Behavioral Economics for Leaders E-Book

Matthias Sutter

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 276

Beschreibung

Every leader should know the surprising research and strange conclusions of behavioral economics--for fairness, teamwork and productivity You and your colleagues don't always make rational decisions. Sometimes that's a problem that leaders must address, and and sometimes that can be a good thing--when employees put their colleagues interests ahead of their own. Dr. Matthias Sutter, a leading economist from Germany's world-renowned Max Planck Institute explains the latest surprising insights based on behavioral economics research. The book explains how people tick, how they react to incentives (monetary or non-monetary in nature) and what that means for working together--or against each other--at work. Dr. Sutter summarizes new and classic behavorial science research that applies the everyday business world, so leaders can improve teams and organizations, the research-based way. Find out which factors are important for professional success, from career entry to senior management. * Start your career on the right footing, advance quicker, and strategize how to meet your goals * Understand what's holding your colleagues back from productivity and implement evidence-based changes * Identify hidden biases in yourself and others to overcome inequalities and inefficiencies * Become a better leader and decision-maker by learning to interpret people's actions Individuals, organizations, and teams will benefit from the often-counterintuitive wisdom in this book. Based on the author's 20 years of research--plus the findings of the world's top behavioral economists--Behavioral Economics for Leaders can help you get your team and your organization where you want to lead it.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Do Smart People Behave Strangely?

PART I: Behavioral Economics for Your Career

CHAPTER 1: The Taller You Are, The Higher Your Salary?

References

CHAPTER 2: The Job Interview—It's Tougher for Women

References

CHAPTER 3: Working from Home Is Great—But It May Hurt Your Career

References

CHAPTER 4: Social Skills Are Worth More Now Than 10 Years Ago—Much More

References

CHAPTER 5: Fifty Percent of People Find a New Job Through Their Social Networks—Weak Connections Matter More Than Strong Ones

References

CHAPTER 6: When Finding a New Job, Rigidly Structuring Your Day Is a Power Move

References

CHAPTER 7: Better “Zappa” Than “Adams”—Why Coming Later Alphabetically Gives You an Unfair Advantage

References

CHAPTER 8: Job Hunting and Patience

References

PART II: Behavioral Economics for Hiring and Retaining Talent

CHAPTER 9: Startups with a Larger Share of Women Last Longer

References

CHAPTER 10: The Unintended Positive Side Effects of Employee Referral Programs

References

CHAPTER 11: Managers Make Systematic Hiring Mistakes—Machines Can Help

References

CHAPTER 12: Why Employers Prefer Employees Who Don't Job Hop

References

CHAPTER 13: Look for Candidates Who Demonstrate Patience and Long‐Term Thinking

References

CHAPTER 14: Unintended Negative Consequences of Salary Transparency

References

PART III: Behavioral Economics for Managers: Teamwork, Motivation, and Productivity

CHAPTER 15: Prejudiced Managers Hurt Employee Productivity—More by Neglect and Lack of Engagement Than Active Discrimination

References

CHAPTER 16: When It's Hot Outside, People Are More Risk Averse and Make Worse Decisions

References

CHAPTER 17: Managers with Good People Management Skills Increase Employee Satisfaction and Reduce Turnover

References

CHAPTER 18: Can You Trust Your Bankers? The Finance Industry Attracts Less‐Trustworthy People

References

CHAPTER 19: Peer Pressure Productivity: Employees Are Influenced by the Productivity of Others Around Them

References

CHAPTER 20: Employees Who Don't Support the Company Mission Are 50% Less Productive Employees

References

CHAPTER 21: The More Collaborative Your Team Members, the More Fish You Will Catch

References

CHAPTER 22: Empowering Employees Saves Lives: The Co‐Determination Bonus

References

CHAPTER 23: Good Leaders Model the Behavior They Want to See in Others—and Employees Imitate It

References

CHAPTER 24: Selfish Leaders End Up with Selfish Followers

References

PART IV: Behavioral Economic Research on Gender Differences and Unequal Pay: Women Are More Risk Averse (and Men Overestimate Themselves)

