The True Promise of Remote Work
Guest Speaker Anne Helen PetersenIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts Anne Helen Peterson, a former senior culture writer for Buzzfeed News. Anne now writes about the future of work, celebrity burnout, and more at her newsletter called Culture Study that’s a full-time venture at Substack. She is the author of four books, most recently: Out of The Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home co-written with Charlie Weitzel. She also wrote: Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. She received her Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Texas, where she studied the history of the gossip industry.
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INTERVIEW SUMMARY AND KEY TAKEAWAYS
The way we perceive in-person offices has shifted, and from Anne’s perspective, pre-pandemic offices need a much larger renovation to keep up with the changes in the workforce. Remote and hybrid work has given many people flexibility that they are no longer willing to give up, and companies who are unable to meet these needs are going to see an inability to retain talent. Anne provides some great perspectives on how companies should be moving forward in this unprecedented era, and how to find the middle ground between the needs of the employee and the company.
Some of the key takeaways from this talk:
- Prioritize intentionality when it comes to creating a culture in remote and hybrid environments. Find what works best for your employees to create spaces for community and connection. (12:39)
- If you are unable to offer employees a fully remote option, consider having core working hours for when people are needed to work together in person. Have these hours be mid-day if possible, to ease the commute and allow people to still drop off and pick up kids from school. (19:33)
- Find ways to create equity whether in person, hybrid, or remote. This can be related to benefits, promotions, and more. Know that just because someone is in the office does not mean they are working harder or more deserving than someone who is remote. (27:37)
- Instead of focusing on the minimum amount of time employees need to be in the office, flip it around to an office maximum. This has benefits for organizing the workplace while providing flexibility to employees. (29:34)
On the topic of community and connection, Anne has an interesting perspective. She believes that although it may seem like there has been a lack of connection compared to pre-pandemic, it has less to do with the remote work and more to do with the pandemic itself. Companies have been remote long before the pandemic and have found creative ways to maintain connectedness. She claims that some companies try to foster too much connection and can provide too many amenities to keep employees on campus for all their needs, which can lead to burnout. Whereas supporting communication and encouraging occasional gatherings can lead to more sustainable connections moving forward.
Anne predicts that offices as we know it will continue to shift and evolve. She believes more collaborative workspaces, like We Work, will be on the rise to provide dynamic spaces for people looking to get out of their home offices. Companies are already shifting away from even the word ‘office’ to terms such as labs or collaborative studios to embody a new sense of meaning when it comes to in-person work. The way we work is changing and compromising to meet the needs of the company as well as the needs of the employees is essential.
FAVORITE QUOTES
“We’ve allowed work to devour our lives and that makes a lot of us really unhappy. And in many cases, worse workers. We burn out faster, we feel more miserable in the jobs that we do. So how can we rethink or add another axis to our lives in terms of community that allows us to be better workers and better community members to one another?” 10:53
“(The pre-pandemic office) was all built to cater to a certain style of worker, we are not that workplace anymore. So why would we go back to that style of workplace?” 22:16
“In some organizations that just have a totally free, do whatever you want, let’s see what happens policy, you’re going to see some equity issues….You’re going to have a lot of people coming into the office who don’t have caregiving responsibilities… and some of that means that you will have younger people in the office and some of that means that you will have, in a lot of cases, more men in the office.” (27:36)
RESOURCES
Anne Helen Petersen:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: Out of the Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Sue Bethanis 0:04
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposa’s monthly Leadership Forum. We’re really happy today to have Anne Helen Peterson. Anne is a former senior culture writer for Buzzfeed News and now writes about the future of work, celebrity burnout, and more at her newsletter called Culture Study that’s a full-time venture at Substack. She is the author of four books, most recently: Out of the Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home. And that’s co-written with Charlie Weitzel. And another book she’s written is Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation. She received her Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Texas, and she lives now in Lummi Island, Washington, which is near Canada, as we’ve found out. So welcome very much, I really appreciate you being here. And it’s nice to have a writer with us who does a lot of research because we, lots of times, we have coaches, and lots of times we have sometimes we have clients. And so, you have a different perspective, which we really appreciate. So, I read your bio, but we like to start out with your sort of your personal journey, and how did you decide to write this particular book, besides the obvious that we’re in a pandemic? And I suppose we’re supposedly working from home, you have actually a different view on that, which is interesting.
