SPEAKER_10: This episode is one in a four-part series that we're calling The Future of... I like to say the dot dot dots. We'll be exploring how changes to the way we live, learn, work, and play may shape our health and well-being in years to come. Thanks to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting this episode. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. Learn more about them at RWJF.org. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And today I'm going to introduce you to my new least favorite word, res-im-er-tial. Here with the definition is producer Chris Perrupe.
SPEAKER_11: Res-im-er-tial, an adjective referring to a kind of office furniture. It's an awkward mashup of residential and commercial. Basically, res-im-er-tial furniture is designed for the workplace, but feels like it belongs in a living room. So think plush, comfy couches and coffee tables. And right now it is all the rage.
SPEAKER_06: Now res-im-er-tial design has been a pretty hot topic in the industry for the last, let's say three or four years or so.
SPEAKER_05: It's this idea of creating a more home-like atmosphere in a commercial setting.
SPEAKER_07: You don't feel a harsh edge on any of this chair, no matter how you're sitting in it.
SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
SPEAKER_07: A holistic standpoint, we were able to consider comfort into this chair.
SPEAKER_11: So why are we getting pitched these comfy wonder chairs for the office? Well, now offices have to compete with everywhere else. Remote work has been on the rise for a couple of years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics says 35% of American workers were at home in the early days of the pandemic. That's who we're talking about on the show today. And I have to acknowledge, these are the luckiest workers, the people who got to stay home through the worst of COVID. But many of these people, they aren't thrilled about the idea of going back to a physical office.
SPEAKER_10: A Gallup survey found that 30% of office workers never want to go back. Another 60% say they want to stay on a hybrid model, only going to the office a few days a week. A different study found more than half of middle income workers were thinking about switching jobs and that remote flexibility was a big part of their decision.
SPEAKER_11: Those numbers make it clear the office is at this inflection point. And that's why it makes a lot of sense office designers are promising a lot right now. They're promising this office of the future that's more comfortable and more pleasant and basically anything to make us go back.
SPEAKER_10: This is not the first time that designers have tried to fix the existential malaise of office workers with furniture. In fact, back in the 1960s, we had a lot of the same problems. White collar workers weren't happy. They didn't feel inspired or satisfied by the office. And designers pitched a suite of new furniture that promised to revolutionize their work.
SPEAKER_11: Unfortunately, it didn't quite go according to plan. In the early days, office workers were a small part of the workforce and offices were smaller too. Think a couple of clerks sitting in a room with roll top desks and heavy wooden chairs.
SPEAKER_10: But then came multinational corporations and paperwork and typewriters and iron frames for buildings and elevators. Business became big business and the office went through its first major shift. By 1960, office workers represented one third of the American workforce and they had moved into a new fleet of gleaming downtown skyscrapers.
SPEAKER_09: It was largely corridor offices. You had executive and managerial offices all around the edges. And then in the middle of the office space, a kind of sea of desks.
SPEAKER_11: That's Mikhil Saval. He's a Pennsylvania State Senator, which, okay, sure, big deal. But for our purposes, he's important because a couple of years ago, he wrote a definitive history of the office called Cubed. And he says the post-war office had very little privacy and a lot of noise.
SPEAKER_09: They sounded to a lot of people like factories. This is because there was constant typing going on. There was constant click and whir of accounting machines. And this all took place in the center of American offices in these typing and accounting pools.
SPEAKER_00: What gives back? You're getting promoted or getting fired? You're prepared to make a small wager? It's a bet.
SPEAKER_09: People are probably familiar with what American offices looked like in the 1950s from television or from movies. For example, the Billy Wilder film, The Apartment, which came out in 1960. In The Apartment, a personal favorite, Jack Lemmon plays a worker drone at an insurance
SPEAKER_11: company in Manhattan who spends all day grasping at the ultimate status symbol, an office with a door.
SPEAKER_07: Why don't we step into my office? It's something I want your opinion about anyhow. I have my own office now, actually. You may be interested to know that I am the second youngest executive in this company.