CHAPTER 25: An Argument for Gender Quotas in Employment: They Can Help Attract Highly Qualified Women

References

CHAPTER 26: The More Competitive Your Attitude, the Higher Your Lifetime Earnings

References

CHAPTER 27: Willingness to Compete Starts by Early Childhood: The Pivotal Role of the Family

References

CHAPTER 28: Cultural Conditioning Helps Explain Differing Male and Female Attitudes Toward Competition

References

CHAPTER 29: A “Nudge” for Reducing the Male/Female Wage Gap

References

CHAPTER 30: Women Leaders Earn More and Revenue per Employee Goes Up When Women Are on the Board

References

PART V: The Economic Benefits of Fairness and Trust

CHAPTER 31: Trust Is an Economic Asset; Lack of Trust Is Expensive

References

CHAPTER 32: A Little Accountability Goes a Long Way: Trust Works Best When Monitoring Is Possible but Not Used

References

CHAPTER 33: Why It’s Important to Explain Difficult Employee Decisions: Treating One Employee Unfairly Hurts Everyone’s Productivity

References

CHAPTER 34: Communicating Good Intentions Gets You a Better Outcome

References

PART VI: Salary and Bonuses

CHAPTER 35: Paying People More Doesn’t Mean They’ll Make Better Decisions

References

CHAPTER 36: Team Bonuses Motivate Employees to Work Harder—and to Help Each Other More

References

CHAPTER 37: Nobody Wants to Be Below Average; How Performance Bonuses Can Hurt Productivity and Job Satisfaction

References

CHAPTER 38: The Limits of Homo Economicus: Employees Underperform If Their Performance‐Based Bonus Hurts Their Colleagues’ Bonus

References

CHAPTER 39: Wall Street Bonuses Incentivize Unhealthy Risk Taking—and Increase Systemic Risk

References

CHAPTER 40: Don’t Incentivize Employees to Sabotage Colleagues: The Problems with Relative Performance Bonuses

References

PART VII: Ethics in Companies and on the Markets

CHAPTER 41: Markets Hurt Morality: Government Intervention Can Help

References

CHAPTER 42: Unethical Behavior Rises and Falls with Incentives—Make It Hard for People to Get Rich Doing the Wrong Thing

References

CHAPTER 43: Small‐Scale Cheating Can Lead to Major Corruption: Leaders Should Not Tolerate Minor Ethical Violations

References

CHAPTER 44: People Care More About the Environment When They Know Their Organization Cares Too

References

CHAPTER 45: The Stunted Career Path of Whistleblowers: Employees View Them As Disloyal

References

CHAPTER 46: A Bad Corporate Culture Can Turn Honest People into Liars

References

PART VIII: Leadership and the C‐Suite

CHAPTER 47: Visionary Leaders Outperform Operations‐Oriented Leaders Over the Long Term

References

CHAPTER 48: The Four Traits That Set CEOs Apart from Other Managers: Strategic Thinking, Charisma, Intellectual/Social Skills, and Focus on Results

References

CHAPTER 49: Leaders Who Focus on Short‐Term Results Innovate Less and Lower Company ROI

References

CHAPTER 50: Charismatic Leaders Inspire Their People to Deliver Better Results

References

Appendix: All Takeaways—For Impatient Readers

Source Materials

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 34

FIGURE 34.1 “Dear parents: Thank you for making it possible that your child ...

Guide

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Why Do Smart People Behave Strangely?

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

Appendix: All Takeaways—For Impatient Readers

Source Materials

About the Author

Index

End User License Agreement

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MATTHIAS SUTTER

BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS for LEADERS

RESEARCH-BASED INSIGHTS ON THE WEIRD, IRRATIONAL, AND wonderful WAYS HUMANS NAVIGATE THE WORKPLACE

This translation Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Copyright © Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG 2020, Munich 2022Translated by: Marc Svetov

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data

Names: Sutter, Matthias, author.

Title: Behavioral economics for leaders : research‐based insights on the weird, irrational, and wonderful ways humans navigate the workplace / Matthias Sutter.

