Even If Marie Kondo Is Less Tidy, A Positive Attitude Towards Housework May Have Its Benefits

By Mireia Las Heras (IESE Business School)

When Marie Kondo recently admitted that she’s going a bit easier on the housework because she now has three kids, it sent the internet into overdrive and made headlines around the world.

Kondo, who has built an empire on teaching us to discard everything that doesn’t spark joy and to roll many of our possessions into tiny compact bundles, said she now prefers to spend her time at home engaged with her children rather than tidying up. “Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” Kondo has been quoted as saying at a recent media event. “I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.”

While this may serve as relief for many parents, it may not be time to throw in the towel on the importance of order. I recently conducted research related to housework, family life and work, together with Yasin Rofcanin of the University of Bath and Marc Grau of the Universitat Internacional de Catalunya. The study, commissioned by the Home Renaissance Foundation, forms part of my research into work-life balance, and how what happens at home influences what happens at work, and vice versa.

This most recent study followed families living in the U.S. and Canada; since children and employment have an outsized impact on housework, all of the families we looked at had two children and both parents worked full-time. We surveyed 65 families over a two-week period, which provided 1,950 data points.

We found that a positive attitude toward housework led to higher levels of:

• Psychological empowerment at work, or having a sense of control over your job. Psychological empowerment was 8.5% higher among those who found some joy in housework.
• Job satisfaction, which on average was 20% greater among people who reported enjoying housework
• Work engagement, or feeling invested in and absorbed by your work, which was 27% higher
• Job crafting, or proactive behaviors to customize your job to your needs and preferences, which was 18% higher

Included in housework is cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as yard work; it does not, however, include childcare. It’s a small sampling, and we realize that families come in many other shapes and sizes. Additional studies are required. But the survey builds on an ever-growing body of work that establishes the intimate connection between work and home, and the carryover there is between the two spheres of life.

It’s that connection that companies would be wise to take into account in many areas of people management. It’s impossible to view housework as anything but a burden if you don’t have time to do it, or you’re working such long hours that the entirety of your time at home is spent on the laundry, or if home time is constantly interrupted by work emails.

Companies and managers need to develop policies in which working hours are respected. They need to have – and enforce — digital disconnection policies, to ensure that leisure time is actually that. Our same study found that 46% of men and 33% of women feel they must be available to respond to work issues all of the time, with the subsequent damage to family life and relationships.

Another trend that we detected: attitudes toward housework vary by age and gender. Rating how enjoyable housework is on a scale of 1 to 10, men gave it their highest rating (5.81) when they were between 36 and 50 years old. Women, on the other hand, peaked at housework between the ages of 20 and 35, when they rated it 6.23 on the enjoyability scale. But after 36, their interest started to wane.

Marie Kondo, who is 38, would understand.

Mireia Las Heras is a professor of Managing People in Organizations at IESE Business School and director of IESE’s International Center for Work and Family.