The Decibel - How remote work changed our grooming habits

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

When the pandemic hit, nearly 40 per cent of Canada’s workforce went remote. More than four years later, that number has dropped by more than half.In a moment when bosses push for a return to the office – and workers cling to hybrid schedules – we’re learning just how much remote work has changed our habits, routines … and personal hygiene. Globe reporter Zosia Bielski recently turned her focus to examining our relationship with time: time use at work, unpaid labour and our hours off the clock. She joins the podcast to explain what researchers have learned about productivity in Canada and abroad, and how the fight over remote work is about how we use our time and what power our employers have over it.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

If you get the chance to work from home, do you bother putting on makeup? Shaving? Do you even shower? Remote work has been a reality for nearly five years, and it's changed our habits and routines. Especially when it comes to grooming and personal hygiene. Zosia Bielski is a Globe reporter who's recently turned her focus to examining gender and relationships through the lens of time. Today, Zosia's here to explain just how our habits have changed, why women are especially affected, and how the tensions over returning to the office are actually a fight over how

we spend our time. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Zosia, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having me. So today you and I are sitting face to face in our studio, but I know you often work remotely. So does your routine change if you're coming into the office versus working from home? I would say drastically. I didn't wear my pajama into the studio for you. So yeah, I would say drastically. And, you know, there's no right or wrong way to sort of work in a hybrid

way. And people really do things differently. But I would say definitely my mornings change. And I find my focus is really sharp instead of what I would sort of do on an office day, which is makeup, kind of getting my hair to not look like a bird's nest, running between the mirror and my smartphone to make sure there hasn't been an email or some breaking news. So there's sort of a level of franticness that invades my mornings when I'm sort of coming into the office that just sort of isn't there on those work from home days. So kind of what you're focusing on there is actually maximizing the time when you know you're going to do the best work instead of kind of using that time for other stuff.

Exactly, exactly. You know, using that time in a more scattered way, you know, planning for the commute, packing a bag, all of that stuff we have to do. And I'm finding as I move between remote work and in-office work, the toggling between the two, that contrast really becomes clear. The days that I can sort of shape in the morning and the days that are sort of shaped for me by the norms of what you have to do to just like be office presentable. I guess we should just acknowledge off the top, of course, many workers don't have the choice to work from home. Only certain jobs really allow you to do that. But a big segment of the Canadian workforce now is kind of in this hybrid space where they sometimes have to go to the office and sometimes can be from home. So it does it was sort of the push for two days a week. Now, the norm is obviously shifting to three. We saw that with our federal workers. But, you know, we're in year four of hybrid work. It persists. Yeah. So as you say, year four of hybrid work, of course, this all

goes back to the pandemic when remote work was really common, essential for a while for, again, not everybody, but for a lot of people. Can you just remind us of that time, Zosia? I guess, what were the immediate changes we saw to people's, you know, how much effort they were putting into actually getting ready for the workday? I think we shut that time out. It's sort of a blur. Time sort of collapses. But there was a real despair and a real uncertainty and sort of the ripple effects of uncertainty. You know, we did hear about people just not getting out of their pajamas, not even getting into like the secondary lounge wear, not bathing, you know, frantically having to do childcare and homework

while trying to meet deadlines at home. So there was a level there that was sort of much more intense than the relics of hybrid work that sort of exists today. Okay, so if we look at, as you say, the relics that exist today, what do we know about how workers spend their time differently than on days when they go into the office versus working from home? And I guess let's first focus on personal hygiene and grooming, because this seems to be a big part of it. Yeah, it's certainly the commute time is the most drastic, but grooming also can't sort of be overlooked. So we all could describe those changes in our lives in the last four years, but there's really interesting sort of burgeoning time you survey industry that really has like were spending on average 24 minutes less per day on grooming, hygiene and getting dressed for work.

