Plain English with Derek Thompson - The Big Winners and Losers From the Remote Work Revolution

Episode Date: June 17, 2022

Most news is all about the immediate present. For instance, everything that is happening in the economy right now could be a historical anecdote in five years. But sometimes, norms change—and they stay changed for decades. I think the remote work revolution is just that sort of a paradigm shift. Here's a stat that should blow your mind: Office occupancy across the U.S. is still just 43 percent of its pre-pandemic high. That means that white-collar offices have had a worse recovery than basically any other economic category—worse than restaurants, bars, stadiums, and even movie theaters. But who is remote work actually working for? What are offices good for? And how will the remote work revolution change the way we relate to each other and the places we live? Today’s guest is Julia Hobsbawm, the author of 'The Nowhere Office,' a new book about the remote work revolution that combines history and reporting to ask a big, beautiful philosophical question: Is remote work making our lives better, or worse? Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Julia Hobsbawm Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up, guys, Rachel Lindsay here, and I am teaming up with your favorite Ringer podcasters to deliver the Bravo drama and news that you've been craving on morally corrupt. It's the show about all things Bravo. From the Housewives to Summer House and everything in between, we'll be mentioning it all every week. Check it out on Spotify and the ringer.com. Today's episode is about the remote work revolution. So for the last few episodes, we've been covering the economic, situation in America, which is incredibly complicated and confusing and important, but also a bit of a

bummer, to be honest. But a point I should make in the show more often is that most bad news is short-term bad news, because even if stocks fall into bare territory even more, and even if the housing market does a U-turn, and retail sales decline, and the auto market shrinks, and inflation sucks for another year to 18 months, and we have a technical recession for half a year, all of that is probably going to end. Everything that we're going through right now will probably in three years' time be a historical anecdote.

But not everything is a short-term historical anecdote. Sometimes revolutions happen. Things change, and they stay changed for decades. And often, these paradigm shifts are technological in nature. Like, you can draw a line in the historical record and say, here was the time before cars,

and then here was the time after cars, and it changed cities and transportation, and everything. You can say the same about, electricity or smartphones or computers. And I do not think it's hyperbolic to say that the remote work revolution is that kind of a revolution. Decades from now, we're going to be talking about how remote work is still a thing and how its ripple effects are touching geography and the future of cities and the nature of commutes and where people live and how families come together. I think remote work is a massive, massive phenomenon. Now, a quick half step back in terms of

of history, you know, for 50 to 100 years, white-collar work was dominated by this thing that had to be invented called the office. And yes, the office had to be invented in the 1800s. Do you think the Mongol Empire had an office? You think they built Machu Picchu or Meso-American Ziggurots out of an office? No. Work is old. Offices are new. And anything that can be invented can, and perhaps should, be reinvented. So I have a hot take that I'm going to push on this show that the pandemic disrupted the office more than just about any other institution in America. And yes, that's a hot take.

But try to think of something as significant and widespread as the office that's been disrupted more by the last two years. I mean, restaurants are back, bars are back, travels back, hotels, airplanes, sports stadiums, even movie theaters have recovered on a ticket sale basis more than offices have recovered on a share of employees back to work basis. So all this brings us to this podcast. And what I want to do here, it's very simple to say kind of hard to do.

I want to ask the question, what is the job that offices do? What are offices good for? Who are offices good for? And who are offices bad for? And then, of course, in the flip side, how is remote work helping versus how is it hurting modern work? Today's guest is Julia Hobbsbaum.

