Anne Helen Petersen & Charlie Warzel: Where Should Work Fit in Our Lives?
“Like family relationship has obligations that go both ways. Hopefully there's unconditional love there, but it's also the, like your re your family and, and, and the other people in your family see you as family too. But in a job, if you, the, the whole family thing goes one way, you're supposed to give and give and give and give and, and, and, and feel this like guilt and obligation to your company and your coworkers, your company at any moment can sever those ties, you know, your is at will employment in, in this country. And, and, and so, like, that's not part of a, a family thing. That's not unconditional. Your job is totally conditional.”
So says Charlie Warzel, who together with Anne Helen Petersen, wrote OUT OF OFFICE: THE BIG PROBLEM AND BIGGER PROMISE OF WORKING FROM HOME. Petersen and Warzel, ditched New York City for the promise of a better life/work balance out west a few years ago, which gave them a headstart on understanding the reality of working from home—before it became a reality for the rest of the world through the pandemic. Both culture, media, and technology journalists for Buzzfeed at the time, they found that the promise of work from home was not a panacea for more time to spend in nature: Like the rest of us—just earlier—they discovered that they were spending even more time PERFORMING their work, showing their managers back in New York City that they deserved the privilege of being untethered from a traditional office. Being out of the office only added to their anxiety and overwhelm.
So when COVID hit, they were already aware of both the the pitfalls and potential of work from home—their fantastic book, which just came out, offers a survey of how we find ourselves in this intractable bind today, where for too many of us, our jobs have taken over the center of our lives, and how we can use this opportunity to reshape workplaces for a more sustainable future. In our conversation we talk about how we don’t prioritize the art of managers, how the idea of time and output is problematic for so many people who are not, actually machines, and what a more inclusive and human HR structure might look like, if it weren’t engineered to avoid abuse and instead could focus solely on providing support. Let’s get to our conversation.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
Trust and remote work…(15:59)
The death of the manager…(20:23)
What is my job?…(30:56)
Challenging the first principles of work...(41:06)
MORE FROM ANNE HELEN PETERSEN & CHARLIE WARZEL:
OUT OF OFFICE by Anne Helen Petersen & Charlie Warzel
CAN’T EVEN by Anne Helen Petersen
THE BURNOUT GENERATION by Anne Helen Petersen
“Galaxy Brain” newsletter from Charlie Warzel
“Culture Study” newsletter from Anne Helen Petersen
Follow Anne on Twitter and Instagram
Follow Charlie on Twitter and Instagram
DIG DEEPER:
Why the Most Productive People Don’t Always Make the Best Managers - Harvard Business Review
Companies Can’t Stop Overworking - NY Times, April 2021
The Worst of Both Worlds: Zooming From the Office - NY Times, November 2021
Is the Four-Day Workweek Finally Within Our Grasp? - NY Times, November 2021
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE:
Your book in so many ways, paint such a sad and appropriately realistic portrait of what it is to be a capitalist slave. So you guys were already remote pre-COVID, is that accurate? Okay. And had already we're contemplating why remote work present, its own issues and not sort of the freedom that I think we all immediately thought it would give us, to work on our sour dose starters and get really fit.
ANNE HELEN PETERSON:
Speaking of which Charlie did make his sourdough bread for the first time in six months yesterday. So I'm, I'm happy about the sourdough.
CHARLIE WARZEL:
When it gets dark really early is when I start making bread. I feel it’s how it works.
ELISE:
But what was the original impetus? like you guys, I know that you were in New York. I mean, you were within the sort of media culture of New York, right? And then you decided you needed more balance?
ANNE HELEN:
No, it really was. Well, part of it was that we were sick of New York. Um, just New York is a hard place to live. Like everything that is easy in other places is hard there. And then some things that are, that are hard other places are easy there, but very few. Um, I think that that's part of what makes New Yorkers so proud is that they do hard things every day. Um, and I have no, you know, I don't, I, anyone who wants to live there and wants to stay there, it's great. Like the city is for you. I, but I grew up in, in a small town in Idaho and that is not how I think my ideal scenario, like my ideal life is, but I've also lived in lots of cities. I've lived in Austin. I've lived in Seattle. Like I used to be an academic so I had to move around a lot. I've lived in lots of different places. And I think that what happened specifically was that I went by to Montana to cover the special election, uh, in 2017 and was driving all over the state for a week and a half and felt great. It was like the sliver of Montana or sliver of May when it's really, really beautiful. It's like fake summer. Before it like goes back to kind of cold. And it was just so beautiful. And also I knew how to talk to people. The reporting felt really natural. Uh, people trusted me because I like had an Idaho license still, cuz I never gotten rid of it. Uh, and we, and I convinced Charlie to come out and like spend some time there and see how he felt about it.