Anne Helen Peterson 1:20
Yeah, I have come to think of this book as part of like, the larger cinematic universe. With my third book Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. So cinematic universe, you know, is often used to describe like Marvel movies, that sort of thing. And this, like thematically, are very much aligned in a lot of ways because they’re addressing this larger question of what is our relationship to work? And specifically looking, this isn’t necessarily the case of the whole of the burnout book. But a lot of the condition that I’m talking about is the type of attitude towards work adopted by people who work in office work, you know, broadly conceived. So people I don’t like, you know, knowledge work is such a silly term, because you have to have knowledge to do all sorts of work, right. Any sort of work that is portable, that is not wed to a certain location. And I think that that sort of work, its portability is part of this encourages a certain type of attitude, and also people who are doing that sort of work, who are college-educated and who have internalized some ideas about, you know, what college would promise and what sort of security that this sort of work would promise have struggled to find that stability. And so I think sometimes the coping mechanisms that we adopt in order to find stability amidst precarity lead to toxic work environments, but also pretty toxic strategies and attitudes towards work. And so that’s it, I think that like they are really in conversation in a lot of ways.
Sue Bethanis 2:54
Right. So it sounds like there’s a jumping off from your other book, was there something else in your research or in your background that sort of pointed to why you wanted to do this particular book?
Anne Helen Peterson 3:04
Yeah, I forgot to address this. I used to be an academic Ph.D. in Media Studies from the University of Texas, I graduated in 2011. And I was in the academic world, I was an assistant professor for three years after that. And that world, all of my bad ideas about work, I got them – I mean, some of them germinated when I was young- but most of them really, really were cultivated as an academic. And then part of what made me a good academic in terms of like my ability to work all the time, which is it a highly prized skill within academia also made me good at digital journalism, and the skills that are necessary to navigate that sort of precarious environment that is really predicated on the ability to work all the time, right, like the ability to pretend or to pay people to behave in a way as if there is nothing in your life other than work. And so I think that that background equipped me to think about these topics in pretty interesting ways. And also like the intersection of work with passion work broadly, and the ideas that we often internalize about what should be expected of us to do work that is, quote, unquote, lovable. So whether that’s teaching, doing journalism, working in the nonprofit sphere, there are a lot of intersections and explosions that happen there too.
Sue Bethanis 4:21
Cool. Okay. Thanks for that, that that makes it – it’s always good to know like little bit where you’re coming from. So your book is framed around four concepts, flexibility, culture, technologies of the office, and community. So let’s start with flexibility. You talked about genuine flexibility, how can we create a work culture that promotes real genuine flexibility that can benefit both the employee in the organization? I mean, this is so steeped right now, right? Tell us a bit more about what you mean by that.
Anne Helen Peterson 4:43
Yeah, I think because I come to any subject from this like academic, sociological, historical background, I always look in and like okay, what is flexibility meant historically, and it’s fascinating to look at the way that they use the word was used in The 1960s, 70s, and 80s, it was entirely you know, the flexibility on the corporation’s part to expand and contract at ease. Right. A great example of this is finding office space that has readily expandable cubicles so that if you hire a bunch of people for our project, you can just put them in that space. And then when, when you have to lay them off six months later, right, it’s easy to expand and contract, which is a real contrast to the way that the peak organization man style of business where someone started to work for you, and they work for you for the rest of their lives, right. It’s very different. But the framing of that term flexibility was all about how does this benefit the corporation, right? Does this benefit the stockholder? And not at all about how does this benefit the employee. And so I think what we were really trying to search for with this understanding of what genuine flexibility is, is how do we come up with a situation when it comes to when and how we work that is mutually beneficial to the employee and the employer? Right? How do we come up with a style of work that makes work survivable? Thrivable is not a word, but it’s like makes it a place where you can thrive, that also a lovely byproduct also creates less turnover, you get better talent, that product is better. productivity goes up, like how do you find that happy medium? And I think genuine flexibility is one of the ways.
Sue Bethanis 6:24
And how are companies doing that right now? Organizations?
Anne Helen Peterson 6:27
They’re struggling. And I think part of the problem and I know anyone who’s listening to this, who is an HR professional or an executive is that the ball has just been kicked on the road so many times, right. Like we keep thinking, Okay, we have this firm back to the office day, and then nope, right?
Sue Bethanis 6:43
Yes. I think maybe think people think now they might, but I don’t know. It’s like, you never know. But yeah, I think that there’s never been a time I don’t think until now where I think I might really happen. And that’s because I think that the government is really taking the lead on that. And yeah, you know, and I think making it a little easier, I guess.
