Millions of knowledge workers have spent the last 19 months working from home, many of whom now say they never want to return to an office full time. The momentous shift toward remote work has presented a series of new challenges and opportunities, which companies and employees are still sorting out.
“There’s this real moment of possibility and promise here,” Charlie Warzel, who writes the Substack newsletter Galaxy Brain and is the co-author of a new book about remote work titled Out of Office, said during a conversation at Unfinished Live.
Warzel’s co-author Anne Helen Petersen, who writes the Substack newsletter Culture Study, said that when businesses closed and socializing became out of the question, employees frequently let their jobs eat up their entire schedules. “A lot of people who worked in offices and have what we think of as a career are particularly vulnerable to this alignment of self with work,” Petersen explained. “This idea that the amount that I work is also a way of gauging how good I am, my value as a person.”
Bosses, on the other hand, have struggled with decreased power and visibility, and as a result, they often report wanting to return to the office more than their staff do. But Warzel said the most successful firms are looking for ways to adapt, instead of giving their workforces ultimatums. “The companies that are doing this the best are really humble about it, they’re not saying, we’re back in the office the day after Labor Day, guaranteed,” he said. “They’re saying, we don’t know, and we’re not sure, and we’re going to give you all the flexibility.”
This conversation was moderated by the business consultant and writer Rishad Tobaccowala.
Watch the full conversation below, and scroll for a written transcript. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. Statements by these speakers have not been fact-checked by Unfinished and represent their individual opinions.
Rishad Tobaccowala
So, I’d like to start with asking each one of you all, what is the big problem—or the big problems—of working from home?
Anne Helen Petersen
The big problem is you work all the time, and I think anyone who worked from home before the pandemic knew of that likelihood and had come up with strategies or no strategies to deal with that. And, people who have started to work from home during the pandemic understood or came to understand just how difficult it is to actually put up parts of your life that are unavailable to work. And, I think in some ways it’s easier for parents or people who have caregiving responsibilities because they have to have places, times in their life when they’re not working. But, for a lot of us, especially in the depths of the pandemic, when there wasn’t much socializing, it’s, what else are you going to do? And, that’s why we’ve had a real summer of burnout, is because of that strategy towards working from home.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Charlie?
Charlie Warzel
I mean, so if that’s the problem, I’d say that the promise that we articulate in the book is one that we’ve sort of seen in our own lives. We started working remotely back in 2017 and moved from New York to Montana, and had this struggle ourselves, especially me collapsing the work-life balance. What we eventually found when we started being intentional about it, especially me, working towards reaping the benefits of more flexible work. What started to happen was my life became a little more three-dimensional, work was truly the only component in my life, personal relationships sort of including ours, revolved around what we did for work. Our friends were our friends from work, and it sort of ate away at everything.
Through this process, we started to realize that making your life more three-dimensional is something that a lot of people truly need. And, it doesn’t mean sacrificing the work or sacrificing ambition, but it’s this idea that work can be just one component of your life. There is so much more, and we subsume so much of ourselves for this. There needs to be another way.
Rishad Tobaccowala
One of the impacts of Covid has been people really rethinking the nature of what they do and their work. So, whether it’s this great resignation or Microsoft study that shows about 41% of people are thinking of switching jobs this year, which speaks to your point about maybe work should not be central to our identity, or should just be a component of it. Can you speak a little bit about how you all manage to make it a component versus central? Because, it seems to me it’s still central for both of you, so I’d like to hear about how you did this.
Charlie Warzel
A lot of people come to us and say like, “We can see you on Twitter. We could see you tweeting at 9:00 p.m. or whatever. It’s very clear you’re doing your work a lot,” and I think that that’s, that’s really true. So, the first part I would say is that, this is a struggle, and what we try to articulate in the book is that this isn’t something that just happens, just like you don’t say, okay, I’m working from home now, I’m done. It’s like anything, it reminds me a lot of the process of therapy, right, or like working out, it’s something you have to continuously do. You struggle with it, some days it’s impossible to get out of bed and do it, and go work out. Sometimes it’s really impossible to organize your life and it collapses on you. So, I would say that we are struggling with this all the time. It’s not something that we’ve really figured out yet, I would say.
