Ashley V. Whillans

Prof. Whillans is interested in understanding the associations between time, money, and happiness, broadly construed. For example, in one set of projects, Prof. Whillans studies how differences in time-use (e.g., chore and childcare burdens) and the willingness to negotiate for time, contributes to gender gaps in happiness and professional success. In another project, Prof. Whillans is developing methods to assess time-use and time-value through observing behavior instead of relying on self-report measures. Prof. Whillans is also conducting research in organizations and exploring how time-use predicts the self-reported happiness and productivity of employees and teams within hybrid organizations. 

Worldwide, women business owners earn less than men. Women tend to run businesses in less profitable sectors than men, but even within the same sector, women-owned businesses underperform male-owned businesses. Full-time employed women typically report higher chore and childcare demands than full-time employed men. Prof. Whillans’ latest research—conducted with 30,000 employees around the world—suggests that this gap widened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on this research, Prof. Whillans focuses on an experimentally untested explanation for these gender gaps: inequality in chore demands. In a randomized control study with 557 female business owners living in Kibera, Kenya, the largest informal settlement in East Africa, time saving services (i.e., meals and laundry) resulted in a sizeable improvement in revenues as compared to unconditional cash transfers and a control condition. Despite the persistence of inequality in chore burdens between men and women, researchers have primarily tested interventions that focus on providing cash grants. Future research will continue to explore whether time saving services can reduce gender gaps in workplace performance.

Following from the pandemic, employees across industries are placing an increased importance on time flexibility and autonomy, and leaders are looking for ways to implement flexible work strategies that create equitable opportunities for all employees. This renewed focus on flexibility leads to the question of whether policies that existed before the pandemic are still effective today (e.g., flexible work hours), and whether policies that were deemed to be harmful in the past (e.g., telecommuting) are effective now. To address these questions, Prof. Whillans is exploring how time and autonomy-related rewards, policies, and norms predict the employee experience.

In one ongoing project, Prof. Whillans examines how one of the costs of hybrid work—increased interruptions—can be offset through the implementation of collaboration norms that legitimize focused work. Across three studies with correlational and field experimental data, Prof. Whillans finds that team-level collaboration norms reduce the felt burden of interruptions during work hours, which in turn increases perceived control over work demands and positive mood.

Lastly, Prof. Whillans is examining the role of informal conversations in predicting employees’ ability to learn, bond, and to enjoy their work. Hybrid workplaces involve more digital communication. Some research suggests that email and meetings have increased by 250% since before the pandemic, and as a result, 30% of knowledge workers are now working a “third shift” between 7pm-10pm. Despite this increase in digital communication, Prof. Whillans’ recently published research finds that informal “sensemaking” conversations often disappear in hybrid workplaces because employees are less likely to be in the office together at the same time. Junior employees used to overhear senior managers debriefing a meeting in a hallway or on the way to the airport. As teams become increasingly distributed, these ‘hallway’ conversations have lessened, possibly undermining learning, development, and team cohesion. Building on this insight, Prof. Whillans is working with a tech company to understand how knowledge workers use technology to engage in informal interactions and sensemaking on virtual and hybrid teams.

In another ongoing project, Prof. Whillans examines whether and how dispersion in hybrid organizations influences the employee experience. Prior research suggests that the geographic, spatial, and configurational dispersion of teams critically shape employee outcomes like productivity and wellbeing. Yet, most of this research was conducted prior to the pandemic, which normalized hybrid work. Thus, management research has little to say about what team dispersion looks like today in hybrid workplaces, or how dispersion influences employee outcomes. To address these questions, Prof. Whillans employs population-level archival data collected from a well-established company (N=26,133 teams). Using a machine learning approach, Prof. Whillans has created a typology of the four most common team configurations. She is tracking changes in dispersion and how these changes shape the employee experience.