Anne Helen Peterson 7:01
Well, and we’re also at a point too, you know, almost exactly two years into when we first went home from offices where patterns have been entrenched, right? Like, people, you cannot be calling people, everyone back to the office right now and be like, Okay, we’re here, right? It’s just, it’s just not gonna work. And I think most corporations understand that. So what is the happy medium? This is what’s hard too because I think there are, there’s a lot of thinking about equity, there’s a lot of thinking about what sort of daycare and care options are available to people right now, because the system’s broken, right? Like this system, it was broken before the pandemic, and it’s even more broken now. And so if you can’t find, you know, like, my friends in Seattle, there’s no one to drive the buses to the after school thing. So someone has to leave their job at 3 pm, to drop to drive their kid who is in full-time care, from elementary school, to the after-school program at the Boys and Girls Club. And like they can, you know, maybe carpool with some other kids, but like that, that has to be something that’s part of my friend’s flexible workday. And so how do you get that?
Sue Bethanis 8:05
You know, one way to get that would be for companies to provide that.
Anne Helen Peterson 8:09
Right? Well, we’re like, say, alright, we have figured out what our core hours are, right. And I know that a lot of companies are moving towards this like we have core hours that we want you to be in the office. And then let’s figure out from there, what your schedule is. And that might vary team by team. task by task. that sort of week by week, but what are our core hours?
Sue Bethanis 8:29
So as you mentioned, already, this idea that the day comes back as move, move, move, especially with these bigger corporations, I mean, Amazon’s move there, it’s a bunch of time. So has Apple. And they also shifted from let’s come back five days a week to three days a week to let’s come back two days a week, and some have decided that no one has to come back. Right. And in your research, I want to focus on tech companies is that really is most of the people that are on the call or in tech companies. What are you noticing about what tech companies are doing? And I can tell you what I’m noticing too.
Anne Helen Peterson 9:00
Yeah, I see a really interesting divide. I think that the smaller tech companies are a lot more nimble, and a lot more responsive right now. I think that Apple dragging its feet is really interesting. And I think there’s gonna be some pushback there continued. What’s happening at Microsoft is fascinating, because that was a company that really felt very butts in seats to me, that has realized that like, in order to be competitive, that they need to have the same sort of competence, this flexibility that these other companies that are poaching their talent are offering. I know who wants to drive to Redmond, right? And I think some companies though… I have a friend who works at a phone company, I don’t want to say the name but like they have said there’s no working from home on Mondays and Fridays, even for upper level and that to me is just such evidence of distressed
Sue Bethanis 9:46
totally. Yeah. And so they’re saying you have to come into the office every day. No,
Anne Helen Peterson 9:51
you can. You can work from home sometimes on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, but you can’t work on Monday because there’s they’re basically saying like you’re gonna screw around on Fridays if we let you work from home on Fridays, and you know what, here’s the thing, maybe you take off a little bit early when your kids get off school, so you can go to a ski weekend or whatever, if that’s a higher quality of life for you, if like the person works really hard to get all the things that are that need to be done. I think that’s great, right, like, allowed you to have lives. But then I sometimes I’ll talk to a leader, CEO, and they’re like, that’s wage theft. It’s not
Sue Bethanis 10:23
Yeah, I don’t think that…so you said a phone company, I don’t know how techie there. But I mean, I would agree with you most small tests in our little sample that we see. Yeah, 60 companies or so that we work with. You know, most of the small companies are not requiring anybody to come back.
Anne Helen Peterson 10:41
Yeah totally. And the small companies are being so much more innovative with four-day workweeks, that sort of thing. Right.
Sue Bethanis 10:47
Right. So we got culture, technology, the office, and community, could you just briefly talk about what you mean by those?
Anne Helen Peterson 10:53
Culture, again, is one of those things like so each one of these, we could start by defining it by how it’s been historically defined, which is oftentimes crappy, right? Like, what is work culture, it’s all the gossip that people say about what you need to know about a place, and how remote work flexible work can change how we think about that thing. So how can remote and flexible work dramatically change the way we think about culture? For one thing, it can really change the monoculture, which is oftentimes a certain sort of person, race, family situation, a location that thrives in an in-person office environment, and then technologies of the office, same sort of thing like what are, for better and for worse, what are the things that remote work facilitates in terms of communicating and how we put together an office space and how we think about how like email and meetings take up our days, and how that works differently. And the community is, I think the part of the book that a lot of people are surprised by that it’s essentially about we’ve allowed work to devour our lives. And that makes a lot of us really unhappy. And in many cases, worse workers, right, we burn out faster, we feel more miserable, and in the jobs that we do. So how can we rethink or add another axis to our lives in terms of community that allows us to be better workers and better community members from one another? Okay.
