NOTES FROM
Out of Office
Anne Helen Petersen
June 5, 2024
Between 1979 and 1996, more than forty-three million jobs were eliminated from the U.S. economy. In the 1980s, the composite of laid-off workers tilted more heavily toward manufacturing and other “lower skilled” jobs, whose pay averaged under $50,000 a year.5 Between 1990 and 1996, that number shifted: the majority of people who lost their jobs were “white collar,” and they lost them at nearly double the rate that they had in the 1980s. Over that same period,
June 5, 2024
“There’s an entropy associated with meetings,” Eric Porres, who runs the company MeetingScience, told us. “They take on a life of their own. We’ve been trained and conditioned to schedule meetings for half an hour to an hour. When we look at a company and they have all of their meetings in thirty-, sixty-, ninety-minute chunks, we say, wow, you have a big problem. You don’t have any time to process. And when do you actually get any work done?” MeetingScience gathers the wealth of information available through a company’s digital calendars and analyzes it alongside a thirteen-question anonymized survey, sent to individuals after every meeting, about what just happened. Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?
June 5, 2024
The tech company Hugo, which bundles meeting scheduling and notes, tracks the number of meetings per week among its clients. As you’d expect, the numbers over the course of the pandemic were telling: Between January and May, the average number of meetings climbed from 12 to around 15, before dipping to around 14.5 for most of the summer. But in early September, the number started climbing again; by November, users were averaging 16.5 meetings per week: more than 3 meetings a day, every day of the week. (Microsoft Teams data shows that this meeting surge was global: between February 2020 and February 2021, average Teams meeting time rose from thirty-five minutes to forty-five minutes.)17 Hugo’s users began meeting more when they hit remote, and then spiked again right as kids went back to school: the more stressed we became, the more meeting we called. In our heads, meetings are usually drawn up in an attempt at having more control over a project or a particular decision.
June 5, 2024
Overanalysis and optimization always risk squeezing the vibrancy and serendipity out of work. Which is why you don’t necessarily need a company to help you, but you do need perspective. Regular meetings should be held up to the light and examined, even the ones that have been on the books for years. It’s not just figuring out the meeting’s goal. It’s figuring out whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place. Many companies have become so reliant on meetings as their primary mode of accomplishment—and demonstration of busyness—that it’s hard to imagine alternatives. Or, if they do, they feel too technically advanced for broad-scale adoption. You’d be surprised, though, just how old-fashioned some of these fixes feel.
June 5, 2024
This isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology, but it is a full-throated endorsement for non-text-based conversations (especially ones where you don’t also have to stare at yourself in a small box in the corner). Video can convey tone in a way that no number of emojis quite can. Our brains, after all, use visual and audio cues like facial expressions to add context to words. Visuals can clear up confusion, demonstrate seriousness, and, most important, help set our minds at ease. According to Roderick M. Kramer, who studies organizational behavior, their absence while working from home can exacerbate uncertainty about status, which can lead to overprocessing information.18 In short, we get paranoid about whether we’re doing good work, about to be fired, annoying our managers, and so on. But
June 5, 2024
And yet productivity went up; employees felt as productive as during the five-day schedule, if not more so, and employee stress levels improved. And this included developers and engineers: actual coding days went down (3.4 to 2.7 for product; 3.2 to 2.9 for mobile and infrastructure), but “productive impact,” a.k.a. how much they were actually getting done, increased significantly and in the case of infrastructure and mobile doubled.21 Buffer opted to extend the trial another six months, to see if it was sustainable, and in February 2021 decided to officially adopt the schedule moving forward.
June 5, 2024
Perry started thinking about what an equitable, flexible, simple, and intuitive system for leave and benefits would look like. It would have to be transparent but also have tolerance for error and even, theoretically, misuse. He called it “universal design for work-life balance.” “Universal design” is the term for the movement to create spaces, tools, and lived environments that are accessible to all, regardless of age or ability. The thing about universal design is that its benefits are not simply for those who need it most. A curb cut in the sidewalk, for example, makes the sidewalk accessible for wheelchair users, but it also makes navigating the space infinitely easier for people on bikes or pushing strollers.
June 5, 2024
As a corporate strategy, “flexibility” transformed so many workplaces into sites of anxiety where productivity-obsessed workers lived in anticipation of the next massive layoff. At the same time, it was repackaged, often to those same workers, as the future: we laid you off, but we’ll give you your job back, as a “flexible” subcontractor, only with fewer benefits and less stability, and you’ll have little choice but to take it.
