The Daily - The Hybrid Worker Malaise

Episode Date: January 25, 2024

The era of hybrid work has spawned a new kind of office culture — one that has left many workers less connected and less happy than they have ever been.Emma Goldberg, a business reporter covering workplace culture for The Times, explains how mixing remote and office work has created a malaise, as workers confront new challenges and navigate uncertainty, and employers engage in a wave of experiments.Guest: Emma Goldberg, a business reporter for The New York Times.Background reading: Emma Goldberg reflects on her evolving beat as tens of thousands of employees return to the office.From March: Office Mandates. Pickleball. Beer. What will make hybrid work stick?For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

So we are going to go pick up our colleague, Emma Goldberg, who told us to meet her on the fourth floor of the Times Building. And she told us to come to this place that she works that feels very relevant to the conversation we're about to have with her. That's not Emma. That's not Emma. That's not Emma. That's not Emma. There she is. Hey, Emma. Hello. How are you guys? You know. Welcome to my phone booth. You know? Welcome to my phone booth.

You're just going to have to describe this booth. Just kind of give us a tour. It's not glamorous. It is a small box. It's probably about the size of a refrigerator. And there is just a little ledge for your laptop, some hand sanitizer, and the walls are like gray sort of carpeting. We should say there's a clear glass door that I assume you close when you're in this. Definitely.

Yeah. I think that's like the etiquette. You hermetically seal yourself off from the rest of the world. Right. It feels a little Narnia-ish to me. It's like a whole other world. I haven't been to one of these, but from what I've read, companies around America are buying these. I mean, they're basically on back order. Yeah. If I have like a lot of calls,

I've come in here for like four or five hours. Really? Yeah. I mean, one of the things I can do in here that I can't do out at my desk is put my phone on speakerphone, talk really loudly, not worry about, you know, overhearing a hundred other co-worker conversations. Right. So basically everything that I do at home, but I commuted here. Right. It's an awkward middle ground that we're in where, you know, you want those exchanges with colleagues. You don't want to be stuck at home forever.

But we've also gotten used to new ways of working. And for you, this is like a compromise. It's like an in-between. Right. Much like hybrid work itself. Exactly. Okay, so as promised, I came to pick you up here to go to the studio to have this conversation.

So with that, I'm going to close this door behind us. Very satisfying thud. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the era of hybrid work has spawned a new kind of office culture that has left many workers feeling less connected and less happy than they've ever been, and is prompting their employers to engage in a wave of experiments to fix the problem. It's Thursday, January 25th.

It's nice to be in the same room, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Imagine that. So as I said on our walk over here from your booth, Emma, we want to talk to you today about post-pandemic office life in America. Because a lot of offices are doing what The Times is doing, which is making meaningful tweaks and adjustments and changes to accommodate the reality that we're engaged in this experimental era

in our work life, where we're sometimes here, we're sometimes home. This hybrid new model we're all in, which was once totally unthinkable, but is now the norm. And that new norm has basically been your beat for the past few years. You have chronicled it day in, day out. And so just to start, where in your mind are we on this hybrid return to office journey? Well, I think the reality is the return to office battles are over and they were battles. All right, listen, let's admit working from home for almost two years gets pretty comfortable. And right now people are saying they do not want to go back to the office. Once people had vaccines, once it was safer for people to be back in the office,

companies started saying, OK, we do want to see you back, maybe three days, maybe even four days a week. While other companies like Citigroup, Microsoft, and Google have announced a hybrid model, a mix of work from home and the office for their employees. Some say it's time to hang up the pajamas and come back to the office full time. There was a big push when people thought that the clock would be rewound and the workplace would look pretty much the way it did before the pandemic. But things kept intervening. So we are here, right, the end of 2021. We have this terrible variant of just rampaging through the world, essentially. What does it look like, that return to work?

There was the Delta variant. There was the Omicron variant. There was the fact that workers just really, really did not want to come back. There's kind of a standoff. Yeah, there was a standoff. Between workers and employers. Apple delayed its return to office plans after backlash from employees, as did Cognizant, which helps operate Google Maps.

After more than 100 workers signed a petition, some threatening to strike. We saw workers doing walkouts, doing petitions, basically saying, we are not going to come back. And that power struggle went on for quite a long time. But over the past year, workers and their employers reached what feels like a truce, where pretty much people are spending about two days at home and three days coming into the office. And what that means is that there's a lot of people who are spending at least part of their time still working from home. How many people? I mean, just give a sense of scale. Well, it's tens of millions of Americans who are affected by this. More than a quarter of workers are still working at least part-time from home. And it's across a lot of different industries.

