Plain English with Derek Thompson - Work in America Is Broken—Can Remote Work Save Us?

Episode Date: December 7, 2021

Derek talks to Anne Helen Petersen, the coauthor of 'Out of Work: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home,' about Americans' relationship to our jobs, work as an identity, and burnout as a policy choice. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Anne Helen Petersen Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode is about the remote work revolution. If you are familiar with myself at The Atlantic, you might know that this is one of my favorite topics in the world, the future of work. I think my most read article ever was an essay I wrote on what I called workism, the idea that in a time of declining religion, work for many Americans has replaced religion. Like many of us used to look to God for meaning or church for community

or religious ritual for transcendence. But now a lot of us seek out these things, meaning community, transcendence from our jobs and our careers. And this is a topic I've been thinking about a lot during the pandemic. I know a lot of people for whom the last 18 months

exploded their workaholism. Like when the pandemic forced them to stay home, they just kicked work off the pedestal. They had always wanted to move to Texas. They were like, you know what, I'm going to move to Texas. Or they spent more time with their family. or they developed a hobby.

Like, I personally got back into piano and I've spent the last 18 months torturing the neighbors with very loud, very amateur renditions of early cold play. But something else has happened. Like, I like to say that the boundary between work and leisure

in this country is very leaky. Like leisure leaks into work. You're watching YouTube at the office and work leaks into leisure. You're checking your email at the beach. Like, that is clearly gotten worse. When you're working from home all the time, the work leisure leak is just a

full-on flood. Your couch is where you watch TV, but it's also where you do Excel. It's where you play with your kids, but it's also where you write memos. And so without guardrails and boundaries, work from home isn't liberating. It just transforms your home into an office place that happens to have a bed. Quote, the dark truth of remote work is it promises to liberate workers from the chains of the office, but in practice it capitalizes on the total collapse of work-life balance. End quote. That's a line from a new, wonderful, and provocative book, Out of Office by Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Worsell.

And that is the big question before us today. Is the remote work revolution a real revolution? Or is it a blip on the screen that will soon throw us all back into daily commutes? Or, third option, has something. something stranger happened, where millions of workers have removed the office from our lives only to invite an even worse relationship with work into their living rooms. I'm Derek Thompson. This is Plain English. Today's guest is Anne Helen Peterson. Anne Helen Peterson is a wonderful journalist and the author of the newsletter Culture Study. She's the author of

several books, including Can't Even, How Millennials became the Burnout Generation, and out of office, the big problem and bigger promise of working from home. Anne Helen Peterson, congratulations on the book, and welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much. I am really happy to be here. Before we get into the book, I think it'd be useful for people to hear about your story. You have been at the frontier of the remote work movement for a while. You moved from Brooklyn to Montana in 2017. So before we get to the book itself, why did you move?

And what was that like for both of you? So I'm going to rewind even more than that and say that before I was a journalist living in Brooklyn, I was an academic. So anyone who's been an academic knows that, or in grad school, knows that you are kind of working from home, right? Like you would just have control of your schedule in a way that is now familiar for a lot of people. And that taught me how to work from home really well. but also taught me how to work all the time, which came in handy when I became a journalist and just had no separation between work and life.

And also, you know, going from one precarious institution academia to another one of digital journalism, it served me well, but at the same time, it was just like a burnout machine. And at some point in 2017, this is post-Trump election. I just, I also vividly remember the subway, It was that summer where it, everywhere you went, it took 90 minutes.

We were like, let's try something different. And I had gone to report in Montana before that, and I'm from Idaho. And I just remember feeling like when I was in Montana, like, everything is easier. I feel really at home here. This is the landscape of like, of my heart to be cheesy. And convinced my partner, Charlie Warzel, who at the time was still at BuzzFeed, to see if we could convince our bosses. And they said yes because we both were workaholics. They like had no, there was no doubt in their minds that we would still produce if we changed scenery. So they gave us

the go-ahead to move to Montana and try to cover our beats from a slightly different location. And once we were there, there's the same that no one moves to Missoula to work. And what that means is that you move to Missoula because you want to live in Missoula. Like you want to live with the beauty, the bounty of the great outdoors right there. And working is just a means to be able to fund your time outside. And we moved to Montana to work, which was not a great idea, right? So like here we are looking at like the beauty out our windows while working all the time. We're traveling a ton too for work.