She is the author of the Nowhere Office, which is a new book about the remote work revolution, which combines history and reporting, and most importantly, to me, philosophy. It asks a big, beautiful, philosophical question. Is remote work making our lives better or worse? Is remote work making work better or worse? If you have questions, comments, thoughts about the present or future of work, I would love to hear them. I would love to do many, many more episodes on this topic. Please send those questions, thoughts, and comments to plain English at Spotify.com. I'm Derek Thompson. And this is

Plain English. Julia Hobbsbaum, welcome to the podcast. Hello. Pleasure to be with you. So first, I want to situate ourselves. Right now, about 40% of white-collar workers have returned to the office in the U.S. That is lower than the relevant recovery in travel, lower than the recovery hotels, lower than the recovery in sports game attendance. It's even lower than the recovery in movie theaters. And a lot of people talk about movie theaters as if those are some kind of Jurassic technology. Right now, it seems to me that you have several different options, several different strategies that are branching off from this challenge right now of what do we do about the remote work present. And I call this the Twitter Apple Musk trio. You have companies

like Twitter that have basically changed their entire corporate policy and said, we are remote work first. You want to work from home, you can work from home, we're not going to bug you. Number two, you have companies like Apple that are trying to get workers back into the office on a hybrid basis, but they keep pushing off the back-to-office date because you keep having these new variants. They say, okay, well, back-to-office will happen in one month, two-month, three months, but that reality never pulls forward into the present. And then finally, you have people like Elon Musk, that have basically said, everybody, get your ass back to the office. So that's my 30,000 foot summary of where we are.

So many interesting spill-off effects that I want to talk to you about, but that's my square one. You have this 40% recovery in the office, followed by these three roads diverging in the woods, Twitter, Apple, Musk. Julia, you've done way more work on this subject than I have. You've got this book. You've talked to executives all over the world about remote work. How would you summarize where we are today?

everyone is experimenting is hybrid too hot, is hybrid too cold, or is hybrid just right? And the reality is that what I think is the overriding context is that the corporate world has lived with norms that have been global for 75 years since the end of the last global reset, the end of the Second World War, the beginning of the era which saw the rise quite literally of the skyscraper in the office. And that meant that from Seattle to Shanghai, there was a globalised norm around, roughly speaking, hours and recruitment and practice. And what I think is happening now is that there are no norms anymore. There are no rules. And that is fantastically challenging. I'd add another 40% stat to yours, which is that 40%, according to Nick Bloom of Stanford, who's done a lot of this data, 40% of people who are being asked back to work are non-compliant. In other words, what you have is a sort of serious power struggle happening between executives

and workers, the like of which we actually haven't seen since the origins of the trade union movement over a century ago. So it's a fantastically important riveting in the, transition moment. Yes, no, it's an amazing moment. I think this is one of the most interesting inflection points in the history of modern work. I mean, you've written about this. I love the concept of work history and the idea that so many different things that we assumed in 2018, 2019, and were just a part of the way things had always been, like the concept of a five-day work week, the concept of a nine-to-five day, the concept of a career. These were all incredibly

modern inventions. They had barely been around for 100 years. Like the word career, is barely a hundred years old. And so we are dealing with an inflection point that might just come around every century, every century and a half. And I really am just utterly fascinated by it. I want to talk about the winners and losers of office work versus remote work.

I don't think people talk about this enough when they evaluate the future of labor. I don't think there's a clear acknowledgement that the office worked really, really well for some people and terribly for others, and work from home works really, really well for some people and not so well for others. This is not like comparing democracy versus totalitarianism, something that's clearly pretty good and something that's clearly really bad.

This is comparing two things that are good or bad for different people. So let's start with the office, the before times. Who won in the office of 1950 to 2019? And who were the kind of people who lost out in the office culture of 1950 to 2019? I frame the nowhere office period of work as the fourth phase following the Second World War. And I would say that the era of 1945 to 1977 was what you might call the optimism years, Derek. The optimism years, the simplicity years of madmen, of the corner office were very much anchored and tethered to needing to go up several floors in an elevator or a lift, as I say, in England. into a place where the serried ranks of desks were massed, because that was where your kit was to do your work.

That then changed in about 1977 in what I would call the mezzanine years, epitomized by that rather wonderful dystopian novel, existential novel, really, of office life by Nicholson Baker. But that was an era in which you could almost physically feel work shifting and becoming intermediate. The issue of flexibility, of rights, of human resources, of all the things that we're now harking back to became visible. And of course, the technology moved closer to the person in the form of computers.