Description: First Edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, [2022] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022034799 (print) | LCCN 2022034800 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119982975 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119982999 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119982982 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Economics—Psychological aspects. | Leadership—Psychological aspects. | Teams in the workplace—Psychological aspects.

Classification: LCC HB74.P8 S8813 2022 (print) | LCC HB74.P8 (ebook) | DDC 302.3/5—dc23/eng/20220721

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034799

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022034800

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: © aleksandarvelasevic/Getty Images

I dedicate this book to my wife Heidrun and our daughters, Charlotte and Constanze.

Acknowledgments

I want to thank Richard Narramore and Jessica Filippo from Wiley for their excellent guidance and many useful ideas on how to improve the book. Special thanks are due to Marc Svetov for his smooth translation and to Kim Wimpsett as a very thorough development editor. Without you, this book would not have been possible.

At some points in this book, I showcase my own research projects, which would not have seen the light of day without the marvelous collaboration of my co‐authors on those projects. I would like to express my gratitude to Loukas Balafoutas, Andrej Gill, Daniela Glätzle‐Rützler, Werner Güth, Stefan Haigner, Matthias Heinz, Jürgen Huber, Sabrina Jeworrek, Michael Kirchler, Martin Kocher, Maria Vittoria Levati, Vanessa Mertins, Wolfram Rosenberger, Heiner Schumacher, Matthias Stefan, Charlotte Sutter, Stefan Trautmann, and Eline van der Heijden.

Some of these research projects could be implemented only with the financial aid of research organizations, in particular, the Austrian Science Foundation (“Der Wissenschaftsfonds,” FWF), the Anniversary Fund of Oesterreichische Nationalbank (OeNB), and the German Research Foundation (“Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,” DFG) as part of the Excellence Strategy—EXC2126/1‐390939966 (ECONtribute Excellence Cluster).

The Max Planck Society deserves special thanks because it has been offering me excellent working conditions since 2017. At the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, I would like to thank the members of my “Experimental Economics Group,” and especially Heidi Morgenstern and Zita Green for their outstanding collaboration. I'm grateful to the Universities of Cologne and Innsbruck for allowing me to continue to be part of these institutions, which I highly esteem, within the scope of short part‐time contracts.

I thanked the three most important people in my life in the dedication.

Introduction: Why Do Smart People Behave Strangely?

Why do taller people get a higher salary? Why do women request a salary raise less frequently than men? Does enough money lure us to ignore all our moral concerns? Why do smart people behave strangely?

This book shares fascinating insights and findings of behavioral economics, a relatively new discipline in cutting‐edge economic science. Behavioral economics uses empirical methods to comprehend the motives of human actions and uses a scientific framework for understanding strange and surprising aspects of professional life. This includes topics relevant to entry‐level professionals, such as to what extent it is important to be the first or last to be interviewed for a job, as well as topics that are relevant to executives up to the board level, such as the question of why social skills play an ever more vital role in professional life as you rise in an organization. Controversial issues are also examined, such as whether hiring and promotion quotas are justified in companies and whether salaries ought to be public.

Behavioral economics is primarily based on economic experiments, where actual human beings make decisions under precisely defined conditions that have real consequences (e.g., in the form of money, prestige, or other intangible rewards). By systematically varying the conditions, you can get a good idea of what really drives human behavior and how people react in different conditions, regardless of how they explain their own behavior.

Many of the findings described in this book are based on field experiments conducted inside “live” businesses and organizations. Later in the book, for instance, I describe a field experiment in which we leased a call center and hired about 200 people to work there. Along with field experiments, lab experiments play a crucial role in behavioral economics. They typically involve students in computer labs who are paid depending on the decisions they make. Although field experiments are closer to the reality of everyday life, lab experiments are an indispensable supplement to the study of human behavior. One of the book's chapters deals with a study I conducted on the impact of gender quotas on women's willingness to compete.

Both field and lab experiments are always concerned with the question of how human behavior responds to incentives (monetary and nonmonetary) since this is what our professional life, from start to finish, is about. This book identifies curious and troubling human behaviors at all stages, from entry level to late career, with observations and insights that are relevant to both individuals and organizations.