Anne Helen Petersen
No, we struggle with it all the time, I mean, my previous book was on millennials and burnout, and the question I always got was, “Oh, so you cured your burnout?” No, never, not at all. I think a lot of people who work in offices and have what we think of as a career are particularly vulnerable to this alignment of self with work, so this idea that the amount that I work is also a way of gauging how good I am, my value as a person. And, unlearning that understanding, that you are not your job, that is really, really hard. And, if you have grown up with that understanding, if you have been reared to internalize that understanding, it takes a lot of unlearning and the way that I think of it as constantly trying to think about ways that I can make… Work is still important, it’s still a crucial part of my identity, but it is not the axis of my life, it is not the axis around which everything else rotates.
Charlie Warzel
And, just a very quick example is, with our schedules, we are tweeting sometimes at 9:00 at night, or working on a Sunday or something like that. But, also this is probably the first Friday I have worked since, I don’t know, the spring. I just tend to take that off, or take the day for myself to read and do other things. And, we really found that our jobs are obviously a little bit different, everyone’s job is different, but building in that flexibility, I did a Zoom call from the car while running errands. So, it was like, “Are you in the car?” And, I was like, “Absolutely, but I’m here.”
Anne Helen Petersen
No, you’re forgetting the part that you were about to go golfing yesterday.
Charlie Warzel
That’s true.
Rishad Tobaccowala
In your book, there are four very interesting modules where they sort of discuss four areas, one of them being flexibility, which is what you all have just sort of described. Another one being technology, a third one being culture, and the fourth one being community, if I recall those four. Why did you all think about the world in that sort of format? There’s lots of ways of writing your book, why did you all decide on those four?
Anne Helen Petersen
Well, I am an academic by training and always want to make things very much orderly, and oh, if I can just do this chapter, and this chapter, and this chapter. And, my thinking as we started to read a lot of research on the history of work and basically how work got so bad. Because, this is a book about remote work, but it’s also about just work generally. And, the themes that seem to emerge again and again, was there are these understandings of what flexibility should be. And, historically flexibility has meant flexibility for the company, not for the individual. And, there are these understandings of what culture should be, and historically they’re pretty toxic. And oftentimes, the part that people say about company culture is not the actual company culture, and then technologies of the office. So, ideas about how our offices can change, even the shift to large office spaces. All of these things had good intentions that have oftentimes soured, and then community, the way that we used to think about community and our place as workers within community and how that has atrophied.
Anne Helen Petersen
And so, it was easy to think about this in terms of, let’s look, let’s go backwards and see all of these different themes and how they were understood before, and how can flexible work, remote work, hybrid work, how can that change our understanding of each of these things?
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, it’s like the subtle process of seeing… Or, the insidious process of watching best intentions slowly get corrupted by working. It just sort of eats away at everything. And then, in this second half of each sort of section is how do we unwind that? Is there an opportunity here? Because, I think the book more than anything else right now, is about, there’s this real moment of possibility and promise here. It’s an amazing kind of control experiment that we did for all knowledge workers to just go inside their houses, and labor. We can either snap back, or we can try to take the best parts of that and move forward, when we don’t have to be wearing masks all the time.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Because, I’ve had the opportunity, in addition to reading a book, to having thought about this, as I travel all over the U.S. now, but, one of the things that I remind people about is if you were to really start a company, whether there was Covid or no Covid, on January 1, 2022, and you were not in the dentistry business, would you actually build a business around a central office? What do you think?
Anne Helen Petersen
Right, and in your most recent newsletter, you refer to offices as museum spaces, essentially, right?
Rishad Tobaccowala
Museum spaces, yes.
Anne Helen Petersen
There are these four spaces that we’re going to have moving forward. This is what I really appreciated about your work is that, instead of this dichotomy of, we are either all distributed, all at home, all the time, or we are all in the office all the time. It’s not what the future is going to look like. The future is going to look like homes that are better outfitted for remote work, spaces like this one where we network with one another and spend specific time idea-generating, collaboratively working on things. Third spaces, WeWorks, coffee shops, places that are not your home and that provides you that actual distance from your home when it comes to work. Or, one that I do a lot is I work with my friends, this is something that I think is hard to conceive of with Covid precautions.
