by Adam Grant
Attaching a single patient’s photo to a CT exam increased diagnostic accuracy by 46 percent. And roughly 80 percent of the key diagnostic findings came only when the radiologists saw the patient’s photo. The radiologists missed these important findings when the photo was absent—even if they caught them three months earlier. When the radiologists saw the patient’s photo, they felt more empathy. By encouraging empathy, the photos motivated the radiologists to conduct their diagnoses more carefully. Their reports were 29 percent longer when the CT exams included patient photos. When the radiologists saw a photo of a patient, they felt a stronger connection to the human impact of their work. A patient photo “makes each CT scan unique,” said one radiologist.
In a recent study, researcher Nicola Bellé found similar patterns in a study of ninety Italian nurses who were invited to assemble surgical kits. After being randomly assigned to meet health-care practitioners who would use the kits, nurses were significantly more productive and more accurate. This effect was particularly pronounced among nurses who had reported strong giver tendencies in a survey. Interestingly, a week after meeting the health-care practitioners who benefited from the surgical kits, all of the nurses actually felt more inclined toward giving. Along with reducing burnout among givers, a firsthand connection to impact can tilt people of all reciprocity styles in the giver direction. When people know how their work makes a difference, they feel energized to contribute more.
Building on this idea that seeing impact can reduce the burnout of givers and motivate others to give, some organizations have designed initiatives to connect employees to the impact of their products and services. At Wells Fargo, a vice president named Ben Soccorsy created videos of customers talking about how the company’s low-interest loans helped them reduce and eliminate their unwanted debt. “In many cases, customers felt like they had a massive weight lifted off their shoulders: they now had a plan for paying down their debt,” Soccorsy says. When bankers watched the videos, “it was like a light switch turned on. Bankers realized the impact their work could have—that this loan can really make a difference in customers’ lives. It was a really compelling motivator.” At Medtronic, employees across the company—from engineers to salespeople—pay visits to hospitals to see their medical technologies benefiting patients. “When they’re exhausted,” former Medtronic CEO Bill George told me, “it’s very important that they get out there and see procedures. They can see their impact on patients, which reminds them that they’re here to restore people to full life and health.” Medtronic also holds an annual party for the entire company, more than thirty thousand employees, at which six patients are invited to share their stories about how the company’s products have changed their lives. When they see for the first time how much their work can matter, many employees break down into tears.
Having a greater impact is one of the reasons why, counterintuitive as it might seem, giving more can actually help givers avoid burnout. But it’s not the whole story. There’s a second reason why Conrey’s extra giving was energizing, and it has to do with where and to whom she gave. Nearly a century ago, the psychologist Anitra Karsten invited people to work on repetitive tasks for as long as they enjoyed them, but to stop when they were tired. For long periods of time, the participants toiled away at tasks like drawing pictures and reading poems aloud, until they couldn’t handle it any longer. One man’s task was to write ababab over and over. As the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer retells it, “He went on until he was mentally and physically exhausted. His hand felt numb, as though it couldn’t move to make even one more mark. At that moment the investigator asked him to sign his name and address for a different purpose. He did so quite easily.”
The same strange thing happened to other participants. One woman said she was so drained that she couldn’t lift her arm to make another mark. But she then lifted her arm to adjust her hair, apparently without any difficulty or discomfort. And when participants read poems aloud until their voices were hoarse, they had no trouble complaining about the task—and when they complained, they didn’t sound hoarse anymore. According to Langer, they weren’t faking it. Rather, “the change of context brought renewed energy.”
When Conrey volunteered as a mentor to TFA teachers, it created a change of context that made giving feel fresh. “Working with adults, doing something that is kind of teaching, that doesn’t burn me out. That invigorates me,” Conrey says. Giving more can be exhausting if it’s in the same domain. Instead of giving more in the same way, over and over, she expanded her contributions to a different group of people. The same thing happened when she started mentoring high school students at Minds Matter: she had a new setting and a new group of people to help. Instead of teaching them Spanish, she was getting them ready for college. By shifting her giving to a novel domain, she was able to recharge her energy.
Otherish Choices: Chunking, Sprinkling, and the 100-Hour Rule of Volunteering
We discussed otherish behavior at the beginning of this chapter, and in both Conrey’s example and that of the fund-raising callers, the distinction between selfless givers and otherish givers begins to come into play. In these contexts, decisions about how, where, and how much to give clearly make a difference when it comes to burning out or firing up. It might seem that by giving more, Conrey was being selfless. But what she actually did was create an opportunity for giving that was also personally rewarding, drawing energy from the visible impact of her contributions. To be more selfless, in this case, would have meant giving even more at school, where endless help was needed, but where she felt limited in her ability to make a difference. Instead, Conrey thought more about her own well-being and found a way to improve it by giving in a new way.
