Government workers are still receiving emails asking them to list what they did last week at work, part of the Elon Musk-led initiative to make the federal workforce leaner and more efficient. This project raises questions about what productivity looks like and the power all workers have at a moment when the labor market isn’t as hot as it used to be and there’s significant new economic uncertainty.

Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He’s also host of the podcast Re:Thinking and author of the book “Think Again.” He spoke with “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour for more. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Sabri Ben-Achour: How much leverage have workers lost in the private sector side?

Adam Grant: On its face, if you follow the media headlines, it seems like workers have lost a lot of leverage, because we’re not talking about “quiet quitting” anymore as a major concern. We’re seeing a lot of headlines about return-to-office mandates, but if you actually look at the data just on coming to the office, for example, the trends are completely flat. There has been no meaningful change in the number of days that people are showing up versus working remotely in the past couple of years. And so it seems that we’ve stabilized with around a third of work days happening from anywhere, which is a huge win for employees.

Ben-Achour: The things that we’ve seen Elon Musk do — you know, these emails defending your employment — are these tried-and-true strategies employed by corporate America normally? Or are these just things Elon Musk did one time at Twitter?

Grant: It’s hard to say. I know of no evidence that these are effective strategies. Some strategies that may be common in startups, and may be popular in startups, are being overgeneralized to a large bureaucracy. I’ve seen this a lot, when we see leaders leave Silicon Valley and enter the behemoth of the U.S. government, they often find themselves hammering away at what they discover are screws, and that doesn’t work very well.

Ben-Achour: Is that a constant or common mindset in corporate America? I mean, is there this idea that people are generally not being productive enough, and you gotta fix it through terror?

Grant: It’s more common than I would like it to be. And I think the response to that by many leaders and managers is to say, “Well, we’ve got to monitor people.” And yet, the evidence tells a very different story. There was a great meta-analysis, a study of studies recently — 94 studies in total — showing that monitoring people’s performance fails to improve it. That, if people know they’re being observed, they do not do any better, and meanwhile, they’re more stressed, they’re more dissatisfied, and especially they’re less likely to trust their managers.

Ben-Achour: Well, what is the best way to motivate and specifically to improve productivity?

Grant: I think the research on motivation is pretty clear that people do their best work when they’re given a chance to pursue autonomy, mastery, belonging and purpose. But, of course, they have to be coupled with accountability. And I think what a lot of leaders don’t understand is when it comes to holding people accountable, there’s a huge difference between being demanding and being demeaning. Being demanding is setting high standards and giving tough love. Being demeaning is insulting people, being uncivil, unkind, cruel, belittling, bullying. And it’s the former behavior, not the latter, that tends to bring out the best in people.

Ben-Achour: The labor market is still strong, but it’s been cooling down for a while. There have been a number of high-profile layoffs. If that results in even less leverage for employees, what does that mean for their happiness?

Grant: Well, I think the short-term effect of layoffs, obviously, is to increase job insecurity among people who are still lucky enough to be employed — and with that sometimes comes survivor’s guilt, where people feel like, “It should have been me. I should have been the one whose job was cut.” And we know that’s bad for productivity. We also know that when workplaces start to cut jobs, the biggest superstars — the people who have the most options elsewhere — are the quickest to jump ship, and so this can be a pretty short-sighted strategy for employers. And my hope is that as we see more haphazard downsizings, leaders start to learn that actually this behavior backfires for them. And the evidence is strong on this one. There was a paper published in a top academic journal about downsizing that literally called them “dumb and dumber,” which is not language that academics normally get away with. But it was a study comparing thousands of firms in similarly dire financial straits. Some of them downsized and cut jobs; others found alternative ways to deal with the financial pressure, like, for example, executive pay cuts. And, lo and behold, the firms that downsized actually ended up performing worse.

Ben-Achour: What is the way to manage a workforce that improves productivity and offers a sense of fulfillment and purpose?

Grant: I think instead of being micromanagers, we need leaders to be macromanagers. I think that a great macromanager is somebody who helps you understand why your work counts. I studied this early in my career. I was doing randomized, controlled experiments with fundraising callers who were bringing in donations to a university, and they had no idea where the money they raised actually went. So I designed a simple experiment to connect those dots. And a month later, the average caller had spiked more than double in phone time per week and nearly triple in revenue per week. All I’d done was bring in one scholarship student who was able to say, “Here’s how the money you raised changed my life.” And I think, intellectually, the callers knew that work was happening, right? They were aware that they were raising money that benefited somebody. But it wasn’t until they were able to connect that work to a living, breathing human being that they found a reason to invest their full energy and attention in their job.