Then you had the co-working years that began in 2007, which is the direct antecedent to the nowhere office without the co-working years. that began with Tim Ferriss's extraordinary book The Four Hour Work Week, that began with Twitter, Airbnb, that began not long after 2007 with WeWork. Without that, and let's face it, without the internet, you wouldn't have had any of this chat

about the end of the office as we know it. And then you have this extraordinary, globally unifying, hard stop of the pandemic. And so suddenly my analysis is that you get this crystallization of a number of factors that were latent, that were aggravating workers, but they didn't have their voice in a weird way, slightly like me too. Everybody knew what was going on. And then suddenly everybody was talking about it and everyone was saying we'd had enough. Slightly like Black Lives Matter. And one of the things that really struck me researching this book, and one of the things that really struck me researching this book, and one of the things,

things that I think is defining the fact that it is never going to go back to how it was before is because minority groups, however you might define a minority group, but certainly people of ethnic minority and certainly women have said that they find the microaggressions and the cultures of workplaces mean that they don't want to just schlep back in as before. And that's what I think makes this such an interesting point of no return moment. Right. So what you're basically saying is like in the 1950s, 1960s, you had these optimism years, the madmen years. And it worked for some people. I would say it clearly worked for, you know, tall men with strong jaw lines who were incredibly charismatic and could use their tallness, their strong jaw lines and their charisma to rise the ranks within the office. It clearly worked for them, but it didn't necessarily work for the people that were forced to come into the office around them.

who didn't necessarily earn very much money and often did work that they weren't given credit for. They needed some way to achieve a certain amount of autonomy from these tall, strong jaw-lined bosses. And they needed two things. They needed a voice, and they needed technology to sort of break that tether from the office. They started to get their voice, the 1970s, 1980s,

and then they got their technology, computer technology, in the 1980s, 1990s. And then this moment that we saw in the last few years, they were able to use their voice and their technology and the fact of a pandemic to pull away from the office. And right now we're in a bit of a renegotiation period for what does the future of work look like. Who do you think the work-from-home reality

works best for? And who do you think it works least well for? I have my own theory that I'll just put out first. I think that extroverts overall do better in the office and that introverts overall do better working from home. Of course, there are exceptions to that rule, but that it's interesting to plot success in the office versus success in a work from home

along that psychological spectrum. Because at least in my experience, the people that are happiest working from home for whom those microaggressions in the office were most difficult to deal with, they tend to be people that are a little bit more interior, a little bit more introverted, and they have, by their own account,

by their own testimony, It's just been unleashed emotionally and productively by this work from home moment. Who do you think working from home works best for overall? One of the winners of this period has been people with, A, the talent and skills to be mobile in a very volatile labor market so they can sell their skills and services. In other words, good luck to those people. There's always hybrid haves and have-nots, as I put it. The second, frankly, is advocates like me,

who've pointed out that work was not so honey-bony great before the pandemic. You only have to look at the $300 billion a year cost. The American Association of Stress cited the 17.9 million British days lost, according to the health and safety executive, the way that the toxic workplace is immortalized in American culture to know that working in an office was not all it was cracked up to be. eulogized it during the pandemic and during lockdown. And we said, oh, you know, we all want water cooler, but let's keep it real here. The winners of people that recognize now that maybe

when you go into an office more purposefully for perhaps more immersive and less intensive periods of time to actually do stuff that needs to be done in an office and you shift away the things that can be done remotely or don't need to be done at all, that then everybody gains. One other winner cohort clearly is recruiters, actually. This has been a game changer for global recruitment because the fully remote market is real. And it means that you can have a much wider labor market. The losers, I think, are both politically those, if I can be rude, the dinosaurs of a generational bent. You know, I would include Mr. Musk for all of his.

