Ezra Klein: on the topic of working from home

I haven’t done a post on Ezra Klein’s podcast in a while, and he usually has some really good deep thought-provoking conversations with writers and thinkers. This particular conversation is centered around working from home and was probably done in August of 2022.

I’m not going to go through a lot of what was discussed because there was a lot and I really just want to home in on a particular subject. He does talk about the case for and against working from home and possibly ventured into how the work environment could be developed in the future, and normally I would dive into that but this time, I want to visit those ideas of why working from home turned out to be very stressful.

First of all, his guests were Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen who wrote the book, Out of Office: The Big Problem and the Bigger Promise of Working from Home. A lot, if not all, were pulled from this book. The link to the article might be behind a paywall so if you are a subscriber to the New York Times, then you have access to it. Or you may be able to reach the podcast through Apple. The title is “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work”.

I’m going to skip the discussions on the pros and cons on hybrid, full time or fully remote since it appears to be somewhat of a regurgitation of what I’ve already read in the news: executives want people back full time while workers want to work from home, those working from home are more productive (supposedly), who wants more flexible schedule.

The line that caught my eye because it’s the first I’ve read of this:

“…there’s a great myth, that I’m sure you have heard, and that everyone listening has heard, which is that there is so much innovation and creativity that happens by happenstance in the hallways at an office. And there’s actually been some pretty great research, I’ve seen it published in Harvard Business Review and cited other places, that this is not the case, that this is absolutely a story that people tell themselves about the importance of the office.”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

No, I haven’t heard that. That’s news to me. I suspected that idea about creativity and innovation happening in the hallway wasn’t always true because I could think of WordPress or Automattic being fully remote and still coming up with new things to keep their blogging products up-to-date.

I am going to skip the part about people being lonely, especially the young ones graduating from school and being at loss as to how to assimilate at work. There is a valid point that we need to find a way of conversing with newcomers and integrating them within the life of the company.

The part I’m going to home in on is the one that discusses how the American’s have a workaholic philosophy and that drove the stress levels very high during the pandemic as we worked from home. They used the term “workist” and I use workaholic.

During the pandemic, a lot of the knowledge workers had to work from home and while you might think that was great because you no longer had to fight the commute and you had time to do personal stuff at home, there was a problem of where you had to “prove” you were working. That you were loyal to the “work” philosophy, that you were dedicated to the company. Managers could no longer see you working and so they needed another method of seeing if you were working. (Here we have the reason why they want you back in the office.) What was developed to signal you were working? It seems to me that Slack and Teams were one way of signaling. The rising number of Zoom meetings were another signal.

You had to pretend or “presence perform” by making meaningless contributions to Slack.

That is the essence of LARPing your job mentioned in the podcast (“live action role playing”). So, this is referring to the performance aspect of Slack/Teams/Zoom.

“…You’re busy, and you’re not really able to give as much attention to your job as you feel you should be in a given moment. And so what you do is you open up your phone, and you skim a conversation going on between a bunch of your colleagues and probably your boss in Slack, and you contribute something pretty meaningless, but nonetheless, it’s a contribution, and it’s visible. Your little dot is red. It means you’re logged on. Therefore, you must be engaged.

But what it is, it’s kind of like work ephemera, work detritus. It’s not creating any kind of productivity. It’s just this performance of presence. And what that’s rooted in, obviously, is anxiety.”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

All of that was noise and actually adding more work to your workday.

In the podcast, they talked about Microsoft’s finding of a third productivity peak in the day, or rather in the late-night hours. One way of interpreting that third productivity peak is to view that as a way to make up for a lot of interruptions and non-work in the middle of the day. People were attending so many Zoom meetings that they had to do real work during the third peak.

So Slack, Teams, Zoom has become a “digital shackle”. You might even have software monitoring your every keystroke.

Here’s another series of lines that stood out to me:

“As a result of graduating into the pandemic work force, they really understood their job as much more of a transactional relationship instead of that familial one. They were able to impose really firm boundaries between work and their personal life as a result of that alienating onboarding process, and I think that there’s something important there. I take all of the points of the loneliness, of the alienation, of feeling lost. I think that’s really important.

I also think, too, that part of this great control experiment is slowly changing the norms and the expectations of what we want out of work, and one of those very well might be that certain people start viewing work as, honestly, what it is to some degree. It’s a transaction between employees and employers. It’s not a family, and that family rhetoric is often incredibly exploitative to the workers.”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

Work as being transactional.

It really has always been that way, but some people (corporations?) have been able to dress up the working world as being a “family” approach – “we are a team”, “we are a family and we care about you”. But no, work is not a family-driven affair. Most leadership care more about the shareholders. In private companies, there may be a rare few that treat their employees as family, but I would beware of anybody saying family.

Here comes the reason why managers want you back in the office:

“…the ideology of the office still holds so strong, and what he means by that is it’s not the physical office per se. It’s more this understanding that work gets done under supervision, that I need to be able to see you to understand that you are doing work, and that also, for leaders in particular, for managers, for C.E.O.s, people in the c-suite, that my power, my authority, comes from that ability to supervise.”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

It’s the ideology of the office that drives American work and remote work could potentially break that ideology, forcing executives to build new skills, real skills on leading employees to productive work.

So we have anxiety driving employees to work those extra hours to prove their dedication. We also have manager’s ideology of the office driving their insistence on the return to the office. But there is also what they call the “demands of the firm” which is probably a corollary to the ideology of the office.

“…And I was literally told by one of my managers, if you want to advance at this company, you can’t stop working before midnight.”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

Companies demand that you work those long hours to prove your dedication. This has been a longstanding belief in the working world. There is such a hagiography around “working hard”. But what if those long hours are actually detrimental to the real productivity?

Do you actually get those ideas that actually sells your business in the wee hours of the morning? Or are those killer ideas coming out of the daytime thinking?

Do the solutions to the puzzle you’re working on flash at 2 am in the morn?

I find my most productive ideas come during the daytime, after I’m rested. Never has a problem been solved at 2 or 3 in the morning.

“…aesthetic of working hard at your desk was never a very good measure of actual productivity”

Ezra Klein, New York Times, “The office is dying. It’s time to rethink how we work.”, August 16,2022.

Enough! This podcast or reading material was a very interesting one and I could go on and on but I need to move on to other things. Listen to it; it’s a fascinating topic.