It is overwhelmingly white-collar industries. So tech, finance, law, media, design. It's a lot of different industries. It is overwhelmingly white-collar industries. So tech, finance, law, media, design. It's a lot of people, but especially people who spend their day working on computers. That's a lot of people. It's a big chunk of the workforce. Yeah. And what we're really here to talk about with you today is how that quarter of the workforce, that tens of millions of Americans who are negotiating the home and the office and being a little bit in betwixt and between, how they're actually feeling about that scenario? I mean, you would think it would be everybody's dream. Like, you would think people would be pinching themselves that this was this perfect new

compromise we've reached where everyone gets a little bit of what they want. And a lot of people are seeing a massive upside to this new arrangement. For working parents, the flexibility of being able to be with their children right around bedtime and then maybe open up their laptops and do a little bit more work at the end of the day, that's been huge.

And a lot of people have found that they're just able to be healthier when they're working from home. Some people are more productive. I've spoken with so many workers who have found that their lives and their work are just so much easier to balance when they're working from home. They can walk their dogs. They can sneak in a little bit of a workout in the middle of the day. Or laundry. Yeah. And people really don't like their commutes, and Americans have long commutes. Right. There was census data really don't like their commutes. And Americans have long commutes. Right. There was census data that showed that people's commutes went down a little bit during the pandemic,

which they used to spend with their families or having a leisurely coffee and a walk or doing work. You know, a lot of economic research has showed that when people don't commute, they put that time back into their job. don't commute, they put that time back into their job. But what we've actually found is that what workers are feeling in this new hybrid reality is a lot of stress. They're feeling uncertain, anxious, a little bit of the discomfort that just comes from having an entirely new way of working that no one ever actually really sat down and explained to you. Right, right. Kind of a hybrid malaise, which, as you've hinted at, was unexpected. But can you just tell us what makes you certain that this feeling exists and is widespread? There's survey data out right now that indicates that people are just feeling kind

of uneasy about this moment. There's been polling from Gallup that showed that 44% of people are experiencing stress at work, which is just the continuation of a trend where that number is just going up year by year. People are feeling a lot of stress on the job. And there was another survey out from Bamboo HR that showed that people are at their lowest level of job satisfaction since 2020. Beginning of the pandemic. Right. So it does raise this question of like, why has there been this dip in happiness? Why is there all of this frustration and malaise when everyone sort of got exactly what they thought they wanted? Yeah. Right. Right. Okay. Well, what helps explain

this hybrid work malaise based on your reporting? Well, the first is that hybrid work has really changed the way we relate to the people that we work with. I mean, our co-workers are the people who we spend more time with sometimes than family. But in the hybrid world, you're not around them in the same normal ways that we've gotten used to. Some people are still working remotely all the time. You know, you might go in on a different day than your boss or than your, you know, closest work friend. Now doing this kind of half in the office, half at home has broken up our work bonds. And, you know, we're all trying to kind of rebuild them in different

ways. But that's easier said than done. There's also the idea that so much of the best kind of work happens from just, you know, an organic run-in with a colleague who gives you a great idea. There's been another study about the effect of remote work on what we call loose ties, which is people that you actually don't know that well and maybe don't work with that closely, but who actually could end up having like a big effect on your career through some little idea they give you or an introduction they make for you or just a little bit of unsolicited help that they give you. And introduction they make for you or just a little bit of unsolicited help that they give you. And when you work remotely, you develop fewer of those,

what they call loose ties. So just kind of random people who end up being unexpectedly pretty important to your career. So that brings us to the second issue people are facing, which is that in hybrid work, it's a lot harder to figure out how to advance your career. Just explain that. Well, there's actually been interesting research that shows that people get less feedback from their managers when they don't see them in person. And there was one study in particular that looked at engineers, and it actually just counted the number of lines of edits they got on their code. And people who were working remotely and didn't see their managers got fewer lines of edits on their code. Can you just explain the mechanics of that? I mean, what's the understanding of why you get so much less feedback when you're not in the office?

