Wednesday, Feb 9, 2022 • 42min
476- Reaction Offices and the Future of Work
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People have been going back and forth about what makes a healthy and productive office since there have been offices. The 20th century was full of misbegotten fads and productivity innovations that continue to this day, even when the whole notion of what it means to be in an office has shifted during the pandemic.
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Chris Berube
Roman Mars
Amy Osterman
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Verified
Roman Mars
00:00
This episode is one in a four part series that we're calling the future of.... I'd like to say the dot dot dots. We'll be exploring how changes to the way we live, learn, work and play may shape our health and wellbeing in years to come. Thanks to
the robert Wood johnson Foundation
for supporting this episode. The robert Wood johnson Foundation is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States
. Learn more about them at rwjf. org.Share
00:29
This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars and today I'm going to introduce you to my new least favorite word, resimercial. Here with the definition is producer, chris berube,
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Chris Berube
00:41
Resimercial. An adjective referring to a kind of office furniture. It's an awkward mashup of residential and commercial. Basically resimercial furniture is designed for the workplace but feels like it belongs in the living room. So think plush comfy couches and coffee tables and right now it is all the rage.
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Speaker 3
01:03
Now, residential design has been a pretty hot topic in the industry for the last, let's say three or four years or so.
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01:09
It's this idea of creating a more home like atmosphere in a commercial setting.
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01:15
You don't feel a harsh edge on any of this chair, no matter how you're sitting in holistic standpoint, we were able to consider comfort into this chair.
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Chris Berube
01:24
So why are we getting pitched these comfy wonder chairs for the office? Well, now offices have to compete with everywhere else, remote work has been on the rise for a couple of years and the Bureau of Labor statistics says 35% of American workers were at home in the early days of the pandemic. That's who we're talking about on the show today. And I have to acknowledge these are the luckiest workers, the people who got to stay home through the worst of
Covid
. But many of these people, they aren't thrilled about the idea of going back to a physical office.Share
Roman Mars
01:57
A Gallup survey found that 30% of office workers never want to go back. Another 60% say they want to stay on a hybrid model only going to the office a few days a week, a different study found more than half of middle-income workers were thinking about switching jobs and that remote flexibility was a big part of their decision.
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Chris Berube
02:18
Those numbers make it clear the office is at this inflection point and that's why it makes a lot of sense office designers are promising a lot right now. They're promising this office of the future that's more comfortable and more pleasant and basically anything to make us go back.
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Roman Mars
02:33
This is not the first time that designers have tried to fix the existential malaise of office workers with furniture. In fact, back in the 1960s we had a lot of the same problems. White collar workers weren't happy, they didn't feel inspired or satisfied by the office and designers pitched a suite of new furniture that promised to revolutionize their work.
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Chris Berube
02:56
Unfortunately, it didn't quite go according to plan. In the early days, office workers were a small part of the workforce and offices were smaller too. Think a couple of clerks sitting in a room with roll top desks and heavy wooden chairs.
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Roman Mars
03:14
But then came multinational corporations and paperwork and typewriters and iron frames for buildings and elevators. Business became big business and the office went through its first major shift. By 1960 office workers represented 1/3 of the American workforce and they had moved into a new fleet of gleaming downtown skyscrapers.
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Speaker 4
03:36
It was largely corridor offices. You had executive and managerial offices all around the edges and then in the middle of the office space kind of sea of desks.
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Chris Berube
03:48
That's the kills of all. He's a Pennsylvania state senator which, okay sure. Big deal. But for our purposes he's important because a couple of years ago he wrote a definitive history of the office called cubed and he says the post war office had very little privacy and a lot of noise.
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Speaker 4
04:06
They sounded to a lot of people like factories. This is because there was constant typing going on. There was constant click and were of accounting machines and this all took place in the center of american offices. In these typing and accounting pools.
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04:25
People are probably familiar with what American offices looked like in the 1950s from television or from movies for example, the Billy Wilder film, The apartment which came out in 1960 in the apartment.
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Chris Berube
04:40
A personal favorite,
Jack Lemmon
plays a worker drone at an insurance company in Manhattan who spends all day grasping at the ultimate status symbol, an office with a door.Share
Jack Lemmon
04:53
You step into my office. I want your opinion about anyhow, I have my own office. Now actually, you may be interested to know that I am the second youngest executive in this company. The only one younger is a grandson of the chairman of the board.
