Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hi there. As you may know, over the past few weeks, "In Conversation" has been running a series called "Think Again." It's all about how to reimagine work, home and more. Today, as part of the series, we're bringing you a special episode from our archives about our relationship to work. Hope you enjoy it.
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Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation" from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, how to rethink the way you work.
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Basu, Narrating: How's your relationship to your job? Does it feel healthy? Sustainable? For a lot of people, it got worse during the pandemic. One survey in 2021 found more than a third of the men and nearly half of the women polled said they often felt burned out at work. Another poll found American workers are some of the most stressed in the world.
So, what's going wrong here?
Anne Helen Petersen: Burnout is a reaction to growth capitalism, right? It is a reaction to feeling like you are unstable and don't have a safety net and the only way that you're gonna find stability is by working all the time.
Basu, Narrating: That's the journalist Anne Helen Petersen. She thinks and writes a lot about work and our relationship to it, including why, for so many people, your work has become your entire identity.
Petersen: And I think that a way to glamorize working all the time is to say, "I'm doing what I love." Right? To say, "This is my identity. And because I'm doing what I love, you know, my life has purpose," and that sort of thing. And it's worth any sort of exploitation. It's worth the exhaustion. It's all worth it because this is part of a larger purpose.
Basu, Narrating: Anne and her partner, journalist Charlie Warzel, came together to write a book called, "Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home."
<v Now, in this phase of the pandemic, some of us have started returning to an office. Other have decided they're never going back to the office, maybe even switched jobs to make that a reality. Peterson and Warzel's book is about how remote work can change your life for the better. But it's sort of a philosophy book too. It asks big questions like>What role do you want your work to have in your life? Who says working longer hours is better? And how we can we unlearn certain expectations and re-center our lives around the things we care about the most?
In my conversation with Anne, we started by talking about why our current way of working, whether it's remote or in person, is just not viable, not on a personal level and not on a productivity level either.
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Petersen: I think about how much waste is in a day when you are forced to sit and work when you are not capable of working well, right? Like those Friday afternoons, when you're counting down the hours or where you're just like twiddling your thumbs, responding to emails, surfing the internet, like doing whatever because you feel like you have to be there or because you have to be there, right? That is waste built into the day. But we've seen this in trials for the four-day work week and in other scenarios, when people are really given control over when they do their work, people do their work efficiently, at the same levels as before, in less time when they're given that option of control over their schedules, or like with the four-day work week, an extra day onto their weekend. It's amazing what you can do when you're given that opportunity, right? But I think that that is very hard for us to change our mindset when we think about how work works in that fashion. So many of us have understood more time at the computer as better work, right? And just that overarching idea that less work can be better work is very hard to graft onto our capitalist understanding of like: more work, always better.
Basu: One thing that I kept coming back to, a thought I kept coming back to, is like, so how did we get stuck here? [LAUGHS] I mean, really what got us so stuck here in this relationship with work? And I appreciated that actually a lot of this book is sort of a historical overview. You go into a lot of the history of just, you know, how we became the workers we are today. So, I was hoping maybe you could do that for us now. Walk us through some of what you see as some of the notable moments on the timeline of defining our relationship with work in America.
Petersen: So, the two big moments that I think about are in the early 20th century, there was this real hope that the continued mechanization of so many processes would mean that we would do less work. There was this hope that not only would we have like [LAUGHS] a four-day week, but we'd have a two-day week, or we'd only work eight to 20 hours a week. And there was a whole movement, in fact, like the Parks and Rec movement, as we understand it now, much of it was motivated by this idea that we're gonna have so many people with more leisure. Like there is gonna be more time on their hands. Where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We gotta give 'em spaces and things to do. Fantastic, right? [LAUGHS] But that idea that when you make things more efficient, that actually is a gift to the worker that they have more time, that was lost when we figured out that what you could actually do is make things more efficient so that the worker could then be asked to do even more. Any growth in technology is just a means for the worker to be able to do more work instead of a means for the worker to do less work. It has to always be in this growth mindset. And the other key thing - and I think this is super interesting - happens in the 1960s, '70s, '80s with the growth of consultants and finance bankers and their understanding of what work looks like and how that trickles down into organizations. So, the culture at so many consulting firms, places like Deloitte, is that you need to be working all hours all the time. That is their understanding of what excellence looks like. Right? Someone is committed if they are working long hours. And when companies started bringing in these consultancy firms, in the 1970s in particular, to try to figure out like, "Oh, we're too bloated. How do we compete globally?" The consultants have this understanding of like, the workers that you need to keep are the ones who model my idea of excellence, which is working longer hours. So, that idea of what excellence looks like really gets mapped onto these different organizations that brought in consultants. So, it wasn't always this way that someone who is in the office at seven a.m. and leaves at ten p.m. is the best worker possible. That wasn't always the case. But it's become really standardized. And that has had real effects too. When you think about who is capable of being in the office that much, it's someone who doesn't have caregiving responsibilities. It's someone who has completely allowed their life to be subsumed by their work.