There's a lot of different theories people have floated. But one is just that bosses just feel more comfortable giving people ideas or kind of getting involved and saying, actually, you know, this isn't working so well when they have an actual relationship with that person. Slack and email tone is famously pretty hard to read. Is it ever? Some CEOs have said this explicitly, that they feel that if young people at the company want a future and want to rise in the ranks, that they have to develop in-person relationships with people. Banking CEOs have been really firm about this, as have partners in some law firms. And some of the champions of remote work at Salesforce, executives have said that they're worried that their junior people aren't doing the best work that they could be because they're not developing

in-person relationships. So reading between the lines of what you're saying here, hybrid work makes workers feel like they have less access to the power structure of a place and less clarity on basically their next move, their career ladder. Yeah, it's just kind of like what comes next for me. I think when people are working from home, it's very easy to start feeling like a cog in the machine as opposed to a human with a relationship with their boss. And maybe that boss will go to bat for you when you want a promotion or a raise or you're just feeling a little stuck in your career. Right. And I think

it's extra frustrating for people when they get the downside of a commute without the upside of the career development or the friendships or whatever else they're looking for at the office. Okay. So what else do we think is really going on here and is behind this malaise? I think the third kind of category of issues people are feeling right now, especially from a lot of the workers I've been speaking to, is that no one knows exactly how to cobble together a hybrid work week. A lot of people don't have strict schedules, like we'll see you Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday at 8.30 a.m.

It's a little bit of a choose-your-own-adventure, like maybe Wednesday at 11 a.m. you're commuting in, or maybe you have a meeting Thursday in the afternoon. And for some people, that flexibility works great. But for a lot of people, it also means you wake up every morning and you have to run an equation of what does my workday look like? What does my workweek look like? Am I going to see the people I want to see when I go to the office? Or am I going to scramble to get to the office and then try and lock myself in a booth so I can get done this deadline that I'm on? It's kind of a constant set of uncertainties people are juggling. Right. And I can hear someone in the back of my head saying, now, Emma, let me show you the world's smallest violin. It's so hard out there for

people who can't decide which day of the week to go in and how to meet their two or three day a week, you know, kind of requirements. But what I'm hearing you say is, in a world where we once had predictability, there's now just uncertainty, and uncertainty creates stress. And the reality is you're talking about tens of millions of workers who have a new kind of stress, even if it's not the world's greatest stress,

it's a new stress, and it's a real one. Right. The work week just used to have a structure for people. They had routines and then all of that went away. And everyone's kind of like handed the tools and it's like build your own work week routine. And for a lot of workers, this is not just about the question of, can I get an extra load of laundry done today? This is about people worrying over whether they're going to keep their jobs. I think it's important to remember that a lot of major tech companies have done big layoffs over the last two years. I mean, Google, Amazon,

Meta, Microsoft. And around that same time, a lot of them are also putting in place hybrid work requirements. And some of them are actually saying that managers are allowed to look at people's office attendance in making decisions around performance plans. Right. So the writing's kind of on the wall. Exactly. So it can feel like a low-stakes decision of like, oh, do I really need to leave the house today when it's cold out or it's raining, can start to feel like a much bigger decision of, you know, if I do this, will it affect whether or not I keep my job? Right. So the stakes are very real. And as you've clearly laid out, the dynamic between

workers, their bosses, their routines, their relationships in this new hybrid world have been upended. It's making a lot of workers uneasy. I'm curious, what are companies doing about it? How can they fight back against this malaise? So I have visited a lot of offices and met with a lot of different CEOs and managers who can see that the vibes around a return to office are not good. And they're really scotching their heads to try and figure out how to make hybrid work work. Mm-hmm. And what I can tell you from all of my reporting is that the results are truly a mixed bag. We'll be right back.

So, Emma, bring us inside these corporate efforts that I know you've been chronicling to make this hybrid situation better and happier for workers. Well, it's been a funny sort of situation because for most of time, workers were just sort of expected to show up at their offices five days a week. There wasn't much fuss to be made about it. But coming out of the return to office pushes, where a lot of companies landed was sort of that they had to make the office a destination. You know, make it somewhere really jazzy, really exciting. A desk, a monitor, it's not enough. You have to give people a little bit of some cherries on top. Some pizzazz. Yeah. You know, razzle dazzle them.

And what does that actually look like in practice? Cherries on top can take a lot of different forms. And we've seen companies take pretty much every approach you can imagine. I went to an office in LA where there were a lot of researchers, kind of academic types, who were offered the opportunity to do free yoga in the middle of the day. And I had the chance to join them, which was, you know, a little awkward when you're taking your shoes and socks off with your sources. But, you know, anything to kind of understand what people are going through right now. And how was it? I mean, other people seemed to be really enjoying it. They were getting to like the headstand phase.

They had all been practicing and building up toward their headstands, which I definitely did not join because this was this is my day one and also my last day in the yoga front. But I did watch them attempt the headstands. I've also seen offices try game night to mixed results in terms of the enthusiasm of the team. I went to a home buying company recently in New York where they were pretty excited because it was their game night and they'd gotten a lot of different snacks. They had a bar cart. They had wine on it. They had beer. They had a little picture of Jimmy Buffett on the cart, like to really set the stage that this is not the office. This is, you know, Margaritaville maybe, or this is almost a vacation, except that you're in cold downtown New York.

