The Pandemic and the Future of Working from Home

Teleworking has gone in and out of fashion over the past 30 years; some companies have embraced it for a while and then give it up, ordering everyone back to their cubicles. 

Marissa Mayer, the chief executive of Yahoo, created a furor when she forced employees back into offices in 2013. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people and impromptu team meetings,” a company memo explained.

Tech companies proceeded to spend billions on ever more lavish campuses that employees need never leave. Facebook announced plans in 2018 for what were essentially dormitories. Amazon redeveloped an entire Seattle neighborhood. When Patrick Pichette, the former chief financial officer at Google, was asked, “How many people telecommute at Google?” he said he liked to answer, “As few as possible.”

Depending on who you ask, these and other companies ended telework either because they realized it wasn't working or because their numbers took a downturn and they panicked.

This time around, the numbers for most companies have been good; here is John Sullivan, a professor of management:

The data over the last three months is so powerful. People are shocked. No one found a drop in productivity. Most found an increase. People have been going to work for a thousand years, but it’s going to stop and it’s going to change everyone’s life.

That isn't true about the past and might not be true about the future, but it seems to be true about right now. For now, things are going great with millions of office workers working from home. What does it mean?

It might turn out to be just another way to micromanage employees, or to make them compete against each other. Here is one CEO:

I kind of learned who was really doing the work and who was not really doing as much work as it looked like on paper that they might have been doing, . . . With some of the supervisory, middle-management people I’m starting to wonder if I really need them.

I find that I am about as productive as ever, but I am having trouble separating work from everything else. Working from home with four children in the house I get a steady stream of distractions, so that to really get in eight hours I have to get back on my computer after dinner and work for a couple of hours. It's great not to have to commute 90 minutes each way, but on the other hand I'm getting a lot less reading done. Plus it's sort of lonely.

I think the brutally efficient thing for my company to do would be to close our DC offices and make us all work from home. I don't get anything out of working in the office that would really justify the cost of renting that space. On the other hand I have worked over the years with many home-office people who were manifestly not invested in the success of what we were doing together, so I can see that there are sometimes costs.

So I don't know. But I have a feeling that after this is finally over most people will go back to their offices and their commutes.

Driven

Every once in a while a little story comes along to remind me how hard the people who make to the top of most fields work. This is a memory of novelist Philip Roth:

I remember when Philip Roth told me he’d stopped writing fiction. He was talking with my wife and me, and — looking honestly happy and relaxed about his new situation — he said, “Now I can have a glass of orange juice in the morning and read the newspaper.” And I remember thinking, You could have had your orange juice after “Portnoy’s Complaint” or “The Ghostwriter,” that you probably earned at least a scan of the A-section by book 10 or 12 or 14. . . .

Philip once told me about finishing a novel, and how, with a new book under his belt and nothing to do, he’d walked out the door of his Manhattan apartment to the American Museum of Natural History, a few steps away. He’d strolled around the displays and told me that, standing in the museum’s Hall of Ocean Life, he’d gazed up at the giant model of a blue whale hanging from the ceiling and thought, “What am I supposed to do, look at a whale all day?” And so he went back up to his apartment and started writing again.

The Project Management Course

At the behest of my esteemed employers, I just completed a 22-hour course in project management for engineers. Some of it was not relevant to what I do, but much of it would be very useful for anyone just starting out in project management. For example, there is an excellent description of what has to be accomplished in a kickoff meeting, and a good discussion of how to delegate. Since I have been doing this full-time for about three years and worked closely with my old boss for nearly a decade before that, I already knew a lot of this. But it was interesting enough that I don't regret having done it.

At the beginning there is a description of a "successful project manager" that is based, they say, on interviews they have conducted over the years; the authors are business consultants who work in the engineering industry. It's just what you would expect from any list of successful Americans: project managers keep physically fit, dress well, tell the truth, treat everyone with respect, don't waste time with trivial matters, and get to the office an hour early to have time for long-term tasks that may get crowded out by crises once the rest of the staff shows up, etc. They "eat, sleep and breathe the project."

There is also an amusing lesson that contrasts the ideal type, the Strong Project Manager, with the mere Project Administrator:

As I worked my way through all these lessons illustrated with photographs of models in spotless, utterly dirt-free, obviously-never-been-on-a-construction-site hard hats trying to look like people building skyscrapers, I amused myself by collecting kernels of Project Management Wisdom. I find that these add up to a sort of pointillist picture of American business life and its values. So here, presented in no particular order, are some of the pearls you need to absorb to become a Strong Project Manager; all of these are direct quotations from the lessons.

Start now.

Keep control of your own time or others will.

When someone asks for your time, make ‘No’ your first thought.

Balance is the key.

The best way to solve problems is to avoid them.

Don’t be afraid to decline attending meetings that are likely to waste your time.

Never say “No”; say “Yes, if...”.

Keep your files in order.

Be assertive.

Recognize when you have to compromise.

Deliver faster than you promised.
Deliver more than you promised.

Eliminate excess perfection.

Keep the lines of communication open.

It’s impossible to see any further ahead than you look.

