Bill Kerr: Global initiatives like the EU disclosure requirements on working conditions and the International Labor Organization’s focus on decent work encourage companies to prioritize worker welfare, but implementation has been met with resistance in political and business circles. And while a growing body of studies show that companies investing in worker well-being often see improved financial performance, this connection isn’t always capitalized on. What would it take to shift the status quo to drive meaningful change at scale?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. I’m joined today by Anant Nyshadham, professor at the University of Michigan–Ross School of Business and co-founder of the Good Business Lab. The nonprofit partners with companies to find ways to improve workers’ lives while also helping businesses grow. We’ll talk about the lab’s focus on soft skills, worker voice, gender, sustainability, and other aspects of worker well-being. And we’ll talk about translating economic theory into practical solutions and studying the results. We’ll also explore what this fieldwork reveals about organizational behavior, its impact on public policy, and the key factors that will shape how businesses prioritize human sustainability. Anant, welcome to the podcast.

Anant Nyshadham: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Kerr: Anant, let’s begin with a little bit of your background, how you got into development economics, and what led you to worker welfare as your topic of interest.

Nyshadham: Sure, sure. Maybe it’s true for everyone, but I think my childhood had a big impact on this. I grew up in a small town in Georgia. It was an old textile mill town called West Point, and I think before we had ever gotten there, the mill really was the economy, and those jobs had gone before we even got there. And so much of what I remember growing up was—really, I didn’t identify it at the time—but abject poverty, just no opportunity. And so that was where I was up until college. And I had a really strong idea then, a powerful image in my mind, of what a lack of opportunity looks like and how stagnant that can be. And I think the flip side of that is, also, I went to India with my family when I was pretty young. We would go to our ancestral area village and have an even different interaction with poverty—one that was so much more profound. There was no running water, there was no electricity at that time. And when you interact with the people, they’re very much stuck there, even in their mindsets. I’d gone to business school. I think I started to see this sliver of an opportunity—that maybe I could operate within the business world. And so could we leverage that toward making change? And so I don’t think the idea was all that well formed until I got to grad school and I started to just think about definitely I was interested in development. But what was a specific aspect that somehow I knew more about and motivated me more? And it really came back to this image of people without opportunity, without the access to jobs or skills that I think pushed me toward this idea.

Kerr: It strikes me that one potential action in both those settings that you described—a rural place in Georgia or in India—would be trying to move to an opportunity, so move to Atlanta or move to New Delhi. How do you think about the mobility of individuals, versus trying to intervene where that textile mill once was?

Nyshadham: I think that, of course you see these kinds of urban agglomerations everywhere and they cause their own problems. But there’s also a lot of people who are never going to the city. And what do you do about that? I think that we are seeing it in our work even now. But how do you bring the job, the opportunity, the skills, the outside world into these same environments? Of course, technology makes it possible, but how do you actually make it equitable and universal?

Kerr: That resonates in some of our projects—the very earliest work with the Golden Triangle region in Mississippi. There was the same lack of mobility, that you needed to bring the jobs to the community, rather than thinking that workers were going to find their way to where the opportunities might lie. In 2017, you start the Good Business Lab. Great title. I love it. Tell us a little bit about what the organization does and what motivated you to launch it, in particular, among the many things that an academic can be doing to help development.