SPEAKER_00: The only one younger is a grandson of the chairman of the board.
SPEAKER_10: Having your own office was a huge relief because in the main typing pool, your job wasn't much fun.
SPEAKER_11: The space was cramped and noisy, but there was also a culture problem in white collar work. The office was supposed to be this kinder, gentler workplace than being on a factory floor, but factory thinking had infected white collar work, largely through a management strategy called Taylorism.
SPEAKER_09: It comes from the management theorist, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of scientific management, of efficiency experts finding the one best way to do a task and to do it at the least amount of time possible.
SPEAKER_11: Even if you worked for a bank or an insurance company, it could feel like you were a faceless part of an assembly line.
SPEAKER_10: The office of the 1950s was ripe for a shakeup, and that's where Robert Probst comes in.
SPEAKER_09: So Robert Probst was a kind of freelance designer from Colorado. I mean, almost a kind of freelance intellectual. He didn't really have any particular interest. He just wanted to make improvements to systems.
SPEAKER_11: Probst would write to local businesses like concrete suppliers or people who make playground equipment, and he would say, hey, I have no experience in your field, but I have a couple of ideas and you should pay me. He actually got quite a bit of work this way because Robert Probst was really convincing. If you watch old speeches from Probst, he comes across as a kind of abstract genius. Even if, I have to be honest, I don't really know what he's talking about.
SPEAKER_06: I'm sure everybody is belabored by this idea that we're suffering or we're impacted by serious rate of change, but it's really the change in the rate of change now that is causing really fundamental changes for us.
SPEAKER_10: In 1958, Probst went to the Aspen Design Conference where he met the president of the furniture company Herman Miller. Herman Miller was famous for its iconic Eames chairs and Noguchi tables, but the fancy furniture business wasn't a huge growth industry. Herman Miller wanted to expand its offerings.
SPEAKER_11: They brought Probst out to Michigan and gave him a pretty broad mandate. Basically, just come up with new stuff Herman Miller could produce. Every day, Probst would sit in his office and think, okay, what kind of products can we redesign? And we're talking about things way beyond the scope of what the company was already making. Here's Amy Osherman, chief archivist at Herman Miller.
SPEAKER_02: Looking at problems such as cattle branding or timber harvesting or my personal favorite, they were working a bit with Kimberly Clark on a better sanitary napkin.
SPEAKER_10: Probst was pitching all these blue sky ideas, but eventually he settled on something that seemed pretty obvious for a furniture company, office furniture.
SPEAKER_02: Probst noticed that the furniture that Herman Miller provided him with to outfit his own office weren't up to his standards. He thought it sucked.
SPEAKER_10: Around this time, the idea of the knowledge worker was becoming popular. This whole concept that many office workers weren't just drones. Accountants and copywriters and engineers, they needed a new kind of workplace for creative thinking.
SPEAKER_11: Probst had been reading about a new trend in German design called Bürolonschaft, or the office landscape, which said office layouts had to be thought about in this more flexible way, and that people shouldn't be sitting in the same place all the time. It called for some radical new office setups. Here's Jennifer Kaufman Buehler. She's a professor of design history at Purdue University.
SPEAKER_12: It was often described as chaotic, visually chaotic, because it was an open interior with no walls, really important to their concept.
SPEAKER_11: Probst had been feeling too static in his Herman Miller office, but now he was inspired to change it.
SPEAKER_10: He teamed up with a mid-century furniture designer named George Nelson, and together they devised a plan for the office of the future, one built around communication and movement. They called it the Action Office.
SPEAKER_11: The Action Office was a suite of furniture that included a couple of stations for each worker. There was a coffee table, and a semi-enclosed phone booth, and a bookshelf, and a standing desk, which I know that's common now, but it was pretty unique at the time. All of it was made with high quality materials, like cast aluminum and rosewood.
SPEAKER_10: The Action Office was designed around a couple of principles. One was the idea that workers get more done when they have to move around.
