Front Burner - Can work-from-home go on forever?

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

The pandemic-era work-from-home experiment has gone on for over two years now and for some, it’s proven to be effective. For others, the isolation that comes with remote work hasn’t been easy. As some employers ask their workers to finally return, we dive into the debate around working from home — and what a successful hybrid model could look like. We’re talking to writer Anne Helen Petersen, co-author of Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey, I'm Jamie Poisson. It's not in your best interest to work at home. I know it's a hassle to come to the office. But like, you know, if you work, if you're just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom,

is that the work life you want to live? Right? Don't you want to feel part of something? So the Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell was on this podcast called Diary of a CEO recently, where he shared some opinions about working from home. If we don't feel like we're part of something important, what's the point? It's not, you're not just doing this to get a pay, if it's just a paycheck, then it's like, then what have you reduced your life to? Now before these statements, Gladwell wasn't exactly known for being an office guy. In 2005, in a column for The Guardian, he said he hates desks. In a 2010 op-ed for The Washington Post, he described himself as someone who works in coffee shops

for a living. So People Online had a lot of thoughts on his news stance on the issue. Doesn't he work from home? Who's he? Where's the big philosopher office? You write books. You're not commuting hours every day to go write your books in the book writing office. That's not how it works. Here's the thing, Malcolm. People don't want to feel like part of some family at work. They don't need to come to a gray cubicle to feel part of something or commute five to 10 hours a week or only see their family two hours a day. Gladwell's comments might have struck a real chord because some employers are trying to get workers to return to the office right now or they already have and of course many people don't really want to go back or at least they want

the option of a more flexible hybrid kind of thing today as pressure builds we're talking about the pros and cons of working from home and the potential for hybrid arrangements with Anne Helen Peterson. She's the co-author with her husband of the book Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. Hey Anne, thank you so much for coming back onto FrontBurner. It's great to have you. Hi, so happy to be here. So before we begin, I want to start with addressing the type of worker we're talking about here. Not everyone, obviously, can work from home, and it is in many ways a privilege to be able to do so.

So when we talk about working from home, who are the workers we're really talking about in this episode? You know, sometimes this group is referred to as knowledge workers, and I really dislike that phrase because everyone uses knowledge, right, to do their jobs. The way I think I often think about it is as portable work. So work that is not necessarily wed to a certain place. And there's a lot of different types of work that falls into this overall bucket. You know, in some of them are hourly paid jobs, things like people who work in what we used to think of as call centers that is oftentimes being done in more remote and hybrid setups. But then it's also a lot of people who work in tech or people who are freelance in other capacities.

So lots of different types of worker, but work that can be taken from one place to another. And just like there are lots of different types of workers, there's so much that we could pull apart here. This is like a big conversation, but I was hoping that we could jump into it maybe by parsing a few scenarios with you, all of which I've heard from people quite recently. And I'd love to get your thoughts. So let's start with parents when we're talking about the pros and cons of working from home, particularly mothers. Our producer Ashley spoke with a writer and podcaster here, Emile Niazzi, and her position is that she would never go back to the office if she doesn't have to. I will never go back to office work if I can help it. I mean, look, the school day is nine to three. The workday is nine to five.

It's always been incompatible. It's always put women in particular in this impossible situation where we have to always be choosing between our careers and our families. And it's why there's all this pay inequity and why there's still so much inequality. And, you know, we should not have to choose. And I think that remote work can be, and for me certainly has been, this huge empowerment tool. It has freed up, you know, my time in a way that is significant. And it allows me to still get all of my work done, but also be present for my children in a way that just was not possible pre-pandemic. I know that you spoke to a ton of mothers for a piece that you recently wrote for Bloomberg. And I thought it was super interesting because it was actually quite complex. And I

wonder if you could tell me about what these women had to say to you. Yeah. You know, I'll preface this by saying that people reacted to the headline, which was that, you know, some women thought that working from home would solve a lot of problems or like be a way to quote unquote, have it all. But really there's a dark side. And I think some people reacted to that by thinking that I was anti-flexible or remote work, which if you knew anything about my previous work is very much not the case. But I think that now that we are two, two and a half years into this grand experiment in some ways of what happens when you allow a ton of people to work from home in industries where people had previously been very bullish on the fact that like,

oh, there's no way we could do this, right? But if you allow this to happen, right now what we're seeing is some initial long-term effects of that flexibility. And I think what I saw happen again and again in my interviews with women who particularly have, they have flex themselves and their partners do not have flex in their schedules. They can't really move it around or they have flex and they're just not taking it as much. We don't have like great stats yet on the gender divide and who is taking up the option to work flexibly. But I have spoken to a lot of people who've said that like, yes, the men in our office, there's more of a pressure to be in.