June 5, 2024
Productivity bibles like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People functioned, in Gregg’s words, as “a form of training through which workers become capable of the ever more daring acts of solitude and ruthlessness necessary to produce career competence.”11 But the other thing they taught was satisfaction, or at least a demeanor that approximated it. Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The
June 5, 2024
The “burdens” of flexibility “have been unequally distributed,” the tech employment scholar Carrie M. Lane writes. “Employees are expected to become infinitely mutable while employers become increasingly rigid, demanding that workers ask nothing more than a paycheck—no benefits, no training, no personal accommodations, no promise of security or upward mobility.”15 Even the bare minimum employer responsibility (for example, paying workers for their labor) has been recast as a form of benevolence. Workers should not feel entitled to wages: they should, instead, be grateful.
June 5, 2024
Consider just how much work you’ve had to do, how disciplined you’ve had to remain, year in and year out, in order to achieve and maintain that ideal. There’s no true allowance for sickness, or sadness, or caregiving. And, if you take time off, it’s often just an opportunity for someone to prove they’re more flexible—and thus more valuable—than you.
June 5, 2024
But instead of making us work efficiently—and, by extension, less—all of this tech has mostly just made us work more. With time, that amount of output isn’t considered above and beyond. Spending an extra two hours on work at home isn’t a way to distinguish yourself. It’s just the norm. It’s keeping up. It’s treading water. But it’s also, in the vast majority of cases, uncompensated labor.
June 5, 2024
But they’re one of the main things that people say they miss about the office: unanticipated, organic interactions. But what people are actually missing is twofold. Some actually crave disruption and dynamism in their days, a symptom that they probably actually don’t need to be in the office, in one place, as much as they are. But most want generative, collaborative conversations, the sort that make the work you’re doing feel, well, alive. It’s not the drive-by meeting itself that’s essential. It’s the space for authentic idea generation and human interaction. And that can be found in any number of places, if we actually allow ourselves to let go of our limited ideas of where it can happen.
June 5, 2024
When Perpetual Guardian first implemented the program, some workers took off Mondays, some Fridays, others loved a day off in the middle of the workweek, but everyone took it, from the newest hires to the most senior managers. The effect was startling: at the end of a two-month trial, productivity had risen 20 percent, and “work-life” balance scores rose from 54 percent to 78 percent. After the change was made permanent, overall revenue went up 6 percent, and profitability rose 12.5 percent. Other experiments have yielded similarly astounding results: at Microsoft Japan, a four-day workweek led to 40 percent gains in productivity; a 2019 study of 250 British companies with four-day weeks found that companies had saved an estimated £92 million, and 62 percent of companies reported that employees took fewer sick days.19
June 5, 2024
For the Microsoft Japan trial, all meetings were thirty minutes or less and limited to five people—the logic being that if more than five people needed to be there, it should be an announcement, not a meeting.
June 5, 2024
The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or anytime after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical, or make-believe; it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.
June 5, 2024
The reality of working from home—at least during a pandemic—has disabused them of that fantasy. But what they haven’t learned is that working from home is a discrete, defined skill. “If you’re going to give PowerPoint presentations, or draw blueprints, you see that as a skill, something you have to learn and apprentice at, get feedback on, and continue to learn,” Dowling said. “But no one has really thought about working from home as a skill: it’s not taught; it’s not addressed. It’s just sort of like, ‘Be on your laptop at home.’ And that’s just not sufficient.”
June 5, 2024
One answer is completing delegated tasks with accuracy and submitting them on time. But that’s too straightforward for a frazzled, anxious, pandemic brain. Instead, our stress makes it difficult to concentrate, and that difficulty is exacerbated by the growing number of meetings and emails and messages that other people’s frazzled, anxious, pandemic brains are sending us. You feel as if you were not getting enough done, and compensate by working more hours, even if they’re scattered, made inefficient by fatigue, alcohol, and other forms of distraction. It’s so incredibly easy to enter the fugue state where you always feel as if you are half working, half not.
June 5, 2024
Reading Ferriss’s book can feel cathartic, especially if you find yourself burned out or frustrated by your work situation. When he suggests strategically withholding productivity so that you get more done on days where you propose a “trial” work-from-home situation, it’s easy to smile at the puckish manipulation. But you can achieve Ferriss’s level of productivity only by ruthlessly off-loading tasks onto others (Ferriss has a whole section about outsourcing menial tasks to cheap virtual personal assistants based overseas) and constantly toeing the line of appropriate behavior—a strategy almost exclusively available to white men.
