54%: New Strategies for Finding Balance at Work

ELISE HU: That’s Anne Helen Petersen, smart observer of the culture—including work culture. Her popular newsletter often looks at the future of work, and her new book is called Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home . She’s got thought-provoking ideas about big questions. How can companies learn and adjust in the move to hybrid? And how can we prevent burnout, when 54 percent of workers globally say they feel overworked? Later on we’ll talk to a Microsoft employee with a powerful story about how work flexibility helped him during a tough time. But first, my conversation with Anne Helen Petersen.

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ELISE HU: Anne Helen Petersen, welcome.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Hi, it’s so great to be here.

ELISE HU: I’m so excited to talk with you. I am a longtime fan and acolyte. Your latest book, co-written with Charlie Warzel, is about the opportunity right now to reinvent how we work. Why don’t we start with the promise of working from home? You two have a message by the end of the book on the imperative to embrace flexibility for workers through remote or hybrid work. Can you share the gist of the message to get us started?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: The message actually keys into a lot of the things that I’ve been thinking about for some time now, which is that we work too much, right? We are burnt out, and our gains in productivity have not led to gains in leisure. We have used all of the mechanization and automation and increased productivity to—instead of working less, work more.

What we’ve seen is that there are diminishing returns when you work more. Like, the more hours that you work do not necessarily make you a better worker, do not mean that you necessarily create better products. Oftentimes, what it does is lead to burnout, which is unsustainable.

ELISE HU: What did you arrive at by the end of a lot of interviews and research on this? How does flexible work support the notion of working less, but still, you know, being able to add value to your company or your creative projects?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: When we say work less, it doesn’t mean, like, figure out how to work only two hours and pretend like you’re working the rest of the time, you know what I mean? ( Laughter )

ELISE HU: Sure, sure.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: It’s more how can you work in ways that we understand are actually more productive in terms of taking breaks, letting your mind rest, have that time to actually recalibrate and to reset. And that can mean taking a walk in the middle of the day, actually taking a lunch that isn’t a sad desk lunch that you eat in front of your computer ( laughter ), taking 10 minutes to play with your dog, or just even step outside or exercise or go pick up your kids, or anything that kind of underlines the idea that work is rotating around our lives instead of our lives rotating around work.

The thing that flexible work can do is allow you to work when you are working and to actually concentrate on the work that you’re doing, and do a lot less of what we think of as LARPing your work—live action role playing your work—( laughter ) pretending to work, like making other people think that you are working, and that that makes you a person who does a really good job instead of the actual evidence of doing a good job.

ELISE HU: This idea of performing your work or performative work, and then also the notion of the sad desk lunch is an outgrowth of that, right? Like, I’m not going to leave my desk because I’m so productive here.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Yeah.

ELISE HU: Systemically, what wasn’t working beyond these outgrowths or outcomes of work culture? What wasn’t working systemically that led us to those sorts of outcomes?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: So, I think that the real change really can be traced to the broad adoption of digital technologies. So, if you remember, the 1980s, even before that, there were people who were considered workaholics. Like, there’s this great memory that I have of Stacey, the character in The Baby-sitters Club . Her dad was a workaholic, and I think he was a finance banker or something, like, maybe insurance business, right?

ELISE HU: Right, yes.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: But a workaholic was almost always a dad who was in the office, physically in the office a lot.

ELISE HU: Right, or Zack Morris’s dad, Saved by the Bell , his giant cell phone and how he was always out of town and not available for Zack, right?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: ( Laughter ) Yes. Those standards were put in place by the twin influences of the finance industry and consultants, and the rise of the consulting industry, both of which thought of more hours as better hours, better work. And that understanding of work really trickled down into companies throughout the United States, but there was a limit to how much a person could be in the office, especially if they had any sort of caregiving responsibilities.

ELISE HU: Sure.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: And what digital technologies, whether it’s the form of the early BlackBerry, home computers, Wi-Fi and phones just generally, smartphones, allowed work to seep into all of the corners of our lives outside of the home, right? So, work became incredibly slippery, which meant that all of us could become workaholics. Anyone who did an office job could start doing a lot of their work away from the office. They were not bound to a physical space.

