How do you define quiet quitting? Material from Gallup help you teach your students about operationalization.

Gallup took a long, hard look at the quiet quitting phenomena. In doing so, they created a great class example for talking about how I/O operationalizes a construct, measures a work-related attitude, 

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/398306/quiet-quitting-real.aspx

1. Operationalization

People talk a lot about quiet quitting. Pop media discussion frames it as laziness, but is it? The Gallup people define it as a lack of employee engagement, a topic most of us teach in I/O. 

2. There is data explicitly looking at folks under 35. So, it focuses on the broad age gap that includes your traditional college-aged students.

3. There is a video.

Hey. Your students need a break from listening to your voice. Sorry.

4. Here are the discussion questions I used.

-What is the general definition that the media uses for Quiet Quitting?

-What are some of the complicated facets of Quiet Quitting described in the video.

-Why is Quiet Quitting a more complicated process?

-What construct does Gallup use instead of the term Quiet Quitting?

Protected classes: What do Americans know and not know?

 WOOOO!

I'm teaching I/O again in the Fall, so I decided to dust off the ol' I/O blog.

I found some data from YouGov America about protected classes, and whether or not Americans are aware of their status.

It never occurred to me to introduce this topic via a guessing game. Still, in the Fall, I may ask my students which they think are protected and which they do not think are protected, compare their data to Americans, and then tell them which are protected. 

There is also data about which classes Americans *think* should or should no be protected. I, personally, wouldn't touch with a 10-foot poll, but maybe you could? 

Crisis Text Hotline's uses data to guide training

Many psychology majors in your I/O course have clinical/counseling aspirations. This is great: They will probably still work within an organization, and I/O certainly intersects with clinical/counseling (stress, well-being), so there is a lot they can gain from I/O.

However, why not get them to buy into the course even more by demonstrating how data is used to determine training needs in mental health care? This is a small example, but one you could use to introduce the idea of training assessment.

Crisis Text Hotline is a 24/7 texting service that provides mental health resources. I share their number with my students in my syllabus because who knows when they need help. Maybe you should, too? Also, CTH is a tremendous mental health volunteer opportunity that anyone with a phone can perform! Volunteers receive extensive training and select the hours when they accept texts. This might be a good fit for your busy students or students hesitant to perform face-to-face volunteer work during COVID.

CTH shares their data: You can sort it by state, by type of mental health crisis, etc. I shared this information over on my stats blog and some ideas for using the data in Psych Stats.

That's excellent descriptive data about user trends, but I'm more interested in how CTH uses its data internally to inform training for this blog post. 

CTH shares internal data, how they use it and invite collaboration.

They use their data in various ways, but this really caught my I/O eye...

Another thing that caught my attention is this example of collecting user data:

CTH also has a running list of research papers published using their data. This might be closer to an RM class than an I/O class, but it does demonstrate how psychologists can use organizational data to gain insights into behavioral health services.

Job rotation? No thanks!

In I/O, there are a few different models for learning how to perform multiple positions in an organization. Job shadowing, cross-training, job rotation...they serve other purposes. Sometimes, organizations do this to diminish any disruptions due to illness or turnover. Sometimes, organizations do this so that workers in higher-level positions can gain a new perspective on the experiences of rank-and-file employees. For example, I have a friend who works at the corporate headquarters of a fast-food restaurant who works in a store once a year.

However, arguably a non-story from the San Francisco Chronicle describes some angry DoorDash engineers who have NO INTEREST THANK YOU for cross-training ass DoorDash delivery drivers.  

How to use it in class:

1. Anything you say on social media could end up in the newspaper. A good lesson for our students and an opportunity to talk about cyber-vetting. 

2. When implementing job training, you need to have employee buy-in. TC does not buy into this practice, but it sounds like other employees might (see quote below).

3. There is also a throw-away comment about employee assessment and annual review. DoorDash employees are working for "credits." 

Gig Work!