But he wouldn't have been open to that if every time that we had like gone on a trip for an extended amount of time to somewhere else in the United States, we hadn't also been like, well, what if we move here? Well, what if we move here? Like we had been trying to think of an argument for ourselves and for our bosses at that time, we both worked at Buzzfeed News, to move outside of the city and it was not a hard sell. And the reason it wasn't a hard sell was because they knew our work ethic, and that we were going to just like work just as hard and ridiculous…even if we weren't in the New York office. In fact, maybe they understood what we did not yet understand, which was that, given that permission to move out of New York and move away from any office that maybe we would work even harder to try to show that we deserved the privilege. And that's what happened.
ELISE:
Right. So you were foretelling essentially work from home and the need to be incredibly performative about our effort as a mechanism, as a security mechanism, right. For showing our value, proving our worth. and reminding everyone that we were working just as hard, even though we were simultaneously contending with the pandemic and Zoom school and um, you know, the collapse of society, not seeing our families. All of those things. I certainly, I had a full-time job at the beginning of pan the pandemic and, and felt that and observe that amongst my team of how do you work from home. Even though so many of us, as you guys point out already, we're working from home, you know, we work everywhere all the time. It's not, it, it, it lost its boundaries sort of with the advent of what the laptop, the smartphone, you know, in a way that we haven't really been willing to the, or haven't had even probably the time or the bandwidth to acknowledge how permeable it's become and how insidious. And so I loved the book because it hit on so many of the themes around, what does it look like when your entire social world and all of your friends are confined to coworkers because it's taken over your life. And what does it look like to not to have no boundaries? And then how do you start to assert them?
CHARLIE:
Yeah, I think, I think sort of two things happen when we moved. Right. One was that we, we did, uh, especially me, did this thing, where I treated remote work as a perk and a privilege to be earned. Every day you have to earn that privilege and obviously compensating and worrying about that privilege, being taken away by working so much that you don't actually make any use of the privilege, right? Like if it's a perk, you're just, you're just pretending that it doesn't exist in order to earn it. So there's that kind of counterintuitive thing. But the other thing that happened at the same time and, and, and gradually we realized that that was an untenable way to do this and, and defeating the purpose. But at the same time, too, the removal from New York and that broader for us, that broader media culture, but more importantly, our, like our sort of overwhelming and dominant startup-y, you know, Buzzfeed culture. The removal of that really showed us just how, how much our lives had become one-dimensional.
As you were sort of alluding to earlier, just there, like this, this way in which, you know, modern American, especially knowledge work just creeps into every element and the ways that, especially your social life, and the ways in which, you know, you they're sort of start using this language of we're a family or your coworkers become your best friends, or you have all the amenities that you need to get through the day and, and the evenings, even at work that you never really leave. And it just starts pushing all these things out. And it's really hard to get the distance and the perspective there sometimes. If you don't have somebody in your life or some kind of grounding force that can say, “Hey, like, this is like, all you're doing is, is hanging out with your work friends. And, uh, and all this is collapsing.” It's one of the things that I think getting out of the office is, is really helpful for is that sort of grounding you and sort of seeing the office for what it is. And I think the office in this case is papering over, you know, a, a lot of it's helping to obscure a lot of aspects in our life that have sort of gone out of balance,
ELISE:
Right. All those other social structures that used to hold us together in community locally, too, have, are gone. I loved…speaking of that idea, um, of, of how familial, um, you guys write “The family relationships can just as easily be manipulative, passive aggressive, and endlessly confusing family members can be racist, exploitative, sexist, transphobic, and emotionally abusive, but because they're family it's often considered impolite or uncivil to confront them about the very real injuries they do to others. As the comedian, Kevin Farzad put it on Twitter. “If an employer ever says, ‘We're like family here,’ what that means, what they mean is they're going to ruin you psychologically.” But it is, you know, in prioritizing and turning work into family, it is also putting it at the center of our lives. Um, as you guys point to where it becomes, what we do is who we are, and our identity becomes potentially warped. And it's obviously not good for us and it's not good for culture. It's not good for society.
CHARLIE:
It's also not the correct, like it's not an accurate relationship. Like family relationship has obligations that go both ways. Hopefully there's unconditional love there, but it's also the, like your family and the other people in your family see you as famil,y too. But in a job, the whole family thing goes one way, you're supposed to give and give and give and give and, and, and, and feel this like guilt and obligation to your company and your coworkers. But your company at any moment can sever those ties, you know, your is at-will employment in, in this country. And, and, and so, like, that's not part of a, a family thing. That's not unconditional. Your job is totally conditional.
