The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier and Happier (40 page)

Tiff stopped panicking and started listening. “I told her, thank you so much for catching that. And then we talked for over an hour about my problems and raising kids. She was amazing. She was so similar to me. She gave me her direct number and said that I should call her directly anytime I had questions or just needed to talk about what was going on.” Duhigg reports that over the next three years Donna Tiff paid off the $28,000 she owed Bank of America, all the while chatting regularly with Tracey. The $12,000 she owed the other card companies? That was never fully repaid.
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It’s easy to think that corporations are exploiting our social responsiveness just to get something out of us. Despite this cynicism, when I saw a full-page magazine ad with the two-inch tagline
“WE SPEAK HUMAN,”
I tore it out. “There are times when you just want to speak to a real, live person about your money,” it read.
You bet I do
, I thought. “And at Ally Bank you can, anytime, 24/7. You just push ‘0’ to speak to a real person. No complicated phone trees to navigate, no repeating yourself three times to a robot.” Whether some executive somewhere realized this was the right thing to do or saw it as good business practice, or both, allowing real human contact within your technological fortress may well give you a competitive advantage, as we shall see.

BADGE OF EXCELLENCE

Imagine wearing a tasteful piece of jewelry, like a watch, that discreetly records whom you’re talking to, how excited you feel about the conversation, how animated you get, how long the two of you keep chatting, and whom you talk to afterwards. Though it sounds Big Brother–ish, our brains already do this. They parse a social situation by reading the emotions and subtle movements of the other person, registering your own reactions as well as her level of interest, all the while executing a subtle, highly coordinated dance. When you lean forward, she does; when you cross your arms, so does she. Your averted gaze tells her that you’ve lost interest and are ready to move on, so she closes off the discussion and directs her attention elsewhere. The sleek little sociometric badge I mentioned earlier, invented by Sandy Pentland, Ben Waber, and their team at MIT, does what our brains do automatically: it registers all these social intricacies and records them so they’re analyzable.

In a paper Pentland published in
American Scientist
in 2010, he characterized the four honest signals that the badges record:

Together these social signals convey how much people trust each other, how happy they are in each other’s company (which we now know is related to their productivity), and how cohesive a
group is. This is valuable but usually hidden information. What’s more, these nonverbal signals predict about 40 percent of what transpires in job interviews and salary negotiations. “That is equivalent to some estimates of the influence of genetic makeup on individual behavior and is far too large to ignore,” Sandy Pentland writes.
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Nevertheless, most businesses ignore it.

Despite the fact that emails, texts, and tweets are devoid of honest signals, most people conflate face-to-face with electronic social networks (this is like confusing a real kiss with the xx at the bottom of an email). The evidence also highlights that the two types of networks function in discrete ways, each with its own M.O. For example, one study from Pentland’s MIT lab had IT specialists wear sociometric badges while they were at work. What the scientists wanted to know was whether face-to-face get-togethers would predict better work performance in these techies. And, indeed, they found this to be true. Smaller groups that communicated face-to-face were more cohesive. There was more trust within the group, which made it easier for people to ask questions and seek help when they needed it. As a result, those groups were more productive, especially when a problem was complex. The rich signaling within the team meant that actual conversations propelled the work forward.

But the opposite was true in email networks.
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These work best when a larger, more diverse and loosely knit network shares information that can be “written into succinct rules,” as the researchers put it. In other words, if everyone shares the same tacit knowledge and the problem is not that complex, there’s not much advantage to getting together in person to brainstorm solutions. What’s needed in those instances is what Mark Granovetter calls the power of weak bonds: the Internet’s unique capacity to assemble diverse groups of people so they can fill in each other’s gaps in knowledge.
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THE VALUE OF A COFFEE BREAK

The face-to-face advantage wasn’t seen only among techies. The MIT research team has tried out their wearable sensors on all sorts of employees, including those who work in banks, on farms, in hospitals, and at call centers. They’ve found that the happy buzz of workplace chatter predicts productivity everywhere they’ve looked.
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Of all the worksites, their call-center study piqued my curiosity most because working in one can be such a soul-deadening job. Employees face rigid schedules and scripts, social isolation, and an emphasis on quantity over quality, and as a rule, they can’t rise much in the organization. In terms of tedium and lack of control, it’s the twenty-first century’s equivalent of a coalmine.

Yet when the badges were handed out at a call center with more than three thousand agents who worked for a major American bank, unexpected patterns emerged. “In the first phase, we just measured what happened. And we found that the more people talked to other people on their team—who were mostly people they were sitting with—the more productive they were,” Waber told me. The researchers decided that during the second phase of their study they would try to elicit that effect. If the structure of the workday were tweaked to make it easier for team members to chat, would productivity go up? That was the experiment.

Waber is a young computer scientist who got his PhD in 2011 while working in Sandy Pentland’s Human Dynamics lab at MIT. A smiling, compact young man with a neatly trimmed red beard, he is now CEO of a management consulting company that uses the badges to provide clues to leadership potential or to boost productivity. In other words, he’s achieved what most young researchers only dream of: making their PhD theses useful. The wearable sensors Waber developed with Pentland and other MIT colleagues have already garnered attention in the
Economist
, the
New York Times
, and on NPR and the CBC, among other outlets. Waber has given talks to think tanks on the link between the bonding that
goes on outside formal meetings and the bottom line. One leads to the other, apparently. What employers used to think of as dead time, such as gossip exchanged at the coffee machine during union-mandated breaks, turned out to be critical to profits. “The more cohesion there is, as measured by how much you interact with people within your team, the more productive it is,” Waber told me. It’s that simple.