Basu: I mean, you talk about the Google Mountain View, California complex, and that's the one that probably everyone would have in their minds, right? It's the place you can play and you can ping pong and you can eat and you can socialize and all your friends are there. And it sort of feels like maybe you sleep there too. And it's just like everything you need in one place. What I thought was so interesting in the book, you talked to the architect of that workspace, and it sounds like he kind of came to regret the design of that workspace. What did he have to say about it?
Petersen: His understanding was that he did not anticipate the ways in which these structures would promote a certain … [CHUCKLES] a certain understanding of work, right? The way that they would promote a subsummation of self into the workplace. That they would addict workers to their workplaces. And I think he sees in hindsight that that wasn't necessarily a net societal good.
Petersen: I mean, this is so interesting. It's like a company town, but … [LAUGHS] I mean, all of the Google Multiplexes, it's owned by Google, of course. But there is this understanding that either people … some people live in their cars. There's someone that we quote in the piece who lived in their van and then just went to work at Google. Or that your apartment or whatever space that you live in is essentially just a crash pad. There are so many apartments in Silicon Valley that are just … [LAUGHS] look like the places where people that I went to school with lived in as soon as they graduated from college. right? It's just like a twin bed on the ground and like filthy sheets, right? No kitchen apparatuses.
Basu: Barely any sign of life because it's all at the office.
Petersen: It is all at the office. And what that encourages is no development of any life outside of the office. Right? If you are getting beers after work at the office, if your laundry is being done at the office, if you can get a massage at the office, if you can go to the gym, if you can go to the climbing gym, all of these different activities are at the office, it makes it really hard to imagine a life outside of the office, or disarticulated from the self that you are with that company. And I think you see that a lot. It breeds loyalty in some ways, but tech companies also, there's a fair amount of exchange in tech companies. People will stay at a tech company for five, six years and then find another job somewhere else. But it's oftentimes at another tech company that offers the same perks. Right?
Basu: So, the same type of lifestyle, the same type of relationship to work can just continue.
Petersen: Yes, exactly.
Basu: The word "flexible" comes up a lot. I think that's a really big concept in the book too. So, let's talk about flexibility because it sounds amazing in theory, but you argue that it's really just a win for employers, and overall, it's a loss for workers. So, why is that? Why did flexibility fail us?
Petersen: So, this word "flexible" was something that I saw come up over and over again when I was reading the literature from the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s about advice that different consultants and different people were giving companies about how they needed to make their organization. And I was immediately struck by how it was a different understanding of flexible than I understood in any way. Right? So, when I think of flexible, I think of my own flexible schedule. The individual worker's flexibility. But these books were really referring to flexibility in terms of corporate flexibility, as in the ability for an organization to staff up and then let go of people very quickly. Or even in terms of buying buildings where they could very easily rent out floors when they fired people [LAUGHS] or take those floors back when they needed more people. And a lot of this has to do with changes in how we think of employment and workforce over the course of the 1960s, '70s and '80s, and the rise of far more contingent workers, right. People who are brought on as contractors, either short-term or longer-term contractors who aren't full-time employees and don't have full-time benefits. And to these corporations, these sorts of contractors, and contract labor just generally, is such a boon, right? There's much less bond between the corporation and the employee itself. And that was thought of as a really great way to maximize profits, right? If you can easily slough off employees as needed, that was peak flexibility. And that is profoundly different from the way that I was thinking about flexibility as something that benefits the employee. Right? So, that's kind of the contrast that animates that section on flexibility is, how can we look at how corporations historically have thought of this term and how can we change our thinking about it moving forward?
Basu: Yeah, what would flexibility look like if it were actually to benefit the people who are working?