June 5, 2024
They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You
June 5, 2024
When it became clear that emails and digital contact were hopping over those guardrails, leaders recognized that they could not depend on individual companies—or the individuals within them—to accomplish what was, in truth, a national goal. Legislation can slow the inertia of capitalist growth, but it cannot counteract it entirely. If you’re an “executive,” you’re allowed to violate the thirty-five-hour weekly cap. And non-executives break it all the time: a 2016 study found that 71.6 percent of French employees worked more than thirty-five hours a week.26
June 5, 2024
Respect for others’ time demands care, knowledge, and thoughtful implementation of policies and practices. Many team status meetings were set years ago, by someone who might not even be your manager anymore, often at a somewhat arbitrary time. Maybe it worked for everyone on the team then. But it has little relation to the needs of your team now, or when people’s schedules become even more flexible.
June 5, 2024
Exercising respect means continual consideration of a meeting’s utility, its place in the day, and its form. Same for email: Does this need to be an email? Do I need to send it now? How would I feel if I received this email right now? How can I make it so that it arrives in my colleague’s in-box at a time that will be more respectful of their time?
June 5, 2024
Front allows users to integrate workflows, chat, and “next steps” into email; in companies dealing with tens of thousands of customer service emails, for example, it allows workers to delegate responsibility, action, and follow-up on each one.
June 5, 2024
But so much of that mindset is simply a long-running coping mechanism for workplace precarity. To be essential, at least in this office job capacity, is to build a protective shell around yourself during times of economic insecurity. It’s a survival strategy, built on fear and desperation. And it makes everyone miserable, no one more so than yourself. Front’s real utility is its ability to transform email from a personal burden into a collective, collaborative task. To do that, however, you have to actually trust your colleagues and be less precious about your own essential role in the process.
June 5, 2024
Say an entire company adopts a force-field approach to email. A culture begins to develop around time off. Those taking time off will be more aware of who will pick up their work burden. They’ll be more appreciative—and ideally more respectful—of others’ time. There might be more coordination, more care, and more respect involved in handing over responsibilities. More important, colleagues in a force-field situation might be more mindful that their requests will fall to others. At its best, it could trigger others to inventory their demands on others’ time.
June 5, 2024
If someone tries to work during a break, chiding them and letting it happen just further normalizes the behavior. When an employee takes time off, not working becomes their job. So how can your team actively set expectations to take that job as seriously as their everyday one? Whatever the policies are, they have to be more than mealymouthed “suggestions” and arrive in collaboration with workers themselves.
June 5, 2024
With time, she grew accustomed to the daily cadences of her job. But she still felt like a stranger in her own company, whose remote policies were haphazard at best. To send chats, employees used an outdated version of Skype; in Zoom meetings, almost all co-workers left their cameras off. Months into her job, she could identify co-workers only by their chat avatars and voices. At one point, she says, she began “obsessively stalking” her company’s Glassdoor reviews, just to try to get a sense of the company culture. She was, by her own admission, unmoored, totally unmentored, and insecure, with no way to learn from her colleagues. It’s one thing to start a new job remotely. It’s another to start your entire career that way.
June 5, 2024
For Kiersten, who has never set foot in her office, her professional life has come to feel like an abstraction—to the point that she’s sometimes not even sure if she’s employed (she is). Worse, her job feels almost completely transactional, with her conversations limited, in her words, to “exchanging information in pursuit of an immediate, work-related goal.”
June 5, 2024
Small talk, passing conversations, even just observing your manager’s pathways through the office, may seem trivial, but in the aggregate they’re far more valuable than any form of company handbook. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be translated into the remote or flexible work environment.
June 5, 2024
We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who—crucially—was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.
June 5, 2024
For organizations with a hybrid approach, where employees split time between home and the office, some of these problems may quickly abate. A few days in the office won’t fix these larger issues. But intentional design could. Truly flexible work may seem breezy and carefree, but it’s actually the product of careful planning and clear communication. It requires peering around corners and attempting to identify needs and problems before they fester. It may seem onerous at first, especially when “let’s just go back to the way things were before” seems like such a clear option
June 5, 2024
But it’s not. We’ve moved past that point. If we’re serious about building a sustainable future of work, we can’t leave a whole swath of employees behind. They’ll just develop bad habits and waste endless hours trying to piece together the rules of the game when someone could’ve just told them.