Sue Bethanis 12:09
So lots of questions. Let’s take culture for a second, we spent a lot of time talking about culture in our organization and with our clients. So my definition of culture is how things are around here. Yeah. So it could be gossip, or it can be, you know, something on the wall, or it can be where your, you know, water cooler is or literally or whatever, it’s behaviors. Yeah. So if there’s no here that changes things a lot. Right. So how have you seen people grapple with that to create it here? And what suggestions do you have?
Anne Helen Peterson 12:39
Yeah, you know, we talked with a lot of companies that were remote first or distributed over the course of doing the book. And they all they were like, this isn’t hard, guys. Right? Like, you just have to be intentional about it. You can create this culture, you just have to stop thinking, how can we create a happy hour in Zoom, that you don’t take offline activities and just try to port them over into online spaces? It’s more thinking about like, how do we do things on here online? What does that look like? And I think every, every organization is different in this capacity in terms of like, what people are up for, right? Like what people are willing to do in a space online. Like I was talking with one company that like, you know, they do like cool VR things. And like their workforces game for that because of this sort of work that they do. They don’t think, Oh, this is hokey and weird or doing more like Metaverse style things. Again, not as weird if it’s something that you’re familiar with, and you work with all the time. But sometimes that can be really lame, too. You know, I mean, that doesn’t, but a lot of in-person stuff that culture-building stuff that companies do is also lame. So how do we think about new ways that we can promote culture?
Sue Bethanis 13:54
What does that so how do you suggest or how often have people done it? How have people been intentional? I mean, this is I use the same exact word. And it’s amazing that it’s intentionality. It’s like, you can’t just bump into people, obviously, you have to be intentional. You have to linger after meetings, you have to get on Slack. You have to get on the phone, you have to be intentional about it.
Anne Helen Peterson 14:13
Yeah. And I think one great example of a way that you can be intentional with this is with the onboarding of new employees. Because I think sometimes people assume like, Oh, when I started this company, I just kind of gradually learned the ropes, right? I observed people around. Or they have a mentor system where you get paired with someone who does something similar to you, right? Or you have a cohort operation where you have a Slack group where people can ask questions, but it’s monitored, and no one can actually ask the questions that you really want to ask. Right? So how do you give new employees a space where they can talk? How do you promote that without explicitly promoting and you’re like, hey, maybe you guys should have a signal group where you can actually ask people the questions that you want to ask. Or a great example that I’ve heard is that instead of pairing people randomly with other mentors who are not very good at mentoring, right, like, that’s not a skill, that’s a tool that’s a great tool in their toolbox, or don’t have the time for it right? It’s not on their job description, figure out who in your company really is the Welcome Wagon? Who was really good at it? And who wants to do it? Right? It takes intentionality. Yeah, and take something off their plate so that they’re not just doing emotional labor on top of everything else. And it can’t just be one person, obviously. And also, you should have enough people at your company so that like, let’s say, you have a new employee who’s black, there should be another black employee there who can tell you okay, here’s how this company deals with race, right? And sometimes those sorts of communications will have happened before the hiring process, when someone reaches out to say, like, what is it like to be black at this company? But that’s something to where someone’s like, Well, how do we start putting this stuff in place? If we’re like a snow cap company, wherever once all the leadership is white? How do we start doing this stuff, changing the monoculture? If we already are in a bad place, you gotta look at your hiring alongside all this other stuff.
Sue Bethanis 16:00
I agree. I agree. I mean, hiring is key to culture and leadership development, obviously, it is key to culture. Okay, let’s stop for a second because we’re about halfway. So really liking the conversation so far, thank you. So who has a question – Tamar, I know you sent a chat over if you want to elaborate on that. You’re welcome to. Hello, how are you?
