Book Review: Out of Office.

248 pages on the problems and promise of remote work, boiled down to top takeaways.

When I read, I’m an underliner, highlighter and page folder. The more messed up a book is when I’m done with it, the more valuable it is. And my copy of “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home” is in a sorry state.

At its heart, the questions this book asks are existential: What is work? Who decided how things have historically run? Why do we have meetings? Does tech enslave or emancipate us? Who does the current system advantage and disadvantage? How do we demarcate work from leisure?

I love big juicy questions like these. Because they get to the heart of the fact that we’re at a societal inflection point where everything is up for grabs. Rubber-banding back to an old way of doing things is missing the point: we get to Marie Kondo everything related to office life.

A good part of the book is dedicated to the history of office work, providing a backdrop for understanding how many things were decided, by whom, and who it best served when first implemented. In 1960, only 20% of mothers worked. The ideal worker, to this day, has as few familial obligations as possible. “For parents – and mothers in particular – attempting to contort themselves to fit the ideal, the result is stress, fatigue, burnout, and in some cases, dropping out of the workforce entirely.”

This echoes recent news reports about how 100% of job losses in December impacted women, and how the share of Americans reporting symptoms of anxiety or depression went from 11% to 41% in 2021.  

My absolute favorite line in the entire book is this one:

 “Why did we ever think choosing one’s hours – or finding time to build work around hobbies or caregiving – sounded like an extravagance?”

Reread that last sentence, please. I’ll wait.

Right?! Who decided work needed to be prioritized above all, including one’s joy and connection to family and community? And how did they miss the fact that joy and connection give people a will to work? Without it, what are we all striving for?

Juniors, interns, recent grads: this is your moment.

There is an entire group of workers who have entered the workforce during COVID. Many of them have never visited the office of their employer, nor met their co-workers beyond square heads on Zoom. And this is the generation that has already stated their need to find meaning in their work and balance in their lives.

While I’m deeply concerned about young creatives at Eleven and elsewhere who are working in isolation right out of the gate, they also serve as the ultimate control group. If you’ve never worked in the conventional office setting, you don’t know what you’re missing, both good and bad. And as companies find their footing in this virtual-first world, juniors are a valuable source of “what if” and “why don’t we” ideas.

Early career workers report wanting a clearly delineated mentor who is not their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. I see an enormous opportunity here for new kinds of mentorship programs. Where every young employee has an older mentor to ensure they’re filling in the gaps of company life that are typically learned in the break room, elevator and in overheard snippets throughout the day. And this mentorship works both ways: where the junior employee can help co-create the future of how work is done at the company: onboarding, meetings, job descriptions, promotions, trainings – the whole enchilada.

4-Day Workweeks

Yes, this book raises – and defends – the notion of reevaluating the M-F cycle that shapes our lives.  

In a 4-day workweek, an employee can find time to reduce stress without off-loading the burden of care on a partner. For parents, when kids are in daycare or school, a 4-day workweek offers a true “found” day that restores you. The authors report a 2-month trial of a four-day workweek where productivity rose 20% and work/life balance scores rose from 54% to 78%. Studies show that “…better work is, in fact, oftentimes less work, over fewer hours, make people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.”

“The real innovation of the four-day week, like other flexible, intentional schedules, is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide, collaborative work. For the four-day companies, that strategy was so effective that it opened up an entire day. For your company, that exchange might open up the mornings, or the middle of the day, or any time after 2:00, depending on the rhythms of your business and your employees’ lives. If that sounds like magic, it’s not because it’s actually mystical or make-believe: it’s a sign of how thoroughly you’ve internalized a rigid understanding of how work works.”

And while we’re on the topic of acknowledging how cynical we can be about radical ideas like the 4-day workweek, let me remind all of us how absolutely unthinkable remote work sounded a mere 24 months ago. Yet here we are.

Dilute the Monoculture

A key theme of the book boils down to the 3 words above – a powerful directive if I’ve ever seen one. The word “monoculture” comes from the agricultural world where it describes growing or raising one specific type of crop or animal. The authors show how a monoculture of leadership – which is the reality in most of corporate America today – is at odds with the kind of rethinking and inclusion this moment calls for.

“Left to its own devices, monoculture will self-sow and replicate itself endlessly. The things that a white male, for example, might understand as the hallmarks of ‘good leadership’ and ‘good management’ are the things that feel like good leadership and management to him – characteristics that can manifest themselves in everything from standards of professionalism to tone of voice. He will naturally promote, elevate, or otherwise privilege workers with those attributes and marginalize or ignore those without them.”