For more than 20 years, the stages of professional life have been my focus of research in behavioral economics. What I found was often surprising, contradicting my expectations (e.g., the impact of quotas). This is why I love this field of research; I can challenge my own expectations—sometimes my prejudices—by looking at empirical data and revising them if needed.

When I applied for a position as a student assistant more than 25 years ago, the first step I took was to go to a bookstore to find specialist literature on “how to write a résumé” and “how to interview well.” When, a few years ago, I was appointed director of a Max Planck Institute with nearly 100 employees, I looked into books on efficient staff management and guides on staff appraisals.

Although the guides somewhat helped me in both cases, I also realized that their point of view was limited, sometimes one‐sided. What I was missing was something like an overriding and far‐seeing idea about which factors are really important in professional life—for entry‐level professionals and people about to retire; for middle‐level managers and members of the board; for employees and employers alike; and for men and women to an equal extent in all these different roles. This greater insight is what I term the “human factor” in this book, the fact—trivial only at first glance—that our working life always concerns fallible, complicated human beings. You often need to take a closer look at it to understand what it's about.

Over the last couple of decades, behavioral economists worldwide have brought to light a cornucopia of answers to the question of why smart people behave strangely. I share these insights with you in this book and hope you will find them as revealing and exciting as I do; they're sometimes surprising but always thought‐provoking!

Before we start, a brief instruction guide on how to use this book: Each chapter presents a key finding that can be read and understood independently of the other chapters. Many of the following 50 chapters start with a short story to illustrate the chapter's theme. The stories are mostly fictitious. (To distinguish fictitious characters from real people, only the real people have first and last names; fictitious characters are identified only by their first names.) I then explain what's interesting or important about the story, in light of current research, and suggest applications for everyday working life.

I wish all readers, from young professionals starting their career to experienced employees all the way up to the CEO, a great and profitable reading experience.

Matthias Sutter

PART IBehavioral Economics for Your Career

CHAPTER 1The Taller You Are, The Higher Your Salary?

Salary depends on many factors, such as education, prior professional experience, and the assumption of management responsibilities. Your height should be irrelevant, but the crazy thing is, it seems to matter.

When you look at the executive and supervisory boards of major German public companies, what you see is primarily relatively tall men. Frank Appel of Deutsche Post is 6′6″. At approximately 6′2″, Michael Diekmann from Allianz is also above average. Most of the American presidents since World War II were taller than the average American male. Generals in the military usually are pretty tall as well. Even Napoleon, allegedly of small stature, is said to have been taller than his average soldier.

So it seems successful men are taller than average. It's known from labor market research that taller men also earn substantially more money on average than shorter men do. But while height may actually be an advantage on the battlefield, the question is: Why should taller men earn more anywhere else? The height of a manager, IT expert, or entrepreneur should be irrelevant to his salary. The data tells a different story. Studies from the United States and the United Kingdom show that men who are 4 inches taller than average earn about 10% more salary a year. Extrapolated to an entire working life, that difference in income easily adds up to six and seven digits!

Andrew Postlewaite from the University of Pennsylvania and his colleagues investigated why height has a positive impact on income. They examined two sample groups of men in the United States and the United Kingdom who were born in the late 1950s or early 1960s. Since the employment careers of women from these cohorts differ from those of men, the influence of height can be estimated more precisely for men, so Postlewaite and colleagues exclusively analyzed men. But height also plays a positive role for women. In the case of female twins, the taller twin earns several percentage points more than the shorter twin.

When trying to explain the influence of height on salary, we might begin with a naive assumption that employers prefer taller people and therefore pay them more. In earlier times, this might have been a reasonable argument in the military or in industry—before most physically demanding work was done by machines. In our highly industrialized economy, though, this is no longer so. There must be other reasons. A second guess would be that taller men come from different families than smaller men, which accounts for the pay differences. Indeed, shorter men are often from families with more children, where the parents had less education than the parents of taller men. But even if you take these family background differences in the statistical analysis into account (e.g., by looking only at men from families with the same number of children and the same level of education of their parents), it still turns out that 4 inches more in height makes for almost a 10% difference in salary. The review of other hypotheses confirms that this correlation is sustained even if you take into consideration health and cognitive abilities (such as intelligence tests).