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Roman Mars
05:03
Having your own office was a huge relief because in the main typing pool, your job wasn't much fun.
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Chris Berube
05:10
The space was cramped and noisy, but there was also a culture problem in white collar work. The office was supposed to be this kinder gentler workplace than being on a factory floor. But factory thinking had infected white collar work largely through a management strategy called Taylorism.
Share
05:29
It comes from the management theorist,
Frederick Winslow Taylor
, the father of scientific management of efficiency experts, finding the one best way to do a task and to do it at the least amount of time possible.Share
05:41
Even if you worked for a bank or an insurance company, it could feel like you were a faceless part of an assembly line.
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Roman Mars
05:48
The office of the 1950s was ripe for a shakeup and that's where
Robert Propst
comes in.Share
Speaker 4
05:54
So
Robert Propst
was a kind of freelance designer from colorado. I mean, almost a kind of freelance intellectual, he didn't really have any particular interest, he just wanted to make improvements to systems.Share
Chris Berube
06:10
Probst would write to local businesses like concrete suppliers or people who make playground equipment and he would say, hey, I have no experience in your field, but I have a couple of ideas and you should pay me. He actually got quite a bit of work this way because
Robert Propst
was really convincing. If you watch old speeches from Probst, he comes across as a kind of abstract genius. Even if I have to be honest, I don't really know what he's talking about.Share
Robert Propst
06:40
I'm sure everybody is belabored by this idea that we're suffering impacted by serious rate of change, but it's really the change in the rate of change now that is causing really fundamental changes for us.
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Roman Mars
06:55
In 1958 Propst went to the aspen design conference where he met the president of the furniture company,
Herman Miller
. Herman Miller
was famous for its iconic Eames chairs and Noguchi tables, but the Fancy furniture business wasn't a huge growth industry. Herman Miller
wanted to expand its offerings.Share
Chris Berube
07:14
They brought Probst out to michigan and gave them a pretty broad mandate, basically just come up with new stuff.
Herman Miller
could produce. Everyday, Probst would sit in his office and think, okay, what kind of products can we redesign and we're talking about things way beyond the scope of what the company was already making. Here's Amy Osterman, chief archivist at Herman Miller
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Amy Osterman
07:36
Looking at problems such as cattle branding or timber harvesting or my personal favorite, they were working a bit with Kimberly Clark on a better sanitary napkin.
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Roman Mars
07:49
Progress was pitching all these blue sky ideas, but eventually he settled on something that seemed pretty obvious for a furniture company. Office furniture.
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Amy Osterman
07:58
Probst noticed that the furniture that
Herman Miller
provided him with to outfit his own office weren't up to his standards. He thought it sucked.Share
Roman Mars
08:07
Around this time the idea of the knowledge worker was becoming popular. This whole concept that many office workers weren't just drones, accountants and copywriters and engineers. They needed a new kind of workplace for creative thinking.
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Chris Berube
08:22
Probst had been reading about a new trend in german design called Bürolandschaft or at the
Office Landscape
, which said office layouts had to be thought about in this more flexible way and that people shouldn't be sitting in the same place all the time. It called for some radical new office setups. Here's jennifer Kaufman Buehler, she's a professor of design history at Purdue University.Share
Jennifer Kaufman Buehler
08:43
It was often described as chaotic, visually chaotic because it was an open interior with no walls. Really important to their concept.
Share
08:53
Probst have been feeling too static in his
Herman Miller
office but now he was inspired to change it.Share
Roman Mars
08:58
He teamed up with a mid century furniture designer named
George Nelson
and together they devised a plan for the office of the future. One built around communication and movement, they called it The Action Office.Share
Chris Berube
09:13
The Action Office was a suite of furniture that included a couple of stations for each worker. There was a coffee table and a semi enclosed phone booth and a bookshelf and a standing desk which I know that's common now, but it was pretty unique at the time. All of it was made with high quality materials like cast aluminum and rosewood.
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Roman Mars
09:32
The Action Office was designed around a couple of principles. One was the idea that workers get more done when they have to move around.