And so, what I see a lot of, pre-pandemic in different ways now, are people who, during traditional work hours, whether it was in the brick-and-mortar office or now remote, they are doing work for all of those hours. They are in meetings. They are trying to juggle emails.

And then what they do in the hours before traditional work hours, and in the hours after traditional work hours, is they do their actual work. So, they do the work that demands a little bit more concentration, or they’re always trying to keep up with their inbox so that the next day won’t feel overwhelming. It just spreads all over the place and you feel like you’re continually trying to play catch up. What that does is it dilutes the quality of work and also makes you feel like you are working all of the time, in part because you are.

ELISE HU: So what, then, did the pandemic forcing this drastic shift out of the office really change, right, for information workers? So, if information workers were having to squeeze work in between every crevice of their lives anyway, what did you observe as the drastic change that happened in March 2020, and on, to work culture?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Primarily, the huge shift is that a ton of companies that were very, very opposed to even thinking about the idea that their work could be done remotely, even though for a lot of people, it had been done remotely, just in those after hours for a long time—

ELISE HU: Unseen, right. ( Laughter )

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: This overarching shift was already in place. Companies were becoming more and more remote, but this accelerated it, forced it.

And I will say that initially, I think most people just worked all the time, right?

ELISE HU: Yeah. Yep.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: There was a real fear that kept us very locked to our jobs, both the actual fear of the virus and of death, but also fear of what was going to happen with our jobs. And, you know, the last recession is still so fresh in so many people’s minds, especially millennials. ( Laughter ) I was just waiting for the next shoe to drop. I was like, okay, I need to work as hard as I can so that when the layoffs come, I will have some mode of survival.

ELISE HU: Yeah, everything feels super precarious for those of us who grew up at a time of real contraction.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: And there also wasn’t very much else to do, right? If you think of 2020, especially those first early months and then the winter of 2020 and early 2021.

ELISE HU: Right.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: You were limited in the number of activities that you could do outside of the home and outside of work. And so, a lot of people, I think, were like, well, what else am I going to do? What else is a Saturday for? ( Laughter )

ELISE HU: Right.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: The natural inclination was to lean into the work, and that led to a lot of burnout. And I think many workers are still dealing with the ramifications of that. But at the same time, and this really depends on the worker, I think, and whether or not they are still dealing with a lack of childcare or elder care or trying to recover from COVID—lots of different factors, but I do think that people have realized and instituted patterns in their day as a means of self-preservation. This is still a work in progress, but the number of people that I know who are like, oh, I realized that I actually could take an hour to exercise in the middle of the day, and it has dramatically changed the rhythms of my day.

ELISE HU: The other angle of this that we haven’t talked about in this season of the podcast yet is the next generation, because kids in school, college students, for example, they’re pioneering remote practices in how they study, in how they’re watched and what they have to do in order to get participation points.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Yeah.

ELISE HU: So, this is going to be interesting in terms of how they feel about going to work when they’re graduating from college experiences that are largely remote or a lot more remote than when we were in school. Have you thought about how new college grads might shape what work culture looks like?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: I love this question. So, the first thing I’ll say is that the research about who benefits from in-person office experiences, this was recently highlighted in The New York Times in an article by Claire Cain Miller, it shows that the benefits of some in-person experience is really important for people who are new to the workplace. For everyone else, the whole, oh, you learn culture, company culture through water cooler discussions and there’s spontaneous collaboration—most of that is really unfounded and not borne out in research. But there are significant benefits to people who are onboarding with an organization.

That doesn’t mean that companies should try to maintain a full-fledged office just so that they can onboard people, right? ( Laughter ) But there are ways to onboard people and to introduce them to the culture either digitally or through what—some of the thinkers that I’ve been reading about, what the future of work is going to be like. They think of the office spaces that are going to remain, that they’re going to be museums of company culture, essentially.

