The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (39 page)

Clearly there is no such thing as a free lunch in the intensely social world of primates, human or otherwise. Nonhuman primates such as baboons spend 45 percent of their waking hours engaged in one-to-one social interaction—namely grooming each other, a hands-on experience to say the least. We humans spend only about 20 percent of our time socializing, and it has to be quality time for us to reap the benefits. The evidence shows that collecting a list of contacts and then keeping in touch via one-way broadcasts may satisfy one’s acquisitive urges, but it doesn’t count as true connectedness. In a study of the effect of Internet use on social relationships in adults aged eighteen to sixty-three, Dutch psychologist Thomas Pollet found that time spent using online social networks resulted in more online contacts but didn’t translate into genuine offline connections or a feeling of closeness.
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Indeed, not only is online contact experienced as less fun, but without face-to-face contact, social relationships decay and are soon replaced by others.

Depressingly, without an opportunity to meet, it takes as little as eighteen months and as long as seven years for our friendships to fall away and be replaced by other local ones, according to two studies, one in Britain and one in the Netherlands.
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Though these data confirm the out-of-sight-out-of-mind cliché, they’re a letdown, given the promising language of global connectivity. “Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends,” says Dunbar.

What does relationship decay mean for business? If we have only so much neural real estate to devote to our “village,” then our
real
social networks may be a lot smaller and more fragile than
we’ve been led to believe. The promise of technology—that one need not be there to talk to and see colleagues and clients in person—may be the message we all want to hear. It’s certainly cheaper, more convenient, and in many ways easier on the psyche to blast out electronic bulletins than to communicate and manage in person, or to hire enough staff to do it for you. It’s not only more cost-effective, it’s aspirational to be able to process training, marketing, and customer service with the same detached efficiency that we apply to other types of digital information. But how well does it work? Let’s look at a few stories, and more evidence.

I SAID, COME BACK TOMORROW

Paul English is a dedicated techie. With a graduate degree in computer science and decades of programming behind him, he has co-founded several tech ventures, including
kayak.com
, where he is currently chief technical officer. In late 2006, after posting a cheat sheet on his blog that revealed how to crack the code of several corporate voice-response systems, he unleashed an online stampede. “He named the companies and published their codes for reaching an operator—codes they did not share with the public,”
Fast Company
’s William Taylor wrote. Less than six months later, English’s blog was getting more than a million visitors a month, many contributing their own code-breaking secrets.
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English had unwittingly launched a movement. “I’ve been a programmer for more than 20 years. I’m not anticapitalist. I’m on my fifth start-up. But I am anti-arrogance. Why do the executives who run these call centers think they can decide when I deserve to speak to a human being and when I don’t?”

English had channeled a torrent of frustration with automated customer service. If my experience is typical, many companies—especially those in telecommunications, insurance, health care, and travel—are forgoing human contact in order to cut costs, deploying either robots or foreign call centers whose agents know
nothing about the business and are paid per call (so they try to make it fast by passing you off to someone else). An attempt to correct a recursive cellphone billing error, for example, required first keying in my ten-digit number and then more than a dozen voice prompts from Emily, the robot customer service representative of my wireless company, which asked me to say my name over and over and over again, enunciating more clearly into the receiver to “confirm my voiceprint.” I was then transferred four times to different call-center agents. Each one requested that I give my phone number, address, and date of birth and describe yet again why I was calling. After twenty minutes of this I was put on hold for another forty minutes, at which point my phone battery died. I never did call back. I switched carriers instead.

Paul English got his revenge by way of the Internet. Within two years of his inflammatory blog post he had launched
GetHuman.com
, a website that publishes companies’ secret cheat sheets, on-hold wait times, and a monthly best and worst ranking. By the fall of 2012, the GetHuman site listed the codes for eight thousand companies in forty-five countries, and was growing. Had I known to call a different number than the one my wireless company provided, then press zero at each prompt, I could have reached a live person in less than two minutes. Instead I felt like Dorothy approaching the Wizard of Oz, who thunderously rebukes her when she gets too close: “Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz! I said come back tomorrow!”

It would be funny if it weren’t so infuriating—and such bad business. But there’s more to this story. By deploying technology to keep down labor costs instead of to enhance the client’s or employee’s experience, businesses are ignoring one of the most critical findings offered by cognitive neuroscience in the past decade, namely that mood, social interaction, and productivity are bound tightly together and multiply each other’s effects.

HAPPINESS

Let’s start with a few findings about mood and productivity. When Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues set out to evaluate mood, they put handheld computers in the hands of about a thousand working women, who were prompted by their devices throughout the day to log what they were doing at that very moment and how happy they felt while doing it. It turned out that their happiest moments were spent socializing or having sex. They were most miserable while commuting or working.
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Kahneman took this finding one step further in
Thinking Fast and Slow
, when reviewing the work of two German psychologists, Sascha Topolinski and Fritz Strack, who found that mood has a powerful effect on performance. Banking on the notion that creative intelligence revolves around finding associations among seemingly disparate ideas, the researchers attempted to see if people could come up with associations between triads of words such as these:

For example, the common element tying together
cottage, Swiss
, and
cake
is the word
cheese
, while the idea common to
bald, screech
, and
emblem
is
eagle
.