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Speaker 4
09:40
That was what was the spirit behind Action office maybe one at some point you're standing working at your desk. Maybe you need to move to a different setting to take a phone call. You're not sitting at one particular place doing the same thing over and over again.
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Speaker 3
09:53
The second principle behind Action office was that a small amount of clutter was actually a good thing.
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Roman Mars
09:59
The
Action
office didn't include a filing cabinet, but instead there was a roll top desk that could hold all of your important papers but not hide all of your important papers, Propst believe that if you file something away, you might as well throw it out and that filing cabinets create unmanageable backlogs of information.Share
10:18
This idea was rooted in Propst very particular philosophy about the brain's capacity to retain information with seven things Plus or -2.
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Speaker 9
10:30
Some people can handle nine things at a time. Some people only handle five, but if you try to manage information and more units than that, then you will quickly boggle. This is a kind of phenomena we see all the time with too many papers on your desk are too many things happening at the same time.
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Chris Berube
10:49
The third principle of the action office was workers should have a little bit of privacy, but not too much. The design is open and workers are always right in the middle of the action. Each employee has their station with their desk and the coffee table in the phone booth, but the stations aren't supposed to be walled off.
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Roman Mars
11:07
In 1960 for
Robert Propst
and George Nelson
unveiled the Action office to the public. They sold it as a new utopian vision of the workplace, complete with gorgeous high end furniture and a layout that would make workers happier and more efficient. The action office wasn't just a set of furniture, it was a way of life and yet the action office was a bust.Share
Chris Berube
11:31
Businesses just didn't get it. Like why should we spend all this money on Fancy coffee tables and phone booths for secretaries and filing clerks. Even if your company wanted to buy the
Action
office, the price tag was just too high, It requires a lot of space and it's also fairly expensive.Share
Speaker 4
11:50
There were high quality materials and this is really the influence of
George Nelson
and as a result, it was widely admired, but not widely adopted.Share
Roman Mars
12:02
The Action Office was a commercial flop, but Robert Propst wasn't ready to give up on the idea. He went back to the drawing board and we thought his entire approach and then he returned three years later with Action Office 2.
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Robert Propst
12:17
You and I are today living in industry's finest hour an age of hurry and in this super fast, smart, effective age. There are millions of people who still work in old fashioned offices and haven't stopped to realize they still work in old fashioned offices. Now we'd like you to think about Herman Miller's action office
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Speaker 3
12:37
Like many Sequels, Action office to was less interesting than the first one. Instead of aluminum and solid hardwood the new designs featured lots of plastics and laminates, which brought the price way down. But the mid century modernist furniture aesthetic that was gone And along with it the designer
George Nelson
, here's Amy Osterman.Share
Amy Osterman
12:57
Nelson got booted from the project because there was too much spice between him and Propst. They just straight up, didn't like each other
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Roman Mars
13:05
Without Nelson in the mix the new furniture kit looked a lot more conventional. There wasn't a phone booth or a coffee table. The standing desk became a normal height desk and the stool became a regular office chair.
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Amy Osterman
13:19
Charles Eames went on to deem Action Office 2 honest ugly. So there was very much a uh, big style and aesthetic difference between the heavy hitters of those times,
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Chris Berube
13:34
There was one more big change the Action Office to included lightweight, easy to install fabric covered panels. They were really functional. The fabric muffled sound and you could move them around to create this sense of privacy.
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Speaker 4
13:49
If at some point in the middle of your workday you needed to have an impromptu conference or workroom, you could then spread out or angle the three walls differently.
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Chris Berube
13:59
Probst included very particular instructions on how to use them in his mind. Three panels should be hooked up to make a kind of half hexagon shape. It looks like a small amphitheater.
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Roman Mars
14:11
But Probst also included a prophetic warning about the panels don't absolutely do not take these panels and make them into a right angled box that encloses the employee if you do that. The whole idea of open communication and teamwork goes right out the window. Probst was very clear about all this.
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Amy Osterman
14:31
He was out the gate prescribing the best ways to configure these panel systems that very clearly stated. Do not enclose people.
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Chris Berube
14:43
No boxes, no enclosures, just open lines of communication. This stuff is important. Well, despite all those warnings, I think you know where this is going. The Action Office 2 became the prototype for the cubicle.
