Workplace culture is changing, and Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant wants Americans to keep up.
In 2022, Grant collaborated with BetterUp to found the Center for Purpose and Performance, a collective of organizational leaders and psychologists that aims to promote and implement new research about human potential.
Now they are announcing a research grant award of up to $100K to researchers looking into areas of human potential and workplace trends in which Grant thinks there will be important cultural shifts. He shortlisted three areas of work that he thinks researchers and company leadership alike should focus on understanding, if they want to keep up with the times.
"Given that most of us spend most of our waking hours at work, we have a responsibility to try to make those experiences better," Grant tells CNBC Make It.
Grant explains the top three areas he's focused on — employee motivation, workplace well-being and AI — and what he suspects will be changing.
Going from languishing to flourishing
Workers are struggling with motivation and it's leading to an overall feeling of stagnation and emptiness, Grant says. He refers to this feeling as languish.
"It's the sense that you are not at peak capacity, that you are missing motivation and meaning but you're not depressed because you still have hope and you're not burned out because you still have some energy, but you are just kind of mailing it in," Grant says. "It's quiet-quitting, if that term is still in vogue."
Grant says this is because of what experts call a "permacrisis," a feeling of tremendous uncertainty that comes from being exposed to an ongoing stream of unprecedented global crises. During these times, it is important to understand how you can establish a sense of purpose and continue to achieve your goals.
Languishing is a barrier to better work and company performance, Grant says, which is why it is on company leadership to figure out how to remotivate their worker population and get them to feel like they are thriving at work.
In a panel at this year's World Economic Forum, Grant suggested that a good way of combating quiet-quitting is by having "entry interviews" or "stay interviews," where employers can check in with their current employees to see what their expectations are and what they are concerned about. Making sure people feel heard, and addressing concerns and expectations proactively is crucial, he noted.
Moving away from a toxic work culture
Workplace burnout is at an all-time high, according to a recent poll by Future Forum and Grant says that "poorly designed jobs and toxic work cultures" are a big source of burnout for employees.
To do so, company leadership should value employee well-being, Grant says. One of the best pieces of advice he heard in regard to establishing effective company policy was from a manager who said "it's okay to call in sick, and it's okay to call in sad," Grant says.
"What I thought was powerful about that was not the idea that 'We're gonna give you 10 sad days a year and if in December you haven't used them all, we're going to take them away;' it was that just like sick days we're going to normalize mental health as part of health," Grant says. "If people are burned out, we want them to be able to do what they need to do to take care of themselves."
Besides making statements, managers should also model this behavior, Grant advises. A manager taking a recharge day sends a much stronger message to employees than any statement.
Grant pointed to research by academics Martin Kilduff and Ginka Toegel, who found that there is a gap in expectations "where employees thought it was a job requirement of [employers] to care about their well-being whereas managers thought it was optional to care."
But especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, more managers are realizing that caring is not optional, Grant says. "I think we've finally landed in a world where managers are learning that part of a skill set in your job is to care about your people," he says. "We have evidence going back decades that managers who care about their employees end up with more motivated people that are more likely to stay [with the company] and do better work."
Learning how to use AI
Grant called the need to keep up with the explosion of generative AI the "most obvious" and the most "immediately happening" of the three. The most striking finding of recent generative AI research is that it can be used to significantly increase employees' productivity, if it is used in collaboration with workers rather than taking their place.
"I've seen probably about a dozen different studies showing that if you're a software programmer or a salesperson or a writer and you're at the bottom of the performance distribution, using an AI tool can help you catch up and I think we have barely scratched the surface of that," Grant says.
"I think a big part of the future of generative AI is to see it in collaboration with humans, the same way that salespeople got a lot better around the 2000s when they had access to search engines and they had much better tools for finding prospects than they did before."
He says that managers should ask themselves what the role of AI is in their workplace, how their employees can collaborate with machines and bots, and how they can manage this human-robot collaboration.
This increase in productivity that comes with AI-human collaboration can also be used to decrease burnout by offloading certain tasks to bots and freeing up valuable employee time, Grant says.
"I think there is real potential maybe for the first time in a century to think seriously about shortening the workweek. There is no reason why anyone should ever have to work 80 hours, that is outrageous at this stage of human development and yet we still have entire industries and organizational cultures that are built around that kind of obsessive workaholism and I think that is something that AI could change," Grant says. "Could [managers] let [employees] work maybe 10% less if they are 20-30% more productive with AI?"
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