brilliance in that. I would certainly include people like Lord Rees-Mogg in the UK, people who genuinely seem to believe that full-time presenteism, which I would largely regard as pointless, has to happen because they just can't conceptualise it to be different. So I would say, weirdly, they're losing, even though they think that they're imposing an edict that says, it's my way or the highway. Lusers are also property companies. I mean, it's becoming increasingly clear that even though initially the property rents dropped by 10% and then everybody scrambled and pivoted and sort of made like they were all wee works and you thought, oh, this is all going to get better. Actually, I would lay money that you're going to see overall a correction,

a downturn of something like 50% by 2025 of traditional office space. I want to put a pin in that because I really, really want to come back to the property aspect of this and the geographic aspect of this. That's going to be sort of the second half this conversation, some of the more interesting spillover effects of the remote work reality. Just to re-circle where we've been, you know, I think the ground zero for who stands to benefit in a work-from-home future or in companies that fully embrace the work-from-home future are something like a 45-year-old software engineer or marketing worker, someone who is immersed in the knowledge economy and relatively established within that company, right? They can keep their job that they used to have to commute

into a downtown area to do. They can keep it. But now for the same salary, they commute to their living rooms. That means they can do the same amount of work for the same amount of money, but less commuting, more time with their family. It is a win, win, win, across the board for them, especially if they are gifted at communicating with the colleagues over email in this sort of asynchronous way that people have to master if they're going to be successful at navigating the work from home economy. But I want to take the flip side of all of that. Let's imagine someone who is the opposite of all of that. Rather than be a 45-year-old mother or father for only established in a software or marketing company, they are a 22 or 23-year-old.

They are just starting in their company. And they start at this company that is fully remote, and they realize, oh, my God, my company is basically a group chat. I don't see my colleagues. I don't walk around my office. I am being onboarded onto a virtual organization that has no corporeal essence. Would you agree with the idea that it is particularly challenging for young people to get started at a company that has no physical presence and is basically a virtual thing that lives on group slack? I would say there are two types of worker that we need to factor in to the workplace of the future, which, by the way, will be very much more freelance than it ever was before. So the professional working classes, if you can call them that, who worked in the knowledge

economy that reached peak burnout before the pandemic, which is driving the Great Resignation, they... Well, just to be clear, it's not just driving the Great Resignation. The Great Resignation, you've mentioned there's a great sort of reassessment, and I agree there's a lot of white-collar workers that are reassessing the role of work in their life. That's definitely true. And that started before the pandemic. But the great resignation, at least as it applies to the American workforce, is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of lower income workers quitting their jobs in order to make more money on an hourly basis. And you look at where the quits are highest, it's restaurants, it's been retail. Those are clearly jobs that are done by lower income workers rather than higher income knowledge economy workers. Although the data coming out of, say, McKinsey is that something like 25% of women over a certain age are now considering leaving their jobs. And PWC has just done a data set of 55,000 people across 44 countries,

and 26% of those workers say that they are considering moving at some point imminently, and they cite toxic workplace de facto factors. So just to that point. I'm not questioning those, I'm not questioning those surveys, but the verb you used was consider. And so I just think it's important to, as you've already done in this interview, disentangle two phenomena. The great resignation, the great quit is a phenomenon of lower income workers quitting jobs and retail and restaurants disproportionately to get more work. A great, let's call it, reconsideration is existing alongside that in the white collar workforce. It might be disproportionately concentrated among women, among mothers, among people that are reevaluating how to incorporate work into

lives. I'm not saying that's not a phenomenon. I'm just saying that's not what we have called the great resignation. I think you're absolutely right. And it talks to the point I make about how the demographic that I think is most relevant now as a worker is what life stage you are at and the stage of the skills that you bring and need to acquire in the workplace. And I would say there are two fundamental cohorts, a learner or a lever and a leader sort of, of bridging across both of those. And what I mean by that is, if you are your 23-year-old worker or your 20-year-old worker who was probably pre-pandemic recruited rather hideously by algorithm and didn't get any acknowledgement when you did apply for a job that you didn't get, but ultimately

you got your job, and then you went into an office, and then you might have had to make coffee or sit in the corner and not do anything particularly interested, but you picked up, you smelt the room as diplomats call it. You've been denied that as well as having maybe less good coffee and smelly flatmates and all the things that people want, you know, lovely offices for. Now, those learners absolutely need to be onboarded. And frankly, for them, the discussion about a three-two week may not be as meaningful as an employer. Meaning three days in an office, two days out of an office.