Give credit. Take blame.

Do not draw a line unless you know what it means.

Schedule meetings at odd times (e.g., 10:53 a.m.); this encourages punctuality. Start meetings at the scheduled time, even if all participants are not there.

Make sure only your agenda takes place.

Brief emails are always better.

There is nothing that destroys the quality of a project more than trying to meet an unrealistic schedule.

Pick one solution and go with it.

A professional (not emotional) response is the best way.

It is a well-established fact that people perform better and make fewer errors if they are able to work in a comfortable atmosphere with other team members. Even though a small amount of stress is good stimulation for most people, constant levels of highly charged stress usually cause the performance to decrease and more errors to occur.

Do not waste time in pleasantries.

Document everything.

Do not surprise your boss.

The Neurologist and his Mother

Andrew Scull:

In 1951, when Oliver Sacks was eighteen and about to go up to Oxford, his father, a general practitioner beloved by his patients, decided to have a conversation with him about his sexuality. Oliver had no apparent liking for the opposite sex, and on being quizzed about this, confessed that he preferred boys, but added "I have never 'done' anything". As he recounts in his memoir, the next morning his mother confronted him: "You are an abomination. I wish you had never been born". She then proceeded to ignore him for days, and during the rest of her long life, never again alluded to the matter. Sacks tries to excuse her as a child of her time and culture. She was born and raised an Orthodox Jew, and for nearly two decades more, homosexual relations remained a criminal offence under English law. . . . Sacks writes: "My mother did not mean to be cruel, to wish me dead . . . and she probably regretted her words". Sadly, one cannot be sure. Such is the power of prejudice. And I suspect that at his very core, Sacks is not sure either, and that his whole life has been shadowed by this knowledge, the hatred he felt directed at him by someone he deeply loved and whose approval he desperately needed but could not have. Indeed, he immediately says as much: "her words", he informs us, "haunted me for much of my life."

It is not just that such an intimate condemnation of something that was central to his identity "played a major part in inhibiting and injecting with guilt what should have been a free and joyous expression of sexuality". Perhaps it also lies behind the decade and more of self-destructive behavior that on many occasions came close to killing him (and might well have brought about the demise of patients entrusted to him as a fledgling physician, since much of the time he was addicted to and high on a variety of drugs and hallucinogens).

From the June 5 TLS.

This makes me wonder again about the part played by trauma and misery in shaping the careers of hugely successful people. Oliver Sacks may have endured decades of lonely, guilt-ridden celibacy, self-treated with dangerous drugs, but his books have given vast pleasure and glimpses of deep understanding to me and millions of others. Would a happy, well-adjusted man have written them? Richard Feynman thought that the best physicists were people who had experienced some awful loss that made them turn away from the world and live mainly in their own heads for years afterward. The miserably mad artist has become a cliche -- this same issue of the TLS includes a review of a collection of scholarly articles about David Foster Wallace, whose suicide seems to have solidified his reputation as the most serious American writer of my generation.

Joyce: Joy and woe are woven fine.

Success?

Here's a review of a book by Susan Pinker that advances a thesis I have been mulling over for some time: maybe women are less "successful" than men because they have better priorities:

Pinker does more than dryly discuss the biology; she provides example after example of women who have succeeded in this “man’s world” and found it wanting. As Pinker explains, let’s move on past the idea that a woman can’t do the same work as a man, and discuss why she may not want to. Any woman who has wondered if her preferences run counter to the feminist cause should pay close attention here; believing that a woman should have every right to pursue the same goals as men is different from believing that every woman should want to. Time and again, Pinker points out how women have sought those goals, attained them, and then shifted their eyes to a different prize. These “opt out” women can be found, as Pinker states, “in every major university, law, engineering, and accounting firm in North America and Europe” (p. 64). Women are 2.8 times more likely than men to leave science and engineering careers for other occupations and 13 times more likely to exit the labor force entirely. This is not because they are overwhelmed with childcare, either. They leave their careers at every age and every stage of life, whether or not they have families. Pinker concludes with what seems to be an obvious yet ignored truth, that women are autonomous beings who know their own desires. As one woman put it, “…work is not the only thing I do. I have a life” (p. 90).

Personally, I think "success" is a great goal for people who can't think of anything better to do with their lives, but something the rest of us might be better off to avoid. If you can be "successful" on your terms, doing something you like to do, great, but if making more money and climbing the career ladder means sacrificing the things you really love, perhaps you should rethink.

Women Soldiers

One of the most radical things we have done in the radical modern world is to erase much of the distinction between men's and women's work. Every agricultural society we know about has fairly rigid divisions between the work that men and women do, and these distinctions are fundamental to the identities of both men and women. Our move toward a society in which men and women do pretty much the same kinds of work strikes me as a very big change. Sometimes I read articles about topics like sexual harassment, or how much corporations should do to accomodate working mothers, that seem to imply that this would be very easy if a few nasty people weren't being wicked. But these are big changes, and they have raised and will continue to raise many problems for all of us.