And then we had the survey of working arrangements and attitudes from work from home research. So that's like a Stanford led cross university group. And they're doing sort of the most interesting work tracking all these wrinkles to our time use, including grooming. They've done a lot of research on grooming. So they found people sort of saving significant amounts of time on work from home days compared to office days when it came to grooming. So for example, women, when they looked at the time women were saving, they would spend almost half an hour on getting ready for work when they had to commute in when they were working from home that dropped down to 18 minutes so more than 10 minutes a morning for men the changes were less pronounced 25.4 minutes spent on grooming when they had to go into the

office versus 20.5 minutes so not much of a difference there but the time really did drop precipitously for women. Okay. So there's an interesting gender gap. What are the reasons behind why women's grooming time drops dramatically when they work from home? I guess, what are we not doing when we're sitting at home versus coming into the office? So the most sort of glaring disparities were in the time that women saved. So they spent more time getting ready for the office than men, but then they spent significantly less time on grooming when they didn't have to go into the office. So that tells you something. It tells you that maybe when women don't have to do this, they don't want to. And they're keenly aware of just how much time this eats out of their lives

when they sort of have to be office presentable and look quote unquote professional. And obviously this takes many shapes and forms, but one of the striking things this group led by Stanford researchers found was women were actually showering less than men when they worked from home. So when they worked from home, 73% of women showered compared to 80% of men. So like women were kind of gleeful. Like it was like a bit of a secret had come out, like when you're not forced to do this out in the world, you might not. And that might be even more of a sort of a drastic shift than it is for men. Yeah, kind of a freedom to not have to do makeup or do your hair or, as you say, even even shower kind of and get presentable in that way. Which is, you know, I guess surprising to a lot of people, but it says something about how women feel about their time. Yeah. I'm wondering how age factors into this, Socia, because I imagine this plays a part. So do we know what the difference is between people who are older or younger?

Yes. So women 50 to 64 years old would put in the most grooming minutes on those office days. So that would be 30.4 minutes. And then when they got to work remotely at home, that dropped right down to 16.9 minutes. So we're talking like nearly half. And that 16.9 minutes was sort of the shortest ritual of any other group of women or men. So what that told the researchers was it signals what the expectations are that women in that age bracket really feel pressure to really have to put themselves together for an office setting based on sort of social judgments. And when they don't have to, they just throw that ritual in the trash when they're home. So, and these are often women like at the peak of their earning years, right? And the peak of their professional experience. So clearly they'd like to focus on something other than, you know,

sculpting their brows or putting on mascara. So it's a telling finding. I want to go back to what you mentioned about men's grooming habits, because you said that actually the time doesn't really change for men, whether they go into the office or they stay at home. So what do we know exactly about that? So yeah, they were really only shaving off four or so minutes. And so when I spoke with Nicholas Bloom, he's an economist at Stanford that does a lot of this research. He's a man, obviously. So he took the call wearing, as he put it, a ratty t-shirt. He

was working from home. And he posited that men are still doing a lot of the stuff they would do if they were going into the office when they work from home, because they just do it because it feels good. So men were showering more, grooming more, just because it's a pleasurable ritual. And they didn't view it as a ritual that you need to engage in before sort of being presentable to the world. They didn't really convey that pressure. And of course, the shaving time really dropped for men. So there are certain things obviously they don't want to do either necessarily on a daily basis. And we saw the pandemic beard, so we know all about that. So certainly there were parts of the ritual they would drop, but they wouldn't drop all of it. I want to, I guess, maybe complicate this a

little bit because even if we're not leaving the house when we're working remotely, Zosia, a lot of us are still on video calls, right? We're still looking at each other, actually looking at close-ups often of each other's faces. I mean, I imagine that must play into how much prep time we put into things as well. Yes, absolutely. And again, Nicholas Bloom talked a lot about video calls. And one of the hints that they had here was when they looked at makeup, they found women were sort of applying makeup 70 plus percent of the time going into the office. But when they were working from home, 40 percent of women were still applying makeup. So they thought, hmm, why is that? Okay, answer is clearly video calls. And Bloom talked quite a bit about this new era of video calls and how it's making people even more nervous because it's a close-up of your face, your hair, and your shoulders. And that close-up might be sort of beamed full-size onto someone's desktop, or it can be a large screen in an office setting where you've got people around a boardroom table staring