Right, which has sort of become the new standardized norm because there's a huge desire for standardization. My pitch is that we need to just let go of that, you know, whether we want the four-day week. It's like the five-two diet, you know, go for it if you like the idea of it. But it's sort of emotional. It's not actually empirical. So let's take that leave a cohort age 23. And that being onboarded, needing to pick up skills and learn, because the office will be very fundamentally for learning and networking. It won't be for emailing and it won't be for emailing.

and it won't be for collaborative software sharing, in my view. Now, why don't you say to those learners, listen, it took you nine months to grow in your mum's belly, right? If you came out early, that would have been a problem. We need you in for nine months to learn the ropes here. And yeah, okay, you can have Friday afternoon or off, or we can mix and match. But fundamentally, if you work for us, if we invest in you,

if we teach you stuff that is going to be valuable for your life, as a worker, you know, nine months, no flexi. And then you can be, for instance, right? Now, the lever is more likely to be older, have caring responsibilities, more likely to be freelance, more likely to be doing side hustles. Right. This is the 45-year-old that I was talking about. Like, so the core demographic, or 35, 55, the person who's the core demographic of those who stand to benefit from a pure work-from-home future, They are already established. They've graduated from the incubating belly of the office to extend your metaphor. Interestingly, the data shows, say Ipsos' global data shows that we all want to have

our cake and eat it every age range, right? I'm in my mid-50s. You look considerably younger on screen. Whatever ageing demographic you are, everybody wants to have a place that they can go to and they do not want to be tied down. The second factor is that the commute is deeply unpopular. The commute is over. It's not that you won't go in and travel, and in fact, business travel appears to still be quite popular, as I speak as someone that's quite enjoying cutting about the place myself.

But the commute is not fun or sexy. The third factor, of course, is cost. Inflation is roaring. You may find that those people that really want to persuade you back to the office make you an offer you can't refuse. You know, we'll pick up your heating bills at home. and we'll give you a stipend for clothes and so on. The fact that commute suck is obvious. It's important, but it's absolutely obvious.

I want to return to the point you made just before that, which is the office as an incubator, as a place that is good for onboarding the 22 and 23-year-olds who need to be brought up into the office culture. I'm really fascinated by this question of what is it that offices do? What is the job that an office does? Because for 100 years, we had this very basic assumption that knowledge work should be just done in offices, period.

This is just how offices work. They're good for knowledge work. But now suddenly we had this new trial. And it really is almost like a randomized control trial. We can literally take the world of 2019 and compare it to the world of 2022 and say, okay, what's the difference? What is it that offices were doing that they're no longer doing? And in fact, Microsoft did just this. Microsoft teamed up with the University of California, Berkeley, and they did the study of 60,000 workers to look at how the pandemic changed the way that they communicated with each other

within the company. And they had two, excuse me, three interesting conclusions to this study. Conclusion number one is that when people left the office in March 2020, they basically continued to send this same total number of messages. Number two, they found that the total number of messages sent within teams went up.

That means the silos got deeper. The teams got deeper. got more naughty, more connected. Number three, however, and this is the most interesting part, the number of messages sent outside of teams went down. So it's like the silos got deeper and the walls got higher. Why does that matter? Well, there's a lot of creativity experts that say that, like,

the skeleton key of creativity is communication across teams, right? This sort of cross-fertilization of ideas. Well, according to this Microsoft study, that kind of stuff basically stopped. And it made me think something, which is that, you know, you can kind of divide a lot of knowledge work, a lot of white-collar work into two different categories, hard work and soft work. So hard work is like what I do every day. I talk to people, I write, I read, I edit. All that work can be done right here in my basement. It can

be done in a coffee shop or can be done in an office. It tends to be asynchronous work, work that can be done anywhere and doesn't be needed, doesn't have to be done in one place at one time. But there's another kind of work that is often done at these kind of companies. It's chatter in the office. It's gossiping. It's building relationships across teams. It's having conversations that aren't immediately productive, but might lay the ground for productivity later. All of that is soft work. And the question, maybe like the trillion dollar question here, is how important is softwork to the long-term productivity of a company? Julia, what do you think about that?