Nyshadham: It was very serendipitous. I had gone to my college reunion and met up with a friend of mine, and I was telling him that I had just finished my PhD and that I’m interested in development. And he had said, “Oh, my family owns a few garment factories in India, and they’re doing this program with Gap where they’re training women in these empowerment life skills and so on. We would love for you to come take a look at it and see if you can measure it or understand what’s going on.” So I went to India that summer to visit the firm and really understand what was going on. When I got there, I realized it wasn’t a couple of firms, it was like 60 factories. The potential was going to be really tremendous here. But as we started to talk, I realized that that firm had to have the right mentality. When I went there, they were curious, they were intellectually curious. They had stubborn problems. Many of them thought, “Look, you’ll never solve this.” But they weren’t opposed to talking about it and trying things. They were talking about, “Look, we have this nearly 100 percent turnover on our workforce every year. We are much lower in pro-worker productivity than firms in China or sophisticated ones in Latin America and so on, same industry.” And I started to realize, no, this firm is willing to try things. They don’t know what to try, and they don’t know how to know whether it works. And that was an amazing opportunity for an economist, I think, to come in there and practice our trade, try to really tease out with rigor causality: If I make this investment, what is the true causal effect on the return I get, and what are the pathways and so on? If you take even a one percentage point change in productivity and you scale it by 150,000 workers, how tremendous could this be? It seems like there’s a lever here. If we can get a firm to let us try things, measure them really well, prove that investing basically in workers is good for the workers, sure, but actually has a business return, we can really start turning development work into core business operations, little by little, around the world. And so I think the idea really started to take shape there.

Kerr: Do most companies come at this from an incentive—like lowering turnover—so a direct financial incentive, versus something that’s more of a concern about their workers independently? And then, second, you being an economist let me ask: Do you worry at all about the selection of what type of firm is willing to work with Good Business Labs? And would other textile firms that did not have that willingness not be as responsive to whatever intervention or have the same treatment effect that you are going to measure?

Nyshadham: I think it depends. We’ve started working with firms that came at this from a very cut and dry, “Can you make our operations better? We’ve got a stubborn problem, if you can solve it, we’re listening, and we’re willing to try some things, and we’ll scale up what works and so on.” But there’s others that actually just have a much more maybe academic mindset. They’re excited that somebody cares to come and measure. And I was always blown away by that feeling—for a firm, it’s a billion-dollar firm, and the head of this billion-dollar firm is seemingly quite excited that we might come and spend our time. We kept asking again and again, “Can we do this?” And they kept being like, “Yeah, we already said you can run this experiment.” And I just didn’t believe that it was true.

Kerr: You had to get the triple confirmation on record that they were going to do it.

Nyshadham: I think that the best partnerships, the most productive and really powerful partnerships, have been these firms saying, “Look, we’re sure we can do something better. You’re the experts. You tell us what to try, and we’ll do it.” And we have to do, I think, things that academics don’t always do well, which is in the middle before even the paper’s done, before the results are done, be really communicating what we’re seeing, what we’re finding in simple terms, in actionable terms.

Kerr: Do you worry about selection bias that happens there?

Nyshadham: I think for sure. The point is to be rigorous so that we have some sense of external validity in generalizability of the result. And in some sense then be opportunistic with the firm that has that mentality. We definitely partner with, often when we can, the largest firm in their industry or region, the most progressive, [which] certainly makes things easier with the hope that, if and when we prove things work and the firm gets excited about it, they can be an example to their peers.

Kerr: Let’s pick out a couple of projects and talk about them in more detail. And I’d love to start with the soft-skills training. Tell me a little bit about where the idea came from, what was the intervention like, and then how did you engage with the employers?

Nyshadham: Actually, the very first project we ever did was this soft-skills training. And it was a program that, actually, the firm that we were working with, Shahi Exports, had co-developed with Gap, the apparel brand. And they had started out with this idea of just trying to give life skills. These are young women who, often, this is their first time they’re leaving their villages and their peer networks and other social networks, certainly the first formal employment they’ve ever had. I think they—both Shahi and Gap—really thought of it as just a philanthropic endeavor. When we started the experiment, I think most of the managers in the firm thought we were wasting our time. We told them from the beginning, “We are interested in whether there’s productivity effects, we’re interested in whether there’s attendance effects and so on.” So I think most of them thought we were wasting our time, that productivity doesn’t move. It’s stubborn, and it’s hard, and I get it. And so I’m sure they thought they’ve been doing it for 20 years, and I’ve been here for 20 minutes, and I’m trying to move productivity. And even I didn’t know if it was going to work.

Kerr: Which is why we run the experiment. It’s why we run the experiment. What were the skills trainings? What was it?