ELISE:
There is rare family estrangement, not to minimize it, but for the most people, both part, your family's not, not going to banish or excommunicate you, um, and, or put you into financial peril.
CHARLIE:
Well, and it's, it's right. When things get tough, too, like the idea of a family is like, when things get tough, we'll try to stick together, hopefully, and with jobs, it's like, when things get tough, we're gonna have to downsize you.
ELISE
Right. We're gonna make you flexible. Um, and families, we don't typically surveil each other. Right. That was such a staggering statistic. Um, but, and I, and it was so well, well, um, observed and delivered, which I think that many of us are like, I specifically wanna believe that it's not true, even though I know it's, you know, when something comes up in the news around data and privacy, I'm like, I don't wanna know. I don't wanna know. I already feel so stalked online, but was it, did you guys find that was, or maybe I found this separately that 60% of large companies, maybe it was in New York Times piece, are now because of the pandemic, have started surveilling employees and they expect it to be upwards of 70%, within three years, I think. Not sure, I'll find that stat, but you guys write extensively around some of the surveillance tools and how it feels for, for white collar workers. Right? Like, of course we're not being surveilled, but there's a lot to suggest that not only are emails being, I think we all sort of know to be careful about what you put on work email, but that there are other tools couched as productivity hacks. Right. But have more potentially nefarious intentions?
ANNE HELEN:
Well, I think that like Microsoft Teams data is a really interesting variation of this, because they are figuring out like how much time you spend in Teams meetings. Right. And how much time that you are spending in like chat clients, and that sort of thing. But like that data can either be used as like, I don't know, a cudgel, you need to be spending more time in Teams meetings. That would be like horrible management to be like, clearly this person is spending less time than everyone else in Teams meetings. So they're doing less work that the really bad and blunt understanding of how that data would work or it could be used in, I think, helpful ways. And I've seen this in, in action from different managers who are like, oh, my, my managers are in too many Team meetings. Like if they, and here's how they're meeting the number of that they're in every week has gone up like week after week.
I'm seeing that they, and I'm also seeing that they're sending most of their emails after work hours. So clearly they are doing more work and they're gonna burn out because they are having too many meetings, and that's pushing their, like administrative and maintenance work into, you know, past the traditional bounds of the workday. Or they'll see that like one, like an interesting example of that is that, um, someone who like a manager who saw that she was always emailing one of her reports during this period of the time of the day where she, where the report was doing her like deep work. It was like her, her section of the day that she was concentrated and the manager was always interrupting it. And so a good manager would be like, "Oh, I will schedule all emails to, you know, not land on this person's inbox from 10:00 AM to noon. So there are ways in which I think this surveillance can be used for good, but it has like, the, the problem with this technology is that it's only as good or as bad as the company that's using it. The manager that's using it. So like all technology it can be used for good or for evil.
CHARLIE:
The other thing I'll, I'll say about, well, like one thing, probably the biggest lesson that, that we've learned in all the reporting and in this book and, and just research about the history of work, is that with remote work, especially the fundamental element is trust. Like if you're actually gonna make it work and, and it's trust both ways. And right now there's extremely low levels of trust in the workforce, you know, and one of the biggest ones is obviously managers and executives, employers, not trusting employees to, to do the work. There are many different kinds, like all technology, you know, puts out metadata or whatever, and that can be used for surveillance. And sometimes you can use that data like Annie was saying to, to really help. There are some tools out there though that are just exploitative and horrible, like keyboard tracking, like, how often are the people typing, are their eyes focused on the screen a bunch of times.
And those are legitimately awful productivity surveillance tools and the biggest problem with them, other than the fact that it like chains employees to their computers all day, and makes them miserable, is that it totally undercuts the number one thing that you need to make actual remote work and flexible work happen and, and be successful. And that, and that is that level of trust. It is sign that like, we are going to extend you this privilege, but rather than think of you as an adult who can just do the things that you need to do, we are going to, you know, constantly track you. And it undercuts it, it creates this resentment. And the whole enterprise is basically, you know, corrupted by that.
ELISE:
Well, and it's this idea which you get at, which is that, um, work has become, has turned us all into automatons in some way. And thatour value is measured by our output. It's measured by the time that we're sitting in front of our computers, moving our mouse, mice, um, and that so much valuable work is it really comes from being fallow, having creative time, having the space to think. And so much of our work is not, it was never intended to be measured by like, you, you guys know as writers like you write in spurts, like you have to think, you have to process. There are times probably when you're like, I just have to go for a long walk. And that's when your unconscious mind is processing all the information and putting it into coherent arguments, or you can sort of force it through and come up with something that's inherently gonna be subpar.