So I think that when the pandemic hit, we had already experienced a lot. of the difficulties of allowing work to spread into every corner of your life, but also had started to adopt some defenses against that. And, you know, we sold the book, and you know this from writing a book. Like sometimes you sell a book and you have an idea for what it's going to be, and then it turns into something bigger, weirder than what you imagine. And that's really what happened with us. So let's move somewhat chronologically through this.

Pre-COVID pandemic, and then we'll do some predictions about the future, work at the end, which are always fun and always accurate. Fun fact, no one has ever been wrong predicting the future of work. So let's start with The Office. Give me your strongest critique of the modern office. I think the Office is a place that has long favored people who are comfortable in the office, which is largely white dudes without caregiving responsibilities or the ability to offload those caregiving responsibilities onto other people. Also, people who are are neurotypical and people who don't experience microaggressions in the office, people who like hanging out with other people, people who take implicit cues, like I can read those really

easily, people who aren't disabled, right? Like, it is a very, a very clear sort of person that the office privileges, whereas I think there is this understanding that somehow the office is neutral, right? That, like, what we had before was how things were. And so returning to how things were is a neutral movement, whereas actually it's returning to, you know, a situation, a scenario in which there was a finger on the lever for a certain type of individual. Charlie loves the office. Charlie's my co-author on this. Like, he really thrives in the office.

And he wrote a newsletter earlier this year about like, oh, part of the reason I thrived in the office is because I'm a white dude who, like, networks well with other white dudes and, like, knows how to leverage those connections. And so I think that that's my biggest critique. But I want to hear yours, too. What's your biggest critique of the office? I do miss the office to a certain extent. However, in listening to your identity checklist, I check a lot of those boxes.

I am white. I'm a guy. I don't have child care responsibilities at home. And I'm relatively extroverted. Like, one thing that I really miss is being able to chop up ideas with people when they're right there. I'm weirdly, really bad at telecommunications. Like, I'm bad at phone. calls, I get distracted by the physical world, to really brainstorm with someone, I kind of feel

like I have to be physically with them. But I also hate commutes. You know, commutes are just discouraged. They are bad for the environment. They are bad for mental health. They're just bad, bad, bad. So I guess what I kind of wish is that I had a teleportation device that could just like take me to the office and we could cut out the intermediary step of writing on the subway. I don't know. Is there something that you miss about the office? I do think I did like that teleportation aspect, right? I've just been in a a different space that isn't your space and having that delineation between workspace and non-workspace. And I think the future of hybrid work, and you and I think really agree on this, is that it's not like home,

like I'm podcasting you from my bedroom right now. So it's not home spaces or office spaces and there's nothing in between. I think we still haven't tapped the potential for third spaces. And so much of that has to do with really obstinate real estate leases. Right? Like people trying to hold on to this idea that like the office is going to go back how it was before, but also just COVID precautions. Like a lot of people are not comfortable going to a space and sitting there for eight hours on mask, right? And if so that's your option and you're like, okay, I could go to a third space where I could just stay in my house and not wear a mask all day. You're going to stay home. So that to me is like, you know, I miss different, like a change of landscape, a change of scenery that.

allows me to also feel like I have an end to my day. And I've written a lot, too, about how there are different ways that you can do that. You can create these on and off ramps off of your workday. But they take intention and deliberation, whereas the commute was this de facto on an off ramp, which actually for most people was not even an on and off ramp, particularly if you were commuting by subway or bus. Like, you're checking emails on your phone. You were still working.

And also, you got home and, like, did whatever thing you had to do. at your house, and then you probably worked some more. So it wasn't a clear delineation anyway. Yeah. So you start writing this book, and the pandemic is in full effect. It's 2020. You're reaching out to people to understand their remote work experiences. What were you hearing last year? What surprised you about the way that people who were forced into their remote work experience were going through it? Well, this is the difficult thing about writing a book that is about remote work for people who started during the pandemic because it was really hard. You know, most people I knew had very difficult child care situations that made life difficult.