June 5, 2024
You can temporarily and authentically lower productivity expectations. Or you hire slightly more than enough people, thereby building in the expectation that a percentage of your workforce could be taking time off at any moment, and it wouldn’t overload the system. Many companies are theoretically set up this way: an average employee’s baseline of assigned tasks should take up, say, 80–85 percent of their day, leaving them available to take on 15 to 20 percent more work when a colleague is sick, on vacation, or on leave. As many of our survey respondents confessed, they usually do their core work over a short period of time anyhow.
June 5, 2024
As will become clear in the next chapter, companies spend millions of dollars on consultants every year trying to hit that sweet spot, and historically it usually means cutting middle management and support staff. The end result: employees are increasingly forced to self-manage and do the essential support work of those who were let go, often quite poorly, instead of what they were actually hired to do. Cue: ever-expanding work hours, and the message that if you’re not getting your work done during traditional hours, the failure, again, is yours, for poor prioritizing.
June 5, 2024
That NCR has such a durable corporate culture that it can survive literal airstrikes? Or is it that NCR’s employees are so dedicated that amid unspeakable death and destruction they feel the need—not to be with or tend to family—but to help rebuild a factory? Deal and Kennedy seem to acknowledge the outlandishness of the anecdote. But that doesn’t keep them from arguing that it remains one of the pantheon of “myths and legends of American business.”
June 5, 2024
But starting in the early 1970s, a wave of recessions and economic stagnation shook even the strongest of those companies’ foundations. Behemoths of respective industries entered the decade fat and happy and naive—characteristics that, under the unforgiving eye of a slumping economy, quickly morphed into bloated, occasionally lazy, and flat-footed in the race to compete globally. Their solution, as we noted in the last chapter, was cuts. In the first eight years of the 1980s, Fortune 500 companies cut more than 300 million jobs, many of them the stable, middle-management positions that had not only helped expand the modern middle class but functioned as the organizational sentries of culture.
June 5, 2024
s tendency to treat management as an “add-on”—as opposed to an actual job, requiring a refined skill set—is, as the Nightingales found, rampant in start-ups, both new and long solidified. But it’s also common in cash-strapped nonprofits, in academic departments (see department chairs), and in “legacy” companies that overcorrected the sprawling, management-heavy org charts of the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, people often dealt with bad management by expanding the org chart with even more badly trained managers. Now we deal with it by ignoring it. Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what David Graeber would call a “bullshit job.” But that’s because bad managing is waste; you’re paying someone more money to essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as “just the way it is,” the less they’re going to value management in general. The key, then, is to think of how to treat management as a discrete, valuable skill: a deliverable that contributes to the overall value and resiliency of your organization. Otherwise, managers will continue to feel like deadweight, no matter how flexible an[…]
June 5, 2024
They found that remote managers they surveyed had an average of about 4.87 direct reports. That might not sound like much, but it was overwhelming most managers as they attempted to deal with 5 different emotionally complex human beings, all under stress and with their own needs and demands. Worse yet, 21.5 percent of the remote managers they spoke with had less than one year of management experience when mandatory working from home began. They’d stumbled on the same problem as the Nightingales had: managers were under-trained, under-experienced, overworked, and forced into a stressful new reality. As a result, everyone was suffering. “To be a good manager, you need to be emotionally intelligent,” Pandiya told us. “It’s our whole company thesis: the emotional intelligence of the managers is what makes a company’s culture miserable or excellent.
June 5, 2024
The secret to good culture and even good management isn’t some weekend off-site or even a fancy piece of technology. As Tan put it, “There’s no way to Ping-Pong table or happy hour your way out of it.” Analytics won’t magically turn you into a better manager. You can use them to inform and transform your own behavior, but only if you actually have a vested interest in managing with more empathy and intentionality. We’re all figuring out what our jobs are going to look like in this new reality, and if we do it on our own, remote work will continue to look like the anxious, endless jumble of the pandemic year. The process is going to require a significant amount of experimentation and grace, communication and transparency.
June 5, 2024
Kill the Monoculture In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race. You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.
