Working From Home

If you're one of the roughly 42 percent of Americans who were able to work remotely during the pandemic, you likely spent most of the time chained to a screen in your home clocking in each morning.1 You were, quite literally, doing your job from home.

But you weren't working from home.

You were laboring in confinement and under duress.

Others have described it as living at work.

You were frantically tapping out an email while trying to make lunch and supervise distance learning.

You were stuck alone in a cramped apartment for weeks, unable to see friends or family, exhausted, and managing a level of stress you didn't know was possible.

Work became life, and life became work.

You weren't thriving.

But the pandemic forced millions into remote work, and companies got curious.

Could Remote Working Be The Answer?

Some of the biggest companies in the world have already made remote work an option for the foreseeable future, which, as with almost any business decision, means they think it could be good for the bottom line.

And their cost savings will be shouldered by you.

Individuals can forge their own path off the main road, as they have for years, struggling to maintain balance in the face of corporate norms.

That's the sort of incrementalism that fixes nothing and exhausts everyone.

Reconceptualization means having honest conversations about how much people are working and how they think they could work better.

Not by taking on more projects, or being better delegators, or having more meetings.

Not by creating more value for their employer at the expense of their mental and physical health.

Instead, it means acknowledging that better work is, in fact, oftentimes less work, over fewer hours, which makes people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.

It entails thinking through how online communication tools function as surveillance and incentivize playacting your job instead of actually doing it.

There's no easy endgame

The process is difficult and, if we're being honest, never ending.

But we are at a societal inflection point.

So many things we've accepted as norms, from public health practices to public school schedules, have the potential to change.

In the absence of visionary governmental leadership, the impetus for change has increasingly fallen on the individual, but from individuals we're also watching movements set in motion rooted in fairness, equality, and racial and economic justice.

The policy proposals guiding these movements are ambitious, and the particulars can feel complex.

They must be reimagined.

Not in some utopian fashion, but with a vigilant eye toward how power is accumulated and distributed.

Difficult and different for each company

It might, at least in the beginning, feel radical.

If we're going to live under it, how can we bend it to make that experience involve less suffering?

Not only for office workers, but also for our immediate families, the societies we share, and the rest of the working world?

It can remove you from the wheel of constant productivity.

It can make you happier and healthier, but it can also make your community happier and healthier.

It can, somewhat ironically, actually increase worker solidarity.

It can allow you to actually live the sort of life you pretend to live in your Instagram posts, liberating you to explore the nonwork corners of your life, from actual hobbies to civic involvement.

Whatever your isolating, claustrophobic setup was during the pandemic, that is not what the future of work looks like.

Work, which has long been a source of inspiration, dignity, and the cherished prospect of upward mobility, has stagnated and trapped us.

The good news is that we can change that, but only if we commit ourselves to refiguring the place of work in our lives.

Right now, our priorities are backward.

Instead of changing our lives to make ourselves better workers, we have to change our work to make our lives better.

For each, we'll explore its shape leading up to the pandemic, what was breaking or long broken, and how remote work could shift, exacerbate, or, most optimistically, begin to mend existing problems moving forward.

Instead, flexibility has been a code word for a company's ability to rapidly hire and lay off employees as needed.

The benefits of the flexible economy have flowed almost entirely to corporations as workers grapple with unprecedented levels of instability in the workplace.

The future of office work has to be guided by a new, genuine form of flexibility in which the work, not the workers themselves, becomes even more malleable.

What does genuine flexibility look like in practice?

It means reconceiving what sorts of tasks and collaborations need to be synchronous and what can actually be done asynchronously, and how many days we'd like people to be in an office, and for how long, and for what purpose.

It includes broadening job descriptions to better meet the time and location needs of people who are disabled and juggle caregiving duties.

And it will require the implementation of actual, respected boundaries to ensure that flexible work doesn't spread into all corners of the calendar.

When an office goes fully or partially remote, there's a potential to retrench existing culture, largely born out of fear.

You can shift company culture.

And if it's toxic, flexible work won't fix it.

But it might provide the window to start rethinking what that culture might be moving forward.

But so much of office culture flows from the technology of design, which includes everything from the physical architecture that arranges workers within a building to the digital architecture that determines when and how you interact with your Slack messages.

So much office tech, from the dreaded open office plan to business email, was designed with utopian hopes, only to collide with corporate imperatives and devolve, slowly, to make work so much worse.

How do we reframe our technology away from the vague but ruthless notion of productivity?

These are challenges that demand more strategy than Inbox Zero, more vision than a behemoth like WeWork, and more nuance than tools that equate time working with time your cursor is moving.