Many people expected to return to the office full-time in January. Omicron has reversed that, indefinitely pushing back many companies’ plans to return to work in person.
For employees who have had the luxury of working from home (WFH) for almost two years now, the pandemic has reshaped the way we think about our jobs. This includes where, how and why we do them – and how much of our identities we forge over our careers.
This reassessment has led to many people quitting their jobs, even with nothing else planned. The trend is called “The Great Resignation”. It’s one of the themes of a new book by Anne Helen Petersen and Charlie Warzel called “Out of the office: the big problem and biggest promise of working from home.”
The co-authors are partners who moved from New York to Montana in 2017 and then to the Pacific Northwest. Prior to the move, Warzel had never worked from home before.
“I was really terrified that I was going to lose a step to not being in the office, or that my work was going to be less visible or readable for my bosses, and that they would call me back because I wouldn’t be do such a good job,” he recalled. “So in order to protect that privilege of working outside the office, I worked constantly and completely destroyed any work-life balance that was left.”
He continues: “But at the same time, being geographically distant from the office really helped me to see how much the work played a supporting role in my identity, in our lives and our social lives, and the way in which we become a lot more one-dimensional as human beings [that] I think one of us wanted to be. And I think we realized that something fundamental had to change.
Petersen had more experience working from home. She explains that as a former university student, she thought she had to constantly work to keep her job, and that the main problem was to take back her life and her sense of self beyond work.
Change the culture
For centuries, the country has viewed work as a moral good, and Petersen says the core tenet of American identity means that an entire segment of society — those with a disability — are not valued.
“What if you say to someone, ‘Don’t you value people with disabilities?’ They said, ‘No, of course not.’ But we bring up the specter of that lazy person who somehow shirks away from work all the time, and all she wants to do is just lie. … We use it as motivation for a kind of moral decline that will happen to you if you don’t make your identity your job. But there is something truly liberating about changing.
A change made by Warzel: exercise in the middle of the day. He says he was guilty about it, feeling like he was skipping school, despite working 14-hour days and weekends.
He says the American mindset has gone beyond valuing industrious employees. “After years and years of being exploited in the job market…it is now necessary that you subsume yourself for the sake of your business and the person who is willing to sacrifice the most, such as the one who is willing to take the less time during the leave year, and the person who does it gets rewarded…. That’s the part that got completely out of control.
When a company is inflexible in the face of change, Petersen says workers should band together to establish labor protections and push back.
FMH permanent or office-home hybrid?
Warzel emphasizes that everyone works differently and companies need to listen to their employees and develop environments where they can thrive.
He says many companies will eventually adopt a hybrid system – some days in the office, some days at home – although it’s the most difficult setup to implement.
“There you have a lot of decisions to make in terms of equal opportunities for people who are less in the office versus people who have a little more time with managers. And I think you’re going to have to rebuild a lot of spaces and say, “Okay, what does an office look like when it’s primarily used for collaborative, episodic brainstorming and a collegial interface?” …Companies that are going to do this well are going to hire a remote work manager, or someone who is dedicated solely to that.
However, some positions require being in the office more than others, such as managers and information technology (IT) team members. Petersen says that’s where it’s important to enact regulations and policies — such as hazard pay — to make sure “essential workers” are actually valued and protected.
Rare: Enough time for yourself and loving your job
Petersen refers to a union slogan that says there are eight hours to work, eight hours to sleep and eight hours to do what you want. “It seems so foreign now – that you would have eight hours for whatever you want. And whatever hours we actually devote to our own interests, or to the interests of our community, multiplied by many millions — [consider] how dramatic and radical it could be.
She says she doesn’t know anyone right now who would say, “I love my job, I’m so lucky, I have a fulfilling and exciting job, and I can’t wait to get up and do it every morning. This is especially the case amid the combination of economic insecurity, fear of COVID and how work has slipped outside of traditional hours.
And if you do have a job you love, Warzel points out, you feel like you have to protect it by all means, which leads people to overdo it.
Petersen adds: “People who… took their jobs during or immediately after the Great Recession feel that if we let our foot down for even a second, everything will fall apart. And that leads to some really bad work habits, as well as a willingness to be taken advantage of or to be treated badly or underpaid just because you’re doing work that other people think is cool.
And the freelancers?
“The freedom to work when you want is the freedom to work all the time, and also without any of the safety nets that come with full-time employment,” says Petersen. “And I think as we move more and more towards that model in this country of more episodic jobs, we need to think about the policy changes that need to happen in order to provide those safety nets that were historically provided by organizations and employers, and especially health care.