Before testing them, Topolinski and Strack asked their subjects to recall either a happy or sad moment in their lives to see what effect their mood would have on their problem-solving. Remarkably, the experimenters could influence how well people did on the test by first eliciting pleasant or unpleasant memories. It sounds too simple to be true. But asking people to think happy thoughts increased their accuracy by more than 100 percent. “An even more striking result is that unhappy subjects were completely incapable
of performing the intuitive task accurately; their guesses were no better than random. Mood evidently affects the operation of System 1: when we are uncomfortable and unhappy, we lose touch with our intuition,” Kahneman writes.
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Now, feeling lousy might be a good thing for your bottom line if a con artist like Earl Jones were trying to persuade you to collapse your retirement savings accounts and sign over the proceeds to him. A stinky mood would make you more suspicious. But if, as an entrepreneur, you wanted your staff to connect with clients to sell them stuff or to come up with creative solutions to their problems, then you’d want them to be in a good—if not a
fabulous—
mood, which, with any luck, would be contagious. Social contact would facilitate matters at the front end, making staff at all levels feel relaxed and happy about their work. And it would also affect their output as they extended that feeling of magnanimity and connection to clients.

Tony Hsieh, cofounder of the online shoe retailer Zappos, discovered this for himself early on. After selling his Internet banner business LinkExchange to Microsoft for $265 million in 1998, he was asked to stay on to help with the transition, a scenario that would net him $40 million. If he left, he’d forfeit 20 percent of that sum. He was twenty-four at the time. “The practice of sticking around but not really doing anything was actually pretty common practice in Silicon Valley in acquisition scenarios. In fact, there’s even a phrase that entrepreneurs use for this: ‘Vest in Peace,’ ” he writes in his autobiography,
Delivering Happiness
. But the prospect bored him. Instead of “vesting,” he wanted to do something new, something that would make him happier than doing the same old thing. But what, exactly, would make him happy?

“I made a list of the happiest periods of my life, and I realized that none of them involved money. I realized that building stuff and being creative and inventive made me happy. Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy. Trick-or-treating in middle school with a
group of my closest friends made me happy. Eating a baked potato after a swim meet made me happy.” He concluded that, along with creating something new, social contact was key to his happiness.
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He turned his back on that $8 million and moved to Zappos, which he had helped launch as an investor a year earlier. He couldn’t care less about shoes and cared even less about fashion. “Long term, it’s not even about e-commerce necessarily,” he told the
New York Times
. “I guess it’s about an experiential brand that’s really about making people happy, or improving their life somehow.” To delight his customers with just the right pair of shoes at just the right time, he created a corporate culture that fostered a gleeful, self-directed, zany social atmosphere among his sales staff, which he hoped would spill over into their connections with clients. “It was about: what kind of company can we create where we all want to be there, including me?” There were no time limits on phone calls; instead his employees tried to make connections with customers—and to make them happy. “Deliver WOW through service” is the first of the company’s core values (one customer service call took six hours). “By imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet,” as one journalist put it, Hsieh succeeded. He sold Zappos to Amazon for more than a billion dollars in 2009, right in the middle of the recession.
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Meanwhile, larger and leaner online retailers were continuing to crash and burn.

WE SPEAK HUMAN

Hsieh may be a rarity in the stripped-down post-meltdown business environment. But he’s not the only one to realize that securing customer loyalty is the Holy Grail. Now that people can bank or shop anywhere, why should they choose you? One reason might be that someone answers the phone at your place. Businesses that are amply staffed with well-trained, well-paid employees who like their work, and who like to work together,
generate bigger profits, according to a 2012 study in the
Harvard Business Review
by MIT management professor Zeynep Ton. She found that four discount retailers—Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip, and Mercadona (a Spanish supermarket chain)—violated the common assumption that to keep prices low, labor costs must be kept way down, too. Instead of offering little to no training, basement-level wages, constantly changing schedules, minimal benefits, and no opportunities to move up (as experienced by nearly 20 percent of the American workforce), they “eliminated waste in everything but staffing, and let employees make some decisions,” she wrote.
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Their stores are better places to work, obviously, but they also generate more profit per square foot than their barebones competitors. Citing a study showing that every extra dollar a five-hundred-store retailer spent on payroll netted it between $4 and $28 in new sales, James Surowiecki, author of
The Wisdom of Crowds
, points out that the opposite is also true: cutting back on human resources can harm a business.

Clearly, scrimping on the human element can hurt business, and since the recession, banks and credit card companies have learned this the hard way. Research shows that when cardholders (who on average own more than five credit cards) are struggling to pay down
their debts, they’re more likely to pay the companies whose employees try to form an emotional connection with them. In 2010 a woman from Missouri named Donna Tiff was being aggressively pursued by several card companies for outstanding balances of $40,000. “The phone would ring nonstop,” she told writer Charles Duhigg. “I would get on, crying, and tell them I don’t believe in suicide, but I’m close.” She threatened to file for bankruptcy, at which point the creditors would get nothing. Then a Bank of America customer service agent named Tracey called, chatted with her sympathetically, and pointed out that an error in her account meant that an automatic payment was being deducted twice.