The New Yorker Radio Hour - Will the Office Survive the Pandemic?

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Cal Newport, the author of “A World without Email” and other books, has been writing about how the shutdown has affected businesses and the culture of work. Remote operation, he says, has raised fundamental questions about the purpose of work, its role in our lives, and how productivity is measured. While most companies are asking employees to return to the office as the pandemic eases, Newport predicts that economic forces will eventually drive an exodus toward permanent remote work. Tech companies that launched as fully remote operations, he thinks, have a head start on the economic advantages of ditching the office for good. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The number of people leaving their jobs voluntarily, the quit rate, hit an all-time high this year. That phenomenon is now known as the Great Resignation, and it's shaking up industry after industry, from office jobs to restaurant work. The repercussions of the pandemic and how and where we work are going to play out. for some time to come. Helping us understand all this is Cal Newport. Cal writes our column Office Space. He teaches computer science,

and he's also the author of the book, A World Without Email. Lately, Cal Newport has been thinking about an idea that was all the rage not so very long ago, the four-hour work week. Your main work is as an academic. As a professor, how has this transformation, which is obviously inextricable from the pandemic so far,

affected your own work as a teacher, as a writer, as a researcher? Well, I think one of the obviously biggest short-term transformations was this experiment we've been forced into, over the last year and a half, into what if we shut down offices? What if we make work remote? This has had an impact, of course, on academia. My university, Georgetown University, was effectively shut down for most students and faculty for over a year. I felt this was a hard period. I'm happy now that I can actually be back and seeing my students. And it was an interesting experimentation and trying to figure out in higher education what's valuable and what's not. There was prognostications, early pandemic, that we would all realize that we don't need physical universities.

Because technically speaking on paper, you could deliver classes via Zoom and we were all going to see that. And that would be the demise of the university. The opposite happened. Students hated it. And there was a rush, like, how can we get back? And that's a theme that comes up a lot in this work, by the way, is that, there's a lot of transformations that make sense on paper. The tech exist for this groundbreaking change to how we work, and then we try it, and there's a lot more complicating factors that rear their head. You recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker revisiting something called the four-hour work week, not four-day work week, the four-hour work week. And that was an idea that was popularized by Tim Ferriss 14 years ago. What brought him to the idea of the four-hour work week, and what does it really mean?

He was in that early period, the first decade of the 2000s, after the first dot com boom, followed by a bust. There was this big growth period where Web 2.0 really picked up speed, Google picked up speed, social media emerged. Silicon Valley became a heroic sector of the economy. And there it was this whole culture of overwork that Silicon Valley was permeating out to the rest of the country. And Tim was an overworked entrepreneur, I should say, not executive. if he worked at a company, became an entrepreneur, was overworked, stressed out, and basically ran a lot of radical experiments and realized, I can run my company in about four hours a week if my goal is just to live an interesting life and not to become a hector millionaire. And so he wrote this book about it, and he went to South by Southwest in 2007. It was the center of this sort of Silicon Valley overwork culture and gave a talk where he told the people in the room, you're working too hard, give up on this goal of becoming rich with your stock IPOs, live a more interesting,

life, and they were wrapped. And then wrote a best-selling book called the four-hour work week, which provided him the economic cushion to propagate the idea of a four-hour work week. But it doesn't work for everybody. How can it possibly work for everybody? And what's wrong with working really hard if you have a goal, if you have some sense of ambition beyond the normal? You know, I asked him about that when I talked about him for the article, and, you know, he's still highly connected to Silicon Valley. So he was quick to say, there's nothing wrong with it. He says, if you're trying to grow a startup, for example, you have to work 80-hour weeks. That's just part of the game. If you're a professional athlete, he mentioned, there is certain standards of training. It's going to take up a lot of

your time. And that's fine. What he thought he was doing was trying to introduce another option into the conversation that just trying to, his model of trying to work Intel retirement hard, he said, that's good for some people, but there's these other options that he felt that technology was just making available. But what was interesting to me about that, is, is that it was in some sense a warning shot in that today post-pandemic or an in-stage of pandemic, lots of people are rediscovering the same ideas. Oh, I can work remotely. I can have different arrangements with my work. I can also focus on other aspects of my life. So it's actually quite prescient that some people might want to try something different. We weren't really ready

for that message in 2007. However, today I think it's resonating a lot more. When we talk about a four-hour work week, are we being serious? That's it. Four hours? That sounds like not a hell of a lot. The idea wasn't, I think, literally that everyone should work four hours. But he would say in the book, and he's quick to say if you talk to him in person, that the bigger point is question the assumptions about what work means, question about what you should actually be spending your time on what's important, what's not. That actual hour will probably really differ depending on what you do. And Tim has said many times, he works way more than four hours now. But the point is, I guess, having that flexibility.

