San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Obvious insights about working from home
In “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home,” authors Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen synthesize what their reporting has taught them about the Sisyphean nature of working from home — that new technologies and supposedly progressive office cultures have had pernicious consequences. “The ability to take your work anywhere means the ability for work to infiltrate all corners of your life,” they write.
Findings like these will surprise no one. Though they did lots of research, interviewing numerous whitecollar managers and conducting a “survey of roughly seven-hundred workers,” Warzel and Petersen have written a book filled with unremarkable conclusions. “The spread of laptops, the internet and smart devices [has] made work all the more portable,” they write, offering a history of the present that adds nothing new to the most exhaustively reported workplace development in recent memory.
Warzel and Petersen, who live in Montana and write popular newsletters on work, tech and other topics, want to help people who work from home — “knowledge workers” is the current, pretentious term for engineers, journalists and many others — find more rational, rewarding and productive work-life balances. Recent events have added urgency to their mission. Encouraged — and during the pandemic, compelled — to work from their couches, white-collar workers are expected to demonstrate “constant availability” and always “look productive,” they add. This is made more difficult by isolation and fears that a lack of face time with management will hurt their careers.
They have ideas for small, specific changes, some of which, like their advice on videoconferencing — “standardize Zoom backgrounds” so that employees don’t feel insecure about their “personal spaces” — is literal windowdressing. Their bigger proposals are smart and compassionate. Expensive, too. Which is why they’re unlikely to be popular with rapacious corporations and struggling small-business owners. Companies, Warzel and Petersen suggest, should consider hiring “slightly more than enough people” and giving employees more freedom to work when they want. Steps like these will let employees know that they can step away from work without repercussions, and that, in their precious phrasing, “self-care is possible.”
Some of their suggested fixes will be obvious to anyone who’s ever held a job. If a company is going to call a meeting, they counsel, it needs to determine “the meeting’s goal” and “whether a meeting is the best way to achieve it in the first place.” Meanwhile, at-home workers might benefit from writing “one-pagers” about their professional routines, letting colleagues know, for instance, when they like to handle office-related correspondence. After all, they pander, we’re all complex individuals, “not just the other end of an email transaction.”
Warzel and Petersen caution that faddish new tech platforms won’t fix everything — but then they recommend some faddish new tech platforms. The technology from San Francisco’s Loom, they write, enables workers to share brief videos of themselves, which “takes the intimacy of in-person interactions and makes them available for flexible application.” They hasten to add that “this isn’t an advertisement for a specific piece of technology.” Funny, it reads like one.
In the final pages, Warzel and Petersen exhort us to forge “networks of care and community.” Join a food coop, they write, and “support the infrastructure” by paying your taxes. “Demand affordable housing,” volunteer at a library or make like the coauthors and play “zombie hide-and-seek” with your friends’ children. This section of the book is overstuffed, unfocused — a well-meaning shambles.
Like other writers trying to shape the future of labor, Warzel and Petersen pepper their text with lessons learned from workplace books that time has forgotten. Theirs will soon join that list.