at your face. And he said, you know, people can sort of stare with abandon a little more freely than they would in an office setting. And it's a zoom in. So he talked about sort of the anxiety around that and the makeup rituals around that. And we've also sort of heard about something called zoom dysphoria, which is people really spending much more time than they normally would staring at their own face on a screen. And we had stories of surgeons talking about Botox and nose jobs and people getting really sort of fixated on how their face looks and moves on camera in a way that we really didn't have to contend with before the pandemic. Yeah, so even for remote workers, you're actually getting maybe a different level

of scrutiny than you would if you were in the office. Where it's not polite to stare. Yeah. We'll be back in a moment. Okay. So we've talked about people's grooming routines for in-office versus remote work, Xosha. Let's just broaden this out now. What else have you learned about how people are spending their time when they're working from home? So in terms of the time saved, these are the grooming minutes, the commuting minutes. We have to sort of remember something that we often overlook. These are unpaid minutes. These are minutes outside of your fixed salary hours. And so when researchers sort of asked people what they do with that sort of extra time,

40% said they pour it back into their jobs. So they're actually just sitting down to work earlier. So they're working more, essentially. They're working more. 30% admitted they are pouring more of that back into childcare or chores. And the other 30% said they're sort of pouring that back into exercise or leisure. And of course, those who would like us back into the office full time raise alarm about, you know, what people are doing with their time when they're not grooming or commuting. But I would remind them that those are unpaid hours. That's your time. That's free time. And in a sense, employers would sort of be wise to look at that because, again, 40% of people

argued that they just poured that time right back into their jobs. I know you spoke to someone named Vijay Patel, kind of about his routine. He's a tech worker that's based just outside of Toronto. What did he tell you, Zosia, about how his day changes between when he's working from home versus going into the office? Yeah, so he described a really sort of lovely morning when he gets to work from home. He'll get up at seven. He has a gym five minutes away, so he'll go have a workout. He'll come home, he'll shower, he'll even meditate or pray, have breakfast. But, you know, by nine or a little earlier, he's, you know, retreated to his home office and he begins the workday. That is like completely upended when he has to commute in. So he lives in Kitchener. So

it's a two hour and 10 commute in one day. So wrap your head around that. That's four hours and 20 minutes a day. And again, that time is unpaid. So he will wake up an hour earlier at 6am. There is no workout. And then it's sort of this frantic, put yourself together race, showering, shaving, moisturizing, beard trimming, matching socks to shoes to belts, and then sort of running out the door and catching his train. And he said that when he's on his train, he often sees like women slapping on their makeup for their own day at work, sort of in front of the other commuters. So again, to me, there was this real contrast of what those mornings looked like. Yeah, really different use of his time, for sure. It sounds like he's got a

pretty good routine when he works from home. So that's one example. But of course, different people would use that time differently. And I guess I'm wondering how race, gender, age, how that might affect what people do with their extra time on work from home days. Do we have a sense of that, Zosia? Well, I think it's clear that women poured a lot more of that time back into chores and child care. There is some sense that men will pour more of it sort of back into self-care. But it's clear that the thing that people really value, no matter their age or their

race, cultural background, religious background, is this concept of schedule control. People really like to have a little bit more say in how their day goes, especially the hours around the work. And reams of research just find when you have a little bit more schedule control, people are more engaged, more satisfied at work, more likely to stay, better retention, and better recruitment. So that research is in and it's clear. And we know that people from minority groups often face different burdens in the office. Zosia, do we know how things have changed for them when they work remotely? Yeah, I spoke with Cheryl Thompson. She's a professor of performance at Toronto Metropolitan University.

And she talked about like the great equalizer of Zoom, where it's sort of like the Hollywood squares on your screen. And sometimes you don't even know who's leading the meeting anymore. It can become a free-for-all. And she sort of contrasted that to the boardroom table where it's very clear who's at the head of the table, what that looks like. And similarly, in terms of aesthetics,

she described racialized workers who, you know, maybe comments are made about their hair or their clothing. She talks about people feeling really surveyed at the office. And she talked to workers who really felt that burden lift when they were at home and could focus without that limelight. And a lot of these questions were sort of innocuous, but they really did add up and people felt sort of watched and surveyed in a way that didn't feel great. I wonder about on the mental health side of things, too. Like, do we have a sense of work from home days versus in office days, how that affects people's mental health?

