Today, Explained - The Future of Work: OOO

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

They said the office would never be the same. In part two of our series, The Future of Work, what happens to your workplace when they're right. Today’s show was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay, let's see what's on the radio. 15% of their jobs right now are remote or remote-friendly. And that's up from, like, the single digits pre-pandemic. And those jobs get 2.5 times the number of applicants as non-remote jobs. So they're much more appealing. Wow. Do we think that's... Hey, Sean.

Did I explain it on the radio? Ha ha. Is it worth it? Let me work it. Ah. It's too early for this. Don't want to work. I just want to bang on the drum all day.

Give it to me, Todd. Uh. Hmm. Mm-B. Turn it up man. Now I'm free, yeah. Free falling. Yeah, free falling It's the future of Yeah, it's the future of It's the future of It's the future of

Welcome back to the future of work, work, work, work, work on Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from, and on the show today, we're going to focus on the future of the office. Office work went remote in a big way last year, and now that there are vaccinations and boosters and treatments and people are all about getting back to normal, it seemed like a logical time to ask if normal office work is going to still be the norm. The last time we dug into this was around this time last year. I spoke with Derek Thompson, staff writer at The Atlantic. He said even when it's safe to come back, people won't. The estimates for what happens in the post-vaccine world go as follows. There was a Harvard Business School survey that estimated that when all this is over,

one in six workers is projected to continue working from home or co-working at least two days a week. One in six workers is a minority of workers, but it still means that something like 20 to 30 million people could be permanently remote work for the future. One year later, it's pretty safe to come back. Were you right that a lot of people won't? I do think I was right that a lot of people who could come back to the office are not coming back to the office.

I think that the game has been changed here. Bosses understand it. Employees are demanding it. And we should be prepared for a future where remote work is a much bigger part of the landscape. The game has been changed. It's clear to see because I think you're in some sort of basement and I'm in a closet. Correct. Basement to closet. But I want to acknowledge here that people are indeed returning. Who is it that's sort of forced to return in this post-pandemic,

still pandemic, soon to be, hopefully, endemic atmosphere? Some of the more recent polls say about 30 to 40% of people who could come back to the office if they're white-collar workers,

have been working remotely, have come back to the office. But that still means that roughly a majority, or significantly more than majority, have not. to the office. But that still means that roughly a majority or significantly more than majority have not. And the friends that I know who work for larger companies, the Googles and Facebooks and magazines like mine, we are not required to come back to the office. Those companies are not required to come back into the office. And there's a lot of tech companies that have essentially said, look, we're going to be dealing with this basically forever. That the

same way that we're sort of thinking of COVID itself being endemic, being a part of our lives forever, that remote work is also going to be an endemic part of the workforce. That a large share of white-collar workers are simply never going to think of the office the way they did in 2019 ever again. They're going to think of it as something that is optional, something that is part-time, something that they do on a hybrid basis. But it's interesting how it's breaking down by industry. For example, a lot of banks have basically said, you're coming back to the office. I don't care what you want.

Make no mistake about it. We do our work inside Morgan Stanley offices. If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come into the office. And we want you in the office. At the same time, in media, it seems like just about everyone is embracing the inevitability of a remote or work from home first culture. I know a lot of journalists, a lot of podcasters, a lot of editors have just learned something in the last year or two years. They don't want to give up. And so they're not going to become a hundred percent office workers the same way that they were in 2018, 2019. And you look at tech, various marketing and other white collar sectors, I think it's a little bit of a mixed bag. You have

a lot of large companies, Facebook and Google, that have basically said to a lot of their employees, it's okay to stay away from the office for a while, but maybe eventually in 2022, we're going to rally people back to the office, sort of olly olly, oxen free. But I honestly think that for a lot of people, the sense is the game has changed. So now that we've been at this for a year, and some people have been, who knows, fully remote for a year, some people have been on hybrid, some people are fully back. What have we learned about what's gained and lost in these two or three different models? Well, I think that one thing we've learned is that not all work at the office is equal. There is this really interesting study that Microsoft did,

and they basically found three really, really interesting things. Number one, total communications within the office didn't change. It was the same amount of talking and chatting. Number two, these silos deepened. People that were on the same team talked to each other more than they did via, you know, texts and chats and, you know, team slacks and things like that. But conversations between teams, conversations outside of teams, between the soft ties that we have at the office, absolutely plummeted. And what I gained from this is that you can sort of divide what we think of as white-collar work

or knowledge work into two categories. There's hard work. That is what I'm literally salaried to do. I am paid to write, to email, to edit, to talk to people on the phone. I can do that from anywhere. I can do it from an office. I can do it from here in my basement. I can do it in Dubai.