But there's this idea of work that across industries, that it's an effort a time in equals a timeout, which I think is wrong, harmful and will just kill innovation and creative thinking. And I wanna go back to, there are a couple things that I think we need to touch on. Anne mentioned good managers, and one of the other, and hopefully sort of something that comes out of COVID is this understanding of management as being not only an art—one where you need to create autonomy and independence for the people who work for you and a mutual respect—but also that it's a full-time job and career track. That's not necessarily appropriate for every one. And we have, these works almost in almost any industry where your value, your compensation, starts to become attached to how many people you manage, how big is your team. And we've deprioritized this idea of like an individual contributor.
I mean, you guys obviously are individual contributors. That's where I'm personally far more comfortable. I would love to just be responsible for my own output and not have to manage a team, but even at the end of my career, in a corporation, like I was managing 70, I don't know how many people, 70 people and an individual contributor. And that's typical, I think, and for the people who are good managers on my team, they still were doing too much individual work. And so I think we need to get, become really clear culturally you're manager. That is what you're doing, and that is, it's like you’re a parent effectively. And that should be where you're focusing, not on that and the rest of your job.
ANNE HELEN:
It's really hard because I think that what happened was that in the 1960s and seventies, like the rise of a lot of contemporary, like companies that we think of now as like standard companies, there was a lot of expansion that included the, the level of middle management. So people whose only job was managing, right. Who were not thought of as individual contributors. And then with the reorganization and downsizing and sloughing of talent that accompanied the seventies and eighties, that level was cut out. Right. And the middle manager came to be seen as a signifier of waste in large corporations, in conglomerates and that sort of thing. And so when companies start to rebuild, or when startups started to build the, the way that they thought of themselves and, and like conceived of their org charts to be lithe and nimble, and, and all of the things that these older dinosaurs were not, was that they didn't have middle managers.
They had people who were elevated to the position of manager who still had to do all of their other jobs and were, who were made managers because they were oftentimes the best performer on their team. They're like, oh, you're really good at this thing. Why don't we don't have any way of like, showing you that you're really good at this thing. Like, we're not gonna just give you more money. So the only way that we can give you more money is by telling you that you are now a manager, even though there's some great Harvard Business Review pieces on this, like the, the skills that are, that make someone the highest performer on their team are almost always the opposite of the skills that make someone a good manager. If we think about soft management skills in terms of listening, empathy, like just generally thinking and like being expand, like having all of those people skills, they're not necessarily the same things that make you a top performer in your team. But that has become the standard. We call it in the book add-on management. And I think it's responsible for a whole slew of just, shitty, shitty management. And I do not blame managers most of the time, because I think the people that have been thrown in this position, it's the only way that they can achieve advancement within their organizations. And there's so little training.
ELISE:
No training, no training in support. And you're sort of, it's sort of, of like, you're deviant, if that's not what you wanna do, or if you're selfish.
ANNE HELEN:
Or you're not ambitious. Right. Right. Like if you turn down a management opportunity, then you don't have a future in the company instead of, I don't actually have management skills and would be a bad manager.
ELISE
Yeah, and I have no interest.
CHARLIE:
I also think that, that you identified a really like important part of this, that even in our own discussion gets overlooked, which is this idea of, like, we talk about the add-on management in terms of like the, the add, like they added on to, it becomes, becomes your job. But also the fact that you're an individual contributor too. I just think like, it is so important. I mean, that, that has happened in, in my career, with the only time I became a manager and not of many employees, it was in addition to this, like all the same responsibilities of being an individual contributor and a, and all of those, all of those things that, that Annie was just describing, like empathy, listening skills, they're all in conflict with you also being an individual person with all the same kind of expectations, because you, you just, you simply, you don't have the time, but also like you just, you don't have the, the incentives even. If you're in almost in a way in competition with the people who, who you're expected to manage, um, like how who's gonna take the time to, to really be trained when, you know, you also just have to get your own stuff done. I think that's a really crucial, um, and, and also a really good point in favor of like treating management as an art.
ELISE:
Yeah. And a highly specialized skill that some people are exceptional at and others should skip. And that that's okay. And that it doesn't necessarily impair your ability to contribute to an organization or do quality work. And particularly, you know, for me, the, in the individual contributor work is where, I mean, I loved my team, but my whole mode of managing is like, how do I get you all to a place of autonomy? So you can really manage yourself. And then I can clear hurdles and get you resources and elevate issues, which I think actually in a perverse way, made me a good manager, even though I was not very hands on. But the real value I think in my work was what I was able to individually contribute. And that's certainly what made me feel safe and secure. Um, and that my job was justified because of what I, I personally was able to deliver.
