Workers commute an average 38 minutes each way between home and work—a trip that can feel like a dreadful chore before the workday even begins. In fact, long commutes lower job satisfaction and increase employee turnover.
Now, recent research provides some advice to ease the pain of the commute: Employees should think about work on the way to work by mentally mapping out a plan for their day.
By using the travel time as an opportunity to get into the work mindset, employees are giving themselves a chance to make an easier mental shift from their home role to their work role, and ultimately, this makes people feel happier about their jobs, according to the working paper Between Home and Work: Commuting as an Opportunity for Role Transitions.
Meanwhile, doing relaxing or purely pleasurable things on the way to the office, like listening to music in the car or scrolling through social media on the train, may actually interfere with people’s ability to transition into work mode smoothly—which makes them feel gloomier about their jobs and more likely to quit.
“I was surprised with this finding myself,” Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino says. “The idea that we need to work to transition from our home role to our work role is not always intuitive. One would think that switching roles is as easy as putting on a different hat. It turns out that transitioning between roles takes time and effort, and it’s a part of the day we need to pay more attention to.”
Gino, the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration, coauthored the paper with Jon M. Jachimowicz of Columbia Business School; Julia J. Lee of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan; Bradley R. Staats of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Jochen I. Menges of the University of Zurich.
Read the full article @ Working Knowledge
Photo: CC EtienneMuis
