When the journalist couple Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen moved from Brooklyn to Montana in the fall of 2017, they thought they'd be able to save time on their commute to Manhattan by doing things like hiking, kayaking, and skiing. The extra time was absorbed by more work.
Millions of Americans experienced something similar during the mass remote-working experiment. The fusion of the home and the office made it harder to disengage from corporate America.
This is not a revelation nearly two years into the epidemic. In Out of Office, Warzel and Petersen argue that better remote work is possible only if we first repair our relationship with our jobs. Cutting the cord to the office is an opportunity to address bigger issues in the U.S. labor force, including the child-care crisis, inefficient working methods, worker burnout, and work-life balance.
Keynes predicted back in 1930 that a 15-hour workweek would be possible as jobs became more efficient due to technology. The version of corporate America that never arrived was the one. Workaholism became the American norm as the U.S. economy expanded, the authors write. The main axis of our lives was careers. America has bucked the trend of more leisure time in rich countries due to increased productivity and wealth, and is ranked as one of the most exhausted countries by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
The work-from- home revolution can cause our broken corporate values and work habits if we don't address workers' needs. Employers need to experiment with ways to cut down on unnecessary meetings and keep employees from doing constant performative work, such as sending emails during vacation or at ungodly hours just to prove they are always-on. Better work is often less work, over fewer hours, which makes people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.
In Out of Office, you will find a lot of what has been published in the past year on the future of the workplace. The authors take the reader on a tour through America's broken work landscape and sketch out a vision of what a better future might look like.
The authors argue that the hybrid workplace will result in a shadow hierarchy that will emerge with overly ambitious employees showing up in-person while remote employees will live in fear of managers. The head of human resources at Twitter spoke with the authors. One solution that they have come up with is to make sure everyone in the conference room dial into the meeting via their laptop to allow remote participants to see all faces clearly.
While Warzel and Petersen are not anti-office blowhards, they are unabashed advocates for the promise of remote work. After moving cross-country and leaving their jobs, Petersen and Warzel decided to start their own newsletters. For most people, traditional office space will commingle with co-working spaces.
The authors focused on U.S.-based knowledge workers in the book. 42 percent of the workforce can do their work from home. Americans are leaving their jobs at staggering rates because of the Pandemic. Many people who stay in lower- wage jobs are discovering more power to strike and demand better terms.
The authors don't devote much time to discussing the role U.S. politics plays in enabling our work practices. China was absent from the list. The Chinese have built companies that are better than those in the U.S. Europeans have a better work-life balance than the US and China, but they have trouble keeping up with innovation.
Buffer, a startup that switched to a 4-day work week during the Pandemic, is one of the companies where Warzel and Petersen see promise. Microsoft Japan instituted a 4-day workweek and productivity increased by 40 percent. The four-day week is a conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work.
Out of Office will become a time capsule of a fleeting, chaotic moment and will serve as a rough guide for how companies and workers can have a healthier relationship with each other moving forward. They write that remote work can change a person's life.
Employers are eager to bring back workers.