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Roman Mars
14:59
The New Action Office sold like a blockbuster.
Herman Miller
sales went up by $10 million dollars after it was introduced and it spawned a series of knockoffsShare
Chris Berube
15:10
And while most of these knockoffs had fabric walls, they weren't mobile as Probst had intended.
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Roman Mars
15:16
The companies buying the
Action
office and its imitators were not respecting the wishes of Robert Propst
. They started installing the fabric panels at right angles and making boxes and the workers started feeling hemmed in.Share
Speaker 4
15:30
It became clear that these three walls could very quickly become a box and you could cram as many workers as possible as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible into as little space as possible.
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Chris Berube
15:43
George Nelson
was the designer booted off the Action Office project and he was not happy with the Action Office 2 and all of its imitators. He wrote a critical memo in 1970 saying one does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that Action Office 2 is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general, but it is admirable for planners, looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies?Share
Roman Mars
16:15
George Nelson
was bitter, but he had a point. The Action Office was supposed to solve the problems of the open fifties style office, but now, instead of loud offices with no privacy, people were becoming enclosed and trapped inside these giant fabric walls which got smaller and smaller over time. Here's Jennifer Kaufman BuellerShare
Jennifer Kaufman Buehler
16:36
By the 90s, you get this sort of image of the Cubicle as a tool of isolation. There is this really interesting contradiction that happens that, that this is all created to facilitate communication and then the very thing that is meant to improve communication becomes a symbol of isolation.
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Chris Berube
16:51
The depressing Cubicle was a mirror for other trends in the white collar workplace. The US went through a recession in the late 80s and American businesses started quote trimming the fats and quote downsizing, which of course really just means they fired a lot of people.
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Roman Mars
17:07
Between 1990 and 1990 to 1.1 million American workers were laid off And workers that remained had very few protections. Only 11% of American workers in the private sector were unionized by the early 1990s.
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Chris Berube
17:22
If the apartment is the defining office pop culture of the 50s, the Cubicle era is captured by more depressing works of art like Dilbert or the movie office space.
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17:35
So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized ever since I started working um every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life,
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17:54
It's just this fundamental protest against not just the setting of office work, but the kind of work that's being done in the way that people are being treated.
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Speaker 4
18:02
It's just this fundamental protest against not just the setting of office work, but the kind of work that's being done in the way that people are being treated. So design in this sense, the cubicle, the hatred of the cubicle is really tied up with an overall sense that american work and workplaces are really callous and unfeeling places.
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18:13
I don't like my job and I don't think I'm gonna go anymore.
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18:20
It's just not gonna go.
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18:21
Yeah, once you get fired,
Share
18:24
I don't know.
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Chris Berube
18:25
Robert Propst lived long enough to see the rise of the Cubicle. In 1997 he gave an interview to the
New York Times
where he called the new wave of Cubicles Monolithic insanity, but he didn't think his designs were the problem.Share
Amy Osterman
18:40
I mean, I think he's super proud of everything that he accomplished as he should be have like a really interesting career. But he said something, he said that the dark side of most organizations is that they're not intelligent or progressive and he said... lots are run by craftspeople who can take the same kind of equipment and create hellholes.
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Roman Mars
19:05
Probst defended the action office and his original designs, he offered these words of wisdom. One of the dumbest things you can do is sit in one space and let the world pass you by.
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Chris Berube
19:20
By the early 2000's, the Cubicle was on the way out and it was replaced by a kind of modern open plan, which was popular with
Silicon Valley
. Like in the 50s you saw workers sitting at long rows of connected desks, but there was a twist. Here's Alison Arians who writes about workplace design.Share
Alison Arians
19:40
In the era of like the dot com boom. Once I would say that the absence of office furniture became the thing, right? I'm one of you, I don't need a corner office. Mark Zuckerberg famously sits in the middle of all of his employees. He's just one of the guys, right? So having fancy furniture is not in your interest.
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Roman Mars
19:59
The modern open plan had another big difference from the style of the 1950s in the new layout, there aren't any noisy typewriters or loud telephone calls.