Petersen: I think it really depends on vocation. You know, sometimes people are like, "Well, I don't wanna be remote all the time" or like, "Our work, we need to be in person sometimes." And I totally agree. Right? This isn't some sort of … like every corporation has to be all in the office or all at home. There are so many gradations in between. And so, one of the things we talk about in the flexibility chapter is that organizations have to figure out, "Okay, what work is inflexible to us? You know, what are our core hours when we actually want people to be online at the same time or in the same spaces at the same time." And it's usually far less than what people think. Right? But what are those core times? And let's move out from there and figure out, okay, what are we gonna tell employees are mandatory online or in-office hours? And what structures are we gonna put around the rest of the time? And so, a lot of companies, I think right now, are like, "Okay, your core hours are ten a.m. to two p.m.," but they're saying that it's every day, right? Or like Monday through Friday. Or they're like, "You can't work from home on Fridays or Mondays" because they're trying to disincentivize workers from taking three-day weekends, which I think is just such a sign of lack of trust. That you're assuming that if you let people work from home on a Friday, that they're gonna do less work, that they're gonna slack off, that they're gonna go to the beach and just like hang out there.
Basu: What's wrong with going to the beach, right?
Petersen: There is nothing wrong with working from the beach. There is nothing wrong with working from an Airbnb. If you leave on a Thursday night and you wake up on Friday and you put in some hours of work, and then you're already at the place, so you can actually roll with your vacation instead of fighting Friday afternoon traffic, right? There are so many different ways that you can arrange this. And the thing is, is that if a company, if a manager, if an organization clearly articulates what is expected of an employee and they get that work done, what is the problem?
Basu: So much of what you keep coming back to in the book too, is talking about this trust, the trust between managers and the people who are doing the work. And "flexible" is now one example of this, but is there other terminology that you think we use often to describe work or our relationship to work that you find really problematic or even manipulative?
Petersen: I mean, the most famous is that "work is a family," right?
Basu: Oh yeah. That's a … that a bad one.
Petersen: Yeah. And I think that that's one that people are using less and less because it's been recognized as something that's really toxic. But at the same time, there are still companies that really use the language of "responsibility" and "faithfulness" and "we owe it to one another" or "we care about one another" to bond employees and keep them in toxic situations or exploitative situations out of loyalty. And I think it's especially effective and especially targeted towards female employees, not exclusively, but a lot.
Basu: It feels like employees are often the ones who are made to feel like they are the ones who are responsible. If they're feeling burned out, if they're overworked, it's sort of their problem to solve. But you put a lot of accountability on employers. So, how can we change things? How can we make it so that employers actually take on the responsibility of setting up their employees to work successfully?
Petersen: Well, this is a good segue into talking about another kind of toxic workplace word, which is "boundaries," right? That word, it gets thrown around so often about like, everyone needs to cultivate good workplace boundaries or work-life balance boundaries. And boundaries are oftentimes conceived of as the responsibility of the individual alone, right? Like this is something that you personally have to maintain. And they also get destroyed constantly by the barrage of work, the pressure of work. Because when you are responsible for them alone, they're just not that fortified, right? They're weak in a lot of ways. But I don't think it's a personal failure when they disintegrate. Work is such an incredible force. And that ideology of work is an incredible force that it's easy to see how any form of boundary gets flattened pretty quickly. So, the way that we try to conceive of it in the book is instead of boundaries, what if there were guardrails? And this is kind of cheesy, but I kind of like it. So, a guardrail - and I got this idea from growing up in the mountain west - you have guardrails on mountain passes. And they're put in place by a larger entity, in this case the government. The guardrails are there to protect the millions of people who go over that mountain pass. And so, what if we can think of structures put in place in the workplace that are maintained by the workplace itself? The responsibility for maintaining them is funded, is contributed to by everyone. Similar to tax dollars, but it's just everyone in the workplace. And the responsibility for them, if they disintegrate or if they get bashed up in some way, the responsibility is the corporations. And so, the way that that manifests is something like, you have a policy in your organization that you do not send communication past, let's say eight p.m. Now, people might have work schedules that make it so that they do their best work at 10 p.m. But you do not send that email, you do not send that message, you do not send that memo until it is normal work hours.