Speaker 3 16:22
I’m good. How are you? See, that was in direct response to Sue, you mentioned something about, gosh, what did you say, and there were some other perks and you’re like, you know, maybe the employer can provide that. But one of the things that I would say is that I don’t think it’s necessarily a struggle at my company, and I do work for a large tech company. It’s not necessarily a struggle, but it’s a topic. And that is in trying to create equity in all of the various aspects of what it means to have identified what place you are going to work from, from time to time. And we are asking people to define what that means for them, whether they are fully remote, that they’re fully in the office or if they are hybrid. But that there are some things that come along with certainly the two polls, if you are fully remote, you already get a package or going to receive a package of benefits that people who are fully in the office do not receive, that could include additional money that could include, you know, putting together something for your home office, that someone who gets to comes to the office regularly is not going to get in where it is right now that we are having conversations is like, what does hybrid actually mean? Because if it’s the best of both worlds, that’s not going to work long term, unless, really, to your point with intention figured out then within these various buckets, how can we very clearly state what is applicable to each of them? If you make a different choice? What does that mean for what you have versus what you are now going to get? And so that’s why I said that it’s not necessarily as easy as you know, saying, none of this is easy.
Anne Helen Peterson 18:03
No, yeah. Right. Like people are like, I want to go back into the office every day because I’m sick of my house, or my kids, or yeah, and like six weeks, they’re like, I hate this commute. I want to go no days a week.
Sue Bethanis 18:15
Right, right. Yeah, I think that’s the there’s time. And so are you noticing is anybody going back full time?
Speaker 3 18:20
Yes. So, where we see them the most and more than I will preface this by saying about 75% of our offices are open. We have 25 locations around the world, where we are sitting the most folks going in are OUS. So that’s outside of the United States. The folks in EMEA as well as folks in APJ, Asia Pacific region are going back in more numbers. And I would say AMEA is probably leading the charge. It makes sense to me just because those places have a very, very different understanding of what culture community in those things mean with them. It is very much a sort of awe. And that’s not where we generally come from. And they’re not that it’s a detriment. It’s just different. And things like commutes, which you all talked about, like, even me, I live over across from San Francisco, that’s my home office. But I don’t want to go an hour to go 10 miles. I wasn’t interested in doing it before. I never really don’t want to do it. Now if I can have like,
Anne Helen Peterson 19:31
You can figure out the core hours for work right? And this is part of what my book tries to talk about is like a hard thing that you have to do before you can come up with these remote ideas is like, what is the work right? Like what is the work that we are doing and what part of it demands synchronicity and what part of it can be done asynchronously? And if you can figure out that that part where you want people to be together, either online or not online, right and like actual physical spaces, then you can be like, alright, every Wednesday 11 to 2 people can go commute off times. So the commute is at least alleviated and also doesn’t necessarily interfere fear with, like pickup times for care and that sort of thing, too.
Sue Bethanis 20:12
Yeah. Great. Well, Tamar, any follow-up?
Speaker 3 20:16
I have plenty.
Sue Bethanis 20:19
Um, well, you should say what you do too, it would help people understand why you’re so
Speaker 3 20:24
Sure. So, I’m the vice president of real estate and workplace globally, for a tech company. And yeah, we patent locations for other companies.
Sue Bethanis 20:33
Yeah. And your role is in real estate facilities, obviously, you know, you think about this, much more than most. So that’s why I want to make sure people knew where coming from Tamar, and I’ve known each other for one time. And yeah, I’m always impressed with your viewpoint on stuff. So I appreciate it.
Anne Helen Peterson 20:41
I have a question. Do you guys have a head of remote?
Sue Bethanis 20:52
So we recently did hire what we – when we originally thought about it, it was kind of head of remote. Yeah, what it ended up being was more organizational effectiveness. Yeah. And I do think that that was an appropriate change, just even from the titling. Yeah. Right, rather than something that’s very specific on, like, the fact that people are not in an office. Yep. And there’s a whole bunch around that too. Like, you know, I’m advocating for not even calling our locations offices anymore, like, what will they become in the future? Because as soon as you say office, and this is not going to be great everywhere, but as soon as you say office, there is an immediate mental thing that happens with what it looks like, what you will be able to get there. And really, that should change. Yeah, yeah. And office, you know, it’s so old, it’s, you know, post World War II era of when office actually became a thing where people would go to, and that was really the sort of that was the beginning of the office that we know today starts from this place of like, needing to get a whole bunch of people together to do work. And while they’re still some of that, the intention behind it is very different. And the intention behind it is how to work better together, either asynchronously or synchronously. But also to continue to build culture a different kind of culture.