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Speaker 4
20:08
You know, what's different about american offices now is that they're overwhelmingly quiet. You actually walk into an open office plan and they're deathly quiet. People with their headphones in, headphones have become the new walls, much like the cubicle.
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Roman Mars
20:22
The modern open plan was promoted with utopian language,
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Alison Arians
20:26
They said, oh my God, this is so amazing. We have all this collaborative collisions and spontaneous interactions because everyone's in here.
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Chris Berube
20:36
Look, your bosses right there. Think of all the communicating you're going to do now that you're free of the tyranny of the cubicle. Well, the opposite has happened.
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Speaker 3
20:46
Harvard Business School says in person, communication has actually dropped 70% at companies that shifted to this kind of open plan office, that's because frankly it's kind of awkward to talk to somebody when they have their headphones in and now we have tools like email and
Slack
and besides, if you do want to talk to somebody, everybody in the office can hear you because at these companies, workers have very little personal space,Share
Alison Arians
21:12
So you know
Facebook
when they were first emerging as a company, they bought the old Sun Microsystems building in Menlo Park and doubled the amount of people in the same office space. So they took square footage and double the amount of people in that square foot.Share
Roman Mars
21:28
12 years ago, offices had an average of 225 square feet per employee by 2017. That number had dropped to 151 square feet and it's even lower today.
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Chris Berube
21:43
Two years ago there was a pandemic, maybe you heard about it and millions of people made a very abrupt transition to work from home. This raised so many questions about how much we really need a physical office, like maybe the next era is just a permanent shift to remote work, like the total death of office space. But the experts I spoke to, they don't think that's likely. Instead many office workers have already gone back even just for one or two days a week.
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Roman Mars
22:11
So assuming that there's still a physical office, what is it going to look like?
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Chris Berube
22:16
Last October I attended Neocon, the world's largest office furniture expo. Okay, so I didn't actually go to Chicago where they hold it every year, but I did attend virtually and scrolling through all the exhibits. I noticed a couple of trends. One was designed meant to address health and safety, you know, better ventilation, more space in the office for social distancing, stuff like that. I also saw lots of design ideas about improving the aesthetics of the office. Things like resimercial furniture, the soft couches and the nice wallpaper that make your office feel like a living room. I also noticed a couple of designers who are borrowing pretty liberally from the action office.
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Amy Osterman
22:55
These products are mobile and they allow the users to move and create the ideal setup for their needs at hand, whether it be creating a private setting or one that fosters collaboration.
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Chris Berube
23:06
I even saw presentations about privacy pods, which to my eyes looked an awful lot like cubicles.
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Roman Mars
23:13
The cubicle may be poised for a comeback, but in a techie nightmare kind of way, last year, google announced plans to pilot a new kind of inflatable cubicle in their offices, a plastic wall that fills with air to create a makeshift privacy barrier if a worker needs to take a phone call.
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Alison Arians
23:31
I know it feels like an episode of
Silicon Valley
right that someone is just standing there waiting for the thing to blow up and it's just like taking a really long time.Share
Chris Berube
23:41
There's a couple of major problems with all of these design solutions for the office. One is how they ignore a lot of people. Most designers are focused exclusively on products for white collar workers and there just isn't as much interest in factory workers or coffee shop baristas or public school teachers or all the other people we started calling essential workers two years ago.
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Alison Arians
24:04
I've really looked very hard to find any amount of attention paid to work places that are not white collar workers workspaces and there just isn't any attention paid to them. I don't think anyone's thinking long and hard about. Is this cashier's space comfortable? Um is this bus drivers seat the safest it could be and is it a comfortable place to sit all day?
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Roman Mars
24:33
The other issue with design solutions for the office is that a new chair isn't going to fix problems that need to be addressed with policy problems like a lack of access to childcare or stagnant wages that don't keep up with inflation or the inflexibility of the eight hour workday, which makes it impossible for lots of people to take care of their older parents or kids.
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Chris Berube
24:55
But if you're a beleaguered corporate manager, it's hard to redesign the work week or provide childcare. It's much easier to just bring in some new furniture and call it a day.
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Amy Osterman
25:05
There is this fantasy that we can, you know change the physical environment of the office and that will dramatically and radically change what's done in the office. And there is this real belief and in the kind of power of design to transform the everyday functioning of the office. And I think just as the office could never have fixed all the problems, it also isn't really the sole cause of all those problems.
