Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home QUOTES

1 " A lot of us have only the faintest traces of those childhood and early adult activities in our lives - what we might dare call hobbies. They largely exist as conversational markers and rhetorical placeholders of who we once were. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

2 " Sublimating your desire for activities that don't involve your children does not make you a more impressive parent; it just makes you a more exhausted and resentful one. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

3 " When we work all the time, we volunteer less, we spend less time hanging out with people who are and aren't like us. We might love the place that we live, but we don't manifest that affection through actual involvement.
Flexible work, done right, means working less and directing far more time, investment, and intention into the greater community. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

4 " Once you've established a baseline, you need to get more granular and detailed in your conception of diversity. Too often executives take the wrong approach here and begin to try to "collect" an employee from every race. Instead, try the following questions: Is everyone in management able-bodied? Do you have a mix of parents and nonparents? Straight parents and LGBTQ+ parents? Is the majority of your workforce from one generation? What percentage graduated from Ivy League schools? From HBCUs? Maybe you've upped the number of women in the C-suite? But are all of those women white? "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

5 " This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

6 " Increased efficiency means more of the most precious commodity: time. But time for what, exactly? Usually, to do more work. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

7 " It’s no surprise that people who thrive in the office are almost always the same people who have accumulated or were raised with a lot of identity-related privilege outside it. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

8 " One of the refrains of the current moment is “I don’t know how to make you care about other people.” And one of the most straightforward solutions could be giving people the time and mental freedom to actually care about things that aren’t themselves and their immediate families. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

9 " If we shift our focus from relentless productivity, we may collectively rethink our societal metrics for success. A society obsessed with shareholder value, GDP, and corporate wealth creation will value and reward those who drive those metrics upward: bankers, venture capitalists, day traders. A society obsessed with quality of life, care, and societal health values and rewards a very different set of people. Before and during the pandemic, our most “essential” workers struggled to receive equitable pay and adequate protections, precisely because their work wasn’t valued. But what if it was? And what if one of the key steps to getting there was for nonessential workers (like us!) to change the way we see ourselves? "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

10 " We don't work from home because work is what matters most. We work from home to free ourselves to focus on what actually does. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

11 " Efficiency and long hours might seem at cross-purposes, but they’re the twin pillars of the ideal flexible worker: obsessed with productivity, but instead of trading that productivity for less work, they work all the time. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

12 " Life at a flexible company might be unstable, with ever-shifting demands, goals, and expectations for future pay and benefits. But successful workers were the ones who could roll with it: make themselves flexible and remain mostly upbeat. The impetus wasn’t on the company to provide stability but on the workers to amend their attitudes toward the absence of it. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

13 " Boundaries can, theoretically, work, but only for a privileged subset of your organization. They’re simply not a sustainable option for the vast majority of workers, especially those who aren’t in senior positions, who are women, who are people of color, or who are disabled. For those groups, attempting to maintain them can lead to an office reputation as difficult, aloof, unresponsive, or the dreaded “such a millennial” or “not a team player.” It might mean getting passed over for promotions or, eventually, getting fired. You can’t 4-Hour Workweek your way out of this problem. You need something structural. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

14 " In America, particularly in non-unionized workplaces, this sort of chronic understaffing acquires a logic all its own. If you can stand to lose employee weight, you should; if you don’t, you’re leaving profits on the table. Appropriately staffing isn’t a way to create a better work environment; it’s “bloat.” Workplaces attempt to counter the negative effects of understaffing with professional development, bonuses, perks, snacks, therapy dogs, subsidized gym memberships, swag, happy hours, access to meditation apps; the list is truly endless. One HR person told us that she was always amazed that employees complained about stress and overwork but then never took advantage of the perks. It makes sense, though. They don’t have the time. What would really make their lives better isn’t a meditation app, but adding a few more employees without also adding the expectation of more work. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

15 " As office work began to expand over the course of the twentieth century, workers were sold on promises of comfort and satisfaction. Instead of toiling on a factory room floor, welding the same joint over and over again, you could sit in an office, filing the same report over and over again. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

16 " We can understand that if companies actually want to cultivate that ever-alluring “good” company culture, they have to rethink not just the amenities and office space they’re providing their employees but the entire style of work, the whole ethos of optimization and presentism. Doing so will demand authentically embracing flexibility, as we discussed in the last chapter. But it will also mean reconsidering core values beyond “growth” and “scale,” and understanding that you cannot compel or surveil your way to sustained, quality productivity. Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

17 " When you conceptualize diversity as something you add onto an existing monoculture, chances are high those employees will always feel as if they were somehow on the outside of it. And when you treat DEI as a module to complete, you can blind yourself to the way your company fails to integrate its ethos into basic, day-to-day operations. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

18 " Getting rid of the monoculture isn’t just about hiring or promoting people. It’s about figuring out how to organizationally shift the locus of power and control away from those who’ve had it, without question, for so long. This is, in a sense, a radical change when it comes to power dynamics inside companies, and the process will likely create some sort of tension. But it’s wrong to think of these changes one-dimensionally—as a power grab, or an overthrow of an old regime. That kind of thinking is zero-sum, destined to fail, and not how inclusion actually works. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

19 " Organizations of every size and shape are always trying to figure out the most desirable, most effective perks their budgets allow, when the easiest one is right there in front of them. They can give their employees the immeasurable gift of a schedule and flexibility that will permit them a world away from work and lift the psychological burden of that second family from their shoulders.

A healthy work culture creates the circumstances for all employees to do their very best work. But a sustainable, resilient one understands and eagerly invites them to have lives outside it. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

20 " This was, and remains, the dystopian reality underlying the redesign and automation of the office. Its mandate is never “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.” It is always “You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiently, so you must now do more tasks, for the same pay. "

― , Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home