But, during that period in June, July, where it felt safe to be around people, I was like, “Okay, come over to my house, and we will work together just at the kitchen table.” And, someone will put together a snack lunch, this will be just a way to be around other people and have that energy of being with other people, but you don’t necessarily have to be in the office. And then the fourth, the museum space, and which will primarily be filled. I think that you put it like, “Mostly filled with all their managers and CEOs who are holding onto this traditional way of doing business.” I mean, there’s a reason it’s called a museum space, right?
Rishad Tobaccowala
It is the reason it’s called museum space, in fact, yesterday I went to three museum spaces. So, people who read my stuff say that we’ve actually created museums, but they actually took me and showed me that they actually have the equivalent, because they are we thinking because increasingly people are really reading. And, I try to remind people, regardless of what senior management in companies are telling their people, because I happen to be in the boardrooms with them. They are not going to go back to the office, because they realize they have a talent attraction and retention problem. And, what I like about your book is you all also have this spectrum of answers, verses there is the way, which is very important. But, I’d like to ask you all, in the world that we sort of live in, are there some groups of people that benefit and some people that suffer from this more and more distributed work rather than place-based work?
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest, one of class of people who potentially can suffer are the class of middle managers, and even to some cases all the way up into the C-suite, because a lot of that work is, can be sort of invisible when it’s happening in a decentralized manner. There’s so much of the management class where presence is the thing, and oh, there’s such a great manager, they’re constantly walking around the office, they’re interacting, they have that open door policy, and I really feel like I can be there for them. And, you basically have to restructure what you think about when you’re a manager that way. So, I think that is part of why bosses are clawing onto this, and now latching onto the museum and not wanting to give it up because it’s also giving up a little bit of status or a lot of status in some cases.
So, I think that that’s why we’re seeing this big push, people don’t want to learn a new sort of way to manage. And then, on the other side of it, I would say that there are a lot of things and concerns that need to be worked out on a business to business sort of level with young, early career people who are coming into an office. If you’re fully distributed and you don’t have a very good understanding of the unwritten rules of the place, you don’t have someone to mentor you, to take you along, it can be really impenetrable, really hard to rise up through. So, that’s something I think people are going to have to be very, very intentional about with helping people, especially those who are young in their careers.
Anne Helen Petersen
Yeah, there was recently some research published in the New York Times, an article by Claire Cain Miller about essentially this idea that the water cooler collaboration, spontaneous collaboration idea, that’s BS for the vast majority of workers. But, it is essential for early career people, especially your first year, because those are the times when you are learning the company culture. With that said, there are so many different ways to create company culture, and to mentor people, and to really on-ramp new employees in meaningful ways. And that, can include some presence in the museum, or at conferences, and at other offsite things. But, it also can be done online and fully distributed companies from before the pandemic have really great examples of how that can be achieved.
Charlie Warzel
This is also where there is a generational component to all of this, right, because I hear people who are later in their career say, “What do you have if you don’t have that constant banter back and forth.” We used to work at BuzzFeed and the biggest, sort of most raucous cultural conversation happening in the office was on Slack, and it was happening 17 hours a day. And, you just popped in, you popped out. And, I think that’s something that people discount, you can build cultures on those platforms. You don’t want to have it as the only thing, and it’s helpful to have in-person work, but there are other meaningful ways.
Rishad Tobaccowala
I think, what both of you all have referred to, and something that since I’m an older person than you all, and therefore I am with that generation who feels accosted by these changes. So, I get to go out now these days again, and this week I have, in three different cities in the U.S. with senior management and over the drinks asked them, “What is really worrying them about this new world?” You need two, three drinks before you really understand what is worrying them. And, there are three things that you all have mentioned, but they are so acute that I don’t think people realize how acute it is, and it’s very human. So, the first one is the loss of status, so there are three parts of what happens when you… Besides money that you gain when you get more senior, there are all these forms of soft power, which are like hard power, which is this big office with an assistant who can make people wait outside.
Part of your power is making people wait outside, and now, nobody waits for them on Zoom. Their big office is the same tile as everybody else has. But, the biggest worry is the one to your point, which is people are asking, what exactly do you do? Because, in many ways, management in companies was really friction, they were not lubricants. And, when the next generation basically wants autonomy and they want recognition, their whole staff is like, what in the world are you doing? And so, this has come at a time where from many of them, the challenge, which includes my generation, is, wait a second, the carpet, the rug’s been taken away from us.