 When I taught I/O SP21, the students had a LOT  to say about gig jobs. I brought it up as a "Future Direction in I/O," and the students expressed much about gig work. Ok, some of it was sharing anecdotes about shady UberEats drivers, but they were engaged in the conversation.

I am going to make it into a meatier conversation this Spring, using these two points:

1) Pew Research gig worker methodology

This Pew article is an interview with two Pew Research methodologists, Colleen McClain and Monica Anderson. This article APPLIES everything we teach our students about in RM. For example, making choices about the type of question (forced-choice, yes or no, etc.) and writing questions for a variety of different KINDS of gig workers (grocery pickers vs. food delivery vs. drivers). It is interesting.

2) The actual data highlighting gig worker diversity and harassment

This isn't just a conversation about a future direction in work. It can also be a discussion about diversity and harassment in the workplace.

Here are some of the actual data from pew (thanks to Ed Hansen for sending this my way!). 

The US Air Force is removing height restrictions for pilots, which will allow more women to serve

Harmeet Kaur, reporting for CNN, describes a recent change that the United States Air Force has made to its pilot selection process. These changes should make the selection process more equitable for women AND maintain the safety of Air Force pilots.

Short version: The USAF has eliminated waivers required for particularly short pilot applicants. Such waivers created another selection burden for women far more often than for men. USAF has created new assessment measures to determine a predict a person's physiological ability to pilot aircraft. 

Long version: 

In the past, anyone who wanted to apply to be a pilot required a special waiver if they were shorter than 5'4". Statistically, this put an additional burden on 44% of women. 

Someone at the USAF was aware of the confidence gap research, in particular, research that finds that women are less likely than men to apply for jobs when they are not 100% qualified. Per the article:

Instead of just using height as a gate-keeper for pilots, USAF will now use a finer-tuned assessment technique that doesn't look at height but does look at a person's physical ability to pilot. From the article:

I think this provides a good example of how an organization can get ahead of selection bias. In this report, it seems that the USAF was very straight forward about how the height/voucher system impacted women at a higher rate than men. They were aware of the historic reasoning behind that assessment decision: Their planes were built to accommodate the average-sized male. They also created an alternative assessment system that would maintain the safety of all USAF pilots while not defaulting to an assessment measure that was biased. 

Using Wegman's to illustrate the antecedents to job satisfaction

I live in NW PA and I love Wegman's grocery stores.

Wegman's employees also love Wegman's, consistently voting the company onto Fortune Magazines 100 Best Companies to Work for the last 23 years. Last year, it ranked number 3 in the nation.

I was happy to find this profile describing how a good employee-supervisor relationship led to Wegman's early adoption of the cauliflower rice craze.  I think it does a great job of illustrating the antecedents of job satisfaction.

Here is the story of one employee, Jody, and the cauliflower rice at Wegmans. It isn't just a story of organizational success, it really is a nice story of how an employee tried to make life better for her customers, supervisors took notice, and everyone won in the end.

While there are many different ways to categorize and organize the antecedents to job satisfaction, here is the list form Levy's Intro Text:

For this activity, I asked my students in "class" (synchronous chat conversation during the Spring 2020 semester) to identify the antecedents that cam through in Jody's story and describe *why* the antecedent applied to the story. They talked about work-family issues, autonomy, supervisor relationships, and task significance, among others.

Employers Used Facebook to Keep Women and Older Workers From Seeing Job Ads. The Federal Government Thinks That’s Illegal

TL:DR: All aspects of recruitment, assessment, promotion, firing are subject to federal laws/EEOC. FB has been violating these laws by allowing organizations to microtarget just younger people with job recruitment ads. The EEOC ruled that such practices are illegal. This whole issue came to light because or ProPublica's reporting and research, and that research used data collection. 


In the original piece by ProPublica, Angwin and Larson reported on large firms using targeted Facebook ads to recruit potential employees. That is legal. However, the firms asked Facebook to limit who saw the ads, and to not show the ads to anyone who was too old. That has been declared illegal by the EEOC.