Nyshadham: It was a broad-based program. It had some financial literacy and some health-related stuff, and also, but really the crux of it was communication, a bit of problem solving, and I think broadly speaking, kind of like teamwork. I think that was generally the idea, be able to communicate what you are going through, what you need assertively but not aggressively. It’s really powerful. And so even in the paper, that’s what we find is that, so the productivity effects are somewhere in the neighborhood of 13–15 percent.

Kerr: Wow.

Nyshadham: Which is tremendous when that’s, like they say, it’s like [a] four- or five-to-one [ratio] in terms of profit.

Kerr: And correct me if I’m wrong in this, but it also doesn’t seem like a setting that naturally would’ve been a place where you had to have collaboration or to come out with some creative innovation.

Nyshadham: Exactly.

Kerr: This is a textile garment manufacturing facility, and you’re still seeing these levels of effects.

Nyshadham: I’ll be honest, I didn’t expect it either—at least that large an effect—and that these were the skills that mattered so much, considering when you really walk down the factory, it’s like it’s 50 workers in a line, and it’s one person to a machine, and you’re sitting in front of this machine for eight hours. What teamwork are you talking about? What communication are you talking about? It turns out that the effects were much larger if, for example, two or three machine operators were working on the same operation. And so it’s their joint productivity that affects the pass-through to the next point and so on. And so even in this least likely place, communication and teamwork matter. And there was this human element. And I think that’s actually been a theme that’s continued to come back, is that we started in the least likely place to find these things like factories and all the way down at the bottom and then have only found it to be more and more important, these kinds of communication skills and soft skills.

Kerr: I want to turn the globe around almost literally and ask you to describe some of your work with the fast-food restaurants.

Nyshadham: Most of what we’ve done with fast food has been in Latin America. And I think a lot of times people would not think about the Latin American labor market as being at the same level of development or maybe facing the same issues that you would find in India. But we have found very universal problems. The advancement of workers—from the front lines to management, particularly women—is very limited, even though female participation is pretty high. And again, these kind of soft skills and teamwork we’ve seen matter a lot. So a lot of what we’ve done in fast food is trying to understand how managers make the decisions of allocating workers to tasks and how workers, their productivity, is balanced into a kind of joint production function. We studied the rollout of this drive-through monitoring technology. And so what we found was, when the manager now sees this really very clear measurement of where the productivity is slowing down, they can do one of two things: They can either try to bring more people to put on those points and increase productivity that way, or they can try to train the workers there, maybe refresh their training and make them a bit sharper. And what we find is actually managers took both of these approaches. But it was actually the managers who decided to refresh the training of the workers who were already there that found the biggest effects and the most persistent effects.

Kerr: What kind of impact did this have for the companies overall after they invested in the worker training for their tasks?

Nyshadham: It was somewhere in the neighborhood of a 6–7 percent increase in sales, but for those stores that decided to use the refresher training. I think for the other strategy, the stores that took the other strategy of the more quantitative approach of moving workers over, I think they got maybe 3 percent early on, but the effect dissipated within four to six weeks, and they really couldn’t persist it.

Kerr: It strikes me that the original garment example was one of the firm being motivated or hoping to help the workers’ soft-skill training just in general. There was seen as almost having we need to build the community here, whereas this one, it’s actually a very specific thing. We want the drive-through to be more effective.

Nyshadham: Exactly.

Kerr: However they came at it, they still were kind of delivering on both those results.

Nyshadham: That’s exactly right. So if you come to us, and you say, “We’re trying to invest in our workers, and we’ve got this philanthropic initiative,” we’re going to try to prove to you that it’s not a philanthropic initiative; that whatever the budget is, you shouldn’t invest to it in it just when times are good or you’ve got some excess money or whatever it might be, or to meet some CSR mandate that exists in India, but this should be actually a core part of your investments. And the opposite also: So if you now come to us with stubborn problems, where it turns out to be true, we’re going to emphasize the fact that, actually, what’s missing here is an investment in the worker. And more often than not, that’s true. You’re not investing in their skilling; you’re not deploying them in the right way. You’re not listening to their needs and optimizing the work environment for them. And so I think, exactly, we’ve been able to come at it from both points but ended up in the same place.

