Review: Out of Office, by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen

[Russ Allbery]

Out of Office
by Charlie Warzel & Anne Helen Petersen

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2021
ISBN:      0-593-32010-7
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     260

Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were not
working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42%
of Americans who were able to work remotely.

  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. You were
  surviving.

The stated goal of this book is to reclaim the concept of working from
home, not only from the pandemic, but also from the boundary-destroying
metastasis of work into non-work life. It does work towards that goal,
but the description of what would be required for working from home to
live up to its promise becomes a sweeping critique of the organization
and conception of work, leaving it nearly as applicable to those who
continue working from an office. Turns out that the main problem with
working from home is the work part, not the "from home" part.

This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with A World Without
Email. Warzel and Petersen do the the structural and political analysis
that I sometimes wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer
less concrete advice. Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core
problems of the sort of modern office work that could be done from
home: it's poorly organized, poorly managed, and desperately
inefficient. Rather than attempting to fix those problems, which is
difficult, structural, and requires thought and institutional
cooperation, we're compensating by working more. This both doesn't work
and isn't sustainable.

Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems
and protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building
better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and
Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so
they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about
the American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work
style that isn't fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing
to point out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of
flexibility. But they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way
office work is organized is not leading to more productivity. Tools
like Slack encourage the public performance of apparent productivity at
the cost of the attention and focus required to do meaningful work. And
the process is making us miserable.

Out of Office is, in part, a discussion of what would be required to do
better work with less stress, but it also shares a goal with Newport
and some (but not most) corners of productivity writing: spend less
time and energy on work. The goal of Out of Office is not to get more
work done. It's to work more efficiently and sustainably and thus work
less. To reclaim the promise of flexibility so that it benefits the
employee and not the employer. To recognize, in the authors' words,
that the office can be a bully, locking people in to commute schedules
and unnatural work patterns, although it also provides valuable moments
of spontaneous human connection. Out of Office tries to envision a
style of work that includes the office sometimes, home sometimes, time
during the day to attend to personal chores or simply to take a mental
break from an unnatural eight hours (or more) of continuous focus,
universal design, real worker-centric flexibility, and an end to the
constant productivity ratchet where faster work simply means more work
for the same pay.

That's a lot of topics for a short book, and structurally this is a
grab bag. Some sections will land and some won't. Loom's video messages
sound like a nightmare to me, and I rolled my eyes heavily at the VR
boosterism, reluctant as it may be. The section on DEI (diversity,
equity, and inclusion) was a valiant effort that at least gestures
towards the dismal track record of most such efforts, but still left me
unconvinced that anyone knows how to improve diversity in an existing
organization without far more brute-force approaches than anyone with
power is usually willing to consider. But there's enough here, and the
authors move through topics quickly enough, that a section that isn't
working for you will soon be over.

And some of the sections that do work are great. For example, the whole
discussion of management.

  Many of these companies view middle management as bloat, waste, what
  David Graeber would call a "bullshit job." But that's because bad
  management is a waste; you're paying someone more money to
  essentially annoy everyone around them. And the more people
  experience that sort of bad management, and think of it as "just the
  way it is," the less they're going to value management in general.

I admit to a lot of confirmation bias here, since I've been ranting
about this for years, but management must be the most wide-spread
professional job for which we ignore both training and capability and
assume that anyone who can do any type of useful work can also manage
people doing that work. It's simply not true, it creates workplaces
full of horrible management, and that in turn creates a deep and
unhelpful cynicism about all management.

There is still a tendency on the left to frame this problem in terms of
class struggle, on the reasonable grounds that for decades under
"scientific management" of manufacturing that's what it was. Managers
were there to overwork workers and extract more profits for the owners,
and labor unions were there to fight back against managers. But while
some of this does happen in the sort of office work this book is
focused on, I think Warzel and Petersen correctly point to a different
cause.

  "The reason she was underpaid on the team was not because her boss
  was cackling in the corner. It was because nobody told the boss it
  was their responsibility to look at the fucking spreadsheet."

We don't train managers, we have no clear expectations for what
managers should do, we don't meaningfully measure their performance, we
accept a high-overhead and high-chaos workstyle based on ad hoc
one-to-one communication that de-emphasizes management, and many
managers have never seen good management and therefore have no idea
what they're supposed to be doing. The management problem for many
office workers is less malicious management than incompetent
management, or simply no effective management at all apart from an
occasional reorg and a complicated and mind-numbing annual review form.

The last section of this book (apart from concluding letters to bosses
and workers) is on community, and more specifically on extracting time
and energy from work (via the roadmap in previous chapters) and instead
investing it in the people around you. Much ink has been spilled about
the collapse of American civic life, about how we went from a nation of
joiners to a nation of isolated individual workers with weak and
failing community institutions. Warzel and Petersen correctly lay some
blame for this at the foot of work, and see the reorganization of work
and an increase in work from home (and thus a decrease in commutes) as
an opportunity to reverse that trend.

David Brooks recently filled in for Ezra Klein on his podcast and
talked with University of Chicago professor Leon Kass, which I listened
to shortly after reading this book. In one segment, they talked about
marriage and complained about the decline in marriage rates. They were
looking for causes in people's moral upbringing, in their life
priorities, in the lack of aspiration for permanence in kids these
days, and in any other personal or moral failing that would allow them
to be smugly judgmental. It was a truly remarkable thing to witness.
Neither man at any point in the conversation mentioned either money or
time.

Back in the world most Americans live in, real wages have been stagnant
for decades, student loan debt is skyrocketing as people desperately
try to keep up with the ever-shifting requirements for a halfway-decent
job, and work has expanded to fill all hours of the day, even for
people who don't have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet.
Employers have fully embraced a "flexible" workforce via layoffs,
micro-optimizing work scheduling, eliminating benefits, relying on
contract and gig labor, and embracing exceptional levels of employee
turnover. The American worker has far less of money, time, and
stability, three important foundations for marriage and family as well
as participation in most other civic institutions. People like Brooks
and Kass stubbornly cling to their feelings of moral superiority
instead of seeing a resource crisis. Work has stolen the resources that
people previously put into those other areas of their life. And it's
not even using those resources effectively.

That's, in a way, a restatement of the topic of this book. Our current
way of organizing work is not sustainable, healthy, or wise. Working
from home may be part of a strategy for changing it. The pandemic has
already heavily disrupted work, and some of those changes, including
increased working from home, seem likely to stick. That provides a
narrow opportunity to renegotiate our arrangement with work and try to
make those changes stick.

I largely agree with the analysis, but I'm pessimistic. I think the
authors are as well. We're very bad at social change, and there will be
immense pressure for everything to go "back to normal." Those in the
best bargaining position to renegotiate work for themselves are not in
the habit of sharing that renegotiation with anyone else. But I'm
somewhat heartened by how much public discussion there currently is
about a more fundamental renegotiation of the rules of office work. I'm
also reminded of a deceptively profound aphorism from economist Herbert
Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

This book is a bit uneven and is more of a collection of related
thoughts than a cohesive argument, but if you are hungry for more
worker-centric analyses of the dynamics of office work (inside or
outside the office), I think it's worth reading.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Reviewed: 2021-12-27

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-593-32010-7.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>