ELISE HU: Oh, wow! ( Laughter )

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: It’s a teaching space for someone who is new to the organization to come in and to familiarize themselves with some of the norms and understandings and to feel like they’re part of something. Like, they visit the museum, they’re onboarded, I’m going to go home.

But I think the more interesting part of your question is, how are the things that these recent or current high school and college graduates [are] learning right now, how is that going to shape how they engage as workers?

I think that employees in a Teams meeting have so much to learn from watching students who are having the same sort of virtual meeting themselves and have figured out how to have these engaging discussions, using tools that show how to be respectful of one another.

And then the other thing, too, that I’ve seen a lot of is study halls, people who are co-working with one another online and how to approximate that feeling of being present and working together with someone else digitally, when people are like, oh, I never get to have that feeling of a coffee shop, because a coffee shop isn’t COVID-safe.

But I’ve actually seen people come together for essentially, they call it office hours or study hall in the afternoon, and people just do their work together, and periodically pipe up and say something funny the same way that you would if you were working in a coffee shop with someone else.

ELISE HU: Oh, I love that.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: And I know that students who are working on their homework and that sort of thing also have used, for that same sort of collaborative space and just for comfort and proximity. So, if you have someone, a class of workers coming into your organization who are already very familiar and at home in that sort of working style, they’re not going to rail against that idea of like, oh, it’s so lonely.

ELISE HU: Because they’re already accustomed to it, right?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Yeah. Well, they know how to not be lonely.

ELISE HU: That’s well said. Looking at the other side of the equation, the more experienced employees, the managers.

If you are in a position to hire for managers or promote employees into management, how do you assess the potential manager’s ability to do that job or capacity for that role when you might not have met that employee in person, you might not have dealt with folks in person anymore?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: So much of management is actually listening. Like, I think, sometimes, we think of management as your ability to talk to other people, when really it’s a lot more of that invisible labor of listening, and not just nodding your head and not speaking, but hearing what the person is saying, and asking the sort of follow-up questions that allow people to understand what’s actually going on.

That’s a hard thing, right? Like, what does management look like when you have not met in person? How do you create a situation where people feel like they actually are communicating well with one another when they are only communicating digitally?

For me, I think that some of it means figuring out the best communication style for someone. With each manager and each report, they have to figure out what is the style that works for them, because all of the people that they manage on a team, they’re not all going to have the same style and it might not be the same style as the manager’s. So, how can they make themselves more flexible to other people’s style?

ELISE HU: Different people, different needs.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Some people are real visual learners, like, how they understand emotion and how they pick up on other people’s emotions. And then some people are incredibly distracted by it or, because of neurodiversity, don’t pick up on visual cues. And also don’t pick up on audio cues. They might need a really straightforward form of communication, that maybe writing is the best way for that to happen.

ELISE HU: Okay, so we are in this moment, now that the wide swath of businesses and employees are vaccinated, where there’s a lot of policymaking going on at the company level. And in your book, you also write about the danger of short-term thinking when companies are thinking about paving the way forward. They’re viewing changes wrought by the pandemic as temporary or reversible. So, what would a more affirmative, longer-term vision be?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: The best analogy that I think of is things like Social Security or Medicare, these components of the social safety net that have been added by the government. Once you give society a benefit like that, it’s incredibly difficult to take it away.

ELISE HU: So, what has your research shown or what do you like, in terms of hybrid schedules or policies?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: I really think it depends on the type of work that a company is doing.

ELISE HU: Okay.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: And also teams within the company. So, there are some teams within a company who don’t do any collaborative work, where all of the work is really solitary, and there’s no need for people to come together and try to have a collaboration. And then there are some teams that really—they are working as a team and it works better if they are in the same space together, even if that’s just once a month, even if it’s just once a year.

Each company has to figure out, actually diagnosing the sort of work that you are doing, either as a company or within your corner of the company, and then being really honest about who needs to be with other people in order to get that work done. And when you figure that out, then from there, you can figure out the schedule that you need.