SPEAKER_09: That was what was the spirit behind Action Office. Maybe at some point you're standing working at your desk, maybe you need to move to a different setting to take a phone call, you're not sitting at one particular place doing the same thing over and over again.
SPEAKER_11: The second principle behind Action Office was that a small amount of clutter was actually a good thing. The Action Office didn't include a filing cabinet, but instead there was a roll-top desk that could hold all of your important papers, but not hide all of your important papers.
SPEAKER_10: Propes believe that if you file something away, you might as well throw it out. And that filing cabinets create unmanageable backlogs of information. This idea was rooted in Prope's very particular philosophy about the brain's capacity to retain information. The mind can grapple with seven things, plus or minus two.
SPEAKER_06: Some people can handle nine things at a time, some people only handle five. But if you try to manage information in more units than that, then you'll quickly boggle. This is the kind of phenomenon we see all the time with too many papers on your desk, or too many things happening at the same time.
SPEAKER_11: The third principle of the Action Office was workers should have a little bit of privacy, but not too much. The design is open, and workers are always right in the middle of the action. Each employee has their station, with their desk and their coffee table and their phone booth, but the stations aren't supposed to be walled off.
SPEAKER_10: In 1964, Robert Propes and George Nelson unveiled the Action Office to the public. They sold it as a new utopian vision of the workplace, complete with gorgeous high-end furniture and a layout that would make workers happier and more efficient. The Action Office wasn't just a set of furniture. It was a way of life.
SPEAKER_11: And yet… The Action Office was a bust. Workers just didn't get it, like, why should we spend all this money on fancy coffee tables and phone booths for secretaries and filing clerks? Even if your company wanted to buy the Action Office, the price tag was just too high.
SPEAKER_09: It requires a lot of space, and it's also fairly expensive. There were high quality materials, and this is really the influence of George Nelson. And as a result, it was widely admired, but not widely adopted.
SPEAKER_10: The Action Office was a commercial flop, but Robert Propes wasn't ready to give up on the idea. He went back to the drawing board and rethought his entire approach. And then he returned three years later with Action Office 2.
SPEAKER_00: You and I are today living in industry's finest hour, an age of hurry. Even in this super fast, smart, effective age, there are millions of people who still work in old fashioned offices and haven't stopped to realize they still work in old fashioned offices. Now we'd like you to think about Herman Miller's Action Office.
SPEAKER_11: Like many sequels, Action Office 2 was less interesting than the first one. Instead of aluminum and solid hardwood, the new designs featured lots of plastics and laminates, which brought the price way down, but the mid-century modernist furniture aesthetic, that was gone. And along with it, the designer, George Nelson. Here's Amy Osherman.
SPEAKER_02: Nelson got booted from the project because there was too much spice between him and Propes. They just straight up didn't like each other.
SPEAKER_10: Without Nelson in the mix, the new furniture kit looked a lot more conventional. There wasn't a phone booth or a coffee table. The standing desk became a normal high desk and the stool became a regular office chair.
SPEAKER_02: Charles Eames went on to deem Action Office 2 honest, ugly. So there was very much a big style and aesthetic difference between the heavy hitters of those times.
SPEAKER_11: There was one more big change. The Action Office 2 included lightweight, easy to install, fabric covered panels. They were really functional. The fabric muffled sound and you could move them around to create this sense of privacy.
SPEAKER_09: If at some point in the middle of your workday you needed to have an impromptu conference or workroom, you could then spread out or angle the three walls differently.
SPEAKER_11: Propes included very particular instructions on how to use them. In his mind, three panels should be hooked up to make a kind of half hexagon shape. It looked like a small amphitheater. But Propes also included a prophetic warning about the panels.
SPEAKER_10: Don't, absolutely do not take these panels and make them into a right angled box that encloses the employee. If you do that, the whole idea of open communication and teamwork goes right out the window. Propes was very clear about all this.
SPEAKER_02: He was out the gate prescribing the best ways to configure these panel systems that very clearly stated, do not enclose people.