I can do it from anywhere. But then there's something that you could call soft work. And soft work is the kind of thing you can only really do in an office. It's sort of walking to your desk and passing by somebody who you haven't seen in a while and saying, hey, what do you think about Alex Ovechkin and whether he's going to break the all-time goals record? It's talking to someone about the NFL games that were yesterday, talking to someone who joined the company at the same time as you and saying, hey, doesn't this company kind of suck?

Those sort of connections aren't obviously hard work, but it's not just totally slacking off. It's relationships being built in the office that might preserve something that work psychologists call psychological safety. That's the feeling that when you present an idea to your colleagues, they aren't going to laugh at you because they don't just see you as just like a fount of dumb ideas.

They see you as a full person and that could be good for creativity in the long term. So what I would say in sum is that offices we have seen aren't essential for hard work, but they are probably better at this other category we think of as soft work. And it's unclear to me, and I think to a lot of people, how critical soft work is to the long-term productivity and creativity of companies. And not only that, but to feeling some sort of allegiance to your workplace, to your company, to your colleagues,

beyond your immediate team, that has to count for something, right? I absolutely think that it counts for something. I totally think that, you know, for a lot of people, there's a little bit of an out of sight, out of mind factor, right? If you're at your computer and the people in your office are just little icons on your computer, the same way that your cousin is an icon on your computer in Facebook, the same way someone who you chat with on Twitter or Instagram is an icon on your computer and Facebook, the same way someone who you chat with on Twitter or Instagram is an icon on your computer, then what exactly is your connection to the office? Like what is culture?

What is community? You're not returning to the office. You're returning to a computer in your basement of which the office is one of many apps on your computer. Like that's not really culture. At the same time, I want to be respectful of the fact that people are psychologically diverse. And some people are not motivated by that at all. They are more productive, more psychologically healthy if they can be alone in their basement, separated

by their computer from their colleagues. We did an episode last week in our Future of Work series about the sort of great resignation. But we focus specifically on this sort of great reassessment where workers have been reevaluating their relationship to their jobs and to their work conditions. And we at least did have some data that suggested that remote work positions are more popular right now than in-office positions, at least on websites like LinkedIn. Does that mean that there are more people in sort of the hard work camp than the soft work camp? Or can we not quite make that broad an assessment? I think it's hard to make a clear assessment right now because there are so many great R's happening at the same time.

Hi, today, letter of day is, ha ha, R. So you have a great reassessment, which is sort of like maybe the genus under which there are all these other species. The great resignation is one of them. The U.S. Labor Department says a record 4.3 million Americans quit jobs in August. That's the highest number ever recorded. The great rudeness is another. The great rudeness is another. The great rudeness? Yes.

It's a trend nationwide in the restaurant industry. People quitting their jobs in restaurant work because customers are rude about mask mandates, for instance. Yeah. People have been stuck in their basement being around their families for the last two years, or a lot of them have at least sort of diminished their social interchanges. And so they're going out and they're going to restaurants, they're going on airplanes, and they're being total dicks. You can refuse service. You're refusing my service. Yes.

Why don't you say we refuse your service? Oh, yeah, I've seen that. They're being terrible to their servers, they're being terrible to the flight attendants. And that, I think, is also pushing up a lot of quits. You also, I think, have a kind of great reshuffling. Whether it was for work or family, millions of people relocated during the pandemic. Zillow now shows 11% of Americans actually moved last year. People are quitting companies more. They're starting companies more. Business formation is up significantly more than it was in 2018, 2019.

Hey, song over. No rule about eating letter after singing letter song. A couple of years ago, I wrote a piece about how America had lost its, quote, mojo. The libido, the life force, the essence, the right stuff. What the French call a certain, I don't know what. Because I said people are moving less, starting companies less, the right stuff, what the French call a certain I don't know what. Because I said people are moving less, starting companies less, entrepreneurship is down, America's lost its mojo, I said. Well, like so much for all that, the mojo is back. Yeah, baby.