Though I'll have to say, I like that idea. Some days. Four hours a week sounds about right than me. Maybe we should make that the standard. I'm talking with Cal Newport, more in a moment. You recently wrote about how plans to go back into the office are creating a lot of tension all around for office workers, for managers alike. And you said that ambiguous plans are somehow good for executives but bad for employees. Why is that? Yeah, when you come out and say, we have a tentative date, but I'm not going to tell you anything about what we're looking at and why we're looking at it. I'm not going to tell you here are our goals in reopening, and these are the metrics we're looking at to see whether or not we've hit those goals. You have two issues. One is the

transparency issue. I don't know as an employee what your goals are and whether I agree with them, and I think the employee should know, what is your standard? What are you looking for? Is it we should have no COVID spread in the office? Is it that we shouldn't have an undue burden on hospitals? Is that we shouldn't have undue burden on parents who have kids in school? That should be clear. And then the second issue is predictability. If I don't know how these decisions are being made, you get this Groundhog Day style setup where then an executive can, you know, emerge, look around and say, no, we're going to close for two more months. So it makes it very hard to predict what is actually going to happen. And my argument was that in part, this strategy of ambiguity is good for those making

the decisions because you can read the tea leaves and get a feel. Am I going to get backlash? Where are people? Where are the culture? And you can minimize basically your headache. as an executive, that becomes the symptom that you're minimizing, but it's not necessarily good for all the people who have to live under it. Without a doubt, but isn't the problem, the pandemic itself. In other words, what we hope that a vaccine will do, and now we're talking about the specific time that we're in, what we hope a vaccine will do is create a situation in which COVID is endemic. And that means people will have breakthrough cases. It's not as if people won't get sick, just as they get sick from the flu, and people do die from the flu, and there are cases where breakthrough cases can become more

serious, although the vast, vast majority are not. So is there a cut and dried way to go back to work in your view? No, I don't think there's any clear answer beyond clarity itself should be part of the answer. And this was really the view of Monica Gandhi from UCSF, who I interviewed for this piece, and she was saying clear off-ramps from a public health policy perspective have a lot of good value. That doesn't mean you're going to have perfect predictability. You're absolutely right. You could say, this is what we're looking at. These two numbers, put into this formula, and you could be watching those numbers and say, we're doing great, and then you get two weeks away from it, and something happens to we didn't predict.

We've learned not to predict this pandemic, but clarity should be a part of the mix. You've said that work in some way is fundamentally broken. What do you mean? When it comes to knowledge work in particular, we have a real tendency towards the improvisational and the haphazard. Unlike other sectors of the economy, I think when we looked at knowledge, work, we put a lot on the worker themselves to figure out. How you organize yourself, how you say yes or no to assignments, how you plan your day, how you communicate and collaborate with people. We tend to place this on the individuals themselves. Management by objectives is the leading approach. We give you objectives and incentives you figure out how to do the work. And I think this has caused a lot of problems. It's led to this

haphazard approach to work where we're on email all day. We can't get away from Zoom. We're bothering people back and forth constantly, can you do this? What about this? And when we say knowledge work, what does that mean? So there's a million little definitions, but basically I'm using my brain, not my hands. Most of the work is happening in your brain and between your brain interacting with a computer. This sort of digital era knowledge work, I think, is the subsector where we're seeing the biggest changes to what work means. And so the way we are working in knowledge work, I think, is far, far from where we could be in terms of worker satisfaction and productivity because we're not thinking about this at a systemic level of what's

the best way to actually do this work. We make it to individualize. Well, there's a history to this. Isn't there, Kel? There's a history of this notion of needing to be at work, the notion of the office as a factory. What's behind it? Well, I mean, obviously there's an arbitrary aspect to the nine to five, we're in a building, we're there from nine to five. I mean, this came directly from negotiations about work hours from factory workers. And we have to Remember that knowledge work emerged in an industrial context. And we use the factory as the main paradigm. It also gives us an element of surveillance that makes it easier to just say, be here and work.