The researchers found this out by changing the way half of the call agents worked. Typically, call agents get staggered breaks. “The way the breaks are structured, no one had a break at the same time, which is just a relic from the past. That’s the way they’ve been doing it, so they keep doing it that way,” Waber explained. So Waber, Pentland, and the team altered the routine to give half the agents a break at the same time. “We’re not going to tell them what to do,” he said, speaking in the present tense, as if he could see the call agents arrayed in their cubicles at that very moment. “So we made that change for half the groups, then let them work that way for three months. And we saw a dramatic change in their behavior, even though we’re only talking about changing fifteen minutes of their day. There was this new opportunity for interaction and it changed their mindset for the whole day.”

After trading hockey scores or juicy bits of gossip, the call agents were more productive, apparently. But that’s not all they talked about. Like the spouses we met in the previous chapter, the transformational aspects of social contact came in several flavors. These agents had an opportunity to vent with someone who shared their experience—someone who sat near them and did the same job. “This is a stressful environment, so having those close relationships with a group of people is very important. You can say just a few things, and it makes a difference,” Waber said. But physical proximity—being there in person—was key. They could also trade tips: “If they’re less stressed, it’s easier to deal with customers. They have a friend who said, ‘Okay, this is how I dealt with this problem. I figured
out how to solve it,’ or ‘This is how to pitch this new product,’ ” he continued. Even he seemed amazed that something as simple as changing the break schedule could have such a dramatic effect.

As a result of their experiment, the bank’s call-center manager shifted to coordinated coffee breaks—and the plan worked. Recognizing that employees, like the bank clients they serve, are driven to make genuine human connections has led to vastly better outcomes. Coordinated breaks at all ten of the bank’s call centers (involving twenty-five thousand employees) improved the weak teams’ performance by more than 20 percent, increased performance overall by 8 percent, and boosted employee satisfaction by more than 10 percent, Sandy Pentland reports. Based on these boosts in performance, the bank is predicting $15 million in increased profit.
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“We have the data to show that small changes can have very large effects,” Waber told me. “The things that matter are these social interactions.” And if they’re truly immersed and embedded in the company, excellent managers know this intuitively. Interestingly, the critical element has nothing to do with what the workers are saying, and it can’t be communicated via text or email. You have to be there.

THE LITTLE CHEMICAL THAT COULD

To find out why hanging out with teammates fosters trust and better performance we have to dig deeper, moving from the honest signals communicated through body language and tone of voice to microscopic neuropeptides circulating in the blood. Oxytocin is one of those neuropeptides, and it has become one of the stars of the neuroscience show in recent years because it has been found to grease the brain’s wheels of attachment and trust.

Historically, this was considered women’s stuff and wasn’t taken very seriously. No longer. Within the past decade, several European research teams have shown that oxytocin doesn’t just play a cameo role in the physiological backrooms of sex and breastfeeding. Its tentacles reach into all social relationships, stretching from the bedroom
to the boardroom. In 2005 a handsome quintet of behavioral economists—Michael Kosfeld, Ernst Fehr, Markus Heinrichs, Urs Fischbacher, and Paul Zak—published an astounding finding. If young men sprayed oxytocin up their noses before playing an investment game, they were more willing to take social risks. More specifically, those who were infused with oxytocin handed over more money to an investment partner compared to men whose nasal spray contained a placebo. What’s the significance of this? Oxytocin facilitated their trust. It lowered their natural aversion to the possibility that they might be cheated by someone they didn’t know that well.
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It made them better team players and more willing partners.

There were many reverberations to the finding that the “cuddle chemical” influences investment behavior. The first was that it raised the profile of this little hormone. The revelation that it affected people’s readiness to take on risk revolutionized the field of economics. Formerly obsessed with the “me, myself, and I” type of decision-making, economics had been about purely rational thinking. Suddenly social relationships had come into play.

Other experiments showed that when people connect—and especially when they touch each other—oxytocin is released, which damps down their stress and enables them to trust each other. We’re not necessarily talking about what Marvin Gaye called sexual healing. A simple handshake, a pat, a fist-bump, a friendly nudge, or a high five does the trick.
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The effect isn’t limited to one-on-one interactions, either. All evidence points to social contact lowering stress among colleagues and making a team more cohesive. This brings us back to the puzzle of why coordinated coffee breaks increase productivity.

In an experiment about group loyalty, Carsten De Dreu, a professor of organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, used oxytocin nasal spray to test how it might affect someone’s commitment to his team. Two groups of men were recruited to play a classic economics game that revolves around how to spend a
windfall. The men were randomly divided into two teams. One team sprayed oxytocin, the control group sprayed a placebo, and then the players were given three choices. They could spend the windfall on themselves, they could spend it on their team (which would give each member a smaller amount than if they spent the sum on themselves), or they could invest the money in a third option that would not only pay each of the investor’s team members a token amount, but would also deduct the same amount from the competing team.

The results were dramatic. Almost 60 percent of those infused with oxytocin spent the money on their team, compared to 17 percent who invested in themselves. This scenario was reversed in the placebo group (20 percent invested in their team, while 50 percent invested in themselves). “The implication for business is that people have a strong, almost hardwired tendency to commit to their in-group,” De Dreu told me over the phone. “And you can play around with the conditions that make them more loyal”—such as ensuring they have the time and place to socialize. “If people share their time and secrets with each other, that promotes oxytocin secretion,” which prompts them to put aside their own self-interest. “This requires a psychologically safe climate, where you don’t have to fear each other.”
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