There was definitely an awkwardness to it, which I think is natural anytime you're having what one might call forced fun with your coworkers. You know, I think in the old days, it might have had that more natural feeling of coworkers are just bouncing from the office after work to go to a bar and have a beer together. co-workers are just bouncing from the office after work to go to a bar and have a beer together. But now you have the energy of HR managers who are saying, like, how do we get people to have fun? Like, what do we need to do to get you guys to hang out together? Right. And what you seem to be describing is authentic efforts to make the office a place that's joyful, that inevitably are going to come off to many of the people who are asked to participate in them as it's kind of dutiful and maybe not exactly where they would choose to spend their 5 to 6 30 p.m. after work, but they're playing ball. Exactly. And to be fair to these managers,

I mean, they are trying to do a difficult challenge, which is make the office a destination. And workers are going there because they're doing their jobs and they're required to be there. And meanwhile, their bosses are looking at them and saying, well, we're not just going to have you come here and do your jobs. We're going to make this so exciting for you. Right. Which is in and of itself a somewhat complicated proposition for many people because if it's work, then it's not a destination. It's a job. Right. Okay. What else are companies doing in this moment to make this work? You know, I've also seen a lot of companies that are actually rethinking what the office has to

physically look like if it's a destination. And I think about this as sort of like the living roomification of the office. If you're going to get your workers to leave home, then you want to make the office maybe look a little bit more like their homes. And I've talked with some of the biggest office designers in the world. I've talked with companies that supply office furniture. And I've visited a lot of offices that have physically remade themselves to look like more of a place where you might want to spend time. One of the funniest ones I visited was actually a cereal-making company. And this is a kind of buzzy, very Instagram-friendly cereal company. And they decided to make their office look like a cereal box.

Why not? Why not? What does it look like when your office resembles a cereal box? I mean, there was a little bit of me that was like, I could live here. And they told me their motto is to be a Froot Loop in a world of Cheerios. And so they're trying to bring that into every piece of furniture in the office. There are bright pink couches and planters everywhere. They really leaned into the fake plants.

They sourced a lot of their furniture vintage. It's color everywhere. It's a little bit psychedelic feeling. I also visited, you know, an office that really feels like stepping into like a Soho club, like it's very hotel lobby. There was really chic curated collections of books. There's like little nooks where you have armchairs, lots of upholstery, you know, faux grapes, Keith Haring coffee table books. It really feels like you are stepping in somewhere special. So it looks very glamorous. I think the actual experience of working there is not the easiest. It's not always the most conducive to working. Right. What a lot of workers tell me is that, you know, a game night or a bar cart can be fun here and there.

But there's also a cringiness to some of these efforts. There's also the challenge of it makes getting your job done at the office a little bit harder. And then there's the fact that when you look at the numbers, they haven't really budged. So HR managers are kind of throwing the kitchen sink at this problem of getting people back in the office. But is it really doing all that much? There's numerical evidence you're saying that ultimately this isn't really moving the needle all that much. Right. From the numbers on how full offices actually are, things have really plateaued.

And finally, there are companies that are actually doing sticks, not carrots. And what do those sticks look like? I mean, for some companies, that looks like basically turning back the clock to pre-pandemic and saying, we will see you at your desk five days a week, nine to five or nine to nine. Give us some examples of that. I'm really curious what that looks like and what the response from workers is. Yeah, I mean, I've talked to an AI company outside San Francisco, for example, where the CEO is adamant that people have to be in five days a week. What he said to me is that, you know,

none of the greatest inventions in history were made on Zoom. It's possible that, you know, we just haven't seen the greatest Zoom invention yet. But his thought is that they are doing very difficult, very fast-moving work in artificial intelligence. It is a highly compensated job, and it's an exciting place to work because you're surrounded by really smart people. Right. And so he will not make any exceptions to the idea

that he wants to see everyone in the office five days a week. He tells me he has the fullest parking lot in the Bay Area. Hmm. I'm curious if this stick approach ever backfires. It definitely does. You know, some companies have taken a much harder line approach to return to office and they've lost people over it. Grindr, the gay dating app, is a good example of that. They decided this summer that they wanted people back in the office at least a couple of days a week, but they wanted people back in the same offices as their teams and managers. And Grindr had grown during the pandemic.