So these women who are making their days more flexible and are able to do things like pick up the kids from school and things that have made their lives easier in a lot of different ways, what's happening as well is that they are picking up that additional slack in addition to doing their full-time job. So one of the ways that I put it in the piece was that these women are becoming one person safety nets for their entire family. I really loved reading this piece in part personally, because we're making the transition back to the office of CBC. And my husband was working from home well before the pandemic. And it also made me realize that I need to have a good conversation with him because I can see myself doing that. Like,

oh, well, you're working from home. You go pick our two-year-old up at daycare who's sick. And then we forget that my partner has a full-time job too. He also has to do all of that work in a day as well. Yeah. And I think that's such a great point, right? Just like we should be expecting organizations and companies to be really iterative and responsive as they're trying to come up with these back-to-the-office or hybrid or fully remote plans, people and families need to also be responsive and iterative and continually coming back to say like, okay, how are we doing now?

How are we doing now about how the division of labor is panning out? Another group that I wanted to talk to you about and a group that I've actually been thinking a lot about are young people, people who are just like starting their careers, maybe even interns. They might be worried that you about and a group that I've actually been thinking a lot about are young people, people who are just like starting their careers, maybe even interns. They might be worried that in like a work from home setup, they're not getting face time with their colleagues or bosses or mentorship. And do you think there's a point there like that being in an office is important to make an impression that will help you further your career? I think if we are still conceiving of the office and the way the office functions as a place where FaceTime is the primary way that you

learn about company culture, learn the ropes, and also that you make an impression and impress people, then yeah, this is a real struggle, right? Because people who have been with an organization for longer have already made that impression, have already internalized the company culture, they just have a better setup to succeed. With that said, I think that companies have to acknowledge that you're going to continue to have new employees. If you are having a flexible setup for the foreseeable future, you have to come up with ways in which to onboard people and to cultivate belonging within the company culture that acknowledge that we are no longer a presence first organization. organization. And right now, I think because of the fact that so much of the first two years was really just a mad scramble. And then also so much of like this past year has been delaying back to the office, figuring out when it's going to happen, like just trying to figure out policy, like the very nuts and bolts that only now are companies really starting to grapple with

these more sophisticated questions of what are we going to do to help cultivate that sense of belonging with new employees? And also, how are we going to cultivate better hybrid management strategies? Like, what could that look like, I guess? What could that look like? You know, I think that management is a very difficult thing to be good at just generally. Oftentimes, the people who are promoted within an organization are the people who are good at their particular jobs, right? So let's say they are very good at processing information and inputting and strategizing. Those are not necessarily the skills that equip one to become a really good manager, right? Management requires a lot of empathy, a ton of listening, things that are not

necessarily like the hallmarks of someone that stands out within a team. And so I think that figuring out how do we cultivate those skills, first of all, both in person management and then also online management, but then also just acknowledging that it's like a skill that needs to be cultivated. Like we need to talk about how to be better at this instead of just saying, well, I guess like I check in every once in a while, that sort of thing. The other thing I'll add to, especially when it comes to onboarding, is that a really huge help for people in these onboarding situations and something that people are scared of losing is informal mentorship, right? Like someone at the office who kind of takes you under your wing, their wing and shows you how things are done, kind of whispers to you in the background, like, oh, this is who dislikes who, and this is how we do this thing. And this is when it's okay to leave all those sorts of things. When you try to do it online, oftentimes it's just like very, I'm pairing this person with

this other person without taking anything out of their plate, without thinking about who really likes to do this, who's really good at this and actually takes a lot of enjoyment in providing these sort of really like empathetic and listening sort of relationships. There is someone at every organization. There are multiple someones at every organization who's really good at that. So figuring out who that person is and taking things off of their plate so that they have more space to provide that skill to the people who are being onboarded. what about the argument that like magic can just happen in the hallways right like mentorship for sure but also work right that that of course you can try and prepare and organize

this kind of stuff but you know you know, sometimes it's just, it just sort of happens organically and we're taking that away. Yeah. This is a really prevalent myth. It's also a false one. So there has been some pretty excellent research published in Harvest Business Review and other places about how many spontaneous interactions that lead to, you know, collaboration and new ideas and creativity, how often that actually happens. And it's actually pretty seldom that it does, but it's just enough to uphold this idea in people's minds. And they can often point to like a single story, maybe in 10 years of working where they're like, I was walking down the hallway and I ran into this guy and we talked about this. And then it became a new idea.