Anne Helen Peterson 22:15
Well and the interesting thing, too, sometimes I think there’s this assumption that like, somehow the office, the pre-pandemic office was like neutral in some way. But like that office, you know, as you mentioned, it was built post World War II, vast majority of people going into that office were white dudes, right? And who had someone at home, who was helping them with the rest of their lives, it wasn’t built, like the style of the office, the rhythms of the office, what you received at the office was all built to cater to a certain style of worker, we are not that workplace anymore. So why would we go back to that style of workplace?
Sue Bethanis 22:51
Right, right. Cool. Tamar, thank you. Look, always a pleasure. I want to talk about community a little bit, because I think in my opinion, I guess you could say is that what’s lost is the sense of connection or go community. And it might be like, you know that the happy hour, or it might be the literally having coffee, most tech companies provide coffee and lunch and everything breakfast, you name it, at least the coffee was probably the most prevalent. And you know, you don’t, you don’t have that anymore. So, people are trying to do that, you know, have coffee on Zoom, and, you know, trying to shove this shove the idea of watercooler into zoom, and people doing that because they’re trying to connect. So, what are your ideas around this? Yes, I agree with you that the office was made for a bunch of white dudes back in after the war, I get that, but at the same time, it does allow for connection. So, what do we do about that?
Anne Helen Peterson 23:46
So it’s interesting, I think, you know, there’s been some fascinating studies out about, like, how much innovation actually comes from water cooler moments, which is like not that much, right. But my sort of oppositional take is that I think workplaces have become too much of a source of community. And that when your workplace is a family, we all know that that’s a red flag and whenever one uses that language, but I also think when everyone in your workplace is best friends, it’s also not great. And I think that encourages this sort of toxicity. And also, from an HR perspective, it’s certainly not fantastic in terms of potential violations and that sort of thing. But also like it just it promotes a culture of overwork, too, because you’re at work. And this is particularly true with tech companies with large campuses, like pre-pandemic…
Sue Bethanis 24:36
Like they want to keep them there. Yeah.
Anne Helen Peterson 24:39
You want to keep them there. You’re like, I don’t need to go to a bar. We have a bar on our campus. I don’t need to belong to a gym, we have a gym on our campus. I don’t need to learn how to cook because all of my meals are provided for me. And in some ways that incentivizes being there and working all the time, in a way that benefits the company, but in some ways, I think it promotes a relationship to work that eventually leads to burnout and people leaving the company.
Sue Bethanis 25:05
Agreed and you forgot the dry cleaning. But yeah, I agree. I totally agree with you. I guess there’s a happy medium. So, let’s just go to the happy medium. I mean, I think that there is something that suddenly yesterday I was I had some friends over, they said, what do you, you know, are you gonna keep working? I said, well, yeah, I’m gonna keep working. I mean because it’s a way for me to connect to people. I mean, like, it’s a source of connection.
Anne Helen Peterson 25:25
Right? And, you know, you want to talk about the thing that you do, right. Like, that’s interesting.
Sue Bethanis 25:30
Yeah, I happen to have a fun job to be able to connect to people pretty intimately. So, it’s nice, but I think that people are missing that. Yeah. And because they’re, you know, some of it’s because there’s insularity around you to see and your family and even friends it’s hard. I think they’re missing it with friends and with work friends.
Anne Helen Peterson 25:49
So yeah, people are lonely is the way that I guess you can think about it.
Sue Bethanis 25:54
Solitude is one thing, but it’s after that it’s like, okay.
Anne Helen Peterson 25:56
And you’re like other people for the last few years have been dangerous, right, like, just medically dangerous for a lot of people. So how do we rethink this? I do think and again, I don’t know how much this really, I think will vary from company to company. But I think like Slack and discord and chat apps like there’s just a lot of ways that you can have somebody that is distant lately about something else entirely that allows you to connect about work, right? So, I don’t know, you’re like in a puzzle swap discord channel. This is very popular in my personal discord, this around my newsletters, there’s like, one for wordle right, and one for puzzles, swap and one for other hobbies, and like other TV shows, and in some ways, those are a time suck. But so is like getting a coffee, and when you talk about you should like do Wordle together or watch a movie or whatever. Like the actual phrase, water-cooler TV show is about people at work talking about a TV show at work. So, if you allow people in those spaces to talk about nonwork things, they promote an intimacy that allows a modicum of trust when you’re talking about work things as well. Right.