June 5, 2024
Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of “good leadership” and “good management” are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him—characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them. Frequently, those perpetuating the monoculture aren’t even aware they’re doing it. But this is how monoculture persists: people endlessly promoting people like them for the rest of time
June 5, 2024
Olson’s solution almost feels like a cheat code. Her organization, We Are Rosie, works as a twenty-first-century version of a long- and short-term temp firm, connecting more than six thousand workers in the marketing field with companies and agencies across the world. Some of these “Rosies,” as employees are called, work for a few weeks on a “pop-up” project at an organization. Some work on political campaigns. Others become long-term placements at legacy organizations, from Bloomberg to Procter & Gamble. But We Are Rosie is not a traditional subcontractor. It takes the reality of the existing fissured workplace and attempts to stabilize it for its employees. Rosies can be remote and work from wherever they want. They can find actual part-time work that still pays well. They have a robust online support community. And if a company tries to cut corners on their contract, treat them poorly, or change the parameters of the project they’ve been hired to complete, they have an external advocate whose primary interest is retaining the Rosies, not the client. The result: a workforce that’s more than 90 percent remote, more than 40 percent Black, indigenous, and people of color[…]
June 5, 2024
Steven Aquino has been covering the technology industry from California for the last eight years. Before that, he was a preschool teacher, but his cerebral palsy made it difficult to meet the physical needs of his students, day in and day out. He looked for something he could do, ideally from home, that would be less physically taxing. He found it in writing and reporting. That shift to working from home “really changed who I am,” Aquino said. “I’m not always so tired anymore. Because I’m not so exhausted, and hurting, and thinking about it all the time, I’ve been able to concentrate on doing work I enjoy and take pride in.” Working from home also helped with Aquino’s social anxiety, which was exacerbated by his stutter. Still, the rhetoric of the current moment and the opportunities of flexible work have felt, in his words, disorienting. “We’re in a society where diversity and inclusion is a big subject right now,” he said. “And it’s inspiring to see. But it isn’t evenly distributed. We talk about inclusion, and then people like me are always off to the side, way over there.”
June 5, 2024
Forced into formalized, factory-like arrangements, laborers viewed six-hour workdays as onerous and perhaps only temporary until desired productivity had been achieved. Attendance was poor. Something had to be done to condition the workforce to perform strenuous labor on behalf of others. Owners began to impose fines and strict oversight because, as the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff points out, “workers submitted to the physical rigors of factory discipline only when other alternatives had been exhausted.”3 Early factory designs were modeled after workhouses and prisons.4 Positive reinforcement was attempted, but the carrot was usually abandoned for the stick, even when it came to the children who increasingly filled the workforce.
June 5, 2024
Frederick Winslow Taylor. As an employee for Bethlehem Steel, Taylor lamented that workers were naturally lazy, and in order to counter their slovenly attitudes, he began to closely study their movements. He realized that coal shovelers with standardized shovel sizes could haul more weight without getting tired quickly. He timed others’ movements on the factory floor with a stopwatch, looking for extraneous movements to shave off their routines.
June 5, 2024
As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. Your collar, as Upton Sinclair famously put it, would be white; your work, at least in the vast majority of cases, would be salaried and steady.
June 5, 2024
The goal was to keep your head down, do what was expected of you (but nothing more!), and encourage others to do the same. Workers conformed, but they did so, according to Whyte, with a placid smile: they were undergirded by real support, whether in the form of their salary, their pension, or their enduring job security. “It is not the evils of organization life that puzzle him, but its very beneficence,” Whyte explained. “He is imprisoned in brotherhood.”
June 5, 2024
imprisonment extended to the home, where the ethos of organization man culture was instrumental in shaping the structures of (white) middle-class life. Early suburbs were quite literally built to accommodate and incubate organization men, their families, and their social lives, which became appendages of the company. Social status was cemented through perks like local country-club memberships, while the organization man’s family, especially his wife, became a form of corporate asset, valued for her ability to host and socialize. Employees were expected to leverage their family life to woo clients and executives alike. “Actually, it’s hard to tell where the workday ends and the ‘pleasure’ begins,” one manager told Whyte. “If you count all the time required for cocktails, dinners, conferences, and conventions, there is no end to work.
June 5, 2024
interests,” Bennett writes. “Dozens of managers stayed with their companies in the face of disastrous situations, working, and working hard. These were the loyal soldiers, staying at their posts no matter what.”17 These middle managers might have felt like loyal soldiers at the time, but they were blinded by loyalty and perks and a workplace “family” that didn’t allow them to see that their battalion had been moved to the front lines in order to be sacrificed.
June 5, 2024
Bennett described the ramifications of downsizing as “the same as suffering a divorce or a death in the family.”18 For the downsized, losing a job wasn’t just losing financial stability but expulsion from one’s social life. Losing the physical space of the office meant disconnection from their daily rhythms and the hundreds of seemingly inconsequential actions that defined their lives. Many had been with their companies for decades and had no idea how to begin to search for new jobs.