It's not enough to completely change the way anyone is doing anything at any moment, but it is enough for people who already want to uphold the status quo to point to it as like, this is what we're going to lose if we move out of the office. So I think like, how can you figure out ways that you can foster creativity and spontaneity in informal interactions online? So there is still a possibility. You do not have to be present all week in order to do that. I've heard some people talk about this and I wonder what you think about it. It's something that I've worried about too. Like this idea that people are now coming back to the

office for one or two days a week. Some people are choosing to come back more than that, right? And do you feel like maybe there's a risk there of creating almost like two streams of workers where the people that actually show up to the office and interact with management more will just end up being like promoted more just because they're right in front of people's faces. I've actually like heard managers kind of talk about this. Oh, for sure. Yes, absolutely. And, you know, one of my favorite sources for data on people's approach and understanding of going back into the office and all this sort of thing is Slack's Future Forum, which you can Google and find. They do quarterly surveys of over 10,000 workers in six countries.

And they have recently started surveying people on what they call and others also call proximity bias. So this understanding of the people who are closer to leadership specifically, but also this could apply to managers simply by the fact that they are present, right? That you are seeing them work more, that they are going to have more opportunities, that they're going to have more promotions, like that they are just going to be seen as harder workers just generally. And I think this is a very, very real and merited fear. We haven't yet seen the data on how it is actually affecting offices, like what's going to happen. It's going to take a couple of years to see that bear out. But smart offices and organizations have already figured out, we have to protect against this because it is, I don't want to say natural. It is an inclination that is going to have problems down the road,

especially since the people who prefer working from home the most are people of color, mothers, and women in general, right? So you have people who are already underrepresented in the workforce and especially underrepresented as you go through the echelons of power within an organization. And those people are going to be affected by this proximity bias. So what do you do? There's a couple different strategies. One that I've seen some offices do is that they have back to the office maximums. So you are not allowed into the office just to respond to email. You cannot be a person who comes in five days a week. Like that is just not an option, right? So they're trying

to equalize it in that way. And another thing is trying to figure out like, okay, if we know this is a thing, how do we account for it? How do we drive this home again and again, when we are thinking about promotions, when we're thinking about evaluations, all of these things. How are we trying to be incredibly cognizant about this bias as we think about work or performance? I'm going to go. as entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years.

I've talked to millions of people, and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I was listening to you on another podcast on the Ezra Klein podcast talk about how you met your husband at work. I also met my

husband at work too. And what you said really resonated with me that like maybe one of the reasons why you met at work is because you had like quite unhealthy work practices because you were constantly at work all the time. So your whole world is work. Yes. And I think that, you know, people who have strong friendships outside of work oftentimes cultivated those friendships back when they were in high school themselves in this position of like, it's really hard to make friends. Yeah, that's true. But part of the reason it's really hard to make friends is because our lives have been cannibalized by work, especially people who are in salary jobs where work can seep into all of these different parts of your life and you can try to prove your excellence at any hour of any day. Earlier, you mentioned that there are offices that look like don't come back five days a week because they're trying to create more of an equilibrium here. But what about the people who

are dying to get back to the office because maybe they work in like a one bedroom apartment. It makes them feel like kind of crazy, right? Like that their home is their work. There's no physical separation. I totally get that. And, you know, I used to live in Brooklyn and it's tiny little railroad apartment where it would have been really, really difficult to stay there and work the entire time. And I think one problem that we have right now and that we've had over the last six, nine months is that we're still struggling to figure out how safe we feel in spaces outside of our homes. Right. So I think people want to leave their homes and that's great. And I totally get it. I will also like leaving my home to work on some days, but we have an imbalance. I think right now of how many spaces are available. I think that that will change over time. And also

as people start to think about like, Oh, I could go over to my friend's house and work next to them. Right. Like this is, I have this post in my newsletter that people often point to as like a revelation point that like, I can work with my friend. I did it this past Tuesday with my best friend. It was lovely. Sort of on that note, I think, you know, maybe what people would think about when they hear that is like, well, you're just going to like hang out and talk to your friend the whole time and you're not going to be productive. And that's no good. Right. But what would you say to that argument? And this great experiment that we've been in for two years, what do we know about what working from home has done for productivity? The productivity information is kind of interesting because the stats went way up in

the beginning. And that's, I think, because people were very interested in showing how productive they were for one, right? Like in being like, how do I evidence that I am working really hard? Also, if we can like mentally go back to that period of time in the early pandemic, there was a lot of fear that the economy was going to drop out and that there were going to be a lot of layoffs. There were a lot of layoffs. So people were trying to evidence their value, I think. And then also there was very little else to do, right? Especially those first like three, four months. Oh my God, especially once you made it to the end of Netflix. You're like, well, I guess I'll just work now.

