shockley: Yes, that's another thing where there's not very much research on the topic at all. There is one study about bosses who telework, and comparing them, their relationship with their subordinates who are in office and their subordinates who are also teleworking. The other comparison is managers who are in the office. You have got these four different quadrants. Not surprisingly that the relationships are a bit more strained with the managers who are working remote. [unintelligible 00:12:48] , but my hypothesis would be that they're just not having as many interactions with people. You don't have the chance just when you're walking by someone to have that informal back and forth in the hallways.

I think there are some challenges there. Another thing we set out to explore in the grant was, what are actually the best practices for managers who are telecommuting? Because there's a lot of theoretical discussion of that ideas put forth in the academic literature. We don't have a lot of actual data to back it up. That was something that was a core part of our study, was to say, what kind of things are managers doing on a daily basis when people are having a good day? What kind of things are they doing that contribute to people not having a great day? That's another question which I hope to have data to be able to speak more directly to in the future.

Mills: A lot of questions out there.

Shockley: There really are, and that's really why we took this grant, because it's just amazing how little we have actual empirical evidence for.

Mills: American Psychological Association conducted a stress in America survey last month that found nearly half of parents with children under age 18 at home said their stress levels related to the coronavirus pandemic were high. With managing the kids online learning, a significant source of stress for many. What can people do to make this work-life family balancing act easier?

Shockley: That's a million-dollar question right now. It's such an unprecedented thing because most what we know about teleworking comes from that assuming people have kids in school or childcare during the time when they're working. I can say I have another dataset not related to my grant where I got data from couples who were both working and continuing to work during COVID but had young kids who were at home, and their childcare, either daycare or their nanny, was no longer coming. We were exploring what are people doing, what are the strategies to better manage this. We asked them a lot of open-ended questions. I've been reading through those. Again, that data collection is just [unintelligible 00:15:00] I don't have a full analysis done, but as I'm reading through it, I'm seeing a lot of people engaging in a lot of very detailed scheduling with their part. It's thinking about, okay, let's take the day, let's break it up into chunks. This is my portion of uninterrupted time, and then we switch off and I have primary responsibility for the kids. Then we switch back to the other spouses, and we are both working with their young kids when they're napping. Then some people, a lot of people were saying, "We're waking up earlier and going to bed later to try to make this work", but to the extent to which that's a longterm strategy, I'm guessing [unintelligible 00:15:36] . I'm assuming there's going to be a lot of burnout, and we have measured that in the data set. I'm interested to see if these different strategies that people use link differently to that.

I think the best thing is really being proactive, not just winging it, but trying to see what you can do to feel like it's fair within your relationship to the extent if you both are able with flexible jobs to help with the childcare.

Mills: Your kids will cooperate. When it's mommy time, it's only mommy time.

Shockley: Yes. That's the other layer of it. Also, just thinking about the burnout aspect of it, so recognizing when you're at a point when you're about to break, so saying, okay, we've got to switch something up because I need a day just to myself. I think that's a really big thing that's getting overlooked in this pandemic, is just the loss of me time, and the loss of ability to practice self care. I think it's important for people to figure out the way that they can do that in the context of sheltering at home and the current pandemic.

Mills: You're looking at people taking vacation time as part of this study as well. That seems to be a real challenge for a lot of us. Why would I take time off? I can't go anywhere.

Shockley: Yes. We did ask, how many PTO days people had, and how many they planned on using? We do have that data, but it was more in the context of using it. We just asked, are they going to use it. We didn't ask why. I've seen a lot of people talking about it in open ended reports more about using it because they have no other option for childcare and being really stressed about that, like, "I don't know what we're going to do when these 10 days run up." We didn't get anything about the vacation aspect, which is really, really interesting because usually people have had that break and now it's tough to figure out what you would do with that time.

Mills: There have been media reports about how the burden of balancing work and caregiving is disproportionately falling on women. Some have suggested that the pandemic might set women back in the workplace for years to come. I understand you have another study going on now, looking at how dual career couples are navigating. I'm wondering what you think and what your research might suggest about how this time will affect women in particular and whether these fears are justified.

Shockley: The data set that we have is all couples where both are working and both have young children at home and childcare has been disrupted. We have these open-ended reports about what they're doing to manage right now. We're still in the process of coding, and we've gone through many iterations. We're almost finished with it, but I don't have actual frequencies to tell you at this point, but I can say just in my own reading of these, and we have 317 couples, so it's quite a bit of description scenarios here. A lot of what I'm seeing is genderized. A lot of it is in the heterosexual couples, which is the bulk of our sampler, you're seeing the woman is the one scaling back more. A lot of comments say things like, "Well, I make less. It makes more sense for me to scale back." If you think about that from a bigger picture in society, we know we have this pay gap. Well, then when you're making decisions like this based on pay, then it's this vicious cycle. Then women are, "Okay, well, I'm the one who makes less, so I'm one who's scaling back more", and then that could have some longterm career repercussions.

I do think that the disproportionate division of labor that we see with childcare and household labor is being exacerbated right now by the pandemic.

Mills: As part of that, do you find that men and women experience work family conflict differently?