I think something that’s really provocative and compelling, a style of work that I think you’re going to see a lot more of, is having offices that are uniquely meant as collaborative spaces. Like a collaborative artist studio.

ELISE HU: Got it.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: And there’s going to be so many different ways that we’re going to be able to work with others, that we’re going to be able to leave our houses. So, I don’t think it’s an either/or of you either have to work at home at your kitchen table or you work at the office. It’s going to be this hybrid understanding of, okay, so maybe we have an office where people go to have these collaborative spaces and meetings, and then I’m going to have a third space, whether it’s a co-working space that is underwritten in some way by the company, a coffee shop, a friend’s house, right—I co-work with my friends a lot. That you do your work together. There’s going to be a lot of different iterations of this. And I think that is part of the difficulty right now, is that a lot of companies are like, give me three options and we’ll pick from one of them. And it’s not that easy.

ELISE HU: Obviously, none of us can predict much of anything these days, but you’ve studied this topic really closely. So, what do you see coming in 2022 in the workplace? What do you think the most successful managers will be doing to prepare for it?

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Great question. I think you’re going to see companies continue to push their back-to-work dates a little bit further.

ELISE HU: Okay.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: There’s still going to be some reticence during the winter, even with just the flu and other diseases, to push people back into the office immediately. And as a result, you’re going to have people who have been out of the office for nearly two full years. That is enough time to really establish new habits and new expectations and new rhythms.

So, whatever happens when people start coming back into the office, it’s going to feel weird, and exciting, and thrilling, and annoying at first. And it’s going to take a few months for both workers themselves and the companies to figure out what rhythms work, what standards, and what ideas.

It’s going to take at least a full year to figure out what policy should look like. Say, here is our initial idea. It’s going to change, almost certainly. So, let’s actually have a space for a lot of feedback. And most importantly, let’s listen to that feedback. And so, I think that the greatest thing, moving forward, to model is that sort of flexibility, that desire and willingness to continue to change to find the best fit for each organization.

And then as far as managers, I think that continually listening, saying, what do you need in terms of a flexible work schedule? What’s going to work for us as a team? How are we going to figure this out? How are we going to deal with the ongoing recovery from burnout? What does rest look like? What does solid work look like? How do we divide our days in a way that means that we’re not spending more time pretending to work or play-acting at work with things like unnecessary meetings or unnecessary emails, and making more time to do the heart of the work. So, I think that a manager who can continue to drill down on those ideas is the best and most successful manager that you’re going to find.

ELISE HU: Alright. Anne Helen Petersen, co-author of Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home . Anne Helen, I enjoyed this so much. Thank you.

ANNE HELEN PETERSEN: Thank you so much for having me.

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ELISE HU: Alright, we’re going to wrap up this episode with a real-life example of the importance of workplace flexibility, something we’ve talked about all through this season of WorkLab , with Anne Helen and all of our guests. We brought in Microsoft employee Daniel Hidalgo to share his personal story, and correspondent Mary Melton chatted with him.

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MARY MELTON: Daniel is a product marketing manager for Microsoft Teams. At the start of the pandemic, he found himself caring for his father while balancing the demands of remote work—truly remote work. I think you’ll find he’s got some powerful insights about flexibility and family.

Let’s start by you telling us a little bit about your relationship with your dad.

DANIEL HIDALGO: So I consider my dad to be my best friend. I carry his name. I’m the oldest of four, and I really, really look up to him. He really came from nothing. I’m the first one to go to college, overseas, and none of this would have been possible without my dad.

MARY MELTON: So it’s March of 2020, and most companies have to ask their employees to work from home. There’s really a ton of uncertainty about what’s happening with the pandemic and the lockdown has begun. Where did you go at that moment?