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Chris Berube
25:31
Look, standing desks and ergonomic chairs, they're great. They can make your work life a lot better but relying on nice furniture to fix the office. Well that's just rearranging Aeron Chairs on the Titanic. We need to look at more long term fixes.
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Roman Mars
25:49
If the apartment represents the office of the fifties and office spaces the nineties, then maybe the utopian office is represented by a little movie from the eighties called
9 To 5
.Share
Amy Osterman
26:02
9 To 5
is such a good example. I always say it really is in many ways a movie about office design because of course at the start of the film, you have this dreary bullpen, very monochromatic and everybody's miserable.Share
Chris Berube
26:15
Okay, so a spoiler alert for a movie that came up 42 years ago, but at the end of
9 To 5
dolly Parton jane fonda and lily tomlin have kidnapped their horrible misogynist boss and with him gone, they make some changes around the office.Share
Amy Osterman
26:29
Really good changes like they started daycare center and a job sharing program so employees can work flexible hours and then we find out about all of those changes in policy that have really transformed the culture of the workplace.
Share
26:45
Our daycare center has been open now for two weeks. It's been wonderfully successful. Really? Yes. Our working parents love it.
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Chris Berube
26:54
In the movie. They changed around the furniture in the office but the furniture didn't fix everything. The real fix is something we should have tried a long time ago. They put
Dolly Parton
in charge.Share
Roman Mars
27:13
You are not off the clock yet, we have more big thoughts on the future of work after this.
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Break
Roman Mars
28:14
So Chris you've been working on this story about the future of offices since the summer and a lot of things kind of have changed back and forth about what we think the future of the office might be.
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Chris Berube
28:24
Oh, you think so? Really? I haven't noticed that. Yeah, there are two things that are really difficult about this story. One is the back and forth, as we're talking right now, we're at this point where lots of companies, despite
Omicron
, I guess maybe with the idea Omicron
is starting to wane a little bit or calling people back in. So we've heard, you know, Citibank for example, a lot of financial companies are doing that. Some companies like Apple
are saying, we want everybody to come back into the office, but we don't know when we're just going to wait until things are a bit better, but we do want you to come back.Share
28:59
And then lots of companies are saying like, don't worry about it, you could work from home, including 99% invisible, I should say, unless you want me to like get on a plane to
Oakland
tomorrow that I don't know about, maybe maybe that's something you'll tell me later. But the other thing, aside from the way that everything is changing is that people's individual situations are so different, right? Like I spoke to a dozen 99 P. I. listeners last fall about their experience with the office and I had 12 very different stories. Like some people love the commute because it gives them time to think and reflect some people, you know, hate the commute. Never wanted again. Some people want the camaraderie the office, other people realized they work much better at home. So that has been a really hard thing with this story, is figuring out kind of all that balance.Share
Roman Mars
29:44
Yeah, yeah, I bet. So the story was mainly about the office and maybe the folly of thinking that furniture will change a whole lot when it comes to the office, but, you know, as we've been at home more I think about my office situation at home and you know this is a huge part of the future of the office is our conditions at at home you know by ourselves or conditions made by our lonesome.
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Chris Berube
30:09
I didn't talk too much about remote work in the piece. So I did an interview with
Anne Helen Petersen
who is a journalist who writes a newsletter called Culture Study and she recently co authored a book with her partner, Charlie Warzel called Out of Office which is about the future of remote work. So I just wanted to add that as our coda to the story today just to talk about remote work which is not going to become the dominant form of work. I think we were saying the office is never going away.Share
Roman Mars
30:36
Yeah well the office isn't going away and probably remote work isn't going away. Like we found like a different sort of hybrid for what life is probably going to be like in the future.
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Chris Berube
30:44
Okay, so here is my interview with
Anne Helen Petersen
where we discussed the promise and some of the unintended consequences of remote work.Share
30:53
Hi Anne so we've had this great kind of proof of concept for working from home during the pandemic and now there's a rush to go back to the office. Does it feel like a missed opportunity to make remote work a normal part of our work life?