They were stuck in small apartments alongside their partners who are also working from home or they felt like they didn't have discrete space if they were living with roommates. They're terrified. Like, this is the first part of the book is like, whatever you were doing over the past few years, like that's not the future of working from home. that was working from home under duress during a pandemic. But also we heard from people who said, it made me realize just how little time I actually have to do my job every week, right?

Like this is really dependent, I think, on your industry because there are people who work in nonprofits and other sorts of organizations that are chronically understaffed where they actually need more hours than they are contracted to do every week to do their jobs. Right? They're just overworked understaffed. And then there are people who are like, I could do my job in 30 hours a week, 20 hours a week, if I concentrated. But instead, I'm here pretending that I am online and available and doing my job for this many hours.

Like I am live action role playing doing my job for performance sake. But really, my deliverables, if I just look at what I'm responsible for delivering, that could take me half of what I'm prescribed to work. Right. You're pointing out that if your actual job takes about 25 hours a week to do, then in a pre-COVIDemic commute environment, you have to go in the office and basically stay there eight hours a day, nine hours a day anyway, because your boss is there. And your boss is evaluating whether you're working, not just by looking at the product at the end of the week, but by looking at whether or not your butt's in the seat. But when everyone's butt is in their own houses, then you can actually just do that work in 2025 hours and then take those 15 extra hours that you just want. and apply it to whatever else. Apply it to a hobby. Apply it to child care. Apply it to binging Netflix

if that's what you want to do. But it essentially disentangles this question of how much of work is larping your job, as you said, live action role-playing your job, just being present at work to impress people versus actually producing something that is called work at the end of the day. Well, and this is where we get to this tension

where, like, I was on a podcast of, I was six months ago with a CEO who was, making the case to go back into the office. And I brought up that idea of just how much more efficient someone is when they're working in this capacity. Like, you can do your job in these fewer amount of hours. And the CEO was like, well, that worker still owes me those hours. That's wage theft. Right? That like, and I'm like, no, it's the same amount of work. It's just that actually, if anything, they will be doing their work better because they will be more arrested and restored from these hours that they're not actually working, right?

But he's like, no, the employee owes me that time. That's such a bizarre way to look at work. Because what that CEO is basically saying is, I'm paying you to not have leisure time. I'm not paying you to do a job. I'm paying you to not have leisure. It's like that actually is a terrible reconceptualization, or unfortunately, conceptualization of what work is.

So in terms of where remote work stands today, the latest figures I saw indicated that about 10 to 11 percent of workers are still mostly working from home. And that might sound small to some people, like, oh, that means 90 percent of Americans aren't doing remote work right now. But my whole thing about remote work has always been that small phenomena can have large effects. 11 percent of the economy is equivalent to the entire workforce of the state of New York. That is an important component of the labor force. So let's start with the strong pro case. And if you believe the caveats for later in just a second,

but the strong pro case, what is the promise of remote work? Well, this is what's kind of controversial, is that I think the promise of remote work is that you can de-center work as the primary axis of your life. This is what we argue in the book, is that it matters because it will allow you to have other parts of your life to cultivate your own personality or relationship with others, your care for your community. You know, when I talk to people our age about like hobbies, investment in their communities,

actual time to volunteer, that seems like something that is impossible, right? They are dedicated first and foremost to their job and secondarily to parenting. And contemporary parenting takes up a lot of time and effort. So if that, but there's more to ourselves and to our lives, right? Like this is kind of an existential question that I think a lot of us are grappling with in this time. There's just more there. And so how can we excavate some time to excavate ourselves, right? To make that argument that there's more there.

And having a more flexible schedule that allows you to not only have the rest that allows you to think, like, what do I actually like to do? who am I? What are my interests other than parenting and working? But also then gives you the time to make those sorts of commitments. It's really important. You have a line in the book. Well, I should say, I love books that have a sentence that begins, the thesis of this book is. And right there it was in your introduction the thesis of this book is. So I'm just going to read this half paragraph because it's a lovely encapsulation of what is a lovely book. quote, the thesis of this book is that remote work, not remote work during a pandemic, not remote work during duress, can change your life. It can remove you from the wheel of constant productivity. It can make you happier and healthier. It can make your community healthier. It can increase worker solidarity. It can allow you to live the sort of life. You pretend to live in your Instagram posts liberating you to explore the non-work parts of your identity from actual hobbies and from actual hobbies to civic engagement.