June 5, 2024
First, there’s the sheer number of hours we’re working. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the average American works more hours than the average laborer in any peer nation. But unlike many Western nations, where increased productivity and wealth tend to lead to more leisure time, Americans continue to overwork themselves despite productivity gains. The OECD found that “the US works 269 more hours than its enormously wealthy economy would predict—making it by this measure the second-most overworked country in the world.”27
June 5, 2024
When the journalist Chika Ekemezie first began interviewing women of color who had made the shift to working from home during the pandemic, she was interested in the ways that remote work liberated black women workers from (white) standards of professionalism in their offices. “I’ve long been a believer that professionalism is just a synonym for obedience,” she wrote. “The less social capital you have, the more you are tethered to professionalism. It’s why Mark Zuckerberg can wear the same T-shirt to work while Black women are punished for wearing braids.”
June 5, 2024
Surveys conducted during the first ten months of the pandemic illustrate the complex relationship that some BIPOC employees have to remote work. Data collected by Slack’s Future Forum showed that black employees were working longer hours and experiencing higher stress around pressure to perform—a sign of a lack of mutual trust between the employees and the managers. But overall, black employees expressed a 29 percent increase in feelings of satisfaction and belonging working remotely, compared with being primarily in the office. One reason for this, respondents said, was that working from home meant less code switching or pressure to modulate their behavior for a boss or co-worker.
June 5, 2024
workers’ “offices” moved into their homes, though, some began to feel standards of professionalism extend to judgments about personal spaces.42 What do my books, my art, my clutter communicate about my competence as a worker? Who’s able to “professionalize” their home spaces for remote appearances, and who’s trying to angle the camera so that colleagues can’t tell they’re Zooming from their bedroom? Which employees feel empowered to say, “Screw it, I don’t care what my background is,” and who is spending outsize time thinking about it?
June 5, 2024
you already have a family, chosen or otherwise. And when a company uses that rhetoric, it is reframing a transactional relationship as an emotional one. It might feel enticing, but it is deeply manipulative and, more often than not, a means to narrativize paying people less to do more work. Family evokes not just a closeness but a devotion and a lasting bond, infused with sacrifice: family comes first.
June 5, 2024
Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer.
June 5, 2024
In reality, Taber argues, family farms are just as hierarchical, patriarchal, and exploitative of workers. She points to the historian Caitlin Rosenthal’s book, Accounting for Slavery, which traces how early slave plantation farms developed many of the management and accounting practices that still structure corporate life. The early agrarian economy was ruthless. It was also a family business, and the abolition of slavery didn’t magically destroy the power imbalances present in agriculture, even on family farms. “Working on a family farm means working in somebody’s home,” she argues. “There are tremendous gaps in wealth and status and power.”
June 5, 2024
they were also mentally miserable. Shoshana Zuboff spent hours interviewing workers in industrial settings for In the Age of the Smart Machine, but she also spent significant time with clerical workers. Like their blue-collar counterparts, the people she interviewed were adrift as the result of the fast technological changes of their jobs. Dentist office employees and insurance claims workers both saw their jobs, which were once social in nature, turn into glorified data entry positions. Cubicles visually walled them off from their colleagues, turning co-workers into an annoying buzz of wafting voices and telephone rings and keyboard clacks. As the job increasingly tethered them to their desks, they became more estranged from their managers, who in turn began to view them as drones. “We used to be able to see each other
June 5, 2024
from this fact: just group them in inviting environments that fit the company’s projected cultural values of “dynamism” and “community.” The office, in other words, as city—or, even better yet, as campus. Back in the 1970s, midwestern corporate giants like 3M and Caterpillar had designed sprawling, bucolic office parks for their thousands of employees, and early Silicon Valley companies like Xerox famously embraced the campus layout in the 1970s. These early campus environments made economic sense: they allowed companies to abandon costly urban real estate, and their location was easier to sell to prospective employees who planned to make their homes in the suburbs. But as William Whyte, author of
June 5, 2024
This is the nightmare scenario for Christie and the focus of much of Twitter’s early hybrid work planning. The solution? Destroy the FOMO and level the playing field by making the office less appealing. “You need to eliminate the idea that you’ll miss out if you’re not in the office,” she told us. Which is why they’re attempting to figure out ways to actively disincentivize people from coming back to the office full-time. “For a long time we’ve rallied around office perks and keeping people around and in the building,” she said. “Tech companies have celebrated and mastered it: come to the office, and you get fed, you get cared for.” That whole well-fed, well-cared-for campus philosophy has to change, Christie says. And it starts with the way the office is arranged and the expectations for people within those spaces. At Twitter, everyone inside the conference room will be asked to have an open laptop and dial into the meeting to make sure that remote participants can see all faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have traditionally been far away from the conference microphone. The company plans to get rid[…]
June 5, 2024
That intentionality especially applies to groups that are usually left out of the design process. For leaders in the disability community, the remote work shift can feel fraught. Flexible work—an accommodation people with disabilities have been asking for, and denied, for decades—is more available than ever before. But there’s also a very real concern that the ability to work from home could end up making actual office spaces less inclusive. “What I don’t want to see is all employees who have disabilities relegated to working from home because newly designed spaces are even less accessible than they are now,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told us. It’s far too easy to imagine companies offering hybrid work but treating their disabled workers as fixed remote employees, thereby reinforcing the segregation of disabled people in the workforce.