They'd hired people who had come on with the understanding that they would just be working from home for as long as they wanted. From wherever they were. Exactly. And then the company said they were going to have to relocate cities to report to the same offices as their teams. And Grindr did lose some people over that policy. There were people who just left the company because they decided they did not want to move cities to, you know, report to the office a couple days a week. On the other hand, the management was really firm that they think that the company is going to do much better and the work is going to

be stronger if people are near their teams physically and if they can interact with their managers, getting that feedback, building those relationships. And as you've been talking here, it's occurred to me that the absolutists in the return to office debate that we now know is over, they might have had a point. And let me just explain. Their point was basically that workers should either all be in the office five days a week or they should be allowed to work from home whenever they want. And that way, there's not this hybrid split brain problem of uncertainty, anxiety, forced fun. You know, the workers who are in the office all the time, they get the benefit of the connection, predictability, clear sense of professional

development and the corporate ladder where they're headed. And those who work from home all the time get the clear benefits of being truly remote. They don't have to commute. They don't end up going to the office like you do in a booth on a Zoom call. And instead of either of those, what we have is this kind of muddled compromise that is now a kind of permanent reality. Well, I think a lot of people are hopeful that we can get to a place where hybrid is the best of both worlds. I think, you know, people were given a level of flexibility during remote work that is just hard to take back from them. during remote work that is just hard to take back from them. I think, you know, what a lot of researchers I've spoken to have said is that when they look at studies on the effects of remote work on productivity, they're kind of all over the map. And the reason is that it basically comes down to

how well managed those hybrid work plans are. When they're done well, it makes people more productive. When they're done badly, it makes people less productive. And so I think, you know, we've suddenly arrived at the end of the return to office battles, and now everyone's trying to figure out how do we make this reality actually work for people. And it's not just about, you know, some coder wearing headphones on a beanbag in San Francisco. It's about people across so many industries, across so many parts of the country. Like, this is a phenomenon, again, touching tens of millions of people. And people are really trying to figure out how do we make this work

in a way that doesn't feel cringey and, you know, counterproductive. Right. And it feels reasonable to remember that it took decades and generations to build up the previous system and then very little time to essentially break it down and arrive at this new hybrid model and therefore stands to reason that it's going to take years and years,

maybe decades to come up with a true replacement, a set of structures, rituals, and rhythms around hybrid work that are going to make it better, more sustainable, less cringy. Exactly. I mean, I think the workplace has seen huge changes before. We've seen the entrance of women into the workplace. We've seen personal computers, which meant you could do your work wherever, whenever. But I can't think of another time when the workplace has changed fundamentally overnight. We woke up one morning and suddenly had to work in an

entirely different way in a different place, just remake our routines. And so I think it stands to reason that it's going to take more than a couple of years to really figure out how to make that actually work for people. And hybrid work also is a new chapter. You know, we sort of got used to remote work. We got used to logging into Zoom and slacking with people and sending them emojis as a way to bond. But we haven't really totally gotten to a comfortable place with hybrid yet. We're still figuring out, is it the bar carts? Is it the game nights? Is it the sticks? Like, what's going to make this actually effective so that people don't commute and then lock

themselves in a, you know, hermetically sealed room? Right. I mean, you have brought me to my final question, which is, what is it going to take to get you, Emma, out of that booth? Have you thought about that? Well, you know, I'm here with you right now having a great time. You have left your booth for us. I've left my booth for you guys. And sometimes my coworkers bring in really good snacks. That's what gets you out. That draws me out. But I also think, you know, everyone's kind of finding their own comfortable resting place. The booth is working for me.

I would recommend it. You know, you can pop in and out and you can still have lunch with your coworkers. You can bump into your manager. I think everyone's finding that sort of resting place that works for them.

Right. One day at a time, we're filling it out. Well, Emma, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. In person. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today.

On Wednesday, pressure intensified on former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to drop out of the Republican presidential race and coalesce around Donald Trump, with the Republican Party's chairwoman, Ronald McDaniel, telling Fox News that Haley has no shot at winning. I think she's run a great campaign, but I do think there is a message that's coming out from the voters, which is very clear. We need to unite around our eventual nominee, which is going to be Donald Trump. Haley has vowed to stay in the race, and one of her biggest supporters, New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, forcefully rejected McDaniel's call for Haley to end her campaign.

With all due respect to Ronna McDaniel, to say that we're just going to call it after two states, 40 states to go, the head of the Republican Party saying we don't want to hear from all the other Republicans in the nation, that's nonsense. You've got to let the voters decide, not a bunch of political elites out of D.C. Today's episode was produced by Sydney Harper, Will Reed, and Muj Zaydi. It was edited by Patricia Willans and engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Contains original music by Marion Lozano, Alisha Ba'itu, Dan Powell, and Diane Wong. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro.

See you tomorrow.