Curbside Consult with Dr. Jayne 9/25/23

I’m not sure what the universe is trying to tell me about work life balance and people’s feelings about the return to the office, but my inbox this week was full of articles touching on the topic.

I’ve written in the past about the concept of so-called “quiet quitting,” where employees transition from going the extra mile for their employer to putting in the minimum effort required to meet the job description. The Atlantic took this one step farther with a piece — albeit recycled from 2021, yet presented as if it was something new — titled, “How to Care Less About Work.” Its premise is that workers need to evaluate how they want to spend their remaining time on Earth.

Spoiler alert: many employees agree that the days of working more than 40 hours a week for nebulous corporate goals are over: “It was seldom to create work that was meaningful or innovative, even if we could mumble something to that effect when asked what we like about our job. It wasn’t so that we could someday work less overall. We worked hard to prove that we were alert and available for more work.”

It turns out that The Atlantic piece is actually an excerpt from a book “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home” by Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen. I was intrigued enough to do some weekend reading and found it to be an interesting counterpoint to the numerous CEOs who are clamoring for a return to the office without clear goals for that change. The chapters keep it simple: Flexibility, Culture, Technologies of the Office, and Community. These are all topics that should be critical discussion in any work environment, whether remote, hybrid, or in-office.  I’ve been in several working situations where technology runs rampant and employees are struggling to even do basic tasks due to confusion about the best communication platforms to use for different situations, whether to call, e-mail, message, or text someone, and whether meetings really need to be had.

Like many of us who worked remotely prior to the pandemic, the authors had embraced remote work, moving from Brooklyn to Montana. They discovered it wasn’t as easy as they thought, and that it was important to figure out how to fit work into a rich home life versus always working because if was so easy to just log on without a commute.

As someone who struggled with one particular office-based consulting engagement a few years ago, I loved some of their descriptions: “unscheduled, drive-by meetings” were definitely one of the things I found challenging, especially since I was working from a cubicle on a main aisle in the office and was constantly barraged by people dropping by to say hi or ask questions. I’m always happy to help, but then it takes a few minutes to get back into the groove of the work you were doing, resulting in lower productivity.

There was one particular group manager that I swear never did work. If you popped your head above the partitions, he was always walking around chatting. Another favorite quote: “They [offices] elevate the feeling of productivity over being productive. They’re a breeding ground for microaggressions and toxic loops of hierarchical behavior.” That’s not to say that the latter elements don’t happen in the remote workplace, because I’ve definitely seen them.

The authors challenge companies to reconceptualize the workplace, “having honest conversations about how much people are working and how they think they could work better. Not Longer. Not by taking on more projects, or being better delegators, or having more meetings. Not by creating ‘more value’ for their employer at the expense of their mental and physical health. Instead, it means acknowledging that better work is, in fact, oftentimes less work, over fewer hours, which makes people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.”

I think the idea of really exploring the concept of value is an important one, especially in companies that have a lot of meetings. It’s challenging to understand which meetings provide benefit for attendees and how to find the right balance of scheduled versus nonscheduled time. I worked for one company where its weekly product development meeting was simply an echo chamber for the chief product officer, and no one was allowed to question him. That, my friends, was not a value-added meeting.

Another quote that really resonated with me was around how companies monitor productivity of remote workers. Another part of reconceptualizing the workplace “entails thinking through how online communication tools function as surveillance and incentivize playacting your job instead of actually doing it.” I was at lunch recently with a couple of physician friends, one of whom had recently started working for a large health insurance company doing case reviews in a particular subspecialty where she has many years of experience. She whipped out her laptop and mentioned that although she had already finished her quota of reviews for the day, they went faster than expected, so she needed to log more online time to complete her day. Apparently since she’s new to the company, she’s being treated like a new employee rather than the seasoned reviewer she is, so she has to be sure to log a full eight hours until she reaches the end of her probationary period.

We all agreed that was ridiculous, but humored her in the situation, although it was less funny when her voice-to-text app started picking up our lunch conversation. If there was any AI involved, I hope it enjoyed our entirely too specific discussion of the best way to prepare fried pickles.

This reconceptualization, according to the authors, “will require organization based on employees; and managers’ preferred and most effective work times, and consideration of child-and eldercare responsibilities, volunteering schedules, and time zones.” I worked for a number of years at a large organization that had clients in time zones from Hawaii to London, with the majority of workers being remote. Although customer support teams were organized largely by geography (except for those supporting nationwide clients), we made it clear that we didn’t expect our Pacific time zone friends to be taking calls at 6 a.m. local time or for our Eastern time zone colleagues to still be working at 6 p.m. local time. It took commitment by leaders and team managers to realign meeting schedules into blocks that worked for everyone. We created a culture where it was perfectly fine to have lunch on camera (after all, many of us would regularly have working lunches in the office-based world) as well as to use the extremes of the day to complete personal errands outside of designated blocks where meetings were typically expected. Sure, there were fewer hours in the day which were acceptable for broadly attended meetings, but it caused us to really evaluate whether we really needed to be having so many meetings and how many people really needed to attend them.

The organization was ultimately acquired by another that didn’t share the same values on workday flexibility. The first thing they did was require people who were geographically located near one of the corporate offices, of which there were five at the time, to come into the office two days a week, just to be in the office. It didn’t matter if their teams were there or whether they would spend the whole day on Webex — management wanted to see bodies in chairs when they strolled through.

I immediately lost one of my favorite employees, who had been using her flexible schedule to help care for her husband following a serious illness. She would work from 6 a.m. to noon, take her husband to cardiac rehabilitation, then return after 3 p.m. to finish her day since it was easier to find an in-home caregiver to cover early morning and late afternoon than it was to find one to cover the full day and transport him to therapy. Of course, that meant she couldn’t come into the office two days per week, and the company was unwilling to accommodate her despite the fact that she supported teams that were all across the US and no one she worked directly would have been in the office.

I have so many other stories about what I’ve seen in my consulting travels, and so often when I give examples they fall into the category of “you can’t make this up.” It will be interesting to see what really happens with the remote work landscape over the next two years especially for technology and knowledge workers, like those of us in healthcare IT.

What’s the most egregious thing you’ve seen in a return to office strategy? Is there a way that your organization has done it well? Leave a comment or email me.

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