Kerr: That’s fair. You’ve done some work in the textile industry that linked both to environmental issues and sustainability and workplace practice. Describe what research is happening there.

Nyshadham: A lot of energy is put—and resources are put—into environmental issues in business, which is great, less in terms of social sustainability. But this bridge that we found where let’s look at the human worker element of these environmental things, we’ve had to find opportunities to do that sort of thing. So, in fact, early on, when we were running this soft-skills experiment, we were just touring a new line, and I was sweating through my shirt, and I thought, “How is it possible that these workers can work in these conditions?” So we started out by realizing that there are sources of heat on the factory floor that are kind of contributing to the problem. So it’s hot outside, but it’s hotter inside. And a lot of that’s because you’ve got machines running, you’ve got lights, you’ve got all this stuff going on. And so we studied, it turns out they were already replacing a lot of their overhead fluorescent lighting with LED lighting, machine mounted, so that you could keep the light and the point of work the same. But for their interest, it was just to use less energy. Buyers wanted to see less units of energy used per unit, and so they were investing in that. But what we did was document causal effects on productivity. And what we found there was that the energy savings they got from switching out all of these lights at that time was something in the neighborhood of $2,800 a year for the factory. They were going to get more than three times that just from productivity. And so that again started a trigger in us this thought process that, okay, well what other things or decisions are they making in this environmental front that are motivated by the energy savings or the emissions reductions and so on to meet regulations or satisfy buyers, but might be actually miscalculating what the true returns are? That there’s this human element, there are people here working in these conditions. If it’s hot, if it’s polluted, yeah, you’re going to get hit with regulations for that sort of stuff, but you also just might not be as productive as you could be. And so we did some stuff with air pollution as well and found that to be impactful and that actually managers were really important in that setting, paying attention to how productivity is moving regularly and monitoring it, were able to make all those changes and basically altogether alleviate that, attenuate it to zero, that effect of the pollution.

Kerr: So, Anant, tell us a bit about how the lab got set up. Who’s involved? Do the companies pay you for your work, or is it coming from an outside grant source, like the Gates Foundation? How does this operate on the ground?

Nyshadham: When this started, there were very few academic funders that really were motivated to fund work in private-sector firms. The general thesis for development especially was, well, the firm should be doing that experimentation on their own. If they’re going to benefit, they should pay for it. And so the entire development community was focused on public good provisions and improvements in those policies and things like that, which of course very much needs a lot of attention, but there was just nothing going on with the creation of what I consider to be public goods, but related to the private sector. There’s this misaligned incentives issue. These managers are just trying to get through their day, they’re trying to meet their targets. Things are hard enough as it is. So they take a lot of these issues as given, and they don’t really want to take the risk of experimenting with new incentives, new policies, new programs, because if it sets them back, they’re the one who are get hit with the flak. And that I think goes all the way up to the firm level, which the firm says, okay, maybe I can have less turnover in workers, but if I experiment with this sort of thing and I get it wrong, I might have a crisis on my hands. But it was a bit novel, especially in developing countries. And so that was a big investment we had to make. And so part of the reason for creating the lab was to do that advocacy. And it’s been slow, but we went from running that first experiment with a tiny $50,000 grant from the U.K. government, and then really pinching those pennies to make that last, to now, thankfully, having convinced really large funders, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and so on, that this is actually a portfolio. This is a piece that should be in their portfolio, this kind of private-sector experimentation. From the beginning, what we were doing was sufficiently novel, and we were the first to approach these firms. We couldn’t point at any evidence and say, “Look, this is going to be good for you.” So we really didn’t want to charge the firms from the get-go. And we also wanted to make sure that the evidence was going to be as bulletproof as possible, because if this thing worked, we knew we needed to scale it. So we were pretty dogmatic about, this is going to be a purely academic exercise on the experimentation side and so on. Scale-up is a different thing. I think we had this vision that once we would prove, you write a paper, and it gets published well, and it’s like that’s all you need to do.