And I think that that gets into the sort of the psychosomatics of the fact that nobody really feels particularly safe or secure in this gig economy, and in this world where you could lose your job. I mean, that's the underlying idea. And it, it goes to going back again a little bit, Charlie, to what you were saying too, about the lack of trust. And it really, it goes to the way that HR benefits are designed. I loved that part of the book, because I think it's something that, you know, obviously we're having social, a conversations about paid family leave, but in the construction of benefits, one, you guys write about how the system has been “engineered to protect against this sliver of bad actors, instead of one that will engender authentic trust and respect. And that they're trying to build systems that will resist abuse rather than help out the max amount of people that they can.”
Um, which I think is really important, this idea of like, always assuming that people are going to take advantage and that they're not really sick and that, um, it's is problematic. And then also I loved the conversation that you guys opened up about people who choose to never have kids or who, and I was having this conversation with my brother who's gay, never wants to have kids. And he's like, it's interesting because like, what if I wanted to take a sabbatical currently ;ike there's no, you, you mentioned this, there's no structure. We don't have benefits that think about the whole course of someone's life. It's almost like now they're also being engineered for this idea that people will only be with you for a little bit of time. And hopefully you don't get a woman when she's in her procreative crime. Hopefully you don't get someone who's gonna get sick or who has parents who are aging.
CHARLIE:
Yeah. And it, and it breeds so much of that, like that resentment and that, and that just like, there's the sort of the, the most basic right. Which is like, we, we, we don't trust you not to, you know, take advantage of this policy, but, but even more so it's just, it breeds a resentment of, you know, David Parry is the person who came up with this, uh, this sort of framework, which is this Universal Design for work life balance is, is what he calls it. And it's based off of a lot of the, you know, the universal design in, in disability, uh, studies. And, uh, and, and, and this idea that, you know, a lot of universal design elements like curb cuts for, for wheelchairs and cars is one of, of the kind of classically cited examples that curb cuts help a lot of things, including cyclists and, and, uh, and other people who, you know, um, like the elderly, tons of tons of different people that, that the effects trickle down.
And the one thing that, you know, that he mentioned in, in our interview with him, that, that just has stuck with me is just that everyone, whether they're able-bodied or disabled, or, or like whoever, whoever you are, whether you're rich, poor, or whatever, every single person is going to have some adverse event in their life. Something that is going to require some help from other people and probably your employer at some point. And it's not clear when that is. And our policies right now are designated for, we will help you if it falls into a very specific category that we have defined early on, right? If your adverse event happens, you know, if family member gets sick and you've happened to work for the company for five years, well, congratulate you're available for a sabbatical, and you can take that time to be with your family.
If it happens three years in, well, sorry, you're outta luck. And so this idea of just granting people, this blanket understanding is not only is it inclusive, but it helps sort of tamp down. It gives you a little bit of that. Like what the safety net is missing. It gives you this ability to say like, okay, if something happens, there are people there who will help me out. And I think that that really matters in instilling trust in an organization. I mean, that, that, that is how people in companies all the time. They, you know, try to say, oh, we're here to support you, how we want you to feel supported. We'll support people by giving them that, that actual thing that says, okay, I'm gonna walk this tightrope in my life. And if for some reason I fall off, there's, I'm not, you know, might still be bad, but I'm not going to be, you know, ruined by this in some way. And, and I think that that's an undercurrent in so many elements of American life right now of people who just feel like there is nothing there to catch them if they go down.
ELISE:
It's wild. And then it, you know, it and inspires a lot of the behavior that you guys talk about in the book around productivity culture, performative work in times of anxiety or stress. And this need to sort of evidence like, I'm here, I'm working. We then start scheduling more meetings and being more, making more busy work for a lot of people, um, in a way that's just not helpful, and sort of sends us on this downward spiral of tedious, empty days. Instead of, instead of feeling like we have the agency and autonomy to sort of be like, oh, I'm in a really intense workflow, and I'm gonna go at it for 10 hours and I'm gonna do essentially a week's worth of work. I mean, that's sort of how I personally work. I've never been able to sort of corral it properly and confine it it's either I am on, or I am off, um, which doesn't really necessarily work in a normal structure.
And I think in all of your research, I'm curious, and I know you talk about sort of, is it a, a New Zealand corporation or entity that has really figured this out? How do you, how can companies start planning with individuals around sort of “What done looks lik”e to quote Brené Brown, but what is their job and what, what are the deliverables? What are the appropriate KPIs so that people can be like, I'm actually achieving what I said. And then it doesn't really matter where I am when I do it, or how much time it takes me, as long as the work is what the work needs to be. And at the level that's required. Like how do we start changing work culture in that way?