Shockley: Yes. That's a good question. I had done a study that was posted in the Journal for Applied Psychology in 2017. It was a meta analysis. We aggregated the results of 350 primary studies. We had this huge sample size of over 200,000 people. We looked at gender differences in work, family conflict, because people usually think women have more conflict. We actually found no to very, very small gender differences, which was a pretty surprising finding, I think to us and to a lot of people. That's all based on the way that it's typically measured in the academic world. That would be questions to measure work, family conflict, the questions would be things like, my work interferes with my family life more than I would like. Then you answered all like a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. We found no differences there. What we couldn't speak to in that data set is mainly for men and women, the anchors have different meanings. Women are so socialized to think about work, family issues, I think much more than men. They expect to have to deal with this issue. The same situation for a man and a woman might be appraises just in agree on the scale for a woman where it's a strongly agree for a man.

You really speak to that with the nature of our data, but we're doing some follow up research to try to disentangle it more. One study we're doing is a lab study where we brought men and women, not couples, but just separately men and women, they're all parents into, our lab, and they read these stories about work, family conflict situations that we had based off of actual real stories we got from people in a previous study. Then we measured their physiological reactions. We have this watch called the impatico watch, which measures your galvanic skin response and your heart rate, and a couple of other things, which are indications of stress.

We also measured their cortisol levels to see if there's a physiological difference, and we didn't find anything with cortisol. We're still working on analyzing the other data, but then we asked, "How do you think you would feel in a situation and a variety different emotions like guilty, angry, irritated." By huge margin, the women reported much higher emotional reactions. Especially guilt, that was the one that stood out the most.

Mills: I was waiting for that.

Shockley: Yes. To me, that suggests that there is, maybe they are reporting the same level of conflict, but I think that women are internalizing it and letting it affect their well being more so than men are. We need to do a little bit more research before I formally say that, but that's the follow up stuff we're doing now, is just to try and see is this no effect, there's no difference really true, or is it coming out of the way we measure things?

Mills: A few high profile companies, including Facebook and Twitter, have announced that they're going to let employees continue to work at home permanently, even after the end of this emergency? Do you think we're going to see a significant permanent increase in the number of companies that offer full time telework from now on?

Shockley: I do. Yes. I think that tech companies, for sure, are at the forefront of this, but I think it's going to be the wave of the future. I think it's going to be the new normal, maybe not full time remote work. I think some companies will do that, but I think a lot of companies will start to let people at least work some of the time remotely. There's a lot of benefits to that from the organization standpoint. I think about it from a real estate standpoint. If you have a full remote workforce, you can spend a lot less money on the real estate in your central office. You don't have to have space for everybody to work all the time. It can become a really nice recruiting tool.

The downsides to it are, there's some evidence to suggest, when you have a full time remote workforce, it does change the dynamic of the organization, that strong organizational culture and strong identification that people have with an organization, is harder to get. Companies like Twitter and Facebook right now announcing that, they're so big, perhaps won't hit them, but for smaller companies, I think you have to really consider how is this going to affect your culture and your practices moving forward.

Mills: Yes, and I think the innovation question is probably legitimate as well. If you're not rubbing elbows with people on a regular basis and bumping into them in the lunchroom or the bathrooms or wherever, you might serendipitously run into somebody that you work with and you might just toss out an idea and then boom, here we go.

Shockley: Yes, absolutely. That's the big thing that gets brought up a lot. That's why I think that a partial remote workforce is really the way to go. Thinking about okay, so if I work, let's say two days from home, then I can think about the tasks that are best done at home where I don't need interruption, I really just need to be focused for a period of time. Then the days when I am in the office, I can reserve for the times when we need to focus on innovation or other things like that. There's some ways that you could combine remote work to still allow for that time of innovation, but I agree with the full time remote work it does out of challenge.

Mills: Any other predictors for how this pandemic is going to change workplaces?

Shockley: One thing that, I don't know if it's so much of a prediction as a hope, but as a work family scholar, I think that it's been interesting because of the ubiquitous use of Zoom and other technologies like that. Coworkers have gotten a glimpse into each other's homes and their lives in a way that they hadn't before, and in a lot of cases, I think they've seen children running around in the background. What I hope this will do is make both managers and other employees a little bit more understanding of people with families who are saying, okay, this person still managed to get their job done, but look at the chaos they had running around behind them, just recognizing it is tough. It is a tough balancing act, and the notion that we have the ideal worker is someone who has no family and puts everything into work. Hoping we'll start to see a little bit of the erosion of that with the understanding that hey, people actually are their whole self. There's a whole side of them outside of work that I think was exposed a little bit more during the time.

Mills: Well, this has been great, really interesting stuff, Dr. Shockley. I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the National Science Foundation study that you're doing.

Shockley: Yes. We've made it, actually as part of the grant, the first thing we're going to do is publish the results for a mass media audience, not academic results. We're going to get those out as quick as we can, and there'll be hopefully very digestible and very actionable.

Mills: Great. Wow. That sounds wonderful. Well, thank you again. I want to say the American Psychological Association has resources and tip sheets available on our website for helping navigating work, telework and the pandemic. Visit us at apa.org. You can also find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org , and you can subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're out there, please give us a rating. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org .

Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Wierman. Our sound editor and engineer is Chris Condayan. For the American Psychological Association, thank you for listening. I'm Kim Mills.