Kerr: And you’ve published a number of great papers coming out of this. But just to go back to your other point, we often naively assume that the firms are doing this experimentation, which could be in their best interest, but we also naively assume that if somebody has shown something works, that others will adopt it.

Nyshadham: Exactly.

Kerr: And so this brings us to your scaling point.

Nyshadham: Exactly. Exactly. I thought we just crunch the numbers, we show this tremendous ROI, and we give you a little blueprint. I remember presenting to CEOs and boards of many of these companies—brands and large multinationals within these supply chains—and they could be fully convinced that it’s worth investing in. But then they’d say, “Great, when you have one, I’ll buy one.” They’re not in the business of this personnel policy or this tool, HR tool or whatever. They make garments. They make automobiles. They don’t do that sort of stuff. Now that you’ve proven whatever this intervention is works, you now need to engineer it for scale in a different way. And that, I think, was the other big impetus behind creating the Good Business Lab. So we realized we’re going to create all of this from scratch. We can’t lose it. It can’t be that we hire everybody on a contract, and then they go their way, and then we have to do it again for the next experiment and again for the next one. And then that grew into a much bigger operation. So we generate the evidence as rigorously as possible by doing the academic stuff. There’s still reasons to have a lab, even on that front, just like to preserve field teams that are really high quality and these types of things. But then we need to, like I said, advocate on the funding side. We need to advocate on the policy side at times. We need to be developing a tool, a product that can be adopted easily for scale-up.

Kerr: And as you think about the scaling, and you could imagine it happening through multiple channels—simultaneously or ones by far the greater among them—firms adopting, mimicking. You work in industries that would have industry associations that could be the channel to get that out. I suppose we could go all the way back up to Gap and say gap should mandate these things across all of its suppliers. Or you go over to public policy and that there’s some kind of policy prescription. Is there one of those that you think is the most likely way of taking your work up to that next level?

Nyshadham: That was a great list of all the strategies we’re trying to put forward. I don’t know which one’s winning yet, and I think it depends a bit. For example, we did a series of experiments on enhancing worker voice in the workplace, demonstrating that, if you give them a method, a tool to anonymously report issues, to communicate with management, and then also be communicated back on progress in the solutions and so on, you can drive down turnover, drive down absenteeism, and even increase productivity. And that last bit seems to be because, once this channel is established, it’s not just for complaining; it’s actually for suggesting meaningful improvements, which is really cool. Then once we realized, wow, this thing really works, we had to reengineer it for scale. And there were tools that existed on the market, but they weren’t designed for these users. Yes, you need to prove the thing works. You need to understand why it works and so on so you can convince them. But then you actually need to create a version of this that is easy to adopt, and you need to convince the people who need to adopt it. The CEO can say, “Great, I want one of those. It’ll reduce my turnover,” and so on. But the HR manager on the ground is the one who’s going to have to use the tool. If they think it’s a nuisance, or if they actually think it’s even a liability because it's measuring their effort and so on, you got yourself a problem. And so we had to learn how to convince not just the top, but actually the frontline workers who are going to use this tool, that “this is here to make your life easier. You are working hard to try to solve all these problems. Sometimes you don’t get credit for how hard you work, and sometimes you’re not putting forth effort in the right place to solve the problem. This will streamline your effort. You know where to go. You know where the problems are. Everything gets organized. And there’s a record that you’re doing everything you can.” And so I think you need something like that to convince a firm to do it, and then you need to hone that sell and hone the product and so on. And we’ve done that. We’ve come up with multiple iterations of that. And we’re just now seeing, I would say maybe six years later, we are scaling up with firms adopting. Even with a large firm, adoption is this slow process. You start with, “Hey, look, I’ve got 60 factories, but let’s just do it in one, and let’s see how it goes.” And that’s okay. That’s good, because when we’re done, if we do our job right, then we’ll have 100,000 workers now covered by this solution. But I think it’s the smaller firms, it’s like, yeah, you can fool around with one of my 50 factories. Well, we only have two factories, and I’m going to take this decision pretty seriously. And the cost is prohibitive for me and so on. So even though we’re proving that this is a positive ROI sort of thing—we’re only focusing on scaling up stuff that makes sense financially for the firms to really want to invest in—and so we’re realizing more now that still, there’s a reason why these problems are stubborn and the solutions don’t proliferate. They’re not the first order of things on the list of places to invest. And so getting public funds, getting foundations to think about, actually, that’s fine. We were supporting the evidence, but we’re actually going to support the scale-up part, too. Policy can help too. In this particular situation. We’ve seen that, recently, Bangladesh instituted a policy where you have to have this particular now nationally provided voice mechanism there. And it’s amazing. For example, in India where firms like Gap that are supplying to Bangladesh and India are now telling their Indian supply chain or the Sri Lankan supply chain, “We need something that looks like that. We are the solution in the market for that.” So that’s great. But you do need, I think, that impetus, because it’s not the problem of the day right now. If Gap says, “Hey, do this in the factories that I’m sourcing from,” you can get that leg in the door. If the government says, “You need to meet some minimum requirements, and here’s a readily, easily adaptable tool that we’ve put in the market that can solve your boxes...”