Well, I mean, every single thing you said I could talk to you for an hour about, I recognize a fellow work nerd, if you will forgive me. I mean, look, first of all, it was Peter Drucker, the great management writer that said culture eats strategy for breakfast. So we are talking about culture. We're talking about cohesion. but we're also talking about something that I think is very important to articulate here, which is getting work done productively and with purpose.

Generation Z is very purpose-led. Productivity, although it went up, you know, clearly and demonstrably, not always in a good way during the pandemic. I mean, Microsoft noticed a 252% increase in the use of teams, right? That's not brilliant. And I know lots of, you know, people who look exhausted because they're on endless back-to-back teleconferencing. And yet and but what has surfaced is that work wasn't working for people and that a mixed economy of separating out,

you call it hard work, cow Newport called it deep work. It doesn't really matter how you give it language so much as it represents different spatial and physical ways in which we do what we do. Now, the difficulty is that control-freak managers, which have been the normal controllers of work, they have wanted presentism, they have wanted surveillance, they have wanted what Nick Bloom calls an input-based work economy rather than the outputs.

The outputs are, go do what you do, come back in three months, give me, right, the success. That is hard to do if you have a very large workforce and it's not very well managed. And so you want presenteism as a metric. The reality is absolutely that some things are better done in person and around other people with built in lost time. The water cooler is a waste of time. And yet, great stuff happens around it. However, my point is you need to balance the great stuff from the serendipity against the cost of the commute, the toxic workplace stuff, and come up with a happy medium. My analysis is that the office is fundamentally good for actually three things only.

One is conflict resolution. It's much better to have an argument or an issue in person. I totally agree. I have a lot to say about that. But I'm going to let you finish your list of three. I mean, you know, it's much better to really noodle something through in person and to disagree. The second thing is the learning point. You know, learning and development and HR and it's all been, it's all got very messy and muddled. And I think this is a fantastic opportunity to reset that whole, you know, people side, talent side, learning side, well-being side, and make it frankly more muscular,

which is what do we want you to learn and we want you to do that well with well-being? You know, and it really, frankly, is not about the beanbags. It's about something else. It's about work being a healthy place that does good work. Now, you do need people to come in for that some of the time and you need to manage and schedule it. The other thing is the networks, the serendipity.

So this is where it gets complicated. you do not, in my view, need to go through a turnstile up a certain number of floors every single day to have serendipity. You can have what I would call managed serendipity. Now, I know that sounds a little bit less cute, but the bottom line of it is anyone that has kids knows that if you show or a partner, to be frank with you, you don't have to show up all of the time, but you have to show up meaningfully some of the time and be fully present with intent. And my belief is that this no office is going to be a much more positive use of time and place. It's going to be much more integrated around what people in their different life stages need. It's going to be much more

purposeful. I think one of the things they're saying is that having an option to the office forces good bosses to make the office special at doing what the office is always done. Good bosses can say, what's the office specialize in? Does it specialize in hard work in pure productivity? No. Does it specialize in soft work? Synchronicity, having people doing the same things together. Yes, that I think is what offices are good for. And it reminds me, several years ago, Google did a famous study where they wanted to learn what makes a good team. And they came to the conclusion that the secret sauce is this thing called psychological safety. What's psychological safety? Well, psychological safety basically means, I can tell you my crazy ideas, and you can tell

me your crazy ideas, and neither of our reactions will cause offense or have a chilling effect on the future exchange of crazy ideas. We are psychologically safe to brainstorm in this way. Now, I'm a fan of remote work. Like, for the million of the time, I work remotely. I use Twitter to find surprising ideas. That is my way of essentially breaking. down silo walls. But oh my God, is Twitter an absolute hellscape of psychological safety? It's just one bad faith drive by after another. And the truth is, there's lots of group slacks that aren't much better. Like a lot of group slacks are just an exercise and colleagues misunderstanding each other. So I ask this of you, Julia, in hope, do you think digital

