Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about It

Description

Why too much work and too little time is hurting workers and companies-and how a proven workplace redesign can benefit employees and the bottom line Today's ways of working are not working-even for professionals in "good" jobs. Responding to global competition and pressure from financial markets, companies are asking employees to do more with le

Erin L. Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and an affiliate of the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research and the Good Companies, Good Jobs Initiative. Twitter @_elkelly Phyllis Moen is a McKnight Presidential Chair, professor of sociology, and director of the Life Course Center at the University of Minnesota. Her books include, most recently, Encore Adulthood: Boomers on the Edge of Risk, Renewal, and Purpose. Kelly and Moen's research on work overload has been featured in the New York Times Magazine.

"Co-Winner of the Max Weber Book Award, Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association" "Winner of the Silver Medal in Business Theory, Axiom Business Book Awards" "One of Business Insider's 10 Books to Read to Learn about the Future of Work" "There's much we can learn from Overload to help make work work for everyone-both now and in the future.... Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen have shown us through their dual work-redesign experiment that it's possible not only to reimagine how we work to make it work for everyone, but also to execute on this ideal together, so that everyone benefits - including the organization. It's giving people a choice about how, when, and where they work and a greater sense of control. In the pandemic, we all have an opportunity to step back and examine what's going well and what's not and envision how work can change for the better. "---Rebecca Zucker, Forbes "Someday soon, when the economic engines of the world are running again, leaders will reflect on what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about the ways and means of work in their companies. As they do, they should read Overload."---Theodore Kinni, Strategy+Business "In their recounting of a five-year field experiment conducted within a Fortune 500 company, two professors show how dual-agenda work redesign can reduce the high levels of chronic stress and ill health, feelings of powerlessness, work-family conflict, and burnout that attend employee overload-without negatively affecting corporate productivity or performance." * Strategy+Business *