Much Feelings about Working from Home
Why our obsession with productivity confuses the debate
Last week, around the Mode/Switch table, our Boomer rep suggested that working from home isn’t good for rising professionals. Why? Because when you’re not in the work culture, it’s hard to move up in the culture.
The Gen Z employee smiled and shook her head. So we all urged, “Say it, say it!” and she responded to this effect: My generation doesn’t care about ‘moving up.’ We don’t want your promotions.
I don’t know how to feel about this. This newsletter comes out each week, because organizational culture matters, a position seemingly sympathetic with Team Return to Office (RTO). But I’ve spent enough time Working from Home (WFH) to know that it saves childcare dollars, saves gas, saves time.
“The one consistent element of the arguments for and against is how strong and entrenched the stances are.” - Mark Mortenson
But last week’s convo with my fellow Mode/Switchers has compelled me to notice that everyone’s got hella feelings about remote work.
Managers tend to hate working from home, and companies work “aggressively” to get workers to RTO. Those workers have fought back, at least once with a walkout, sometimes with protests. As one trade journalist notes, “the one consistent element of the arguments for and against is how strong and entrenched the stances are.”
These feelings for and against are amplified by contradictory headlines. Take a few headlines from 2021, and you’ll see pervasive confusions:
April, 2021 - Why Too Much Work From Home Could Be Bad For Your Career
May, 2021 - The Case for Letting People Work From Home Forever
August, 2021 - Why Working From Home Doesn't Work for Many Employees
November, 2021 - Work From Home Works Until You Need Time Off
That same year Chandler Dean’s argued sarcastically that the best defense for RTO is that “it’s impossible to be productive without eating a fourteen-dollar salad.” But his satire points to a central reason this debate continues to rage so fiercely. We’re full of feelings because we don’t notice the productivity addiction that’s inflaming them.
Right about now, you’re shaking your head. Okay, maybe managers and CEOs are concerned about productivity, you say. They’re the ones buying the surveillance cameras. They’re the ones putting on what Emily Bosscher calls “the theatre of productivity.” But what about the workers? Do they care about productivity? Aren’t they pushing back against hustle culture by shopping for leisure wear?
And yet, one of the first arguments that’s trotted out in defense of remote work is that it enables all of us to do more. Stephanie Murray (who’s critical of this multitasking) writes about women professionals, “If you account for all of the caring that remote work has made possible, it amounts to an increase in productivity with positive implications for the economy.” So, yes, weirdly, WFH advocacy draws energy from a productivity impulse: If I don’t have to drive to the office, I can do the laundry and watch my kids and finish the month’s-end report and be on that call! And when we say that sort of thing, we sound an awful lot—like our managers and CEOs.
The French theorist Jacques Derrida might say we’re in a confused condition of undecidability. Our seemingly opposed positions rely on the same misguided productivity principle.
The first way to cope with all the feelings, then, is to start critiquing our own productivity urges. Here’s a story from my own early professional days to do just that.
My first job out of college was an inflexible gig as a deejay on a 100,000 watt Gulf Coast station. I loved the work. But even during hurricanes, I had to go to the studio to spin the tunes and give storm updates. That’s RTO with a Category 3 vengeance.
A few years later, my partner decided to go to law school in Michigan, a thousand miles away; so I gave the radio station notice. But instead of accepting my resignation, my boss said, “Here’s a mic, a Dell, and a pair of headphones. How about we pay you to broadcast from home?” Suddenly, my inflexible job turned fully flexible, as I started making radio spots in our Mitten State living room.
The trickiest thing for me was that, while my wife took the bus to campus and I churned out the all this programming, somebody had to take care of our one-year-old daughter. For some hours of the day that somebody was me. Honestly, it was pretty easy, thanks to her olympic napping capacities. But sometimes, when my recordings were interrupted by small cry from the kitchen, I’d have to push away from the mic, and go out to the kitchen to wind up the baby swing. (Remember how noisy that was?)
Some days, though, even the swing wasn’t enough, so I started lengthening my on-mic time by giving our daughter a spoonful of honey. She liked that a lot.
But then, we started noticing that she was throwing up. Nothing scary. Nothing emergency-room-able. Just more upchuck than you’d expect from a Gerber’s diet of mushed up peas and carrots. “Are you, um, giving her anything while I’m gone?” my wife asked one day as she threw the thirty-seventh towel of the week into the laundry bin. I shook my head, the very picture of fatherly puzzlement and concern. Then I added nonchalantly that sometimes our daughter took in the occasional mouthful of fair trade organic honey. My wife’s eyes widened to three times their normal size.
I’m happy to report that some of my parental missteps have proven survivable: our girl is now a grown-up speech therapist. But I tell that story, because whatever else you do with all the feelings about WFH and RTO, don’t just use your preferred spoonful of honey to keep up the productivity. The emotional upchucks will continue.
Each of these works reflects on the nature of work in late-modern society with special attention to the fact that, as Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
The mode/switch I’d like to propose instead is a move from productivity to wellbeing. I take this idea from Harvard University’s “Flourishing Measure,” which gauges wellbeing with questions worth asking of yourself, whether you’re at the kitchen table or in the cubicle. Their questions measure “to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile” as well as the adequacy of descriptors like, “I always act to promote good in all circumstances, even in difficult and challenging situations.” They’re strange questions, not the sort of productivity scales we usually resort to. But they’re getting at our underlying feel for what matters in work and life.
I’m also inspired by Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing. She tells a story about a Deloitte employee named Pilvi Takala, who spent her days sitting at an empty desk gazing at nothing. It bugged her coworkers no end, especially when she spent the whole day away from her desk, riding the elevator from floor to floor. Her coworkers got so upset that they completely missed the fact that Pilvi wasn’t a fellow employee at all. She was doing performance art for an installation entitled The Trainee.
But if an ideology of productivity creates a lot of emotional heat and not much light, the quest for wellbeing offers a mode/switch worth making.
Managers, I’m looking at you first: wellbeing doesn’t exclude getting the job done and turning a profit. You probably think I’m just saying your company needs to offer more therapeutic care to your exhausted workers. Maybe you do. But the reason I’m using the term “wellbeing” rather than “wellness” is that I’m trying to get at a larger concern than personal health or spirituality. Your team members need not just individual wellness but an organizational culture of wellbeing. That includes economic viability, of course. But it also includes allowing people room to be people, with all the complexity that wellbeing obliges.
Workers, I’m also looking at you: start to notice that, even when you work from home, it’s easy to be a multitasking fiend. How do you escape the productivity warp? Odell recommends a practice she calls “standing apart.” To stand apart is a mode of attentiveness that’s present to the overwhelm of the life you have and yet faithful to the life that you desire.
Do us a solid at the Mode/Switch, would you? Reply to this newsletter with a story, not about how productive RTO or WFH has made you, but about how you’re finding ways to be well with others.
-craig