Right, or the weekend, you're like, ah. And I'm also talking a lot too about um people who didn't have small children um or people who had small children who were totally stressed about the fact that they felt like they weren't working enough so they were working a lot of additional hours over compensating it yeah yeah I think that like a lot of places are seeing that workers are right about like a little more productivity, not like an outstanding or super impressive amount more of productivity. But particularly for people who are replacing their commute with work, there's just more hours. They're just doing more. And I think that if you want to protect against burnout with this increase in work, companies need to be very thoughtful about how you can engage practices

that protect against that burnout, against attrition and job loss and people just being worse at their jobs and hating their jobs. And one of the things we talk about in our book is guardrails, which are different than boundaries because boundaries can be broken at any point, right? Like when everyone's like, oh, I'm trying to work on a boundary between work and life, like that is a boundary to be broken to prove excellence. But a guardrail is something that's put in place by the organization. You know, it's structural. So like, what would that be? A great example is we do not send emails after 6 PM. Right. And that might mean someone in the organization might take part of the afternoon to pick up their kid and be with their kid and send emails in the evening, like address emails go through their inbox in the evening, but they are

very mindful about, you know, about future sending it. You know, you can mark an email to be sent in the morning instead of when you are, when you're looking at it. And by doing that, you are decreasing the amount of work information that is going towards everyone else in the organization. Because even if you say, don't worry about this until the morning, if an email is sent at 10 PM, what the person who receives it is thinking is like, oh, am I not as on top of things as this person who's sending emails at 10 PM? I should respond and evidence that I am actually just as on top of this. And it, I think, allows this overwork ethos

to proliferate. And so it's not just that, oh, this is our policy. It's also that if someone does it, they are taken aside by management and people say, you know, this is not what we do here. And this is also something that is modeled from the top echelons of the organization. So like the CEOs and leaders, that sort of thing, all the way down to new hires. Wow. Imagine. I can't. I really can't imagine. That sounds lovely. During this conversation, you've been talking about a more flexible kind of hybrid way of working a lot, right? But just paint more of a picture for me of what it could look like. Because it could definitely also really suck, right?

Like hybrid work arrangements. Like why do I want to go in on Tuesday if no one else is going in on Tuesday? So I just have to sit in my office and sit on Zoom all day, right? Like, that's no fun. week, but have no, have not figured out what they actually want people to be in person for, right? Like what, what do we want people to be there for? Is it for, we have a big meeting as a company? Is it to do collaborative work where we are all together? Is it to meet at the beginning of the week as a sort of anchor day, and then to figure out what we're doing for the week and kind of let that trickle through the rest of the week. They just haven't figured it out. And so people come in about two times a week, but it's not overlapping with other people on their team with other people

that they like or know. Like, it's just, it's just, you, you show up and you're like, I guess I'm did my hair and put on nicer clothes and commuted to send emails from the office. Yeah. It doesn't have it doesn't feel like it has a purpose. And I think that when you have a policy that seems arbitrary and meaningless and groundless, right, like there's no evidence for why it is happening, that creates incredible resentment and distrust. That creates incredible resentment and distrust. Yeah. I mean, basically you're talking about different kinds of work, like a very purposeful way of looking at work.

Like you're going to come into the office, you're going to do this kind of work. We're all going to stand around a whiteboard. We're going to brainstorm. And then everybody's going to go home. They're doing a different kind of work. Maybe they're going to research and do the reading and whatever they need to do in like a quiet space. Like just thinking about it as, as that you'd need different places to do different kinds of work. Is that, is that fair? Totally. Well, I sometimes I even think about it like in my own

home, I have different places that I go to do different types of work. Like I oftentimes check emails and scroll Twitter in one place in my house. And then, you know, my partner knows that when he finds me sitting in the bed, that I am like deep in writing a draft. Like it's where I go to do more concentrated writing and creative work. And so that sort of thing, like it would make sense that also that extends to like, there's some work that is best done in these more collaborative spaces with other people. It demands presence. And then there's other work that doesn't demand that, that people should be free to do wherever is free and safe for them to do it. And thank you so much for this. This is a lot of fun. Thank you.

Thank you. This is great. fun. Thank you. Thank you. Great. All right, that to cbc.ca slash podcasts.