And, we were already having trouble connecting with these people, and what do we do? Have you seen a lot of that?
Anne Helen Petersen
Oh yeah, and I think that the primary way that people have reacted to that fear is by more surveillance, which makes everyone feel like they’re doing a worse job. Whereas, and I think you pointed this out in a recent newsletter, a way to move forward is to actually model leadership instead of surveillance. And that’s hard, right? To model leadership as a manager, to show, oh, these are behaviors of work and of self-education, and I’m showing my expertise instead of just demonstrating it through my office and my assistant.
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, and then a big part of it that we’ve seen with people who are successful, and I mentioned this yesterday in another talk that we did, is this modeling vulnerability being the big one… You can harness that being the same Zoom tile, or not having the big office. I was on a Zoom with a bunch of people, and there’s this fancy executive at a really huge company, I mean, this person’s making millions, if not billions of dollars. And, their kid came in, and there’s a way in which you can have that, like the emperor has no clothes, or there’s a way, it’s like, hey, I’m dealing with all the struggles that you have, you can come to me with this, we understand.
And that builds so much trust, and it’s really sad to watch a lot of people not take advantage of that, and instead clam up.
Rishad Tobaccowala
You all refer to this in both the technology and other sections of your book, but one of the things that I also discussed in my book, which came out prior to Covid, had this entire chapter on how do you manage companies that are distributed. And, people said, “Did you know Covid was happening?” I said, “No.” Because, the last time HarperCollins let me touch my book was in September, and even if I was in China in November, I would not have known it. But in effect, the three big shifts that are taking place, and we’re taking place before Covid, which have to a certain extent accelerated, but they were already there. Sometimes we blame Covid for certain things, but all that Covid did was reveal what was. And, I called it the three big shifts, but when I first sent it out in the newsletter, there was a typo. So, if you have to see the new, it’s called the three big shits. And, a whole bunch of people within minutes, I had all these CEOs say, “It’s actually the three big shits, it’s not a typo.”
So, I said, “No, it’s actually three big shifts.” But, these are the three which existed even before Covid, who one is that increasingly all of us are becoming gig workers, but we don’t know it yet. Okay, and it’s not just whether it’s Grubhub or Uber, if you actually look at major industries, including consulting, or let’s say Hollywood, people work on projects, they don’t work on an ongoing basis. And, because of modern technology and the ability to connect, and outsource and near source, all of us really are working on jobs, we really aren’t working at a career. And this, just accelerated that, that reality. There’s this very famous example of someone at Microsoft, who took their salary, hired someone for half that price in Bangalore, gave the money to the person to do it, and with the other half, vacation all over.
And, there’s an entire group of people who now have multiple jobs, because the sole idea of monitoring is I can do two, three jobs if I wanted to, which is one. The second one really is the increased automation, AI, and other forms of technology that are actually taking away the non-intuitive, non-leadership box of jobs. Anything that is about process is being very quickly automated across the board, and that’s the second thing that was happening even before, but now it’s forcing people and that has accelerated even more because people are having trouble attracting talent, and retaining talent. The companies I was with yesterday literally had turnover rates of 50%. And I said, “You must be kidding me.” They said, “No, we have 50% turnover, because there’s this entire thing.”
And then, the third one, I think, which is very, very important is that all of us also have to sort of recognize that it’s this whole idea of how we work, man plus machine or woman bless machine. And, all of that has already begun to happen, and your book shows that it was happening, and then this became accelerated. So, I try to explain to people that you would never actually design companies, even if there was no Covid in 2022, the way it looked like in December, 2019, so stop thinking about going back. And especially, for senior leadership or more seasoned leadership, I would say because senior leadership can be all over it, but let’s say experienced, or I wouldn’t call an aged, but experienced. Is one of the challenges that we, I think really truly basically have, is this world is so different than what it used to be, that we are having not problems with Covid, but we’re having problems with the reality that change sucks.