SPEAKER_11: No boxes, no enclosures, just open lines of communication. This stuff is important. Well, despite all those warnings, I think you know where this is going. The Action Office 2 became the prototype for the cubicle.
SPEAKER_10: The new Action Office sold like a blockbuster. Herman Miller sales went up by $10 million after it was introduced and it spawned a series of knockoffs.
SPEAKER_11: And while most of these knockoffs had fabric walls, they weren't mobile as Propes had intended.
SPEAKER_10: The companies buying the Action Office and its imitators were not respecting the wishes of Robert Props. They started installing the fabric panels at right angles and making boxes and the workers started feeling hemmed in.
SPEAKER_09: It became clear that these three walls could very quickly become a box and you could cram as many workers as possible, as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible into as little space as possible.
SPEAKER_11: George Nelson was the designer booted off the Action Office project, and he was not happy with the Action Office 2 and all of its imitators. He wrote a critical memo in 1970 saying, one does not have to be an especially perceptive critic to realize that Action Office 2 is definitely not a system which produces an environment gratifying for people in general, but it is admirable for planners. Looking for ways of cramming in a maximum number of bodies.
SPEAKER_10: George Nelson was bitter, but he had a point. The Action Office was supposed to solve the problems of the open 50s style office, but now instead of loud offices with no privacy, people were becoming enclosed and trapped inside these giant fabric walls, which got smaller and smaller over time. Here's Jennifer Kaufman Buhler. By the 90s, you get this sort of image of the cubicle as a tool of isolation.
SPEAKER_12: There is this really interesting contradiction that happens that this is all created to facilitate communication and then the very thing that is meant to improve communication becomes a symbol of isolation. The depressing cubicle was a mirror for other trends in the white-collar workplace.
SPEAKER_11: The US went through a recession in the late 80s, and American businesses started quote trimming the fats and quote downsizing, which of course really just means they fired a lot of people.
SPEAKER_11: If the apartment is the defining office pop culture of the 50s, the cubicle era is captured by more depressing works of art, like Dilbert or the movie Office Space.
SPEAKER_04: So I was sitting in my cubicle today and I realized ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that's on the worst day of my life.
SPEAKER_09: It's just this fundamental protest against not just the setting of office work, but the kind of work that's being done in the way that people are being treated. So design in this sense, the cubicle, the hatred of the cubicle is really tied up with an overall sense that American work and workplaces are really callous and unfeeling places. I don't like my job and I don't think I'm going to go anymore.
SPEAKER_06: You're just not going to go?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: Won't you get fired?
SPEAKER_11: I don't know. Robert Probst lived long enough to see the rise of the cubicle. In 1997, he gave an interview to the New York Times where he called the new wave of cubicles monolithic insanity, but he didn't think his designs were the problem. I mean, I think he's super proud of everything that he accomplished as he should be.
SPEAKER_02: He's had like a really interesting career. But he said something. He said that the dark side of most organizations is that they're not intelligent or progressive. And he said, lots are run by craftspeople who can take the same kind of equipment and create hell holes.
SPEAKER_10: Probst defended the action office and his original designs. He offered these words of wisdom. One of the dumbest things you can do is sit in one space and let the world pass you by.
SPEAKER_11: By the early 2000s, the cubicle was on the way out. And it was replaced by a kind of modern open plan, which was popular with Silicon Valley. Like in the 50s, you saw workers sitting at long rows of connected desks, but there was a twist. Here's Alison Arieth, who writes about workplace design.
SPEAKER_08: In the era of like the dot com boom once, I would say that the absence of office furniture became the thing, right? I'm one of you. I don't need a corner office. Marcus Zuckerberg famously sits in the middle of all of his employees. He's just one of the guys, right? So having fancy furniture is not in your interest.
SPEAKER_10: The modern open plan had another big difference from the style of the 1950s. In the new layout, there aren't any noisy typewriters or loud telephone calls.
SPEAKER_09: You know, what's different about American offices now is that they're overwhelmingly quiet. You actually walk into an open office plan and they're deathly quiet. People with their headphones in, headphones become the new walls. Much like the cubicle, the modern open plan was promoted with utopian language.