communications can provide the same kind of psychological safety as physical presence? Or will we simply always be a little bit more skittish and a little bit more bad faith in our dealings with each other online? Okay, I think you're referring to Project Aristotle, which Google ran, which was that exercise in what really makes the juice flow between teams. And personally, I think that Project Aristotle is probably the second thing one has to be most grateful to Google for on top of Google's basic search marvelousness. right. But what's interesting about that is that my takeaway from Project Aristotle was that the defining clincher was somebody a manager who had run a team for a very long time. And in the end, he, and I'm pretty sure it was a he, stood up and said that he had cancer. And the minute he shared with his group what was going on for him personally, the minute he broke down the barrier

of what was happening in his life, a trust and intimacy flowed. So I would like to slightly delineate a difference between this notion of psychological safety, because actually if you push back on people and challenge them, that may not feel psychologically safe. But if you trust someone and feel they're being real and their true self, then that's different. My point is this, yes, we want trust. Yes, we need to be in a room for all sorts of things that certainly AI, is not as good, thank God at doing, of really mimicking the human. And yet, we need to understand that this idea that simply being in a physical space together is better, is not validated. I mean,

look at the way global organizations have run very successfully in different times as using teleconferencing. So the truth is we've all got to feel our way to what is real rather than what our narrative is. And that's my concern about the psychological safety is I don't want it just to become a narrative, a little bit like I don't want the four-day week to become the prevailing narrative. That's a fantastic answer. I really appreciate you giving it. Let's talk about spillover effects and second-order effects. You've already mentioned that one thing we're beginning to see from the rise of and stability

of remote work is the decimation of commercial real estate values in central business district. We're seeing office valuations plummet in downtown areas. And at the same time, we are seeing what, we'll mention him again, the Stanford economist Nick Bloom, has called the donut effect. That is that real estate values are hollowing out in urban centers, and they are rising, plumping up like a donut in the light suburban and ex-urban areas around cities. So, for example, you take a city like Washington, D.C., housing values, and certainly commercial real estate values, are slumping in the downtown areas. But if you go to Arlington, McLean, Bethesda, Potomac, Maryland, and even a little bit further out, you're really seeing housing values rise a lot as people are moving further and further

away from companies they know they don't have to go into the office for as much. What's another second order effect or related second order effect that you're seeing in property values or real estate? So that is an interesting shift, and you may also see two different things happening around offices. One is that I am pretty sure that the way office space is used in big cities is going to sort of become a hybrid of hotels and offices. What I mean by that is large companies. have people that have now migrated to a commuter distance away, two hours away, a two-hour flight or a three-hour train journey. You want them in, not necessarily three days a week.

You want them in for three weeks or you want them in for five days. Well, are you going to put them up in a hotel or are you going to say the 14th floor is dormitories? I mean, I don't want to go Dave Eggers, the circle on you, but I do think that some shifts are going to be happening. And actually, I'm in discussion with, you know, pretty interesting architecture firm called Katz architecture about this. And we're sort of noodling through, well, what would the Office of the Future look like? And the second observation is that what you may find is a big masthead global firm, instead of having an enormous masthead HQ, actually has 20 different hubs. And that, you know, the Bloomberg of tomorrow becomes like the we work

of yesterday. I was actually thinking of it, yeah, I was thinking of it as the Airbnbification of the office. Right? You take these offices that right now are, you know, what are they? They are places where people don't want to go. They would prefer to stay in their homes rather than go into the office. And what you basically say is, what if we make our offices an ersatz home, a replacement home?

We Airbnbify the office. It's not just a place that you come to that has all. of these beautiful amenities. One person I talked to said the office of the future is going to be a vertical yacht. That's the number of amenities that will be necessary in order for these sort of especially high-collar, high-amemnity offices the future to have. But also, they'll have beds. They'll have places for people to stay. That makes me think, you know, between hotels and Airbnb's and this sort of office times dormitory of the future, you're going to have a lot of competition for hotel space in downtown areas,

which could potentially, just by virtue of supply demand curves, make hotels a little bit cheaper in some cities. That's a very interesting way to think about it. I actually hadn't heard about that. The last question that I want to leave with you is recommendations. I want you to end with one recommendation

that you are giving to bosses and one recommendation that you would give to employees. Let's start with bosses. Let's say that someone in the, the second category that I outlined at the beginning of the interview, the Apple category, comes to you and says, we want to move our employees toward a three-two hybrid model, eventually because we see certain benefits of in-office work. We want three days in the office, two days at home.