Basu: You schedule it. If you'd …
Petersen: Yeah, you schedule it. Technology is here for us, right? There are so many ways you can schedule a communication. But the big thing here it's not just that you tell individuals that. It's that if someone does send it at 10p.m., that that is something that they get talked to about. Right? It is not held up as like, "Oh, look at this person putting in that extra work." Emailing at ten is not a way to show that you are doing more work than other people. It's actually something that you get criticized for. And that is the way that you can implement an actual guardrail. And actually, a point of company culture is we do not communicate that way. But you have to enforce it and it has to be modeled from the top down. So, something like taking PTO and not checking your email while you're on PTO. That can't just be something that a manager says to a managee, like saying, "Oh, you know, while you're on vacation, don't check email." And then the manager, while they're on vacation, checks their email every day.
Basu: If someone is listening right now and they're feeling really stuck in their job, stuck in their life, what is a New Year's resolution that they should consider making?
Petersen: So, sometimes there are relationships that no amount of therapy can fix, right? A couple that goes to couples therapy, and it doesn't matter how many times a week they go, their relationship is broken and it's just beyond recovery. And I think some people are in jobs that are beyond recovery right now. And sometimes that's because of patterns that were put in place even before the pandemic, it's because of frustrations that have not been addressed. There's a real awareness that the way that your workplace treats you, it's not gonna change. They're not going to value the sort of work that you do. People who have been elevated over you, or just like watching the sort of people who succeed in a company and seeing, this isn't me. Right? I think that a great New Year's resolution is to muster the confidence to start looking elsewhere. And that's hard, right? A lot of people, especially if it's their first big job or a job that they've been at for a really long time, it's hard to leave that. And getting a new job will not fix all of your problems. It's really important to understand if your relationship with work is broken, it's still going to be broken even if you get a different job. But at the same time, oftentimes the biggest source of toxicity is that workplace that you've found yourself in, is that toxic relationship with your current job. And so, finding a way to take that first step to even imagine a different way forward. And I think sometimes too, if you do have a broken relationship with work, it's really hard to change patterns in your existing job. But a fresh start with a new job might be a way to set the tone and set standards moving forward.
Basu: I'm wondering if I can ask you, this is a tough one, but if you could choose just one thing that we could change as a result of experiencing the pandemic, like the single most transformative change that could come out of this, what would it be? I guess the other way to think about this is, what would be the biggest missed opportunity if we didn't take this moment to change it?
Petersen: I think for a lot of people pre-pandemic, and even during the pandemic, our lives have really rotated around the axis of work. It is the center of our lives in so many ways. Everything else is slotted in, wedged in to try to work within that larger universe of work, and what a revelation it would be if we could make work rotate around the rest of our lives. But you have to have a sun at the middle of your life that is strong enough to create … I'm mixing all of my …
Basu: To sustain life. No, there's something there. [LAUGHS] There's something there.
Petersen: Right. You have to have something else, right? There has to be a different pole of attraction. And so, that's why I really encourage people, in a non-dorky way, oftentimes to figure out what they actually like to do that isn't their job. Because if you don't have something that isn't your job, like what else is gonna pull you? And I think the easy answer for a lot of parents is like, "Oh, my kids," right? That's not enough either. There's more to life than just parenting and work and figuring out how to excavate and create more poles. It's not saying that work has to become like Pluto, like not even a planet anymore, out in the nethers. But it's saying, how can you make more gravitational pulls in your life instead of just work? Because work will eclipse everything else if it's allowed.
Basu: What's one of your other planets?
Petersen: Gardening, which makes me sound like I'm like an 85-year-old retiree. But I love it. I am not …
Basu: Well, that's because they make time for it. And the rest of us don't. So, it doesn't need to be a cliche for 85-year-olds.
Petersen: Yes, totally. Well, and I think one of the things I love about gardening and why it has proven to be such an excellent hobby for me is I am not very good at it, right? I'm not a master gardener. I've taken no classes. I have learned by osmosis and by reading books and texting my mom. But there's a real curiosity there. I love seeing what works and what doesn't, watching my failures and learning from them. But also, not feeling like it has to be performative or I have to be the best at it. It's just something that takes a lot of time. A lot of it's really meditative. A lot of it doesn't have immediate payback. But it's just, it's something else. Right? It's something else that is a really important thing in my life.
Basu: Yeah. Anne Helen Peterson, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.
Petersen: Thank you so much. And for your tolerance of all of my mixed metaphors. I really appreciate it.
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Basu, Narrating: "Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home" by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel is available now on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.
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