Alexis Fink - The Science of Making Work Not Suck

Welcome to the Economics of Work. I'm thrilled to welcome Alexis Fink, a leading voice in industrial organizational psychology and people analytics. Alexis, welcome to the show.

I am delighted to be here. Thanks for inviting me, Ben.

Yeah, of course. Great to see you. OK, so so, you know, I had been sort of making the case to you over the years of what IO psychology and people analytics can learn from labor economics. But can you make the reverse case to me? Like, what can economists learn from IO psych? First of all, what is IO psych and what can economists learn from it?

I love this question.

So industrial organizational psychology is really

the science of work and workers. So how work happens and how workers engage. So it gets all kinds of things. There's occupational health, but there's also things that would be relevant to an economist like counterproductive work behaviors. There's all kinds of change management and how you have to get people engaged and bought in to the new design you're creating so that they'll actually live into it. There's all kinds of things about management and leadership and team effectiveness and organization structure that becomes really relevant and are the kinds of things that I don't often hear in conversations with my economist friends.

Lots to unpack there. First, what is occupational health? I actually never heard that term before.

Oh, yeah. Occupational health. Easiest to understand, how do you look at workplace injuries?

Oh, like physical health.

Yeah, like actual bodily

health.

But also sometimes it gets into well-being kinds of spaces as well. since that's health too

okay interesting you know the way you define it as like the science of work so so i i have a i have a four-year-old daughter and my my wife is a psychologist when we try to explain what we do she says i'm a feelings doctor and that is like totally a good way for a four-year-old to understand it and then she's like what do you do and i'm like well i'm a doctor of work nice i don't know if she really understands that but if you were explaining your career to a four-year-old would you also say you're a doctor of work

That's pretty close. I used to say that my job is to make work not suck.

Okay, to make work not suck. Interesting. Now that is like very actionable. Yes. Yeah, I would think of that as like distinct from descriptively measuring like how work works. It's like actual prescriptive.

That's exactly right. And in fact, just a couple of days ago, I taught a workshop about how to make sure that you're really getting value out of all of this science. And near the end, somebody said, well, gosh, that sounds like you're talking about change management. And I sort of said, well, yeah, this work doesn't matter unless you can actually implement it, unless you can actually engage with the change management to see your wonderful research findings turn into some kind of a prescription that you can bring to life. And so that very strong action orientation has always been really important to me.

Yeah. I mean, when I think of biopsych, I think of all of you as really embedded scientists. You are in organizations, you're doing stuff, you're taking action on what