A basic explanation of what this entails:

They use their I/O words to explain precisely what law was broken:

Later in the article: 

They explain microtargeting, or how ads can be aimed at specific groups at the exclusion of others:

And microtargeting isn't illegal. That's good business, right? It allows organizations to target the most likely customers. In fact, some of the companies argued that targeting likely hires is just like targeting people most likely to use a given service:

I think this would be a great discussion prompt for students. How is advertising for a job different than advertising for a service or product? What laws protect one but not the other?

As a stats instructor, I also think it is interesting that ProPublica stumbled upon this issue while collecting data on Facebook ad placement and politics. And that was a big, communal data collection conducted with the help of ProPublica readers. Because anyone can be a scientist and help with science, my friends.

More on that political placement study here: https://www.propublica.org/article/help-us-monitor-political-ads-online

The follow-up piece has a lot less information about the targeted ads BUT does cite the EEOC and their ruling on the topic. This is helpful when teaching I/O because it shows the ongoing relevance of the EEOC and their role in making legal decisions about new hiring issues.


PS: If you can, support ProPublica. Their investigative reporting is top-notch, in-depth, and considers many different angles. This is not the click-bait reporting we've grown accustomed to. The story I linked above is one of several stories that Propulica has published about this issue.

Crash Course videos for I/O

The Crash Course YouTube channel contains a series of well-edited, well-researched, close-captioned, engaging educational videoes. Like, there are so many terrible-but-well-intended educational videos out there. And there is so much terrible content on the Internet. But Crash Course is the real deal. I use their videos extensively in my Stats class and their Psychology content is also good.

They don't have an I/O psychology series, but they do have a Government and Politics series. This series covers a lot of I/O ground in terms of employment laws and discrimination. So, the content isn't being explained through the lens of I/O psychology, but I think it may stick with your students better to have it emphasized that the ways we try to promote workplace fairness aren't just nice or right, they are the law. Here are three great videos that you could use in I/O:

Sexual Harassment

Affirmative Action

Discrimination

Terrible job interview questions

Apropos of nothing, what's the worst question you've been asked in a job interview and how did you answer it/how do you wish you'd answered it?

— Erin Bartram (@erin_bartram) April 3, 2019

So, this thread brings the cringe. Go see the dumpster fire for yourself, but I'll include a few of the response here:

But it is ALSO a really good way to illustrate two things in I/O:

1) Why structured interviews are better than unstructured interviews. Sure, we have the data to back up this claim but these tweets demonstrate just how terrible interviewers can be.

2) This serves as a great way to review protected classes in the U.S. You could ask your students to match every tweet to the specific protected group this potentially harmed.

Performance appraisal for super heroes

Most Intro to I/O classes cover performance appraisal, which includes employee comparison procedures, like rank-ordering employees for specific purposes, like selecting a new manager.

One engaging, interactive example is to ask your students to create their own tier system for Marvel Comic Univers characters. https://tiermaker.com/create/85mcucharacters-29248 allows you to do just this. Note: They list 115 different characters (!) which is probably overwhelming for students but maybe they could just create a rank order for leadership skills, the capacity to work on a team, ability to persevere in difficult situations, etc.

Note: This example doesn't reflect on my feelings about the characters, I was just playing around with the template to create an example for the blog.

ANOTHER way to discuss rank ordering is by using the COUNTLESS lists of MCU character rankings that already exist.

My favorite example of this are efforts to rank order all of the MCU superheroes. It is an accessible example for our students, better then a dry example from a textbook, AND you can demonstrate how there are all sorts of different criteria one can use for rank ordering since there are some many different lists of MCU heroes based on various characteristics:

Brute Strength:

https://www.thegamer.com/mcu-main-characters-marvel-weakest-strongest-ranked/

Ranked from least to most funny:
https://www.looper.com/151456/the-funniest-mcu-characters-ranked/

Ranked from "Not worth saving" to "If they die, I die"

https://www.buzzfeed.com/ehisosifo1/ranking-marvel-cinematic-universe-characters