The book alternatively calls to “kill the monoculture” and “dilute the monoculture.” So many of these passages align with my work running The 3% Movement over the past decade. It’s not demonizing one kind of person or thinking, but rather embracing how homogeneity is the enemy of creativity. The more we can bring different viewpoints together and help those who’ve historically been the status quo widen their cultural competency, we all win. I prefer the word “dilute” to “kill” because it honors the way micro-actions cumulatively shift cultures over time in a sustainable way. Yet most leaders will cling for dear life to the monoculture because it’s familiar and has privileged them.

“A lot of leaders at companies are trying, as best they can, to ‘just ride this shit out’ …to the way they were before: location-bound, obsessed with presentism, equating leadership material with ‘constant availability,’ still thinking of DEI as something that can be solved with a committee.”

Meetings + Tech

As many of us dial in to video call after video call without questioning why, authors Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen would like to have a word. Offline.

Anything we’re doing as a default is up for reexamination. And the thing to be on the lookout for in our routines is whether they’re rooted in “productivity culture.” 

“Productivity culture is rooted in the performance of work: making a to-do list and crossing items off it, achieving in-box zero, writing and sending memos, or holding meetings, or completing tasks that transmute the intangible products of knowledge work into something tangible. Productivity culture has no room for creativity. It doesn’t include thoughtful management or mentorship, the sort that actually makes your organization run more smoothly or actually facilitates the rollout of products. It’s getting things done. Plowing through tasks, off-loading work, and, most important, exuding an aura of efficiency – becoming the person who’s known for responding first to an email, even if that response is vapid and meaningless, or always being in the office, doing…something.”

So how do we weed out the performative parts of work and unlock true productivity? For starters, we can reexamine meetings which account for the lion’s share of many people’s schedules. Instead of conventional 30-, 60- or 90-minute meetings, trim that down considerably to 20- or 50-minute meetings. Give people space to process in between meetings. (And remember that people are generally worse at making decisions in the afternoon so schedule the brainiest sessions in the morning.)

If your people routinely take work home because they can’t get to it during their official working hours, are they absorbing work that could be allocated to an entirely separate part- or full-time employee? Burnout is a huge problem in advertising agencies and I’ve spoken publicly about how it’s not a necessary byproduct of creative life, but rather an HR failing. Hire enough people to manage your workload – even during pitches or peak seasons.

There were also some great suggestions of matching the tech tool to the need instead of defaulting to video calls. The authors are big fans of Loom, a tool for quick video interactions sent via email or Slack. They also introduced me to a tool called Donut, a Slack tool which randomly matches willing participants and schedules a one-on-one meeting for them to talk about anything – work related or not. I love the spirit of spontaneity of Donut and believe this is precisely the kind of non-productivity tool that ultimately makes people more productive because they know and care about one another.

As for tech that surveils employees and reports back to employers about keystrokes and other meaningless metrics, just don’t. It breeds distrust and fetishizes productivity culture.

Proximity Bias

As companies reconceive who works where, it’s important to ensure that one group (likely those who comes into the office) don’t have the advantage of being perceived as more dedicated or productive.

“Single parents, workers with elderly family members, disabled employees, and those who simply don’t want to live in proximity to the office risk being overshadowed by those who come in every day.”

To combat this, Twitter has everyone in their conference rooms dial in to meetings from their open laptops to make sure that remote participants see faces clearly and hear those who, in a different configuration, might have been far away from the conference room phone.

(I’ve also seen companies combat this by always allowing dial-in participants to speak first and for longer to equalize and neutralize any proximity disadvantages.)

And to un-office the office, Dropbox built new styles of offices dubbed “studios” in 4 cities where they previously had official offices. In other cities with cluster of employees, they provided passes to co-working spaces.

Director of Remote Work

 The job of the moment appears to be a Director of Remote Work, someone whose job is to constantly think and rethink how to make remote work sustainable. Apparently many large corporations created such positions during the pandemic and my own LinkedIn search for the job title confirmed this. Some people called themselves “Virtualization Director” or “Head of Mobility.” In fact, Meta has a current job listing on LinkedIn for a Director of Future of Work. No matter what companies call these roles, I think they would work better as a committee, combining folks with backgrounds in HR, tech, creative and operations.

Next Up on My Nightstand

I'm just starting another book relevant to figuring out how to make the time we spend together meaningful and memorable. Will report back on this one, too. Tell us all in the comments what you've been thinking/reading/hearing on the subject of remote work.

And I'll leave you with a thought-provoking post from Augie Ray about the ways we're signaling to our people who and what matters, often without realizing it.

Deep sigh.

Until next time, remember that culture is the new creativity.