ANNE HELEN:
Well, I'll say like moving kind of backwards in, in the question to looking at the example of, um, the New Zealand Trust Company. Trust our, like, it's like very old fashioned sort of company, like a staid company that implemented successfully implemented the four day work week. And I love this example because I think a lot of times people think of any sort of newfangled work operation. It's like something that is uniquely available to startups. Right,And some like that, like, oh, this would never work for a bank. But this company, which is essentially a like very in-line with how we think of an old-fashioned institution of a bank, the CEO was like reading the Economist on a flight one time and read this thing about how like, if you reduce the amount of time that people are working, but you say we still wanna produce the same amount of work that your workforce actually sometimes produces more, and they're happier, and retention goes up and it's just overall a really good policy for your institution.
And you have to think creatively about how to implement it. That will work in a way that will work with the rhythms of your own institution, but it's possible. And this guy just happens to be like an innovative thinker in charge of an old fashioned institution and was like, let's give it a try. And like that decision on the top. And he got, then he got buy-in from like the upper executives from different outposts of the organization across New Zealand. And then that trickled down too. And so you have to have someone, I think on top, who is on board with this idea that less work can be better work. And that, if we have very clear expectations about the work that is expected, and we say, if you can get those done, then you have this extra time, then people will do it.
And even have increased productivity. Right. Um, and you know, in the book, we talk a little bit about like, what to do if your organization is not necessarily on board with this, right. If the upper levels are not on board. And how you can start with something as simple as like asking your manager to sit with you and revisit your job description. Because I think a lot of people have, if they have been with an organization more than a year or so, there is some description drift. They've taken on responsibilities that were not in their original job description. So even just saying something as, but seemingly benign, it's like, let's take a look at my job description and see if we can have it mirror, what I'm actually doing is a great way for any employee to revisit with their direct manager, what they are actually doing and what they are responsible for. Does that make sense?
ELISE:
No, absolutely. And I think, you know, you touched on this too. Um, I don't remember. It was like Keyes. I mean, I think it was like a lot of, of at the advent of technology, there was this idea, this fantasy, what proved to be a fantasy that was legitimate idea, which I think we've kind of forgotten, which was that this technology that we have is supposed to enable us to condense our work, to minimize, to make us more efficient to do less work so that we would have more time to sort of be with our families and our communities and, and ideate. And instead it's like, oh, you're more efficient. Now we have like all this more time to plant with work. We’re not built for that.
ANNE HELEN:
Right. Well, and I think like the most vivid example, and this is included in part in the book is when these automation technologies were really spreading in the office in the 1970s, say there was a real pushback from secretarial workers who were unionized in some loose and some solid ways, pushing against the toxicity, the actual health toxicity of some of these new technologies. Like they hadn't figured out how to make the monitors on computers so that they wouldn't give people headaches all the time. Or they hadn't out how the chemicals, um, and radiation like different things associated with like Xerox machines. Weren't making people feel like physically ill. And I, this seems very odd I think to us now, now that we don't think of like anything of putting our phone under our pillow when we sleep.
But at the time it was actually making secretaries feel like shit a lot. And so they were pushing back and a lot of the executives were like, no, it is so amazing that now, you know, you used to be expected to do 10 reports a day, right. To type up 10 reports a day. And now you can do that in half the time. And the secretaries were like, yeah. But then you expect us to do another 10. And there was no consideration of like, yes, you're doing it faster, but there's still a real mental exhaustion associated with doing double of those reports. And no one thought, oh, well maybe because they're doing more reports, that they should be paid more. And, or what if we just like, had them do the same amount of reports and, and had them work less right. Or had everyone work less, it's always been in service of more profits instead of more time for the individual.
ELISE:
There's just no way of correlating effort and time and concentration with output. I mean, I think we all know it's like you can sit and work in a really concentrated way for two hours and just blow your energetic wad, like you're done, you're, you know, you're cooked. And then you sit there and look busy for yeah six hours.
ANNE HELEN:
Um, you're just like email, like clicking between browsers and emailing.
ELISE:
Right. Um, and taking care of everything that you now don't have time. And then you're haunted. It's, it's a, it's a very insidious loop. Going back to the Perpetual Guardian. I also of their idea, which I think every workplace that should adopt where they would install flags at their workspaces, red, yellow, or green, um, so that individuals could indicate whether they were available to chat, which I think is brilliant as someone who like, when I was in an office, I could be both the office pest and also the office introvert. And you know, it's hard when people are, when you're interrupting, people's intense workflows. So what do you, think's gonna happen? I'd love to hear from both of you. If you could prop offer a prophecy about what you think work post COVID is going to look like, is it gonna be a snap back? I know so many of my friends have scattered to, to the country.
