“Remote Work Isn’t a Perk to Toss into the Mix”

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic made working from home more common and prompted some people to relocate, journalists Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel did both: They moved from New York City to Montana in 2017, and from staff jobs at BuzzFeed News and the New York Times to writing full-time for Substack after that. But they haven’t just lived through work-life changes; they’ve studied them, too. Petersen and Warzel’s forthcoming book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home, tackles some of the thorniest questions around what our jobs will look like in the future. It’s a fresh take on what we can do better and suggests new ways for employers and employees to think about, and organize, remote work. Both authors also write frequently about management and back-to-the-office issues on their Substack newsletters, “Culture Study” (Petersen) and “Galaxy Brain” (Warzel). In this interview, which was conducted over email and has been edited, Petersen and Warzel discuss what organizations are still getting wrong about remote work, why “flexibility” means different things to companies and employees, and why it’s so darned hard to rethink your relationship with your job (even if you wrote an entire book about it). You started working on your book prior to the pandemic. What are the biggest differences between then and now? And what misperceptions do people still have about remote work? If anything, we’re surprised by how many companies still think of remote work as an untenable way to do business, even after a year and a half of it. On the worker side, there’s a bit more demand for labor right now and workers across industries feel moderately more empowered than they did before. They’re fed up and vocal about it. They’re quitting or changing careers. And employers are a bit unnerved by it all. The big misperception on both ends is that remote work is something you can just do or tack on. But remote work isn’t a perk to toss into the mix; if you want it to succeed, it has to be intentionally implemented. You have to invest in leadership (like a head of remote) and new collaboration tools and workflows. Otherwise, you’re asking for failure. We have a friend who works for a nonprofit with offices in four countries in wildly different time zones. Even prepandemic, they were doing conference and Skype calls from home outside of normal hours because that was the only way to make it work. This past summer, the organization issued a plan for workers to be in the office from 9 to 3 PM on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That sounds pretty flexible, right? But given that they’d been working remotely for so long and would still have to take calls from home at, say, 7 AM, it’s pretty arbitrary. And a lot of it was driven by the CEO, a 50-something who really likes to lead in person but doesn’t even live in the same city as the headquarters. You can see how employees, many of whom are parents with drop-off responsibilities between 8 and 9:30 AM, could see this schedule as inflexible and in person for in-person’s sake. So, the organization had a bit of a mini-mutiny on its hands. People had a strong case for why they should continue to work remotely. That didn’t mean never coming into the office. But they pushed back on the two-set-days-in-the-office plan, and it was being revised when the Delta variant hit and changed the schedule again. And let’s be real — this isn’t the last time a variant (or another pandemic?) is going to push knowledge workers to be fully remote. If your company wants to be agile and competitive, it already should have started figuring out the best way to have these flexible plans. But now’s a good time, too. In your research, have you found a big disconnect between how organizations and managers view remote work and how workers do? What are some of the biggest misalignments? Short answer: Bad bosses kind of throw their hands up about why workers wouldn’t want to be in the office; they think the only way to manage is by having people in proximity. Good managers are really trying to figure it out, acknowledging that they need new skill sets and trying to cultivate them. Workers are mostly cognizant of the ways in which managing remotely is hard and have patience for the difficulty, but part of the problem might be that the people being promoted to leadership roles don’t actually have any managing skills, which is only exacerbated when the task moves online. What about trust? Do employers trust employees enough to let them work in new ways? And do employees believe that their organizations have their best interests at heart? There’s a real lack of trust that’s born out of a decades-long erosion of protections and benefits for labor. It’s hard for workers to trust that companies have their backs when a defining characteristic of American jobs is the precarity of at-will employment. Meanwhile, employers’ business models are predicated on growth at all costs and fealty to shareholders, which is a different kind of precarity. Anne Helen Petersen, Charlie Warzel, and Peggy. (Photo: Charity Burggraaf) But trusting employees with new ways of work is truly mutually beneficial. It makes clear that openness and vulnerability are valued by both employer and employee and creates more transparency and better communication. It can also make companies more productive, because they’re actually figuring out what needs to be done and how to do it in the places (physical and emotional) where people are. Have you seen any big work-from-home policy stumbles — or successes — from companies? The biggest