This is a huge promise. How much of fulfilling that promise is about something our companies have to do versus something we have to do. Like, an interesting tension in something you just said is that, you know, you said, I'm a workaholic, right? You love your work. But you also want remote work to de-center work,

in your life. But there's a certain aspect of workaholism in which the worker, his or herself, is centering the work and has the power to center the work. So how much of the promise of the remote work revolution as you see it is about what companies and government have to do to change systems versus what we have to do to change our lives? Great question. And it's both, right? Like, I think in the United States, at least in our current moment, we have so much of the focus on who's responsible for change focused on the individual. Like, I even think about, like, how people respond to politics that they don't like is,

vote, right? Like, make individual change. Like, what can you personally do to save the planet? Recycle. Like, individualized action is what you can control. And I do think that a lot of people, whether we're talking about, talking about burnout, workaholism, whatever activity, behavior, posture. It's a personal, it's a personal neuroses, right?

Like a lot of unlearning these ideas, it takes process. It's like therapy. I'm unlearning them all the time. It's personal work. It's a personal project. But at the same time, you have to have organizational buy-in, societal buy-in, to unlearn some of these ideologies as well, right? And I think that this is where unions have been really handy in the past.

Handy is not a strong enough word for what unions have been. But they, like, they mediate that process between the employer and the employee so that it's less about like, oh, we're being nice to you. Or, you know, it's not about emotion in that capacity at all. It's like, this is what it looks like to not exploit our workers. Here is this place, this thing in place that is ensuring that that happens. And absent union activity, which, like, just the way that our labor laws are in place right now, it is really hard to enact strong unions.

And, you know, we make the argument that that should change. But if it hasn't changed yet, what can happen? The organization itself can really put in things that are structural for all employees. And, like, I have this kind of corny thing in a section of the book that I wrote about the difference between, boundaries, which are all about the person, like the individual upholding these boundaries between work and the rest of life and guardrails, which are, you know, at least in the terms of like a mountain pass out here in the West, like they are federally maintained, they are organizationally maintained to protect everyone. So like a boundary is like, I personally don't

like to email past 8 p.m. A guardrail that is upheld across. the organization is no one should email past 8 p.m. And if they do, you delay send so that no one is receiving any email past 8 p.m. And also, if you do it, it is not a chance to, like, prove that you are working harder than everyone else. It's actually something that we're going to talk to about because it is not our company culture. Connect the dots here, because this is a really interesting point, but it's not an obvious one. Unionization might seem like a totally different phenomenon than remote work to people, but you see them as intertwining? How so? I actually think that part of what unions do, first and foremost, is underline that the work that you're doing is labor, right?

That, like, you're not doing this because you want to be part of a family. You're not doing it because you love your work. But, like, you are a laborer and you deserve fair treatment under the law, right? And that interlocks with this larger understanding of, like, my job is not my identity. My job is something I do for pay. it is important. I value the work that I do. I value quality and precision and all these things that make me a good worker. But like I also deserve as a person to not be exploited. But sometimes it takes taking that step back from work as the primary access of your life to to understand that.

Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. We want laws and rules, guardrails, as you call them, that protects workers from overwork and exploitation. And that is paramount. But we also need individuals to take responsibility for their lives. We need individuals to be the author of the role of work in their lives. And the emphasis in individuals is important because people are diverse. We are different from each other. We need different things. That's why our individual preferences are important.

Like, for example, remote work. The introverts in my life are loving this. They're like, get me out of the office. People are constantly trying to pull me into never-ending dad jokes. Thank God I can say home. Extroverts in my life, some of them at least, are like breaking down the doors of the office building. They're like, let me tell my dad jokes to a new audience.

Let me brainstorm with physical human beings. Give me back my coworkers. But do you think that your friends miss their coworkers or do they miss being around friends, right? That's a great question. And it's your right to suggest that the office is one arrangement for bringing people who like talking to each other together. But there's lots of other arrangements too.

What they miss, yeah, if I had to refine my statement, I would put it this way. There are a lot of extra rates in my life that miss a job that the office did. Yeah. And it's possible that there are other institutions or other places that could do that job, but because they work together for the same company, they see the most efficient way to do that job as coming back to the office. I'm wondering whether you've spoken to other people who, for whatever reason, have a psychological style or work style life preference where they say, you know, remote work is just not working out for me the way that it might be for other people.

