Facilitating Telecommuting and Flexible Work Hours

In a result that is very gratifying to me personally, remote work and flex time generally reduce burnout. However it can’t be done blindly. My personal experience has been that if a company’s workflow is set up for on-site work (e.g. no one responds to IM and you have to physically track people down to get answers, information is generally not written down), remote work reduces personal efficacy to the point that it’s not worth it. But when it is supported (meaning, co-workers are responsive, a strong culture of writing things down), telecommuting removes commuting, reduces work-life conflict, and gives people more control over their environment.

As a bonus, remote work makes it impossible to know how many hours people are working, removing the incentive for productivity theater.

Two caveats to this:

• Remote work is better for introverts than extroverts. Some extroverts may hate it.
• After a certain point (this meta-analysis says half the week), remote work weakens social bonds, which is shown elsewhere to increase burnout. I believe this can be ameliorated with things like a strong Slack culture and regular retreats. I felt more supported and connected in my time at Wave (an entirely remote company) than I did at any previous job.

Facilitate Sleep

I found no peer reviewed study on this, but firmly believe nap rooms to be helpful when properly implemented. A note to Google: in a busy hallway next to the noisy massage chair does not count as proper implementation.

Especially in international companies, people can be pressured to attend meetings both very early and very late. I don’t have a good solution to this as long as time zones are real.

Private Offices, or at Least Cubicles

At this point the evidence is overwhelming that most people hate, are less productive and more sick in open offices. Open offices don’t even increase in person interactions between co-workers. Plus you can nap in private offices.

Autonomy

Autonomy makes people happy, and lack of it leads to cynicism and feelings of low personal efficacy (it doesn’t appear to have much effect on exhaustion).

Autonomy can conflict somewhat with having a clearly defined role and goal, and the correct balance will vary across people.

Find Ways to Measure Productivity that Aren’t Hours Worked

If you measure hours visibly at work, people will Goodhart and put in more hours at the office. This may not make them more productive, and depending on who you ask may not be able to make them more productive- humans only have so many hours of thought-work in them per day. But it will eat up their time and prevent them from recovering.

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