At least I know you're working. That saves me from the trouble of actually having to figure out what works means, how we structure work, how we track work, how we assign work. We can get away with not having to do that type of managerial effort if we instead just say, be in this building when I can see you, answer my emails when I send them, and we'll just rock and roll. So, you know, we're talking as if this is a universal dilemma. And obviously, there are lots and lots and lots of jobs in this country and beyond that this is not relevant. And already roughly 13% of U.S. workers remain remote. That's it, 13%. So is the battle with the office as a factory already over to some extent?

I think the battle is going to be lost in the short term, but the war. is going to be one. My prediction is that in the next year or so, we're going to see a pretty large scale retreat back to what I would call largely in-person work. I think there will be a more extensive granting of one, maybe two days a week, that you're not at the office, but you still have to live near the office and come to it every week. I think that's going to happen because the friction of remote work will become too strong if we don't do significant other efforts to restructure how work happens. But I also think there's other economic dynamics that have already begun. that means in five or six years, we're going to see a much more widespread return to more aggressive

remote policies. I think the pandemic planted the seeds for figuring out how to do that. Those plants, these metaphorical plants are going to grow. So five or six years from now, it's going to be a vastly different workplace than it's going to be, let's say, next year. Is that related to what we've been seeing in terms of what's known now as the great resignation, a huge number of people who have quit their jobs? The real force, I think, that's at play here. And I'm drawing this from an entrepreneur named Chris Hurd, who I interviewed, he thinks startups that are starting right now, especially in the tech sector, are figuring out how to make remote work actually work, because they are starting as native remote companies. So they were forced to start in a period

where they couldn't have an office building, so they're innovating. He thinks that innovation is going to then spread. Once they figure out how to do remote work properly, they will have an advantage, no long-term leases, and they're going to have access to more talent from more geographic areas. That advantage means they'll dominate. And then the knowledge they learn will spread. from these startups to bigger companies, out of tech to other sectors. I think that's actually the economic force that's going to cause a lot of changes. Companies are going to make more money once they can figure out how to do this, and that wisdom is being forged right now in the startup culture.

Now, you hope that the vision that's offered by Chris Hurd, the entrepreneur in your piece, is correct. Show me exactly what that vision entails. In that vision, there would be no central office for the company you work at. So there would be no constraint on where you live because there's no long-term lease they hold on any sort of building. In that vision, however, once every month to two months, you would be in person with key people that you work with from that company. The location would differ depending on the purpose of the meeting. Are we brainstorming?

Are we getting to know each other? Are we trying to push through an initiative? Are we doing a post-mortem? And so you would have some connection. But Chris does make it clear that the office would not be the primary source of your social relationships, that this would be a world in which you then turn to the local, you turn to other types of communities as your main source of social support.

It would be a different relationship for a lot of adults with work. And who do you think will be for that and who will be against it? Well, I think ultimately, if that vision is correct, most companies will be for it because it's more profitable, which tends to be what the forces I bet on in the end, much more so than the forces of cultural change

to great resignation, ultimately the forces that make massive changes at scales that dwarf any other sources when it comes to the commercial sector tends to be, this is more profitable. And so if you do not have a long-term lease, your overhead per employee is lower. If you can access talent without geographic constraint, your return on talent investment is going to be much higher. So it's sort of economic Darwinism at that point, that if that works, that model is going to take over because those companies are going to be more profitable than their competitors. So it's simply the money saved on not having to buy or lease an office, a building.

Well, the talent access, I think that's going to be huge. If I can access talent all around the world, not just in the metro area of where my office is built, that's going to be a huge advantage compared to competitors that don't have access to those same markets. And you don't think there'll be more discussion about offshoring talent? When you go to a hyper-competitive, globalized digital marketplace for talent, there's a lot of, I think, downsides that come with that. As with most of these transformations, they're rarely all positive. but if there's money to be made, they tend to be quite powerful. Cal Newport, thank you so much. Well, thank you.

You can find the writing of Cal Newport at New Yorker.com. He writes our column called Office Space. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us and see you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino.

With additional help from Priscilla Alabi this week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.