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--:-- Shumita Basu: This is In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: It's a new year, a fresh slate, a chance to hit restart. So here's something to think about: resetting. How is your relationship to your job? Does it feel healthy, sustainable?
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So what is going wrong here? 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 going to find stability is by working all the time.
--:-- Shamita Basu: That's the journalist Anne Helen Peterson. 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And I think that a way to glamorize working all the time is to say, I'm doing what I love. To say, this is my identity, and because I'm doing what I love, 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Anne and her partner, journalist Charlie Warzel, came together to write a new book out now called Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, this book is about how remote work can change your life for the better. But it's also 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 can we unlearn certain expectations and recenter our lives around the things we care about the most?
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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?
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Like, 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Hmm. One thing that I kept coming back to, a thought I kept coming back to is like, so how did we get stuck here? I mean, really, what got us so stuck here in this relationship with work?
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: There was this hope that not only would we have like, you know, a four day week, but we'd have a two day week or we'd only work, you know, eight to 20 hours a week.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 like, we're going to have so many people with more leisure.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Like there's going to be more time on their hands. Where are they going to go? What are they going to do? We got to give them spaces and things to do.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Fantastic, right? 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 like someone who is in office at 7 a.m. and leaves at 10 p.m. is the best worker possible.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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, right? It's someone who doesn't have caregiving responsibilities.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: It's someone who has completely allowed their life to be subsumed by their work. I mean, you talk about the Google Mountain View, California complex, and, you know, that's the one that you probably everyone would have in their minds, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: It's a 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: What I thought was so interesting in the book, you talk to the architect of that workspace, and it sounds like he kind of came to regret the design of that workspace.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: His understanding was that he did not anticipate the ways in which these structures would promote a certain understanding of work, right? The way that they would promote a subsumation of self into the workplace, right? That they would addict workers to their workplaces.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And I think he sees in hindsight that that wasn't necessarily a net societal good. I mean, this is so interesting. It's like a company town, but I mean, all of the Google multiplex, it's like owned by Google, of course.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But there is this understanding that either people, some people live in their cars, right? Like there's someone that we quote in the piece who lived in their van and then just went to work at Google.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 like, look like the places where people that I went to school with lived in as soon as they graduated from college, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: It's just like a twin bed on the ground and like filthy sheets, right? No kitchen apparatuses. Barely any sign of life. But yeah, because it's all at the office.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And it's 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, like if you can go to the gym, if you can go to the climbing gym.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Like 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And I think you see that a lot. Like it breeds loyalty in some ways. But tech companies also, there's a fair amount of exchange in tech companies. Like people will stay at a tech company for five, six years and then find another job somewhere else.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But it's oftentimes at another tech company that offers the same perks, right? So the same type of lifestyle, the same type of relationship to work can just continue.
--:-- Shamita 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So why is that? Why did flexibility fail us?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And I was immediately struck by how it was a different understanding of flexible than I understood in any way, right? So like when I think of flexible, I think of like my own flexible schedule, right? The individual workers' flexibility.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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, you know, even in terms of buying buildings where they could very easily rent out floors when they fired people or, you know, take those floors back when they needed more people.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 like 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What would flexibility look like if it were actually to benefit the people who are working?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: I think it really depends on vocation. You know, sometimes people are like, well, I don't want to be remote all the time. Or like our work, we need to be in person sometimes.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 where we actually want people to be online at the same time or in the same spaces at the same time.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 going to tell employees are mandatory online or in office hours?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And what structures are we going to put around the rest of the time? And so a lot of companies I think right now are like, okay, your core hours are, or, you know, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. But they're saying that it's every day, right? Or like Monday through Friday.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 going to do less work, that they're going to slack off, that they're going to go to, like, the beach and just, like, hang out there.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: What's wrong with going to the beach, right? 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?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Like 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?
--:-- Shamita Basu: So, 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.