DANIEL HIDALGO: Yeah, so there was a lot of uncertainty, and with uncertainty comes a lot of anxiety. And in fact, the first case of COVID, if I remember correctly, was in Seattle. And so, at the time, I actually went home, I went home back to Ecuador. I took a two-week trip. But then unfortunately, my dad ended up catching COVID. This was one of the earliest cases in the country, and it was really a test-and-learn situation. He ended up being hospitalized, treated with different meds, and luckily after 14 days of being in the ICU, he was able to make it. And that certainly changed plans for me.

MARY MELTON: So you stayed on to help your dad through his recovery and ended up in Ecuador for 10 months, and you were still working remotely from your childhood bedroom, which couldn’t have been easy. How did you maintain work-life balance?

DANIEL HIDALGO: Before the pandemic, I feel like my work-life balance was defined by the different spaces that separate work from life. I took the shuttle, I went into the office, I did work, and then when I came back, sometimes I would answer emails, but it would be very sporadic. I knew that I was off work and into, you know, my other activities, and that certainly blended when we went into this remote work situation.

Your room became your workplace and these blurred lines then made it harder to separate the two things, and it actually caused more stress. So what I actually had to do is create my own spaces. Since I was in the Eastern time zone, I could wake up in the morning and go and have some walks with my dad, have some quality time, clear my head a little bit and then go into work later in the day.

MARY MELTON: Do you have any advice for someone who wants to negotiate some more flexibility in their job?

DANIEL HIDALGO: The first one I’d say is it all depends on the role that you have. In my day-to-day job, I work on providing digital tools for frontline workers, and I obviously understand that many frontline workers cannot work remotely, and we are trying to provide them digital tools to make their jobs a little easier. But if you are in one of those situations where you can work remotely, I would take advantage of asking for this opportunity. It all depends on the company, of course, but I genuinely think that being able to grant opportunities to work remotely actually benefits the employees’ output.

If I would have been in Seattle dealing with all of this uncertainty, I would have probably gone through a lot of more mental health trauma, and the fact that Microsoft was able to help me navigate this situation, knowing that being with my dad and my family was something really important at the time, and at the same time, knowing that I took care of the things that are most important to me, I was able to be the best version of myself at work. So I would look at it holistically, and if you’re a manager, be able to understand the different situations that your employees are in, knowing that if they’re okay, then they’re going to produce the best work as well.

MARY MELTON: That’s great advice. You’re working remotely now from Florida, so that you can travel more easily to visit Ecuador. For you, how has the way you approach your daily work been influenced by this ability to be with your family?

DANIEL HIDALGO: One, I think it all comes back to how you are doing mentally, and being close to family, and sort of getting that energy and that is just going to uplift you.

And being uplifted like that then, in my opinion, has made me operate at a higher capacity at work. And then the other thing as well is, my coach, or psychologist, told me one day that what do you think is stronger, bamboo or wood?

And I was like, oh, I think wood, but it’s like, no, bamboo is actually three times stronger than wood, and that’s because it can bend, and it’s malleable, and the fact that it’s malleable lets it be more flexible, and more flexible is actually stronger. So that thing, that kind of flexibility equals strength, I think is something that companies are starting to adopt, and we’re actually seeing it at Microsoft and that’s, I think, what’s going to make the difference.

ELISE HU: Smart insights from Microsoft employee Daniel Hidalgo, talking about what a family crisis taught him about flexibility at work.

That’s it for this episode of the WorkLab podcast, from Microsoft. Check out the WorkLab digital publication too, where you can find, among many other things, a transcript of this very episode. That is all at microsoft.com/WorkLab. And for this podcast, please rate us, review, and follow us wherever you listen.

The WorkLab podcast is a place for experts to share their insights and opinions. As students of the future of work, Microsoft values inputs from a diverse set of voices. That said, the opinions and findings of our guests are their own, and they may not necessarily reflect Microsoft’s own research or positions.

WorkLab is produced by Microsoft with Godfrey Dadich Partners and Reasonable Volume. I’m your host, Elise Hu. Our correspondents are Mary Melton and Desmond Dickerson. Sharon Kallander and Matthew Duncan produce this podcast. Jessica Voelker is the WorkLab editor. Thanks for listening.

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