10/23/2021
What makes work meaningful; Small vs Big teams; Why people are quitting; Covid Statistics; Don Kohn Says...; Real Estate; Supply Chains; What I'm Reading
What Makes Work Meaningful (Brookings)
Many of us have taken those employee surveys that ask about the work environment. Many of these surveys are based on Self-determination theory; according to this theory, three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness - drive results. This paper suggests that the relatedness factor dominates.
Specifically, using three waves of the European Working Conditions Survey, we show that autonomy, competence, and relatedness explain about 60 percent of the variation in work meaningfulness perceptions. Meanwhile, extrinsic factors, such as income, benefits, and performance pay, are relatively unimportant. Meaningful work also predicts absenteeism, skills training, and retirement intentions, which highlights the concept’s economic significance
Perceptions of career advancement and job insecurity matter for meaningfulness in the expected directions, and longer working hours decrease meaningfulness, suggesting that excessive work intensity may limit the ability to derive work meaningfulness. Tenure, the number of working days, being a public employee, having a permanent contract, working multiple jobs, and supervising others do not influence work meaningfulness, but respondents working in smaller firms have higher meaningfulness perceptions, compared to those working in larger firms. This finding may at first appear at odds with the positive relationship between relatedness and meaningfulness.
The paper has more insights, and is a worthwhile read for those of you interested in this kind of thing.
Small vs Big Teams
The above paper noted that “working in smaller firms have higher meaningfulness perceptions.” Relatedly, a tweet from Ethan Mollick
has a link to the abstract (I’m too cheap to buy the paper) of a paper Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology which concludes “smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones.”
Work from larger teams builds on more-recent and popular developments, and attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams search more deeply into the past, are viewed as disruptive to science and technology and succeed further into the future—if at all. Observed differences between small and large teams are magnified for higher-impact work, with small teams known for disruptive work and large teams for developing work.
Food for thought as you organize your teams.
Why are people quitting?
From McKinsey - the ‘more important’ light blue boxes sure look like Relatedness points.
Covid Statistics
Don Kohn says
The US needs urgently to raise its macropru game (Don Kohn)
The Federal Reserve should permanently exempt deposits at the Fed from calculation of the leverage ratio.
The Federal Reserve should make the CCyB (countercyclical capital buffer) positive in normal risk environments and then manage it actively as risks build or materialize. As it implements a CCyB, the Fed should consider the appropriate level in the context of sterilizing a potential release of capital from adjusting the leverage ratio and the composition of the overall capital stack that would best support the resilience of the financial system and the economy.
The Treasury and the Fed should examine the costs and benefits of mandating central clearing for Treasuries and repos, which might free up dealer capital that would be available to be used for market making.[5] And the agencies need to gather and publish more complete data on market transactions to help both regulators and market participants better understand and anticipate market dynamics.
To better guarantee Treasury market functioning, the Federal Reserve needs to design a repo facility that is available to a variety of large participants, like hedge funds and other leveraged investors that are playing an increasingly important role in the market.
The SEC must change regulations to align the liquidity offered investors with the liquidity of the underlying assets in the fund.
The CFTC and the SEC should draw on the systemic perspectives of the Fed and Treasury to make margins in CCPs less procyclical with more through-the-cycle methodologies.
Real Estate
This doesn’t look great for commercial property
Hotel occupancy still below 2019
Supply Chains
Ryan is the CEO of Flexport1. His insights on the supply chain issues are outstanding.
Hear are two reports from the Port of Long Beach - must reads;
This will all be obvious to anyone who’s read Eli Goldratt’s The Goal
Things I’m Reading Today
‘Speculation is Entertainment‘
Before COVID we lived in a world of ‘Netflix and Chill‘
Over the last 40 years, we’ve seen a complete transformation in the portfolio mix necessary to hit a 7.5% return, from 100% Treasury bills in 1981 to 100% in Corporate bonds in 1996 to more than half of the portfolio in equities today.
Errata
This is the way to display information - so clean (if only they got their headers correct):
Full disclosure, I’m an investor in Flexport