Okay, but what about our cities? I've been occasionally going into the office and it's deserted. Downtown DC, it's dead. We spoke last year about how the pandemic might reshape our cities. It could mean a lot more work for construction workers, a lot more work for interior decorators. It could also mean a lot more housing supply in downtown urban areas, which is a great need for lots of cities, especially cities on the coast like Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Boston. I wonder now that we're over a year into it, if we've seen any of those changes take place. Well, we definitely still see that commercial real estate is in a really strange moment. A lot of these offices are not at 100%

capacity. They're not anywhere close to 100% capacity, especially in San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C., sort of the larger coastal cities. Eventually, those offices are going to do something with that space. What are they going to do with it? I don't know. Are they going to turn it into WeWorks? Are they essentially going to accept a lot less money

because there's just a lot more space for the demand? I think you could also see this shaking out in terms of downtown retail. So a huge part of sort of commercial business districts is not just people working in offices, but people coming out of those offices to have like lunch meetings. Well, those lunch meetings

clearly aren't gonna happen as often because there are fewer people working in those offices. So there's a couple of ways I think that the spillover effect of more vacancies in downtown areas could sort of affect city employment. It could affect city taxes. I think we're just beginning to see how that's going to happen. I think a good way to summarize what's happening is that for a long time, the U.S. economy was sort of frozen in place.

And we got a little bit of our mojo back. People are moving more. They're starting companies more. They're rethinking their careers more. And that, I think, is all good. This good is happening. It's like a rose with many thorns. It's bad for employers that a lot of people are quitting on them.

It's bad for managers. They feel sometimes like they can't manage their workforces that are far-flung rather than in an office. But those are, I think, acceptable thorns. The big rose here is that you have more mojo in the economy, and I think that over time it's going to lead to productivity growth. I think it's going to lead to higher wages for low-income workers, and it's going to lead to just a more dynamic U.S. economy. We're going to do a quick break and then when we come back, we're going to talk about the other side of the coin.

How to make working from home more sustainable now that it's for sure, for comes from ramp ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend with ramp you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp.com slash explained. R-A-M-P dot com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. Anne Helen Peterson was working from home before it was cool. Before it was cool to move to a mountain town during the pandemic,

I wanted to move there to do different sorts of reporting, and they had enough trust in me to let me do that. There was Montana, where Anne now lives. They was BuzzFeed, where Anne used to work. You know, there was a standard of, like, we come into the office and do work here. And I think there was this kind of idea that, like, we'll do better work and we'll do more collaborative work

and you will actually be working if you were in the office. So it was, in some ways, it was sort of like an unaccountability, low-key surveillance, but also, like, the larger tech idea that, like, people should essentially live at work. But Anne saw through the scam.

She made it out to Montana long before the pandemic. And around the time office workers around the world went remote, she thought it'd be a good time to write a book about remote work. I think the biggest argument from remote work is that you are able to make work rotate around your life instead of your life rotate around work. There were a lot of things that were in place that were pretty arbitrary about like times that you had to leave the house, right? When everyone else was leaving the house and sitting in traffic, or you had to leave at a certain time in order to like pick up your kids at a certain time. There are all these different timing things that people did just out of habit or out of compulsion that just didn't have to be that way.

And the shift to remote is allowing people to make their schedules flexible in a way that works for them and works for their families. And people are, what, just as productive, more productive? Which? The data is really interesting right now. It shows that people have been more productive. But at the same time, if you think about the first six months, 12 months after people went remote, there was a lot of frantic overworking because people were scared for their jobs, right? Because we didn't know what was going to go on economically. And also, what else were you going to do? A lot of people allowed work to seep into every corner of their lives. And that is part of, you know, what I write about is that it's really easy with remote work to just work all the time. That's not great either in any capacity.

So you have to be really mindful when you have this remote or flexible work about creating boundaries for yourself and also creating on and off ramps off of work and just like giving yourself permission not to make every hour open to be colonized by the work that you're doing. The way that my co-author and I, Charlie Worzel, talk about this in our book that's coming out is that offices are oftentimes monocultures. Whether or not they realize this or not, like the culture has been determined

by a certain sort of person with a certain sort of attitude towards work and like how you should behave with other people at work. And the vast majority of organizations have a very white and very male monoculture. Even if they have a lot of women, even if they have a fair amount of people of color who work in that organization,

there's still a standard of interaction that is extroverted, neuroatypical, and doesn't have caretaking responsibilities at home, and very white, right? And like, I think that when you allow for more flexible types of work, then you break up some of that monoculture, that expectation of how you should be in the office. And how do those benefits, you know, less office conflict, perhaps more productivity, more flexibility, compare with what Derek was talking about as the benefits of office work in the first half of the show, where we have more opportunity for, you know, cross-team collaboration and pollination

and more of a sense of belonging, perhaps, to the office? At the end of the day, which of these matters more? Well, I think it depends on whether or not the office is the most important thing in your life and your job is the number one important thing in your life. A lot of this has to do with overwork. And I think there are benefits to the office in terms of cross-pollination. I mean, Derek and I have read the same studies in terms of like who actually benefits and how often these benefits occur, right? It's the myth of like people going into the office and coming up with incredible ideas at the drinking fountain is BS.