Postlewaite's study made two fundamental findings in its further analysis. First, it's not the height in adulthood that matters but the height as a teenager, that is, at the age of 15 to 16. Some teenagers are already relatively tall by then; others go through a growth spurt later. Those who are relatively tall at that age earn more later than those who are shorter in their teens, regardless of their height in adulthood. A later employer normally possesses no information about the height of an employee as a teenager, so it can't be of any significance to the employer (and it has nothing to do with the intelligence quotient).

The second finding of Postlewaite gets to the heart of the matter. Taller teenagers have more social activities and contacts. They are, for instance, more often members of all sorts of clubs (sports or cultural ones, e.g.) or of student organizations. This fosters and trains so‐called noncognitive abilities such as the capability of working on a team, endurance and stamina, ability to compromise, and leadership skills. Such qualities are of great importance in professional life. When you consider teenage activities in the analysis, there's no longer a statistically significant correlation between height and salary, Postlewaite's study proves. Height helps in the acquisition of social skills as a form of human capital, and this human capital leads to higher salaries in adulthood.

Takeaways

It's generally assumed that salary depends on people's skills and previous professional experience. But height also plays a role, at least for men. Taller people build up larger social networks in their late teens and acquire more social skills. This results in higher salaries later in life.

References

Persico, N.; Postlewaite, A.; Silverman, D.: (2004) The effect of adolescent experience on labor market outcomes: The case of height. Journal of Political Economy, 112: 1019–1051.

CHAPTER 2The Job Interview—It's Tougher for Women

Equality between women and men in the labor market is far from perfect. It starts with the job interview, in which women are already at a disadvantage. Let's take a look behind the scenes of the arts, entertainment, and academic hierarchies.

The violinist steps on stage and walks toward the center. The floor is covered with a thick carpet. Nobody is on the stage but the violinist. The curtain to the auditorium is closed. Via a loudspeaker, she is asked to start playing. The woman has opted for a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. Fully concentrating, she lowers the bow onto the strings and commences. The melody sounds heavenly. But who's listening?

Five people sit behind the curtain in the auditorium who pay close attention to every note. They have no idea who is currently auditioning for the open position of a violinist in their orchestra, whether a man or a woman is playing, whether the person is young or old, whether they are white or a person of color. Since the thick carpet on the stage floor absorbs the sound of steps, the jurors cannot guess the gender of the violinist by listening to the clacking of high heels. The five people simply have the task of finding the best qualified person—of any gender—for the vacancy.

Today, many orchestras around the world handle auditioning for a vacancy like this. To ensure equal opportunity for all genders, musicians of any, white people or people of color, the auditioning is blind as it's called. This means the selection panel makes its decision on who will get the job solely based on what it hears. Does this boost a woman's chances of being hired?

Data on the filling of vacancies in the top American orchestras—such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—shows that blind auditioning has made a significant contribution to more women being hired. Compared to hiring procedures without blind auditioning, the anonymity of an audition increases the likelihood by around 50% that women will make it to the next round in a multistage selection process. When it comes to the last round, women end up prevailing almost twice as much in a blind audition than without anonymity. In other words, blind auditioning avoids discrimination due to gender.

Although many orchestras are turning to this approach, normally corporate hiring processes are not blind. Quite the contrary. Usually, when someone applies for a job, the name on a résumé or an in‐person job interview inevitably betrays personal attributes such as gender, age, and race. Of course, when filling a vacancy, the personal impression a candidate makes is important in addition to professional qualifications. Most people think the “chemistry” must be right between all parties involved in the recruitment process. However, it can be empirically proven in this context that thinking the recruiter can ignore the gender of an applicant is an illusion. One reason for this is the gender makeup of hiring committees, as new studies on academic promotions in Italy and Spain suggest.