stumbles we’ve seen are companies just forcing their employees back without any real discussion. Anecdotally, we’ve spoken to workers who’ve been brought back against their will, who are concerned about Covid, and who are furious, even if they’re not speaking up. Many of them are looking for new jobs. Some quit rather than go in. And pushing workers to the point where they quit is, we think, the most egregious, shortsighted mistake. Apple, for one, has struggled to be responsive to a subset of employees on certain teams who want more remote flexibility. The best companies are approaching these issues with a humble mindset. They realize that everything could change in a matter of weeks and are listening to their employees while investing in a workplace structure that allows for hybrid work. We’ve been impressed with Dropbox. The company has implemented a back-to-the-office plan in which it has studios in four of the main cities where its employees are clustered. These are intended for group collaborative work — not just going into the office for face time. Technology has saved us over the past 18 months — but it also can be phenomenally draining. What have organizations gotten right and wrong about tech use? Zoom fatigue is real! I think we’ve learned that when used correctly, these tools are immensely useful. But we’re having too many meetings with too many people and always holding them on video. Not every meeting needs that, and any meeting with over eight people should be an email. At the start of the pandemic, when many workers were worried about losing their jobs or falling off their trajectory, we set a lot of unhealthy standards around presence. They reacted to their feelings of uncertainty by working all the time, meeting too often, and even overusing Slack, email, and text messages. Technology is amazing — it makes remote work possible. It can also really screw with your organizational culture if you’re not vigilant about the ways in which it can create more work, more stress, more wasted time. Flexibility is often seen as a boon for workers with commitments and interests outside of their jobs. And yet some research indicates that giving employees too much choice can backfire, particularly for women. How do you define flexibility, and what does it look like in practice for employers and employees? One of the things our book research revealed is that larger ideas and themes about work — including flexibility — have been defined differently over time. In many instances, these definitions made work difficult or toxic or otherwise shitty, but in recent years they’ve started to shift. In the past, “flexibility” generally meant an organization’s ability to modify itself and shed workers as needed: to expand quickly and downsize even more quickly, primarily through layoffs and restructurings. There’s a lot of fascinating academic work on how consultants and Wall Street came to prize this type of flexibility — which benefits the employer and its shareholders, not the worker — and how the current fissured economy, heavily reliant on contractors in place of full-time employees, reflects that value system. Flexible work today, whether full- or part-time, helps to reclaim the word and re-vest some of the power in employees, who are able, maybe for the first time, to exercise more control over their schedules and the general placement of work in their lives. But that’s not nearly enough, because you have millions of subcontractors and gig workers who now have those freedoms but also get paid less than their peers — some barely a living wage. So, the question is how we can wed work flexibility with labor protections — especially for gig and contract workers, women, people with disabilities, parents, and those providing eldercare. For example, should we decouple health insurance from employment? We also need to be vigilant about the ways in which “flexibility for all” can reproduce existing hierarchies when it comes to who is most able or inclined to show up to the office, who feels at ease navigating company culture, and more. Why did you decide to move to Montana and eventually leave your traditional city news jobs? We didn’t move West specifically to cultivate some better work-life balance. But the distance from the office and its trappings — the new environment — offered some real perspective. We realized just how much we’d allowed our careers to cannibalize our lives. We had wonderful work friends but a too-homogenous social life. We’d effectively abandoned the few hobbies we’d cultivated. We’d gotten to the point where we both viewed almost every life experience through the prism of our jobs. We’d convinced ourselves that our lives were three-dimensional, but they weren’t at all. I identify with all of that. Like so many, I had a busy winter between my two jobs, so this summer I swore I would spend more time resting, seeing friends and family, and doing activities I enjoy. But I did none of these things. Why is embracing flexibility and resetting one’s work-life balance so hard? We both really empathize with this. Finding a way to balance work and life and be at peace with that is a gradual process — a lot like going to therapy or committing oneself to being “in shape.” You have to do the hard work of interrogating your mindsets and behaviors and then the crucial, never-ending work of maintenance. You’ll have breakthroughs and regressions, and that’s OK, provided you have a broader goal and keep working toward it. If it makes you feel any better, we’ve studied this deeply and we still struggle and fail to maintain balance all the time.

“Remote Work Isn’t a Perk to Toss into the Mix”

Summary.

Partner Center