--:-- Shamita Basu: 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?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: I mean, the most famous is that work is a family, right? Oh yeah, that's a bad one. Yeah. And I think that like, that's one that people are using less and less because it's been recognized as something that's really toxic, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But at the same time, there are still companies that really use the language of like responsibility and faithfulness. And we owe it to one another. We care about one another to bond employees and keep them in toxic situations or exploitative situations out of loyalty.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And I think it's especially effective and especially targeted towards female employees. Not exclusively, but a lot. It feels like employees are often the ones who are made to feel like they are the ones who are responsible.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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?
--:-- Shamita Basu: Well, this is a good segue into talking about another kind of toxic workplace word, which is boundaries, right? Like that word, it gets thrown around so often about like, everyone needs to cultivate good workplace boundaries or like work-life balance boundaries.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And boundaries are oftentimes conceived of as the responsibility of the individual alone, right? Like this is something that you personally have to maintain.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And they also get destroyed constantly by the barrage of work, right? 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But I don't think it's a personal failure when they need to disintegrate, right? 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: So a guardrail, and I got this idea, you know, from growing up in the Mountain West, you have guardrails on mountain passes, and they are put in place, you know, by a larger entity, in this case, the government.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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, right? The responsibility for maintaining them is funded, is contributed to by everyone, right? Similar to tax dollars, but it's just like everyone in the workplace.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And the responsibility for them, if they disintegrate, right, is, or if they get bashed up in some way, the responsibility is the corporations, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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, 8 p.m. Now, people might have work schedules that make it so that they do their best work at 10 p.m., right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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. You schedule it if you'd really... Yeah, you schedule it.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Technology is here for us, right? There are so many ways you can schedule a communication But the big thing here is it not just that you tell individuals that It that if someone does send it at 10 p that that is something that they get talked to about right
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: It is not held up as like oh look at this person Put it in that extra work. Like emailing at 10 is not a way to show that you are doing more work than other people. It's actually something that you get criticized for, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And that is the way that you can implement an actual guardrail, right? 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.
--:-- Shamita 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?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: There's a real awareness that, you know, the way that your workplace treats you, it's not going to 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 like, This isn't me, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: And getting a new job will not fix all of your problems. That'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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But at the same time, oftentimes the biggest source of toxicity is that workplace that you found yourself in, is that toxic relationship with your current job.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But a fresh start with a new job might be a way to set the tone and set standards moving forward.
--:-- Shamita 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?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: I think for a lot of people pre-pandemic and even during the pandemic, Like, our lives have really rotated around the axis of work. It is the center of our lives in so many ways.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But you have to have a son at the middle of your life that is strong enough to create it. I'm mixing all of my legs. Same life. No, there's something there. Right. Like you have to have something else, right?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 like figure out what they actually like to do that isn't their job.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Because if you don't have something that isn't your job, like what else is going to pull you? And I think like the easy answer for a lot of parents is like, oh, my kids, right? That's not enough either.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: There's more to life than just parenting and work. And figuring out how to excavate and create more poles. Like, it's not saying that, you know, that work has to become like Pluto, like not even a planet anymore out in the, you know, out in the nethers.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: But it's saying, how can you make more gravitational poles in your life instead of just work? Because work will eclipse everything else if it's allowed.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What's one of your other planets?
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Gardening, which makes me sound like I'm like an 85-year-old retiree, retiree, but I love it. I am not. 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: Yes, totally. Well, and I think like 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: I've taken no classes. I have learned by osmosis and by reading books and like texting my mom. But there's a real curiosity there. Like 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.
--:-- Anne Helen Peterson: 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 something else, right? It's something else that is a really important thing in my life.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Anne Helen Peterson, it's been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. And for your tolerance of all of my mixed metaphors, I really appreciate it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Out of Office, The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home by Anne Helen Peterson and Charlie Warzel is available now on Apple Books. You can find a link on our show notes page.