Kerr: You’ve done so much here. You’ve taken it from theory into actually running experiments inside organizations all the way up to the scaling. How has this shaped your view of a firm, a business? And a lot of the things that you described, perhaps we could at least label partly about the culture of an organization. Is that fair?

Nyshadham: Yep.

Kerr: But in the end, where does this lead you to your thought process of how you would portray a firm and its relationship to its workforce?

Nyshadham: More than ever before, I see firms as just a bundle of people and relationships and these implicit contracts and streams of reciprocity and things like that. Ultimately, you’re trying to steer them toward some sort of common goal, but they’ve all got private costs and private incentives, and their own motives and so on. And so a lot of this is about understanding why the culture might be what it is now and what it would take to improve it for workers in some way. And part of it is about the evidence, but part of it is about, what is the action to resolve this. Part of it is about making that action doable, easy, and valuable for the people who need to do it and so on. Certainly, a firm can design, from the top down, how it wants its culture to be. We believe that workers are an asset instead of a cost. These are kind of the fundamental things that we are driving at. Even in these labor-intensive global supply chains where margins are thin and turnover is high, but maybe it doesn’t have to be, can we change that thinking from here is a cost, a liability on the balance sheet, or it’s a usable input, to this is the same as our heavy machinery. It’s expensive, but we maintain it, we upgrade it, we invest in it and so on. But it won’t sustain. It’ll break down if the incentives and the relationships aren’t set up to support it. And I think a culture can arise just from the way work is organized. Is it organized to enable collaboration, to value collaboration and so on.

Kerr: It’s been five years since the Business Roundtable famously, and also controversially, brought out its statement about stakeholder capitalism. How does this influence or relate to your perspective on the ground?

Nyshadham: Well, I certainly think that the intuition is very similar to what we’re trying to do here—that the employees are a stakeholder, that the community around is a stakeholder, but we think that, fundamentally, the employees are being missed as a stakeholder. Each one of those workers is going to decide how the business goes, whether it succeeds or not. And so paying attention to what their day-to-day life looks like can be really impactful. I love the discourse. I think it’s good that we’re talking about things that way, but I find so often that even if CEOs think about it this way or the C-suite or even a GM or a factory, there’s a whole bunch of other people who need to get on board and who, themselves, need to be somehow incentivized in this way. Maybe those middle managers don’t have stock in this company and aren’t going to be incentivized or rewarded in the same way. And so whether it affects their day-to-day life is going to be the ultimate bit here. And so I think coming back and linking that much more micro foundation has been kind of our day-to-day work.