Sue Bethanis 27:01
And that’s exactly right. Okay, this is great. Let’s go back to something that Tamara said that it’s kind of out there, it’s like, it’s easy, it’s easier to figure out the remote thing, it’s easier to figure out people who are in the office, but it’s the in-between, it’s hard. So, what are some ideas around hybrid, I mean, you mentioned this idea of like, you got to figure what the work is, I totally agree with that. But their other ideas you have in terms of how to help HR folks, frankly, anybody, but especially HR managers, terms of how to deal with the hybrid, we just say, Okay, come in whenever you want, or come in on Wednesdays, or…
Anne Helen Peterson 27:36
Each company is gonna have to see how it shakes out in some ways, like, they’re gonna see who’s coming in who’s not, and how it feels, and how it feels. But I do think that what we’re gonna see in some organizations that just have a totally free, do whatever you want, let’s see what happens policy, you’re gonna see some equity issues. Because people that I know, but also people that are part of my larger lose that are community and I get people who email me all the time, but here’s what’s happening in my corporation, you’re just gonna have a lot of people coming into the office who don’t have caregiving responsibilities, or who don’t have primary caregiving responsibilities. And that could be for kids, it can also be for elders, right. And some of that means that you will have younger people in the office. And some of that means that you will have in a lot of cases, more men in the office, and also people who feel very comfortable in the office, which depending on extrovert style, will be extroverts and or people who, like there’s, I mean, there are fewer microaggressions online than there are necessarily in the office and like I’ll like things about getting ready, right? It takes more time for women to get ready to go into the office than it does for men, in most cases, not all. So, what you’re gonna see are these trends of a certain type of person coming into the office and a lot of leadership loves being in the office, because leadership skills are more like control. Yeah, it’s control. And it’s also just like what you do as a leader is more legible when you are in person. Right that that work is what’s called concrete. So there, there’s going to be the eyeballs and eyeballs of the person who’s in the office and like it’s going to communicate, this person is working more, even if they’re trying actively not to, to think that they’re trying not to think, oh, just because a person is in the office doesn’t mean that they’re working harder. It still is going to feel that way in a lot of ways.
Sue Bethanis 29:24
It’s hard not for it to Yeah, frankly.
Anne Helen Peterson 29:26
Yeah, totally it’s presence bias for a better word.
Sue Bethanis 29:31
And trademark that.
Anne Helen Peterson 29:34
And also just like there will be like opportunities. They’re like, Hey, you Yes, yes. Right. Totally. And that’s it’s not equitable. Right? That’s right. And so I think one thing that we talked about a little bit in the book and I’ve written about is you need to come up with it in office maximum as well. And that’s hard for people to hear.
Sue Bethanis 29:53
I love that. That’s the first time I’ve heard anybody say that in-office maximum versus in-office minimum because we’re all talking about minimum Yeah. So if that’s the case, we say something to the effect of like everybody comes in Wednesdays, you get to come in three days. I mean, I’m making this up. But you get to come in three days.
Anne Helen Peterson 30:10
Yeah. The maximum number of days to come in. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, part of that, too. I think you’ll see this more in companies that are using more of like a hot desk. situation. Yes, yes. Because it actually makes it a lot easier. If you have a max capacity on any certain day.
Sue Bethanis 30:27
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think it will, it makes, I mean, for someone like Tamara, who’s dealing with real estate and facilities, it’s like you get, you know, I’ve heard a lot of that from HR, as well, that I work with a guy, another guy that did IT. So he’s obviously in very much into with HR and facilities, it’s like, they can only have so many people in the office. Yep. Can’t have if they can’t have everybody in the office at the same time. Right. Exactly. So, so, uh, yeah. So I think I like it. So to answer your question Tamara I hope we answered it, it’s like, yeah, there is. So what we’re proposing here or thinking about is the idea of there’s a maximum that you’re allowed to come in? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Got it. Okay.
Anne Helen Peterson 31:06
I mean, I think that’s interesting, too. I, I’m really fascinated, I actually did an interview with someone at the New York Times, he was writing a piece about real estate and larger tech companies in office space. And he was like, you know, it’s interesting if all these tech companies are really going for this flex option. Why are they buying so much real estate? And my answer was because they have, the big ones have endless money. And they’re like, well, we just want to have all possibilities open to people. But if you have to be more mindful about the size of your real estate that you’re purchasing, this is I think, like having a maximum makes it transforms it into something. And going back to what Tamara was saying as well, just giving it a different name. Even I know that Dropbox is thinking of their previous office spaces much more as studios as a collaborative studio. So you only go in, if you’re working with other people, you don’t go in to send emails so you can go to work with other people. But if you want to send emails, you could do that at home, or you could do it in a third space. And that’s the other thing that’s really hard for people to understand right now is because a lot of these third spaces are not great space, or what happened. And I think we’re gonna see a lot more development of really cool third spaces that are more accessible to more people.