CHARLIE:
So I think that a lot of people are setting this up in this false binary of, you know, we are either all going back to the office and we're gonna be like, well, that was a fun experiment. And it's just like, it's over. And we don't learn anything from it. Or his idea that like, we all gonna be work like working from home and in like in 10 years, like there won't even be an office and you'll like, regale your grandchildren with the story of this weird time we all used to go into a building. I think both of those ae false because I think that work has to be collaborative at times. And then it also works so much better, you know, when it can be done in an isolated, flexible manner. So I think there, we end up, we will end up in a, in a hybrid situation, which unfortunately happens to be sort of the highest degree of difficulty to pull off.
I think this is like a negotiation that takes place it, and negotiation's like, you know, a, a nice way of putting it, but I think it's gonna be this like, kind of struggle for, you know, five to 10 years of us figuring out what the equilibrium is, and it's gonna vary from company to company and there's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be unequally distributed, and it's going to be, you know, unequal in the amount of fairness and autonomy that workers get, you know, like sort of high labor power tech employees are gonna get the best version of it. And there's gonna be people who get the eye tracking software that, you know, it just like, kind of is the worst possible version of it. And we're going to need to, you know, be mindful of that and try to, you know, fix those inequalities with it.
But I think what is rather profound and meaningful about this moment is that, and it kind of comes back to what we talked about earlier. It's this notion that for so long employees have wanted flexibility and part of it is because they can see all this, all these technological tools that grant it, right? Like, okay, I'm connected to my devices all the time. I can do my work from anywhere. So now I want, I want, you know, the affordances of that, I want that opportunity. And then they were told by employers time and time again, if you leave like the office is the thing that holds all this together. If you pull that thread and leave the office, the whole thing unwinds. Company culture starts to go away or become toxic productivity drops. We just did this really fascinating societal experiment where we found out that, that wasn't true.
And people are looking at that. And it's this sort of like opening of a lot of people's minds to say, well, if that was bullshit, what else is about the way that I've been doing this? And the way that I've been told specifically by employers, that this is the only way to do it. And so that, like kernel, that's a really hard thing to put back, that sort of shift in mindset. And I think that that is where you will start to see more and more, even if it isn't, directly related to remote work versus it's this sort of skepticism that is breeding, and this understanding of maybe I need to challenge some of, some of these, you know, of these quote unquote first principles of working. And that I think is going to be the, the legacy of this, regardless of whether it has to do with where you work, it's gonna be how we work.
ANNE HELEN:
I mean, Charlie, just like, did the slam dunk, we sometimes talk about in interviews is like, one of us is, uh, the person who like, is saying like smart, okay. Things. And then the other person, like it like jumps down from the top rope of the wrestling ring and like, does the, does the really good answer?
CHARLIE:
To be fair. I rarely get to be that person. So I was pretty, I was pretty jazzed about this, this opportunity to come off the top rope with the, you know, the people's elbow.
ANNE HELEN:
That's exactly what just happened. Um, I think the only thing that I would add, and this is totally in, in, uh, building on what Charlie said is that it's like, it's gonna take some hard work and it's gonna not be, it's gonna be messy. Right? Like flexible work is messy to figure out. And I hope that we have some tolerance for that process of figuring it out. The only other thing I would also add, is that so much of our, the future of, of figuring out how all of this works is really dependent on us figuring out some really vital care systems. Yeah. Right. So the childcare system is broken, right. It is a market failure and it demands investment from the federal level. So we have to continue to make that happen. Right. And we also have to figure out elder care because I think that we are staring down this tunnel, this abyss of like what elder care, the, the reality of elder care is going to look like as Boomers continue to age.
And I do not mean this in, at all, like a, a like coarse way. It's just, it's a reality that Gen X has been dealing with what it's like to be the sandwich generation for a long time. And I think that as more and more people are dealing with that reality and the options just continue to decrease. Like, we're just, we're going to have a crisis where people either aren't getting the care that they need, or there's too much reliance on individuals and no safety net for how you can continue to provide elder care for someone in your family and, and continue to work. Right. Like we're just not figuring this stuff out. I think that right now the attitude is like, well, someone will make it work. And usually that is the unpaid work of women. Or the, the poorly paid work of women of color. So we need to figure that stuff out and that needs to happen on a societal level. It can't happen on a corporate level, or it can, but it's not complete. And it can't just happen on the individual level.