That choice has real consequences for givers. In numerous studies, Carnegie Mellon psychologist Vicki Helgeson has found that when people give continually without concern for their own well-being, they’re at risk for poor mental and physical health.* Yet when they give in a more otherish fashion, demonstrating substantial concern for themselves as well as others, they no longer experience health costs. In one study, people who maintained equilibrium between benefiting themselves and others even achieved significant increases in happiness and life satisfaction over a six-month period.*
To gain a deeper understanding of otherish and selfless givers, it’s worth looking more closely at the decisions they make about when and how much to give. It turns out that Conrey’s giving helped her avoid burnout not only due to the variety but also because of how she planned it.
Imagine that you’re going to perform five random acts of kindness this week. You’ll be doing things like helping a friend with a project, writing a thank-you note to a former teacher, donating blood, and visiting an elderly relative. You can choose one of two different ways to organize your giving: chunking or sprinkling. If you’re a chunker, you’ll pack all five acts of giving into a single day each week. If you’re a sprinkler, you’ll distribute your giving evenly across five different days, so that you give a little bit each day. Which do you think would make you happier: chunking or sprinkling?
In this study, led by the psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, people performed five random acts of kindness every week for six weeks. They were randomly divided into two groups: half chunked their giving into a single day each week, and the other half sprinkled it across all five days each week. At the end of the six weeks, despite performing the same number of helping acts, only one group felt significantly happier.
The chunkers achieved gains in happiness; the sprinklers didn’t. Happiness increased when people performed all five giving acts in a single day, rather than doing one a day. Lyubomirsky and colleagues speculate that “spreading them over the course of a week might have diminished their salience and power or made them less distinguishable from participants’ habitual kind behavior.”
Like the participants who became happier, Conrey was a chunker. At Minds Matter, Conrey packed her voluntee
ring into one day a week, giving all five weekly hours of mentoring high school students on Saturdays. By chunking her giving into weekly blocks, she was able to experience her impact more vividly, leading her efforts to feel like “more than a drop in the bucket.”
Chunking giving is an otherish strategy. Instead of mentoring students after school, when she was already exhausted, Conrey reserved it for the weekend, when her energy was recharged and it was more convenient in her schedule. In contrast, selfless givers are more inclined to sprinkle their giving throughout their days, helping whenever people need them. This can become highly distracting and exhausting, robbing selfless givers of the attention and energy necessary to complete their own work.
One September, seventeen software engineers at a Fortune 500 company were charged with developing code for a major new product. It was a color laser printer that would sell for 10 percent of the cost of other products on the market. If it succeeded, the company would be a dominant player in the market and could release an entire family of products to follow the printer. The division was losing money rapidly, and if the printer wasn’t ready on time, the division would fold. To finish the project, the engineers were working nights and weekends, but they were still behind schedule. The odds were against them: only once in the division’s history had a product been launched on time. They were “stressed” and “exhausted,” writes Harvard professor Leslie Perlow, with “insufficient time to meet all the demands on them.”
The engineers had fallen into a pattern of selfless giving: they were constantly helping their colleagues solve problems. One engineer reported that “The biggest frustration of my job is always having to help others and not getting my own work done”; another lamented that “The problem with my work style is that responsiveness breeds more need for responsiveness, and I am so busy responding, I cannot get my own work done.” On a typical day, an engineer named Andy worked from 8:00 A.M. until 8:15 P.M. It wasn’t until after 5:00 P.M. that Andy found a block of time longer than twenty minutes to work on his core task. In the hopes of carving out time to get their own work done, engineers like Andy began arriving at work early in the morning and staying late at night. This was a short-lived solution: as more engineers burned the midnight oil, the interruptions occurred around the clock. The engineers were giving more time without making more progress, and it was exhausting.
Perlow had an idea for turning these selfless givers into otherish givers. She proposed that instead of sprinkling their giving, they could chunk it. She worked with the engineers to create dedicated windows for quiet time and interaction time. After experimenting with several different schedules, Perlow settled on holding quiet time three days a week, starting in the morning and lasting until noon. During quiet time, the engineers worked alone, and their colleagues knew to avoid interrupting them. The rest of the time, colleagues were free to seek help and advice.