Well, the first thing I would say is that there's a lot of people, whenever I talk about these ideas, I'll get DMs from people who are like, I'm just really lonely. And I really get it. I think that that's in part because the scenario that we've had over the last few years has been really lonely. And the future, which is going to be more hybrid. And if people are going into the office, it's not going to be this, like, crappy worst both work worlds scenario where they're going, they're commuting in. And then they're sitting alone in their offices and zooming each other from individual offices.

Like, this is bad for everyone. There's going to be the capacity to work with friends in scenarios that really, feel much more like going to the library when you're in college, right? That's one of my favorite ways to work or going to third spaces with other people who are your employees, but are the actual people that you want to be around, right? Or in adjacent industries, which I think will actually promote the sort of cross-pollination that is so fetishized when we talk about actual office spaces. Like, the way to get ideas going isn't necessarily to talk with is that your coworker who you talk with all the time, but maybe it's to talk with, like, another person who's just doing a podcast,

right? Another person who's doing work, like, for you and I as reporters, like, I love just running into random people who then tell me about how their office is going, right? How they're back-to-work scenario is going. Like, those are the sorts of conversations that are really serendipitous and interesting for me. But then another thing, another group of people who I think are struggling with the hybrid schedule right now, even though it's somewhat, how do I put this? It's surprising is that I know a lot of working moms who both need this hybrid schedule right now or staying from home, but are also kind of going really nuts about it, too, because child care is just not reliable or affordable yet. And I don't even just mean like full-time child care. I'm talking

about the fact that there's a national bus driver shortage. So someone needs to drive their kid every single day at 3 p.m. from the school to the boys and girls club, that sort of thing, right? So they have to interrupt their day every day for a chance 20 minutes because that hasn't become part of their flexible schedule yet. But they also can't imagine a way forward. Like, what if they have to be in the office all day? How is the kid going to get from one place to another? Does this make sense? Like that tension there? It absolutely does. Yeah, it does. And you brought up a couple of things I want to sort of put a pin in, third spaces and adjacent industries. But I think we should talk about sort of the edge of the present here, like the world that is emerging, which is the world of hybrid work. I am concerned that hybrid work is going to be a bit of a disaster, a fixable disaster, but a disaster. Office work was clean. It had problems that it was clean. What do you do? You commute into the office, end of story. Remote work.

in a way was clean. The causes for it were horrific, but there was like a cleanliness to the decision to close down offices and push the entire knowledge economy to work from home. Hybrid, I think it's just going to be messy, messy, messy. Tell me more about some of the problems

that you're already seeing in hybrid work and dig us a little bit deeper into that wonderful piece that you wrote about worst of both worlds. So I think one of the problems right now with hybrid is you have organizations that are very focused on making their offices worthwhile, right? They're like, no one's been in this office for a year and a half.

You're coming back in. I don't care. And then you have the employees who, for whatever reason, because of high-risk people and their families, because of unvaccinated kids, so for whatever reason, are like, I still feel kind of unsafe in the office. We're all wearing masks. we can't be in a conference room together. So we're doing all of the crappy parts of the office

and then all of the crappy parts of Zoom and work from home. It's really none of the benefits and all of the crap. I also think the secondary thing that we're seeing and that we're going to see more of is massive steps back in terms of gender equity in the workplace. So many women have dropped out of the workforce and are continuing to stay out of the workforce. and are continuing to stay out of the workforce for us

for precisely the reasons that we were just talking about in terms of child care. And I think that without real intention, you're going to see more women who are opting to work from home more in order to keep track of their various domestic responsibilities and caretaking responsibilities and more men who are like, I'm out of here, I'm going to the office. And if you have managers who still understand,

hard work, primarily through the lens of presence, those men are going to be the people who are elevated, who get choice projects, who are promoted. And I think that that's going to exacerbate the already existing step back that we've taken in terms of gender equity. Yeah, I think there's two points there that are so important to emphasize. Number one, I think you're right that there's this worst of both worlds

