I take all of the points of the loneliness, of the alienation, of feeling lost. They were struggling and feeling very alienated from everything, and their job was consuming so much of their time that they had what you describe as this kind of deep loneliness and floundering. One thing that I think about when trying to figure out what the office is for, I think the office is, to some degree, a place for people who work together to learn a bit about each other. Yeah, and I think that there’s some really good data to show that it’s actually just a bad business decision, to Charlie’s point.
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This is part of the messy part of being human, and it requires constant vigilance and constant inventory and a constant reassessment of is the way that I’m living my life in line with what I want out of it? But I think for everyone, it’s beneficial to take that time and really take that stock. And I think, for a lot of people, the office was really the last thing, the last institution, binding them to a given place.
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And I think part of the reason that happens is the way that working hours themselves have become an elite status signal in our society, in our culture. And an example of a guardrail would be something like, at this company, we do not work when we are on PTO. And so a guardrail would be something that is not just in the company handbook, but it is a communicated understanding between manager and managee, and it is practiced by everyone in the company. And I just think that mentality is going to have to change if true flexible hybrid work is to succeed because we can’t manage the way that we did before.
The rich show that they were better than you by refusing to do anything that even looked like work. And so you have the situation where, up until 60 or 70 years ago, you can tell how rich someone was by how little they worked. You could be like, oh, well, I need to take care of my kid, but I guess I can stay a little bit later. Or I try to not work on the weekends, https://remotemode.net/ but look, here I am working on the weekends. I think it’s important to point out, too, that this happens at the firms that consider themselves the most cutting edge and productive, and often isn’t just even about worker anxiety. And so I want to dig into some of the ways that not everyone, but many of us who are working from home, are working more than ever.
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We can’t demand the same things, and we have to start to create systems of work where employees feel comfortable not always performing and feel like their job isn’t constantly in a state of precarity. Yeah, this gets to this larger conversation about what good work looks like. And it gets at this point that you make, Anne, which is that the root problem of this LARPing phenomenon really comes down to the way that companies have historically measured and defined the productivity of knowledge work. So I was wondering if you could just talk about that piece of it a bit. So your performing of your job is sometimes creating things for other people to attend to.
Before we get to our final question I just want to end where you end the book, which is your letter to workers, and here’s my particular question for you. A company like McKinsey, part of their ethos is let’s burn people out to see who rises to the top over the course of their 20s, and the only way to institute healthy guardrails is unionization. And I don’t think that you’re necessarily going to see that at a place like McKinsey, but there are a lot of other places that are using unions as a way to create guardrails because working from home podcast leadership refuses to create them themselves. Part of the solution is guardrails at an organization, but a lot of companies are never going to do that. 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.
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But what we end up seeing is a very lazy implementation in so many offices of something like Slack, and what ends up happening is it becomes another channel overlaid on top of all the other communication channels where you have this long running performance of your job. You’re live action role playing your job, and that ends up being such a drain on productivity. A lot of people, especially young people, and I think especially millennials, never built up that muscle. I’m so glad you asked about this because I think it’s a huge problem. And I think that the fundamental problem predates the pandemic, and that work had become the primary source of interaction, of comfort, of friendship, of relationships for so many people. It should not be our employer who is solving our loneliness problems.