June 5, 2024
Despite the miraculous technological affordances in our life, few of them have liberated us as advertised. And nowhere is that truer than our working lives, where today’s office tech has absorbed all of the formalities, anxieties, and oppressive mundanity of corporate life and ported them into every corner of our lives. The magical ability to see your co-workers face-to-face from anywhere in the world morphs into Zoom fatigue. The lively, collaborative instant messaging app gives way to an always-on surveillance tool that lives on company servers forever. A shared digital calendar evolves into a way for others to demand our time and attention until there’s none left for ourselves. The more efficient we become, the more overwhelmed we feel.
June 5, 2024
But almost all have unintended consequences, even when they’re not digital. From the open office plan to the Aeron chair, new ideas about the physical design of the office have reshaped not only our work environment but also our relationship to work. Innovations that were supposed to make the office more humane get co-opted, put through cost-efficiency calculators, and end up making the workplace feel even more like an overdesigned cage.
June 5, 2024
In 1981, while working on a book about the future of work, a young Harvard business professor named Shoshana Zuboff visited an old pulp mill. The mill’s bleach plant had recently been redesigned and outfitted with state-of-the-art technology, including digital sensors and monitors that fed signals to a shiny, new centralized control room, stocked with computers whirring away on brand-new microprocessors. To an outsider, it was all very impressive. But, as Zuboff quickly learned, the workers despised it.
June 5, 2024
Across the office world, workers were promised that these new technologies would make their lives easier. And yes, it was great not to have to type the same letter in triplicate. But many of the machines were situated in spaces that simply weren’t designed for them: mimeographs in rooms without ventilation, word processors in spaces without proper lighting. Thousands of workers reported migraines, severe eyestrain, cataracts, bronchitis, and allergies.16 Automation was literally making office workers sick.
June 5, 2024
As workers, we’ve always been assisted by technologies in some form. Those tools have become more sophisticated with time, but as their users we remain stubbornly human, and there are limits to the productivity that any body or mind can sustain. In the early 1980s, workers began to brush up against those limits but were driven into survival mode by the continued volatility of the American economy. It didn’t matter if the office sucked, if it made you feel ill, if it made you resent your co-workers. Attempts to organize, like those led by Nussbaum and Working Women, ran headfirst into a massive wave of antilabor sentiment and legislation. It felt as if there were no recourse, no way to push back. And so a whole generation of employees internalized their employers’ quest for productivity as their own, settled for less pay and less stability, and got back to work.
June 5, 2024
Reflecting today, Wilkinson’s less sure of that vision. Over the last two decades, his brilliant, innovative designs have rippled through the architecture world, as large-scale tech companies and smaller start-ups alike have cribbed elements of his team’s dynamic workplaces for their spaces. And Wilkinson’s increasingly aware of the insidious nature of those same perks. “Making the work environment more residential and domestic is, I think, dangerous,” he told us in late 2020. “It’s clever, seductive, and dangerous. It’s pandering to employees by saying we’ll give you everything you like, as if this was your home, and the danger is that it blurs the difference between home and office.”
June 5, 2024
The new campus design had a profound impact on company culture. Some of that impact was undeniably positive: he created work spaces where people genuinely want to be. But that desire becomes a gravitational pull, tethering the worker to the office for longer and longer, and warping previous perceptions of social norms.
June 5, 2024
With time, your colleagues become your closest friends and, with even more time, your only friends. It’s easier to hang out and have a social life at work, because everyone’s just already there. Life feels streamlined, more efficient. Even fun! Sometimes you’re just goofing off, killing time, kinda like back in the dorm room in college. Other times you’re working together, like those endless nights back in the library. Sometimes it’s a hazy hybrid of both, but it’s generative nonetheless. It’s the new organization-man-style company devotion, only the country club’s moved on campus.
June 5, 2024
When we moved away from New York, however, we came to realize how work friendships had functioned as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn’t make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance altogether, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn’t seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just . . . life.