phenomenon where people are being asked to come into the office for the purpose of zooming from the office. So you have the commute plus the suboptimal experience of working. And then also, you don't want companies to have an official hybrid policy simultaneous with an official we're going to promote people who are in the office the most policy, right? So it's like the hierarchy is based on office presence, but there's a general rule of hybrid work. Like that seems like, frankly, a sneaky way to accidentally not promote a lot of moms. Or if you wanted, purposefully not promote a lot of moms. But like the outcome seems to me to be a lot of moms not getting promoted. I want to ask about community. Community is a huge part

of your book. I know that you're familiar with the Robert Putnam thesis, American sociologist, whose work, starting with the book, Bolding Alone, has documented the decline of community in American life. He's written that in the last half century across the U.S., we have declining church attendance and trust in government, following membership in chapter-based associations like bolding leagues, declining social trust. And, you know, when I think about, you know, what is he talking about? What is the word community actually mean? The best definition I've ever heard is that community is where you keep showing up. And for the first few decades of this century, where you're most people in a age of declining association kept showing up was the office.

Yes. The office was like the last community standing in a graveyard of communities. And now a lot of people are losing that. And you can see this as a crisis or you can see it as an opportunity to build better spaces. So I wonder what kind of better spaces if your negative toward offices, what kind of kind of better spaces you and think we should start building? So I think one of the things that often happens when we think of community of our grandparents

is we think of these old fuddy-duddy associations. Like the Elks Club was one of the big ones in my hometown. Or church or, you know, the FFA. Like people were joiners, but they were of things that feel very old and stayed to us. I think, like, to make a stereotypical generalization of your potential audience, like, Fantasy football is a form of community. Coming over to each other's house to watch a football game is community. But oftentimes when we are so obsessed with work and it filters into our weekend spaces,

our nighttime spaces, there's less room to reserve for those sorts of things. And so whether that is a football game or making plans to actually hang out with people in your community and bringing around other randos that live in your neighborhood, you're like, come to the game at my house. It's a great low-pressure way to make the sort of low-pressure connections that eventually turn into a safety net, right, of care and compassion. There's so many other different things. You know, I live on a tiny island now on the coast of Washington where people have to rely on each other in this sort of way. And it's been really revelatory for me.

It's actually part of the reason we made this move from Montana to here was to practice what we preach. And so part of that for me is showing up for kind of nerdy things. Like I'm going to the library association meeting next Monday at 4 p.m. And it's got to be kind of awkward at first. And then they're going to be like, oh, it's so cool that someone under the age of 40 is here. But that's the sort of thing that I never would have made the time for before. Right? I've been like, oh, I need to work at that time.

Or like there's always something that has to be done. you can make excuses so readily to not participate, to not make commitments. But when your schedule is more flexible, you can say, okay, you know, once a month at 4 p.m., I can do this thing. Once a week at 8 a.m., I can block off this time on my calendar to make the commitment to work at the food bank that I was going to before, but never felt like I could. And so I just gave money, right? but our actual presence, our actual person, like that is something that we can give of as well. And when work isn't the end-all be all of our lives, it makes space for that. Let's say I'm a 30-year-old worker.

And I've been working mostly remote for the last 18 months. And I am nearing a point where my firm is going to force me to go back into the office. And I really, really don't want to. What do I do? So first of all, your firm or your organization has already anticipated your request. And if you really, really don't want to go back and your organization is pushing you back, it might not be the right place for you. And that's okay, right?

You are allowed to change jobs. Like, we are not in a moment with office work in particular where, like, the market is so tight that, like, there's no room to change. You can start looking. And that's something that I feel like sometimes people never consider. They're not like they always are trying to give advice on how to make a job work for you when maybe the relationship is so toxic that you need to break up. And then the other thing, though, is if it is a relationship that you do want to make work and your manager is at least a human who is receptive, then you can have these conversations about like, look how productive I was. Look how efficient.

Here's some evidence of the quality of my work over the past two years. when I was in this scenario. What's a way that we can figure out what sort of work needs to be in person that demands presence and then that we can also figure out what sort of work is better done alone, efficient on my own time.

And Ellen Peterson, thank you so much. This is a real pleasure to talk with someone who is obsessed with this topic like I am. I am indeed, very, very obsessed. Great to talk to you. And catch your fairy and be well. Talk to you soon. I will.

Playing English with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. We will be back with our second episode this week on Friday. We will see you then.