SPEAKER_08: They said, oh my God, this is so amazing. We have all this collaborative collisions and spontaneous interactions because everyone's in here.
SPEAKER_11: Look, your boss is right there. Think of all the communicating you're going to do now that you're free of the tyranny of the cubicle. Well, the opposite has happened. Harvard Business School says in-person communication has actually dropped 70% at companies that shifted to this kind of open plan office. That's because, frankly, it's kind of awkward to talk to somebody when they have their headphones in and now we have tools like email and Slack. And besides, if you do want to talk to somebody, everybody in the office can hear you because at these companies, workers have very little personal space. So, you know, Facebook, when they were first emerging as a company, they bought the old
SPEAKER_08: Sun Microsystems building in Menlo Park and doubled the amount of people in the same office space. So they took square footage and doubled the amount of people in that square foot.
SPEAKER_10: Twelve years ago, offices had an average of 225 square feet per employee. By 2017, that number had dropped to 151 square feet. And it's even lower today.
SPEAKER_11: Two years ago, there was a pandemic. Maybe you heard about it. And millions of people made a very abrupt transition to work from home. This raised so many questions about how much we really need a physical office. Like maybe the next era is just a permanent shift to remote work, like the total death of office space. But the experts I spoke to, they don't think that's likely. Instead, many office workers have already gone back, even just for one or two days a week.
SPEAKER_10: So assuming that there's still a physical office, what is it going to look like?
SPEAKER_11: Last October, I attended Neocon, the world's largest office furniture expo. Okay, so I didn't actually go to Chicago where they hold it every year, but I did attend virtually and scrolling through all the exhibits, I noticed a couple of trends. One was design meant to address health and safety, you know, better ventilation, more space in the office for social distancing, stuff like that. I also saw lots of design ideas about improving the aesthetics of the office. Things like resumersal furniture, the soft couches and the nice wallpaper that make your office feel like a living room. I also noticed a couple of designers who were borrowing pretty liberally from the action process.
SPEAKER_01: These products are mobile, and they allow the users to move and create the ideal setup for their needs at hand, whether it be creating a private setting, or one that fosters collaboration.
SPEAKER_11: I even saw presentations about privacy pods, which, to my eyes looked an awful lot like cubicles.
SPEAKER_10: The cubicle may be poised for a comeback, but in a techie nightmare kind of way. Last year, Google announced plans to pilot a new kind of inflatable cubicle in their offices, a plastic wall that fills with air to create a makeshift privacy barrier if a worker needs to take a phone call.
SPEAKER_08: I know, it feels like an episode of Silicon Valley, right? That someone's just standing there waiting for the thing to blow up and it's just like taking a really long time.
SPEAKER_11: There's a couple of major problems with all of these design solutions for the office. One is how they ignore a lot of people. Most designers are focused exclusively on products for white collar workers, and they're just isn't as much interest in factory workers, or coffee shop baristas, or public school teachers, or all the other people we started calling essential workers two years ago.
SPEAKER_08: I've really looked very hard to find any amount of attention paid to workplaces that are not white collar workers' workspaces. And there just isn't any attention paid to them. I don't think anyone's thinking long and hard about, is this cashier's space comfortable? Is this bus driver's seat the safest it could be? And is it a comfortable place to sit all day?
SPEAKER_10: The other issue with design solutions for the office is that a new chair isn't going to fix problems that need to be addressed with policy. Problems like a lack of access to childcare, or stagnant wages that don't keep up with the plan, or the inflexibility of the eight-hour workday, which makes it impossible for lots of people to take care of their older parents or kids.
SPEAKER_11: But if you're a beleaguered corporate manager, it's hard to redesign the workweek or provide childcare. It's much easier to just bring in some new furniture and call it a day.
SPEAKER_12: There is this fantasy that we can change the physical environment of the office, and that will dramatically and radically change what's done in the office. And there is this real belief in the kind of power of design to transform the everyday functioning of the office. And I think just as the office could never have fixed all the problems, it also isn't really the sole cause of all those problems.