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Anne Helen Petersen
31:08
And I will say that there are a lot of companies that are and have been for the last, you know, I don't know a year and a half have been thinking about this in really interesting ways. So even a place like Microsoft, which before the pandemic was very much like you must live in Seattle, you must come into the office even though it's a horrendous commute every day to the suburbs. You know, like they had had previously been very, very stringent about allowing people to work from home and in most positions. And I think from everything that I've heard they are completely reconsidering that position and part of it too is that they realize that they have to compete with other tech companies that are offering more flexible work scenarios. But then there are other companies like
Apple
right now that is apparently like a very big stickler in terms of like we have this beautiful office and you will come into it.Share
Chris Berube
31:59
Yeah. I feel like the other side of that is I was reading about designers who believe the office has to be less homey now, like things like free snacks, it's keeping people in the office too long and that maybe if we got rid of some of those amenities, it would be healthier for people because they're not staying at the office for 14, 16 hour workdays. And I just thought that was really interesting.
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Anne Helen Petersen
32:21
Yeah. And I think that that is a gesture or an attempt to think about things like equity because if you have a group of people who are going to be working from home more in order to attend to caregiving responsibilities. I'm not talking about like watching your kid and also working, I'm talking about my kid gets done with school at three and someone needs to watch him for half an hour until he goes into after school care. You know, whatever those things are, a lot of those people are going to be parents and a lot of them are gonna be moms and so we don't want to have this split workforce that's, you know, the secondary workforces working from home and then the primary workforce that is getting the facetime with managers and executives are the ones that are in the office who don't have caregiving responsibilities, right? Like that's going to lead to a lot of inequities and so they're trying to think about how can we make the office less appealing.
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Chris Berube
33:16
I've been working remotely through all this. I understand you've been doing that too. There's a lot of things I find really healthy and satisfying about it. Like I don't miss commuting for two hours, which I used to do. But what are some of the unintended consequences of remote work for people who have had to make that switch.
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Anne Helen Petersen
33:34
I think a lot of people have found just how slippery work is, right? It can, who's into all of the different crevices in our lives and some people kept that at bay previously through the natural on and off ramps of commuting. So my work starts when I get into the office or at least when I leave the house and start checking emails on my phone on the subway or whatever and my work ends when I come back. But even most people I think actually that was not a very clear delimitation like they still were checking emails when they got home. I think at the beginning of the pandemic a lot of people were very anxious about their jobs and about demonstrating their commitment to their jobs. And that turned into habits of rollover, Start working while you're still in bed looking at your phone work all day and then at the end of the day you don't have a social life because you're not seeing other people so you keep working. So I think that there are are habits that were put in place during that time but we haven't really figured out how to create any sort of boundaries around where work is in our lives or any sort of buffer space? So when people say to me... I miss the commute. Do they miss being packed on the F train for 45 minutes during rush hour? Do they miss being in stop and go traffic on a freeway in the rain? No they don't miss that at all. What they miss is some sort of transition period and you can make that transition period in your life. You really can but it's there and it can be going on a walk, it can be doing the crossword puzzle, it can be meditating or doing yoga like there are so many different things depending on your personality that can function as this sort of buffer space.
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Chris Berube
35:20
Yeah. I want to ask you about the physical consequences as well because I'm talking to you today for my kitchen you know I'm sitting on a kitchen chair. I can't imagine that's good for my back. Like a lot of remote workers. I haven't invested in you know an errant chair or an ergonomic office chair which can be pretty expensive and take up a lot of space. Has anybody been talking about this kind of physical consequence of people working from home and not having access to good office furniture?
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Anne Helen Petersen
35:46
Yeah. And this is a really interesting question for companies that get rid of their leases right, are they going to take that money that they spend on the office and that they're just going to put that towards their bottom line or are they going to say we're going to take a chunk of this money and we're going to direct it towards our employees to outfit their home offices. Now in my situation, I have a really small home, I don't have a place for an a round chair unless I wanted to put it at like my kitchen table. Do you know what I mean? Like it would be a little bit obtrusive to have an air on chair at the kitchen table. And so it's something I've been thinking about in terms of and I think a lot of people who live in smaller smaller spaces have been thinking about this as well, like what are our solutions? And this is where I'm reminded of the fact that like working in a flexible style does not mean forever working in your own space. And this is what I say to people who say I'm so lonely working from home as well is that this is not the future, right? The future is not working during a pandemic where you can't be around other people or where it's not as safe to be around other people. The future is going to be tons and tons of coworking spaces that will have good chairs that won't hurt our backs. It'll be working at other people's homes, it will be working at libraries and coffee shops, like there'll be all sorts of configurations that we can think of, but that I think is like the biggest thing to remember that whatever we're doing now is not what we have to be doing in the near future.