Sue Bethanis 32:25
Do you mean like cafes and like, WeWork? So what do you mean by that?
Anne Helen Peterson 32:28
Yeah, combination. You know, cafes, WeWork. Private? Yeah. We’re both like, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that that’s true. I don’t know enough about WeWork and how they can if you can provide or protect data privacy more if you’re working in a more secure location where you sure don’t that more but yeah, like a coffee shop… But young people, if you’re like, there’s some work that you can definitely do.
Sue Bethanis 32:56
Yeah. But does it these are all like the way we’re thinking in terms of being creative. Because I think that that’s what’s great about this situation is that it requires us to think more creatively requires us to think more intentionally. And so that is why we do these, you know, these talks and to get people to think about different ideas. And I really, really appreciate both of you actually, Tamar. Yeah, I love how you’re chiming in here a lot. I appreciate that a lot. We’ve got just a couple more minutes. So what are some other things in your book that you think would be helpful to this audience?
Anne Helen Peterson 33:27
Well, one thing that I think in messaging to employees as well. Whatever working from home was for the last years, it’s not what the future of working from home is going to look like. Right? What so that includes options for third spaces, but also what it feels like. You know, I think a lot of companies have met in person sparingly, or, you know, during the kind of lulls and in peaks of the pandemic. But what if you can actually have a happy hour? Every week? How is that going to change how it feels? Or what if you are able to really convene in summits every quarter for people who are more distributed, gonna change how it feels? Right.
Sue Bethanis 34:08
We know that’s happening, by the way. A lot of our folks are doing offsites Yeah. On Off sites, bringing people together off sites on-site, actually. Yeah, that’s happening more and more, we’re getting asked to do it, and we’re seeing it more and so it’s gonna be more like, yeah, once a quarter kind of thing.
Anne Helen Peterson 34:25
Yeah. And that’s gonna change how we think about the amount of community and culture to I think, like when I meet with my friends from college, right, like you meet for a three day weekend or a four day weekend, incredibly concentrated like a fun time, no kids, no partners, just friends. Right. And it’s enough to last you for like three months sometimes. Right? And I think that that is in some ways what we’re gonna see with work collaboration, as well as you have that really, and again, distributed companies were doing this before and there’s A lot of wisdom there that we can gain from them.
Sue Bethanis 35:03
There’s a lot of research on. In fact, people will say, you know, how do I fire people in Zoom era? I’m like, Well, how do I fire people? Period? Right? And I said, well, and you obviously you can’t see them. So I said, so I just went back to research around how are people firing people in, you know, remote? I mean, it’s like, it’s not that different. Is it? So you get the articles. So still good from three years ago, and 10 years ago? Yeah. So but the stuff like that, I mean, I, we laugh about it. But I mean, that’s, it’s a lot harder to hire and fire people right now. Yeah, it has been, do you require that when you’re hiring people, you’re going to require people to come in to meet them at that you don’t? So they can just send them? What if there is an office and have them? And so that there’s that? I mean, I think that that might happen more and more now? Yeah, I don’t think it was. Yeah. And on the other side of it is, are people going to take a job if they have to come in? So there’s both sides of that? Right.
Anne Helen Peterson 35:57
I think that that’s one of the disconnects about why they’re so like, there are so many jobs, but then also people feel like they can’t get a job. Yes, right. Matching, the matching is just not happening. And I do think that that will change a little bit as we get, like a little further into whatever this next movement is going to be. But right now, it seems like an impasse between like, Yeah, well, this is what I want. And this is what I want. And those things are not the same.
Sue Bethanis 36:23
Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, really good point. Well, listen, you’ve been wonderful in terms of your inputs. And I can’t wait to read more of the book. And I just want to remind everybody, again, that Anne’s book Out of the Office: The Big Problem and the Bigger Promise of Working from Home, and you can get that anywhere, but particularly on Amazon, your website annehelen.substack.com
Anne Helen Peterson 36:45
Yeah. And I write about all sorts of stuff because it’s called Culture Study. But there’s a lot of if you just even Google Culture Study and then work, there will be a lot of stuff.
Sue Bethanis 36:57
So again, thank you so much for being with us, and I appreciate it very much. Alright, everybody. Thanks again. And we’ll see you next time. Bye.