But right now, between the variance and the disinclination of our employees, it is really, really hard to feel like we can put our foot down on this. What do you advise those bosses to do? okay well when those bosses come to me and say will you advise how how can we get our people back to the office i say effectively come lie on my couch and let me understand and help you understand why you think that's a good idea rather than listening to what your workers are saying this is not a one-size-fits-all edict-led top-down thing and that is very difficult but it's not beyond the wit and wisdom and my god

the budget that has been available to leadership development over the years to figure it out. So my advice to those bosses is stop trying to control it quickly, stop trying to create a model that is replicated at scale and instead iterate, listen, trial. And by the way, raise your game on evaluation. You know, evaluation is sort of okay, large at-scale surveys, but it's a little bit like polling. It's a bit imprecise. People might say one thing and then they do another thing in the ballot box. I think teleconferencing is very fertile to do much more responsive, constant opinion gathering. There could be a lot more innovation in the way you listen and ask your workforce. If you're asking the worker, I would say this. We are all in this together. Work has to be.

to work for everybody. If what you're trying to do is leave your job because you don't like it or because you've reevaluated, coming back to the theme we talked about earlier, that's absolutely fine. Don't try and shoehorn your desire for more work-life balance or less commute and overlay it into an environment that simply may not be compatible with that. I'm very much in favor, despite being, you know, I think fairly, you know, fairly maverick. I'm, I'm of course in favor of management's right to manage. You know, I'm not suggesting. But the Elon Muskway, come on.

It's an unimaginative. It's actually Luddite. It's not the right way to go. The Elon Muskway specifically, I think, is actually just a ploy to get 10% of his company to quit because he doesn't want to tell investors that he has to cut 10% of his workforce. So instead he's putting his foot down

and hoping 10% of them leave by their own accord. But I agree that at scale, the Elon Musk approach of get back to the office or your toast is just so obviously not going to work for the vast, vast, vast majority of companies. This is

not something that is like calculus or engineering, where there is a perfect formula that will allow the plane to fly in any atmosphere. This is human nature. This is a psychological spectrum. And companies are different. And offices might be differently

necessary for different companies. as you just said. So I think you're absolutely right. I think that, unfortunately, for a lot of bosses, they had 60 years, 100 years of black or white. You're either in the office or you're unemployed. And then we get two weird years of a different kind of black or white. No one's in the office if you're a white-collar worker.

And right now, operating in grayscale is complicated, and you have to recognize that complication if you want to succeed in it. Julia, last words here. Well, let's not forget that history has repeatedly innovated and responded when it comes to work and the workforce. I read an op-ed for the Washington Post around the story of working hours and working time. And the fact of the matter is it was, you know, the industrial barons like Lord Leverhue that were the first to notice that there was a link between productivity and purpose and homework. life balance. You know, Henry Ford introduced the five-day working week. These constructs around time and place and who the person is doing the work and where and when they're doing the work have been around for a long time.

And this is a moment where instead of panicking and going back to what we did before the pandemic as if it was so great, we need to say, how can we learn and how can we move forward in a way that actually gets what everybody wants, which is better outcomes, you know, less drain economically. So I would say this is a great reset moment. I think this is a moment to look back in history as well as to look at the present. You only have to look at Lord Leverhue and the recognition at the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, that things need to change for workers. You only have to look at Henry Ford.

And now you have to look at the nowhere officers that run the companies and organizations that are going to move the needle. And I'm afraid if it isn't Elon Musk, someone else is going to step into that space and win. Julia Hobbsbaum, thank you very, very much. My pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you have a comment, a concern, a question, an idea for a future show,

please email us at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space, English at Spotify.com.