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Chris Berube
37:16
I mean it feels like there is a lot of promise to remote work for improving work life for a lot of people, but something we're also seeing is this divide between the people who can work remotely and the people who have to physically go in for their job, like high school teachers and people who work in hospitals and you know, most of the people in the workforce actually, do you think that divide has grown worse during the pandemic? And where do you think that's going?
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Anne Helen Petersen
37:40
It's a really important question. I think that we are slowly figuring out which jobs do demand presence. You know, there are some companies that I think are forcing people to go into the office for very hierarchical reasons. You know, a lot of law firms during the height of the pandemic, all the lawyers stayed at home, but they made paralegals go into the office, right? And that is, that is just hierarchy in place. That is just trying to say we can control where you go and we think that you probably do better work if you are in an office, but it has little connection to the necessity to be in an office. So that's part of the question is that I do think that there are some jobs that need to be reconsidered in terms of presence.
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38:28
But when we think more largely about what we generally consider essential workers, which are people who had to go into the office or into a workspace every day, the last few years is evidence that we've treated them as in essential and disposable in so many different ways and this is true of whether someone is a health care worker or a teacher. And I think a lot of those workers are incredibly gratefully frustrated with people who have no understanding of this sort of risk that they undertook every single day in order to continue to make society function and moving forward. Unless we address some of these things, I think that we have to start thinking about these questions in terms of actually demonstrating that the work that essential workers do is essential. And this means pay, this means support, this means paid sick leave, like all sorts of different components that make it more possible and sustainable for people doing this work to keep doing it. Otherwise, we're going to see the continued mass resignation from a lot of these fields where people feel continuously undervalued in their day to day jobs and thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you so much.
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Roman Mars
39:54
99% invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, edited by our executive producer Delaney Hall. Music by Swan Real. Sound Mixed by a media Sinatra, fact checking by Francis Carr Jr kurt Coulson is our digital director of the
Rescue
team includes Vivian lay joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Last Ramadan, Jason de Leon Martin Gonzalez, Sophia Klassiker and me Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Mark Luther at the Henry Ford Museum, Amy Osterman for providing access to the Herman Miller
archives into all the 99 P. I. listeners who spoke to us about their experiences with the office. It really helped us shape this story. Thank you so much. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM
podcast family now headquarters six blocks north in the Pandora
building, in beautiful uptown Oakland,
California.Share
40:46
You can find the show and join discussions about the show on
Facebook
. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi. org. We're on instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows as well as every past episode of 99 p. I. at 99PI. org.Share
41:17
Thanks again to
the Robert Wood johnson Foundation
for their underwriting support of this special episode. Keep an eye out for each episode. In this four part series, the future of... the next one will be looking at broadband communication as an essential public utility. All of the episodes will be appearing in the 99 p. I feed over the next few months. If you like thinking about the future of things and have a hunch about what it will take to build an equitable future, share it at shareYourhunch. org. I'm spending my own hunch that comes to me from all the years of doing the Con Law podcast with Elizabeth Joh. So I'm going to shareyourhunch. org and selecting the prompt. I have a hunch. I have a hunch that different states in the US will continue to diverge when it comes to basic rights and the notion of federalism and states sovereignty will become more and more hallmark of political progressives. That's kind of a heavy one. But you know, it's what's been on my mind. Check out other hunches and submit your own hunch at shareyourhunch. org.Share
42:28
Dolly, please forgive me for what I'm about to do. stitch your
Sirius
. Xm what a way to make a living.Share
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Roman Mars
Chris Berube
Jack Lemmon
Robert Propst
Amy Osterman
Jennifer Kaufman Buehler
Alison Arians
Anne Helen Petersen