Oh, I like to think that world exists. I mean, and it's also like a very like this weird understanding of like who's able to profit, like come up with these ideas at the water cooler, right? It's still part of this larger monoculture. Who is comfortable like walking up to someone's desk and being like, hey, I had an idea, right? And even the sense of belonging, the people who felt like less belonging are white people who are used to having the office be like a very comforting space, right? Yeah. So they are sensing like a decrease in their sense of belonging, which was already very high because that space privileged them. I got to admit that I am that guy who feels comfortable rolling up to a co-worker and

being like, hey, we should cross collaborate and make our teams do X, Y, and Z. Right. But confession, I'm not. I'm not a white guy. You just have the confidence to go up. I've got the swagger of a white guy. And you know what? When people have that sort of confidence, it is not obviously inherently white, right?

It is a certain sort of confidence that not everyone has. Even white people don't have it. So I think that what really is more of a marker is, like, are you a person who feels really confident and respected in the office? Yeah. And what are all the things that make that the case? And who predominantly benefits? Like, who mostly has that confidence? And oftentimes it's upper management, which is part of the reason why upper management are like so horny to go back in

the office. I mean, as we commit to this sort of permanent hybrid remote situation as a work culture, as a country, as a world, you talk about having boundaries and ramping up and ramping down into and out of work. Is some of that easier said than done? I mean, you seem to have more experience than a lot of us in terms of remote work. I mean, when you don't have an office and you're looking to belong to a culture, maybe that ends up translating to working more or taking more meetings or canceling your personal stuff just to further feel like a presence in your now remote workplace, right? The big thing, I mean, there's two parts of this question. So the first part of the question is that how do you create boundaries? Like that's really hard for individuals and 100%, like a huge part of my thinking on this is that it cannot be contingent on the individual to uphold those boundaries. It has to be something more like, we call it guardrails. Guardrails are, if you think about them in terms of like out on a highway or a freeway,

they are maintained by the government, right? And I'm not saying that the guardrails in our lives have to be maintained by the government, but they should be maintained by the organization. They should be standards of behavior that are like just the norm. You do not send emails after 8 p.m. Or you certainly don't expect a response. No, here's the thing. I think it's actually even more than sending it and being like, it's okay, you don't need to respond, right? Because what that does is subconsciously, especially for people who are more junior in an organization, they see that someone who has succeeded in the organization

is the sort of person who sends emails at 8 p.m. So you are implicitly encouraging that as a norm in your community, even if there is something that says you do not need to respond. I just wonder how many companies in the country or in the world who have embraced some hybrid work have fully grasped these guardrails, as you call them. Well, this is why they need to read my book. But also, I think that the companies that are not burning out their employees and are serious about retention and about recruiting the best employees, they're the ones who are thinking very seriously about this. And companies that are like, oh, well, we'll just like kind of create this like, you can work from home sometime and like, you know, we'll have it work out.

Like those are the companies that are burning out their employees. Office work, at least in America right now, feels like a real choose your own adventure. You've got companies that are forcing people back for no apparent reason other than they don't trust employees to work remotely. You've got companies that are leaving it in employees' hands, saying, you know, come in if you want, stay at home if you want. And then you've got companies on this, like, far side who are extremely, you know, COVID paranoid, who are saying you absolutely can't come back in,

even though it would be safe to have at least some employees back in the office if everyone knows they're vaccinated. Have we learned how to do this or are we still very much figuring it out? I think in this moment, we are so very much figuring it out and things are going to change when kids get vaccinated. Like that's going to be when things come to bear. At the same time, there's still going to be a lot of people who don't feel comfortable in the office. There's still going to be a lot of people who are high risk or live with someone who's high risk and need that sort of flexibility and are going to quit if they don't have it. I think companies are trying to figure out an iterative way that makes people feel comfortable and also responds to workers' demands. So I think, like, companies have to be forward-thinking in a way that they might not have always been in terms of policy and HR.

Whereas for the last 18 months, they've just been, like, kicking the can down the road. It's a really complex thing. And I think that the best policy is admitting that it's a hard question, right? And addressing it and approaching it as it is instead of being like, we'll work, work. But you gotta do the work, work, work, work, work, work, work. You don't gotta do the work, work, work, work, work, work. As you may have heard, Anne Helen Peterson has a book about remote work coming out with her co-author and life partner, Charlie Worzel.

It's called Out of Office, and it drops in early December. Today's episode was produced by Hadi Mawagdi, and we've got two more on the future of work dropping next Friday and the Friday after next. You can hear more about the future of work across other Vox podcasts this month. Keep an eye on Recode Daily, The Weeds, and Vox Conversations. This one's today explained. Work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, work, Thank you. Bye.