In both countries, candidates for vacant academic chairs must undergo selection procedures organized by the government; in other words, they have to present themselves to a panel of academics in their fields. Based on more than 100,000 application procedures with more than 8,000 panel members, Manuel Bagues of the University of Warwick and colleagues investigated how the chances for a woman being hired were impacted by how many women were sitting on the selection panel. As a gut reaction, you might think that a greater share of women on the panel would be an advantage for female candidates. Italy and Spain, nonetheless, don't corroborate this assumption. On the contrary, having more women on the panel actually reduces the chances of success for female candidates, albeit only to a slight extent.

The explanation is that although female panel members evaluate female candidates better on average than their male counterparts, female candidates are evaluated substantially more harshly by male panelists as soon as there are women on the panel. This result appears to indicate that men on selection panels have a tougher attitude toward hiring female candidates because other women are already sitting on the panel who have made it “to the top.” Mandatory quotas for the number of women on important decision‐making entities (e.g., selection panels) are obligatory in many fields, not only in academia. This might have unintended and undesirable consequences for female candidates looking for a position.

Takeaways

Women are evaluated more negatively by men in job interviews if the proportion of women in responsible positions is already relatively high. Therefore, more women on staff selection panels often pose a certain disadvantage for female applicants.

References

Bagues, M.; Sylos‐Labini, M.; Zinovyeva, N.: (2017) Does the gender composition of scientific committees matter? American Economic Review, 107: 1207–1238.

Goldin, C.; Rouse, C.: (2000) Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of “blind” auditions on female musicians. American Economic Review, 90: 715–741.

CHAPTER 3Working from Home Is Great—But It May Hurt Your Career

The COVID‐19 pandemic produced an unprecedented shift in the location of work by forcing millions, perhaps billions, of people to work from home. While before the pandemic working from home was often viewed skeptically, now it is widely embraced. So, we are beginning to understand its pros and cons better, in particular, also what it means for your career.

Brian has been working as a language editor at a prestigious research institution for several years. With the advent of the COVID‐19 pandemic, he has shifted to working from home for the entire week, while before the pandemic he was usually in the office for four days. When the pandemic hit workplaces worldwide, Heidi, his boss, was not sure whether Brian would work equally well and productively from home as he always did in the office. Given that the young researchers benefit considerably from his revisions of their scientific texts, it is important for their publication, and thus career prospects, that Brian is doing his job as excellently as he did before the pandemic. So far, Heidi and the researchers, as well as Brian, have been very satisfied with the new work arrangements.

Even before the pandemic, the use of the home office was on the rise worldwide. In the United States, for instance, the proportion of employees who work remotely on some days of the week has risen fivefold over the past 30 to 40 years before the pandemic hit the world. Similarly, in Germany and Austria, around 50% of employees worked from home, albeit usually only one day a week. With the pandemic, the number of people working from home has further increased, reaching levels that would have seemed impossible—and to many unacceptable—before the pandemic. Of course, this development has not only been somewhat forced on us due to social distancing restrictions, but due to an increasingly digitized world, the place of work has also become increasingly irrelevant. The trend toward working from home is also welcome for environmental reasons, since it reduces commuter traffic between home and the workplace.

From an employee's perspective, working from home improves work‐life balance. On the employers' side, they benefit from needing less office space and thus save money. Yet, many employers may be skeptical whether employees work sufficiently well from home. Employee interest groups see a risk of employees becoming isolated and lonely if they work too much from home. Depending on which perspective one takes, working from home is judged as rather positive or negative by employers or employees.

One of the problems of how to assess working at home is that there is hardly any evidence of causal effects because virtually all studies are flawed by a selection problem. This means that people who request to work from home and use the opportunity to do so are not the same people as those who don't. In an ideal situation, either you allow the people who want to work from home to do so or you force them to continue to work in the office at the company's premises. This would get rid of the selection problem, and the causal effect of working at home would be measurable as long as the activities to be done in the office or at home are practically identical.

Even before the pandemic's onset, a study conducted by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and a group of coauthors met these conditions. Around 1,000 employees at the Shanghai branch of the largest Chinese travel agency CTrip were able to choose if they wanted to work in their home offices four days a week. The group of 500 employees who were interested was randomly divided into two subgroups. Two hundred and fifty