When Perlow polled the engineers about quiet time, two thirds reported above-average productivity. When Perlow stepped back and left it to the engineers to manage their own quiet time for a full month, 47 percent maintained above-average productivity. By chunking their helping time, the engineers were able to conserve time and energy to complete their own work, making a transition from selfless to otherish giving. In the words of one engineer, quiet time enabled “me to do some of the activities during the day which I would have normally deferred to late evening.” After three months, the engineers launched the laser printer on time, for only the second time in division history. The vice president of the division chalked the success up to the giving boundaries created by quiet time: “I do not think we could have made the deadline without this project.”*
Since the engineers were facing an urgent need to finish their product on time, they had a strong justification for making their giving more otherish. But in many situations, the appropriate boundaries for giving time are much murkier. Sean Hagerty is a principal in investment management at Vanguard, a financial services company that specializes in mutual funds. Sean is a dedicated mentor with a long-standing passion for education, and he has made a habit of volunteering his time at least a week each year to teach employees at Vanguard’s corporate university. When Vanguard’s chief learning officer counted his hours, she noticed that Sean was spending a large amount of time in the classroom. She was worried that he would burn out, and Sean recognized that he might be at risk: “It’s a pretty significant commitment given that I have a day job.” But instead of scaling back his hours, Sean asked for more: “It’s among the most valuable things that I do.” The more hours he volunteered teaching, the more energized he felt, until he approached two weeks and cleared one hundred hours of annual volunteering on educational initiatives.
One hundred seems to be a magic number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than two thousand Australian adults in their mid-sixties, those who volunteered between one hundred and eight hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered fewer than one hundred or more than eight hundred hours annually. In another study, American adults who volunteered at least one hundred hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000. There were no benefits of volunteering more than one hundred hours. This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining.
A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week. Research shows that if people start volunteering two hours a week, their happiness, satisfaction, and self-esteem go up a year later. Two hours a week in a fresh domain appears to be the sweet spot where people make a meaningful difference without being overwhelmed or sacrificing other priorities. It’s also the range in which volunteering is most likely to strike a healthy balance, offering benefits to the volunteer as well as the recipients.* In a national study, several thousand Canadians reported the number of hours that they volunteered per year, and whether they gained new technical, social, or organizational knowledge and skills from volunteering. For the first few hours a week, volunteers gained knowledge and skills at a consistent rate. By five hours a week, volunteering had diminishing returns: people were learning less and less with each additional hour. After eleven hours a week, additional time volunteered no longer added new knowledge and skills.
When Conrey started volunteering as an alumni mentor for TFA, she was giving about seventy-five hours a year. When she launched Minds Matter, the nonprofit mentoring program for high school students, she sailed over the 100-hour mark. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that her energy was restored right around that point. But it wasn’t just the amount of time that mattered; there’s another form of chunking in Conrey’s giving that’s also apparent in Sean Hagerty’s giving, and it reveals a key contrast between selfless and otherish giving.
As Sean Hagerty spent more time teaching in the Vanguard classroom, he began to crave more opportunities for giving. “I want to leave the place better than I entered it in my small way,” he says, and he began asking himself how he could have an impact on the world. As he reflected on different ways of giving, he noticed a pattern in how he was spending his free time. “I found myself reading more and more about education. I had a natural passion for it.” Sean decided to lead and launch two new programs around education. One program is called The Classroom Economy, and it has a national focus: Sean and his colleagues teach the basics of money management to kindergartners around the United States. The other program, Team Vanguard, is local: Sean has partnered with a charter school in Philadelphia to administer a four-year mentoring program, where employees volunteer their time on evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks. Despite the substantial time commitment, Sean found that both programs “have a tremendously positive impact on my energy. It’s the selling point I have with senior staff who worry about volunteer hours, which take time out of the day. It does sometimes, but my point of view is that it creates a much more highly engaged employee, including me. I love that work is givi
ng me an outlet for philanthropic interests.”
If Sean were a purely selfless giver, he might sprinkle his energy across many different causes out of a sense of duty and obligation, regardless of his own level of interest and enthusiasm for them. Instead, he adopts an otherish approach, choosing to chunk his giving to focus on education, a cause about which he’s passionate. “I get incredible personal satisfaction out of giving back to the community in this way,” Sean says.
Psychologists Netta Weinstein and Richard Ryan have demonstrated that giving has an energizing effect only if it’s an enjoyable, meaningful choice rather than undertaken out of duty and obligation. In one study, people reported their giving every day for two weeks, indicating whether they had helped someone or done something for a good cause. On days when they gave, they rated why they gave. On some days, people gave due to enjoyment and meaning—they thought it was important, cared about the other person, and felt they might enjoy it. On other days, they gave out of duty and obligation—they felt they had to and would feel like a bad person if they didn’t. Each day, they reported how energized they felt.
Weinstein and Ryan measured changes in energy from day to day. Giving itself didn’t affect energy: people weren’t substantially happier on days when they helped others than on days that they didn’t. But the reasons for giving mattered immensely: on days that people helped others out of a sense of enjoyment and purpose, they experienced significant gains in energy.* Giving for these reasons conferred a greater sense of autonomy, mastery, and connection to others, and it boosted their energy. When I studied firefighters and fund-raising callers, I found the same pattern: they were able to work much harder and longer when they gave their energy and time due to a sense of enjoyment and purpose, rather than duty and obligation.