ELISE:
Preach. Okay. That was pretty good too. No, I think, you know, it's, it's about too bringing the humanity back into the office and this idea, and you can apply it to any system, medicine, we’re moving past again, past binaries or this idea that all people are effectively the same and, um, starting to recognize like how personalized nutrition needs to be and how personalized work needs to be. Um, and that we all deserve..this is where we're spending the foundation of our days and our lives. And we all deserve bespoke treatment and a plan, and guidance, and management and management is not a great word, but support, as we consider sort of how to use our very limited time here. Um, so anyway, thank you for your book. I it's impressive that you guys got the, I mean, obviously you had a head start on this work from home concept. But it's still impressive that you guys got this out so fast.
ANNE HELEN:
Well, yeah, it was, it involved, you know, a lot of destruction of work life balance while we were writing it in like the two months of real concentrated writing time. But that's something that I think, we wanna talk about more to moving forward is like, sometimes it's not just about like finding balance within your day, like flexibility within your day. It's also about like rhythms within your week, and rhythms within your year, right? Yeah. Like, we were talking about earlier, like a concentrated burst of work for a couple weeks, a couple months, and then like these recovery and recuperation times as well.
ELISE:
Yeah. I think if so I think that that's so important and there really are so few, I mean, obviously there are jobs in various industries, if you're a waiter, you gotta physically be there. And there's a certain boundary around that shift if you're a receptionist, et cetera, but so many jobs aren't, aren't built like that. And so we need a new paradigm.
ANNE HELEN:
Well, and even, you know, sometimes I think that we discount the amount of jobs that are non-office jobs that are more seasonal. Like, you know, I have friends who've worked like the fish canneries in Alaska, where you go up there for a summer and you work really, really hard and it sucks, but they pay you really, really well. Yeah. And then you spend the rest of the year doing what you want, right. There are different models for this as well.
CHARLIE:
And, and the one thing I would say about the, we, we, we tried to get at in this, in this book is that like, we need all of those, those social safety net things. Like if there's one, if there's one thing I'm pessimistic about it's that none of this, none of this, the, the real meat of the change can happen without, you know, like buy in from the executive level. And also this, like, we need to, you know, it has to be buttressed by policy and like real changes to social safety nets and, and that's, that's really difficult, but the one sort of thing that I, I think we, we hang a little bit of hope on is this idea that if we, if, if the ones, if all of us, with the privilege to do this type of knowledge work, that is that doesn't require us to be in there or be on the front lines in some kind of way, if we can find ways to, you know, reorient and reframe the way that we think of, of our jobs and the way that we conceptualize ourself, not, not as like this, you know, lofty vocation, but as labor and, and reorient ourselves and have, you know, more of a community focus and, and just have more time to give ourselves to things that we care about, including our communities.
That's a small thing. It's not gonna change the entire world immediately forever, but it's also really meaningful to reposition this. Like we are on this you know, work treadmill, and it's so individualist in the mindset that it makes it really hard to have a collective spirit. And I think that's really like one of the hopes of this is that like, yes, it is for a, a, a privileged sector of the workforce, but like, it is still just so important in something that we can do to help reframe this. And hopefully, you know, like make, make the help make changes in the world instead of just like running on the treadmill and being like, well, they can, they can fend for themselves cause I don't have time for this. Right. Um, so I, I, I just, just, I wanted to add that in there that that's something we're really hopeful for.
ELISE:
I think sometimes about this women Anne Emerson who I work with occasionally as an additional form of therapy. She does muscle testing, which is strange but cool, as she gets at your limting self-conscious beliefs. And she told me that I’m never allowed to take any work…so besides writing my book and doing my podcast, I do some consulting projects. And she said I’m never allowed to be paid by the hour, because the way that I work, and I don’t think I’m unusual…I think a lot of people, particularly people who work min more…I don’t even think I would say it’s more creative people i think we all process in this way. But I can deliver in 15 minutes sometimes. But I work in really intense bursts, and I don’t think I’m unusual, but to do that, and amortie it over eight hours, would destroy me. But we don’t really get credit for all that unconscious programming that we do. And I remember interviewing Srini Pillay, a psychiatrist at Harvard, fascinating guy. And he wrote a book called Tinker, Tailor, Doodle, Try or something like that. And he talks about the power of the unconscious mind. And I think our conscious minds, we can process 60/bits a second. And the unconscious mind can process like 11 million/bits, something staggering. We don’t really prioritize that in work culture. So my wish for the future is that we start to allow for the natural rhythms in our lives, so that we can maintain that energetic balance and not let workplaces destroy us.