June 5, 2024
In 2012, McKinsey was on the hunt for just such a solution: something, anything, that could decrease the email burden on workers and boost productivity among its clients. In a report from that year, its analysts found that the average knowledge worker spent 28 percent of their workweek managing email, and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information, or simply tracking down colleagues who could help with specific tasks. They believed some sort of collaborative chat—or “social technology”—had the potential to raise the productivity of knowledge workers by between 20 and 25 percent.31
June 5, 2024
Many companies own or lease their office space on long-term contracts. And when the space is there, sitting on the company’s expenses, it’s likely that management is going to incentivize employees to use it. And after we’ve been trapped in our homes hiding from a deadly virus for well over a year, we’re starved for social interaction. Many of our former commuting and workplace annoyances now sound like tiny luxuries. Some of us miss our colleagues. Others are just sick of their homes and apartments and, yes, even their partners and kids. The only question is, how?
June 5, 2024
To be clear, there’s no quick technological fix to what ails our workplace. What works best for Mills and his team of young, extremely online employees likely won’t work for Linda or Mark in accounting at a regional auto parts company. What Branch does best, however, is clarify what the office actually means to you. Because what a lot of us actually miss about the office—apart from not being in our claustrophobic homes—isn’t anything that practical. You might miss what tech executive and essayist Paul Ford calls its “secret, essential geography”: knowing the best place to cry, or find privacy, or use the bathroom.40 But what you really miss is a feeling. In some offices, that feeling is playfulness. In others, it’s siloed concentration. For Mills, it’s an empathic, ambient presence. “You can create connection just by being present, even if you’re not saying anything,” he told us. “People know if they do talk, somebody is there to listen.”
June 5, 2024
LARPing is a virulent pathogen, but there is an antidote. It’s just trust: cultivating it, communicating it, propagating more of it. When you don’t feel as though your manager trusts you—or, more specifically, how you make use of your time—you feel the need to underline just how much of it you’re dedicating to work. You update, you check in, you sneak in casual mentions of how late you worked on something. Maybe your manager actually does trust you but is incredibly bad at communicating it. Maybe they’ve never told you to update this way but have never told you to stop, either. What matters is that the distrust hangs in the virtual air, goading you to spend more time evidencing your work than actually working.
June 5, 2024
Microsoft found that between February 2020 and February 2021 the average Teams user was sending 45 percent more chats after hours and 50 percent of Teams users responded to chats within five minutes or less.42 More and more, we find ourselves in a fun-house mirror of performance anxiety that distorts our understanding of what work even is.
June 5, 2024
But one of the companies that has managed to do so has a lesson for the aspirationally flexible office. That company is GitLab, a software platform that helps web developers build and share open-source code. If you’ve read about remote work before, chances are you’ve seen it mentioned as an example. That’s because, even pre-pandemic, it had built its company on the premise of truly reimagining work. It doesn’t have any offices and its employees live everywhere, across many time zones. It’s fully distributed, fully remote, and fully asynchronous and it embraces a radical form of transparency.
June 5, 2024
Because employees are working at different hours in all parts of the world, the company relies on meticulous documentation. Employees take extensive notes on calls, meetings, memos, brainstorming sessions, you name it. Almost all of it, including many of the company’s internal deliberations and operations, is posted publicly. In practice, that means someone outside the company can get an idea of how its employees are building the product they might ultimately buy. Internally, it means that an employee in the marketing department can go into GitLab’s system and follow what the legal, comms, finance, and engineering teams are doing. They can read the team’s notes, monitor their objectives and reports, and follow along with colleagues as they work.
June 5, 2024
And that was before the pandemic. If financial firms don’t get on board with flexible work, Poleg predicts, that shift toward tech will only continue. This principle applies far beyond the world of finance. “Executives have had flex forever,” Michael Colacino, the head of the commercial real estate firm SquareFoot, told us. “I’ve been able to work from home on Friday since 1992. People always say that the future is here, it just hasn’t been evenly distributed. And that’s true: flexibility has just been segregated off into the C-suite and slightly downstream. So what you have happening now is that no one’s going to accept the five-days-in-the-office mentality. Now that they’ve tasted the forbidden fruit, there’s no going back. If you say to a millennial, come back 9:00 to 5:00, five days a week, people are just going to quit.” Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them. It’s irrational, it’s[…]
All Excerpts From
Anne Helen Petersen. “Out of Office.” Scribe Publications Pty Ltd, 2022-01-05. Apple Books.
This material may be protected by copyright.