Charlie Warzel
Yeah, I mean, I wrote recently about this phenomenon, it’s part of the great resignation, but it’s a lot of, especially in younger people in their careers, or in their lives, coming to this understanding of, I don’t necessarily think I want a career. And, the split, when I wrote about that, between people who are like, I finally, I feel seen, and it speaks to that gig mentality, right? There’s parts of it that are more precarious and there’s parts of it that are really freeing. Like you said, “You don’t feel like you have to owe this person, because down the line, you’re going to need this from them.” You’re a little less bound in that way. But, the more seasoned, as you put it, folks, I think are actually, they’re offended by it because there are a lot of parts of building out a career where you have to eat a lot of shit. And, I think a lot of people don’t want others to have to go through those proving grounds, I don’t know, I find it interesting.
Anne Helen Petersen
Well, I also think this points to the ways in which what’s happening in the workplace and what’s happening with remote work is not in isolation from the rest of society. I think that traditional employers have a lot to learn from, I think the Hollywood guilds in terms of, okay, yes, we are going to have this episodic work. We’re going to have gig work, but we are going to have the protection of a union, and also healthcare that accompanies it so that we are not in a precarious situation.
Rishad Tobaccowala
Also, healthcare that accompanies it.
Anne Helen Petersen
I mean, a lot of these guilds do everything from, they provide that backbone of security. And right now, in the United States, we are not particularly receptive to those labor protections, I think we should be more so, but if we are going to shift into this more gig style of work, we can’t get healthcare through our employers. And, we can’t also have this understanding that all time off should only come from the employer, or rely on the discretion of the employer for leave for caretaking. So, I think that these things do have to come from a national level.
Rishad Tobaccowala
In fact, your book indicates that, which is why it’s very forward-looking too, so as we were talking, I don’t think you’ll have to be worried that the topic has got boring, which is one of the key things. But, I think the sole idea of healthcare and a lot of other stuff, what we’re really struggling with is, I’ve basically said the future doesn’t fit in the containers of the past. And, in some ways the office is a container of the past. But, so is much of our legal and healthcare systems, and how we do stuff, because everything has been optimized for the company and not the individual. So in fact, I often tell folks is because I got grandfathered into healthcare … and continue to have healthcare, and not worry about it, makes a very big difference.
But, one of the recommendations I do encourage everybody, especially, it doesn’t matter if you’re 70 years old or 20 years, is try to think about how you operate as a company of one, because in reality, you are going to be a company of one. And, that’s everything from, making sure that you’re well-regarded and you collaborate well in a whole bunch of other things, which you also leave too. Since we have about the last three, four minutes, I’d just like to ask both of you for any closing comments, advice, or thoughts to the audience.
Charlie Warzel
A word that came up yesterday when we were talking about some of these issues was, intentional, it came up a lot and I was really glad that it did. Because, I think that that is going to be so key, if you’re trying to think about how to do this with your business, or how to construct a distributed career, or whatever, it’s going to be really hard. Again, there’s no switch to flip and you’re going to need… The companies that are doing this the best are really humble about it, they’re not saying, we’re back in the office the day after Labor Day, guaranteed. They’re saying, we don’t know, and we’re not sure, and we’re going to give you all the flexibility you need to make those changes.
And so, I think being humble, being really intentional, don’t just tack remote work on as a perk, right? And say, hey, if you want to do it, whatever. Hire a head of remote, whose only job is how to fix that, and all the way down to the nitty-gritty tax and healthcare, and how to deal with those things, geographically, and person by person. That kind of intentional hard work is going to just pay off so much in the long run.
Anne Helen Petersen
I think that the one thing to think about with how we arrange our lives with remote work is that, we have the opportunity to actually work less. And, to get our heads around that is hard because I think we really think of more work as always better. But, working all the time is actually less productive, it has diminishing returns, you hit walls, you have turnover. There’s all sorts of very hard evidence about the fact that working all the time is not better work. So, how can we figure out how to arrange our lives around less work, less work that is better work, that is more fulfilling work, that is more rested, and clear, and imaginative work. But that, I think it really requires this shift in a lot of our brains about, it’s not wasteful for me to go garden in the middle of the day for two hours. It’s actually, my brain is working in different ways and it has value, and whatever that thing in your life is that is not work, it is of ultimate value, it is your identity as a person. And, to rediscover that can be really meaningful.