Since this is my general attitude to the problem, I find it very interesting that women in the American military are increasingly doing the same things as men, and facing the same risks, without anyone making much of a fuss over it. The kind of conservatives who go crazy about the minor changes embodied in Obama's health care proposals are mostly silent about women carrying guns and getting killed in combat. Where, I wonder, are the fundamentalists on this one? Aren't female soldiers a bigger violation of Old Testament norms than limits on medical tests?

But the changes go on, and I can't remember the last time I heard an important politician say anything about them. Right now about 1 in 20 of the soldiers in our front-line Iraqi bases is a woman. The attitude of American officers seems to be pretty much my attitude toward the whole problem of breaking down gender barriers, that is, the problems involved are only what would expect from any major organizational change. It probably helps that the female soldiers aren't exactly shrinking violets. From a piece in today's NY Times:

Staff Sgt. Patricia F. Bradford, 27, a psychological operations soldier, said that slights, subtle and not, were common, and some were easier to brush off than others. Women are still viewed derisively at times in the confined, occasionally tense space of an outpost like Warhorse.

“You’re a bitch, a slut or a dyke — or you’re married, but even if you’re married, you’re still probably one of the three,” Sergeant Bradford said.

At the same time, she and other female soldiers cope with the slights, showing a disarming brashness.

“I think being a staff sergeant — and a bitch — helps deflect those things,” she added.

The issues that arise in having women in combat — harassment, bias, hardship, even sexual relations — are, she and others said, a matter of discipline, maturity and professionalism rather than an argument for separating the sexes.

I think the lack of any political opposition to women serving in combat reflects two major changes that have taken place in America. First, the military has become a career path full of specialists, not a trial of manhood for all the males in the population. Second, most Americans have accepted that some women can do almost anything a man can do, and that if women can so something, it is just wrong to keep them from doing it.

the future of work

Robert Reich has a column out on why trying to save GM's assembly-line jobs is a waste of time. He goes over the numbers for how many manufacturing jobs have disappeared worldwide -- even China is losing manufacturing jobs -- and explains how work is changing:

Any job that's even slightly routine is disappearing from the U.S. But this doesn't mean we are left with fewer jobs. It means only that we have fewer routine jobs, including traditional manufacturing. When the U.S. economy gets back on track, many routine jobs won't be returning--but new jobs will take their place. A quarter of all Americans now work in jobs that weren't listed in the Census Bureau's occupation codes in 1967. Technophobes, neo-Luddites and anti-globalists be warned: You're on the wrong side of history. You see only the loss of old jobs. You're overlooking all the new ones.

The reason they're so easy to overlook is that so much of the new value added is invisible. A growing percent of every consumer dollar goes to people who analyze, manipulate, innovate and create. These people are responsible for research and development, design and engineering. Or for high-level sales, marketing and advertising. They're composers, writers and producers. They're lawyers, journalists, doctors and management consultants. I call this "symbolic analytic" work because most of it has to do with analyzing, manipulating and communicating through numbers, shapes, words, ideas.

Symbolic-analytic work can't be directly touched or held in your hands, as goods that come out of factories can be. In fact, many of these tasks are officially classified as services rather than manufacturing. Yet almost whatever consumers buy these days, they're paying more for these sorts of tasks than for the physical material or its assemblage. On the back of every iPod is the notice "Designed by Apple in California, Assembled in China." You can bet iPod's design garners a bigger share of the iPod's purchase price than its assembly.

At the risk of standing on the "wrong side of history," I would like to express grave doubts about a civilization in which most people do "symbolic analytic" work. I think that the farther any job is from making something or helping someone, the less satisfying it will be for most people. Sure, the people who design iPods have valuable jobs that probably satisfy them, but that is a few hundred people making something used by tens of millions. Not many jobs there. Anyone who has ever worked in the average design shop knows that most design -- along with most advertising, public relations, and half a dozen other fields -- is a tedious exercise in continually reinventing the wheel, clotted with jargon and silly fads, in which trying to seem impressive and "sharp" wars with a deep cynicism. In my experience, few people who design things like tissue paper boxes and corporate publicity campaigns feel very good about what they do. Reich doesn't mention bureaucrats, another major growing field full of cynicism and siege mentality. Research science sounds like an exciting field, but I know several people who have dropped out of scientific work because what they did was so bureaucratic, repetitive, and irrelevant. One of them loves steam railroads and longs for the days when high technology was what the boys could hammer together down in the shop. And one of the fastest growing fields is legal services, which is, as far as I am concerned, much more of a drain on our civilization than a benefit.

I was very impressed by this essay, by a man who gave up work in a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop. I would personally rather work in a think tank, but there are millions of people who want to do something that feels real to them. How many designers, marketers, or assistant vice presidents feel the kind of pride and sense of identity that thousands of steel mill workers used to get from being "men of steel"? Yes, I know their work killed them and poisoned the planet, but it still had a reality and solidity that "symbolic" work will never have from most people.

I have ended up complaining a lot on the blog about modern work. And not, as I have said, because I hate my own job. I rather like my job. But much about our current work culture feels poisonous to me, and I think we should be trying harder to fix that instead of just letting things run along in their current rut until we wake up hating our world.