There's real evidence that hybrid work really appeals to people. So for that deep focus, they really talk about work from home days, allowing them that deep focus. And then for the mental health mix, you know, coming in really is important in terms of bonding with colleagues, building culture, brainstorming, collaborating, you know, even sort of being in the city and putting yourself together like an adult and interacting with other adults. But the mix seems to be key. People seem sort of happiest and most likely to stay with employers who offer that flexibility. We really are thrown off balance

when we have no control over our time. A lot of research points to the idea that people will, they would take a pay cut if they could control their time. And when you have no control over your time, as a lot of low wage workers don't, and you have to be somewhere for a certain number of hours and get permission for bathroom breaks. And there really is a sense of despair in not having any say over the minutes in your day. And I think the pandemic showed us that when you're given sort of a blank slate and asked, do you want to commute into work for many hours a day? Do you want to spend inordinate amounts of time and money on your grooming rituals? The answer resoundingly was no.

And people got their work done just the same. And as employers are sort of pulling us back, I think it's clear workers are saying, you know, we showed you we could do this differently. And it worked. Well, let's talk about this a little bit, because as you say, there is kind of this push to have more people in the office. A lot of companies want to mandate more days in person now. But from what you're saying, you know, especially 40 percent of workers who work from home are actually working more, working longer hours. What is, I guess, the conversation or the argument around forcing people back to the office? It really depends on the employer. But sort of the old school employer, there's sort of a question of trust.

What are you getting done at home? What else are you getting done at home other than working? There's something called FaceTime bias. It's also called proximity bias. So, you know, if your boss is in, they'd like you to be in as well. That's a hierarchy question as well. But this idea that if they can see you in the office, you must be working. And we all know that's not true because, you know, how many times do you walk behind a coworker and they're like on Perez Hilton or online shopping? Like there's many,

many ways you can waste your time in the office or gossiping in the cafeteria or taking a long lunch. You know, all of these things are sort of sanctioned as part of office life, but they don't make us terribly efficient. So, you know, there is a sort of growing divide between bosses who still have sort of trust issues and managers who are sort of starting to focus a little bit more on results and what you actually get done rather than where you do it, how you do it, and what you're wearing while you do it. Yeah, it sounds like this might have more to do with how work performance has kind of traditionally been evaluated versus actually looking at productivity kind of on its own. Is that, I guess, something that plays into this?

Definitely that conversation is getting louder, and we have lots of data now that sort of divides GDP by hours worked. And what the finding is, is, you know, the long hours do not equate to productivity. So you'll get a hyper overwork culture like Japan, where, you know, overworking is sort of prized. There's a phenomenon called Karoshi, which is death by overwork some labor lawyers estimate 10 000 people die this way or get very sick contrast that to iceland which much of the workforce works a four-day shortened work week and so when you divide the gdp by hours worked lo and behold iceland's productivity ranks higher than japan so we have these myths about long work hours equating to productivity,

but a lot of the research just isn't bearing that out. And a lot of that goes back to sort of the Protestant work ethic that guides a lot of our ideas about work, how we do it, and for how long. Just lastly here, Zosia, I guess I'm wondering, to come back to this idea of our grooming habits changing when we're at home. Do they also change when we come into the office now? Like, I guess I wonder if there's been a shift in what is deemed professional appearance as a result of all this. I think anyone can say that maybe people at the office sort of look like they're dressed for a Friday more often. You know, you see more sneakers, less heels, less pantyhose, you know, I think some of that formality has gone out

the window. And I was really intrigued by some of the comments to the story, like hundreds and hundreds of comments and quite a bit of counterpoint. And I'd like to read one if I could. Please, yeah. So this came from a woman, shoes, boots I'd never wear anywhere else. If I had the chance to work from home, I'd have leapt with joy and still done the job. Working from home has been earned on the backs of millions like me. Don't back down. I mean, there's such intensity there, right? So again, these are questions that people are really giving a lot of thought to. And, you know, while grooming can seem like a trivial focal point, it really tells you about how people are reevaluating how they use their time. Fascinating. Zosia, thank you so much for being here today and taking the time to go through this.

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.