Kerr: And now, as you think about your work—and we’ve spent a lot of time talking about all the things you’ve done inside of the firm—in the United States and in many other countries, gig workers are a growing share of the low-income spectrum workforce and probably the place that many of us look and worry about the very challenging conditions there. Relate some of your work into that space.

Nyshadham: I think the problems are even more acute in some sense. In these organized firms, if this worker is more comfortable, they’re going to show up to work more, they’re going to be more productive, they’re going to be happier, then the firm’s going to benefit. That part is still there on these gig platform kinds of jobs, right? The debate of the day is, should the gig or the platform firm provide benefits at all? So at least with the larger firms and employers, where we started was, you’re already doing some things. Maybe some things are regulated. Maybe they’re mandated by the government. You’ve got some set of policies for your workers. We are trying to move it incrementally. We’re trying to say, “Look, if you invest a little bit more in this direction or in that direction, look, you get a big benefit.” We’re starting at a really bare-bones situation here in the gig and the platform space where the mentality is not that these are my workers. These are users. And so I think that we’re going to have to bridge that gap, but I still think the programs, the evidence, are in some sense the same. In developing world, we’ve got new platforms that are organizing domestic work and so on, things that really excitingly for us are even geared toward female labor-force participation. But there’s a lot of room to improve here on the benefits you can provide and so on, making this work accessible, making it sustainable for these women. Construction trades and so on, also. But you’ve also got the traditional kind of driving setup. And I think those problems, those workers, they don’t face different problems, but maybe they face them in different intensity. So the financial instability that we see as a problem everywhere in the developing world and all the impacts of that are so acute for those workers. “If I don’t work today, if I don’t drive today, if I get a ticket, if I get a flat tire, that’s it. My family doesn’t eat.” And I’m now doing quite a bit of work, preparing for a project in New York City among those drivers. And even qualitative foundational work has shown that if you’ve got less than $300 in savings, if you missed a day, you wouldn’t be able to pay your bills. That financial risk and the impacts of that on your mental health are really acute. And the other thing is that you’re your own boss. And I think a lot of these workers, they don’t have even the mental models to understand, “Well, how should I organize my work?” Either maybe they work until they drop and that has so many issues for longevity and the ability to consistently earn, or maybe they have these kinds of, it turns out, many of them have these kind of just heuristics, where it’s like, “Okay, I’m just going to hit this target, and then I’m going to quit.” But that’s not terribly optimized. And so there’s all these, I think, ways to equip them with financial sophistication, whether it’s actual measurements or just a mindset. There’s ways to insulate them and insure them from not even tremendous financial risk here. We’re not talking about expensive insurance policies, but can we give them a buffer stock saving, a sick pay kind of benefit? And then so much around healthcare access. They don’t have health insurance in a formalized way through their job. They don’t have the time. It feels like the opportunity cost of their time is so high, so they don’t have the time to go seek out care and so on. And so if you’re just not interacting with the healthcare system, your case management basically is really poor. Chronic illnesses can fester and become exacerbated and so on. We’re seeing those particular issues more acutely for gig and platform workers, I think. But the solutions feel like the same strategy could apply. We need to get in there and see if we can put some evidence on, “Well, what happens if we do provide these things?” Who benefits? Let’s make sure that workers are benefiting. We’re delivering it in a way that they can access it, they can use it and actually change their lives. That’s critical. That’s the first thing. Is it impactful there? But then who’s the residual claimant? Is there somebody with the means to make this investment that will actually reap benefits? That’s ultimately the same thing we’ve always been looking for.

Kerr: Well, that’s an amazing set of work that we all look forward to taking a look at. Anant, you described how some people work all the time and can never seem to stop. This breathtaking tour of the Good Business Lab makes me think that that may apply to you as well, but thanks for sharing everything with us and also the good work that you’re doing with improving worker welfare.

Nyshadham: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me again. And I’ll just give a shout out that, yes, I’m probably working too much, but we have amazing people working for us, and that’s really the secret.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.