Game Plan

Latest Episodes:

The Art of Listening to Music at Work May 17, 2017

Show notes

Francesca and Rebecca talk about when listening to music out loud, and with your co-workers—becomes a job requirement. They report from various scenes of communal workplace listening, including retail chains, where employees have to listen to whatever somebody at headquarters decided fits a store's vibe, and a public relations firm that's experimenting with a cooperative DJ-ing environment. Even in operating rooms, many surgeons use music to focus on their high-stakes work, but one—Becca's dad—bans tunes except during the holidays. They look at the effect of music on our productivity and happiness at work, and ask whether forced-music regimes can make people's jobs better, or if jamming should remain a solo pursuit.

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Real Talk About Disabilities and Work May 09, 2017

Show notes

We're used to seeing accessible bathrooms and wheelchair ramps at the office, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But in many ways, employers still don't go far enough to accommodate people with disabilities. The unemployment rate is two times higher for disabled people than the general population. Those who do find work get paid less, making 63 cents on the dollar, on average. And, of course, there's workplace bias. Francesca and Rebecca talk to Gideon Goldberg, a software developer at The Guardian with cerebral palsy about what it's like to work with a disability. He talks about all the small things he has to consider in his working life that most people don't. Like: How his limited spacial awareness makes navigating to job interviews slightly more difficult. But, thanks to accommodations he's entitled to by law in his native U.K., he doesn't have to worry too much about doing his job.

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The Working Family Has Changed. Why Hasn't the Workplace? May 02, 2017

Show notes

Families in America used to look pretty similar. Moms in the 1970s were far more likely to stay home with the kids, while dads went to the office and paid the bills. That paradigm has shifted dramatically. Now, more households have two working parents than ever. America also has more single-parent households — and more female breadwinners. Yet the rules and norms of office life — commuting to the office, spending most of the weekday there, and working late if you have to — haven’t adapted to the realities of modern families. In addition to running on a rigid 9-to-5 schedule, many offices don’t offer paid family leave and still punish working women. On this week's show, we discuss that disconnect. Guest Ashley Ford, a senior features writer at Refinery29, polled 130 millennial women to find out how they felt about making more money than their male partners. She talks to Francesca and Rebecca being a female breadwinner in a world that isn’t sure it's ready for that.

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The First Day of the Rest of Your Job Apr 25, 2017

Show notes

First days at a new job fall on a continuum. There are the days-long orientation with each minute planned out with activities, powerpoints, and trainings. And then, sometimes you get to work on day one and the manager has no idea what to do. He gives you 20 minutes of paperwork and the next eight hours are spent pretending to work on tasks that don't exist. What happens on a first day can color the rest of a worker's experience at a job -- so much so that companies spend an average of $4,000 per new hire. A good experience can keep new hires around long term, which saves companies money on retention. But what makes a good first day? Rebecca and Francesca find out by taking a field trip to Great Neck, New York, to visit Northwell Health, which prides itself on its orientation.

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Here's Why Your Company Is Still So White Apr 18, 2017

Show notes

If throwing money at problems solved them, much of corporate America would look like a rainbow coalition by now. Companies have poured millions into diversity initiatives with the aim of recruiting and retaining more women, minorities and people from underrepresented groups. But a lot of what they’ve done hasn’t worked. On this week’s Game Plan, Francesca and Rebecca ask whether companies are doing enough—and doing the right things—to diversify their staffs. Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, joins to talk about Project Include, a diversity consultancy she co-founded, and how it is tackling the complex problems that keep many workforces largely male and white in a new (and maybe better?) way.

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Here's What Office Workers Need to Get Healthier Apr 11, 2017

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From smoking-cessation programs to step challenges, companies do all sorts of things to push employees toward getting healthy. Why? Sick workers are expensive. If companies can create healthier workforces, they save tons of money on health insurance costs. These efforts have helped spawn a $6 billion dollar corporate wellness industry, but they aren't really working. People don't care enough to participate, and many wellness initiatives don't have a good return on investment, studies have found. Is there a better way to stay healthy at work? Joanna Frank, the founding executive director of the Center for Active Design, joins Game Plan to talk about a growing movement to create workspaces that quietly manipulate workers into healthier behaviors. Sign us up!

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Your Work Friends Are Faking It Apr 04, 2017

Show notes

Work friendships are a complicated dance. Research suggests we’re more inclined to undercut our colleagues than the people in our personal lives, and a big factor in what makes us feel close to work buddies is their sheer physical proximity. So are we all conniving frenemies on the job, or can we actually form meaningful bonds? Guest Jessica Methot, an expert on workplace relationships at Rutgers University, discusses the value of even surface-level work connections, and drops some surprising science about which coworkers exhaust us the most (hint: it’s not our enemies).

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It's Fine to Obsess over March Madness at Work Mar 28, 2017

Show notes

For many office workers, March means hours spent surreptitiously watching college basketball games and obsessively checking in on brackets. Even if you're not a March Madness fan, we all have our own workday distractions. (The Olympics, anyone?) Even when there’s nothing major going on, with Slack, an unrelenting news cycle, and open offices, getting through an entire workday without some kind of distraction is pretty much impossible. For the easily distracted—which is all of us, right?—we have some great news: not all distractions are bad. Gloria Mark, an informatics researcher at UC Irvine, studies workplace interruptions and her research has found that being distracted doesn’t necessarily destroy productivity. You’re welcome. (Corrects name in first sentence of second paragraph.)

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Learning to Love (or at Least Live With) Email Mar 27, 2017

Show notes

Lots of us suffer from email overload, but few have taken such dramatic steps to address it as Dan Ariely. He’s a behavioral economist at Duke University who was so buried by emails he wrote software to help triage his messages, and uses a two-page auto-response to redirect all but the most important ones.\u0010\u0010Rebecca confesses this week that she has 2,026 unread emails. That number might send you into a cold sweat or sound kind of low, depending on what kind of email personality you have. Email is such a universal enemy that strict deletion regimes like Inbox Zero have gained cult-like followings, and office chat apps like Slack hope to make it obsolete. Despite these efforts, email isn’t going anywhere, so you may as well learn to deal with it. And there are some things about email you may come to like—or even love.

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You're Using Your Standing Desk Wrong Mar 14, 2017

Show notes

Everyone's heard the new mantra: Office life can be hazardous. Staring at a screen all day ruins your eyes. Poor air quality deprives your brains of energy. Worst of all, sitting is the new smoking. In an attempt be healthier and more productive in our cubicles, workers and workplaces have hacked the office to encourage better patterns of behavior. There's no more popular hack than the standing desk. But does it live up to the hype? Rebecca and Francesca seek answers from Mark Benden, director of the ergonomics center at Texas A&M, whose research has found that we're using standing desks wrong. With his help, we learn how to get the most out of standing (and sitting) at work.

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