SPEAKER_11: Look, standing desks and ergonomic chairs, they're great. They can make your work life a lot better. But relying on nice furniture to fix the office, well, that's just rearranging Aeron chairs on the Titanic. We need to look at more long-term fixes.
SPEAKER_10: If the apartment represents the office of the fifties and office space is the nineties, then maybe the utopian office is represented by a little movie from the eighties called 9 to 5. 9 to 5 is such a good example.
SPEAKER_12: I always say it really is in many ways a movie about office design because of course at the start of the film you have this dreary bullpen, very monochromatic and everybody's miserable.
SPEAKER_11: Okay, so a spoiler alert for a movie that came out 42 years ago, but at the end of 9 to 5, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, and Lily Tomlin have kidnapped their horrible misogynist boss. And with him gone, they make some changes around the office, really good changes. Like they start a daycare center and a job sharing program so employees can work flexible hours.
SPEAKER_12: And then we find out about all of those changes in policy that have really transformed the culture of the workplace.
SPEAKER_03: Our daycare center has been open now for two weeks. It's been wonderfully successful. Really? Yes. Our working parents love it.
SPEAKER_11: In the movie, they changed around the furniture in the office, but the furniture didn't fix everything. The real fix is something we should have tried a long time ago. They put Dolly Parton in charge.
SPEAKER_10: You are not off the clock yet. We have more big thoughts on the future of work after this. Support for this four-part series exploring the future of health and well-being comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which is committed to improving health and health equity in the United States. Knowing that the healthy, equitable future that we all deserve won't simply arrive, RWJF is exploring how new technologies, scientific discoveries, cultural shifts, and unforeseen events like COVID, as we talk about in today's story, may shape our lives in years to come. Through these explorations, they're learning what it will take to build a future that provides every individual with a fair and just opportunity to thrive, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have. Learn more about their efforts at RWJF.org.
SPEAKER_10: So Chris, you've been working on this story about the future of offices since the summer, and a lot of things kind of have changed back and forth about what we think the future of the office might be. Oh, you think so?
SPEAKER_11: Really? I'm not sure I missed if that was the case. Yeah, there are two things that are really difficult about this story. One is the back and forth. As we're talking right now, we're at this point where lots of companies, despite Omicron, I guess maybe with the idea Omicron is starting to wane a little bit, are calling people back in. So we've heard Citibank, for example, a lot of financial companies are doing that. Some companies like Apple are saying, we want everybody to come back into the office, but we don't know when, we're just going to wait until things are a bit better, but we do want you to come back. And then lots of companies are saying, don't worry about it, you could work from home, including 99% invisible, I should say, unless you want me to get on a plane to Oakland tomorrow that I don't know about. Maybe that's something you'll tell me later. That is not the plan. But the other thing, aside from the way that everything is changing, is that people's individual situations are so different. I spoke to a dozen 99 PI listeners last fall about their experience with the office. And I had 12 very different stories. Some people love the commute because it gives them time to think and reflect. Some people hate the commute and never want it again. Some people want the camaraderie of the office. Other people realize they work much better at home. So that has been a really hard thing with this story is figuring out kind of all that balance.
SPEAKER_10: Yeah, yeah, I bet. So the story was mainly about the office and maybe the folly of thinking that furniture will change a whole lot when it comes to the office. But as we've been at home more, I think about my office situation at home. And this is a huge part of the future of the office is our conditions at home by ourselves or conditions made by our lonesome. Yeah, I didn't talk too much about remote work in the piece.
SPEAKER_11: So I did an interview with Anne Helen Peterson, who is a journalist who writes a newsletter called Culture Study. And she recently co-authored a book with her partner Charlie Worsell called Out of Office, which is about the future of remote work. So I just wanted to add that as our coda to the story today just to talk about remote work, which is not going to become the dominant form of work. I think we were saying the office is never going away. Yeah, well, the office isn't going away and probably remote work isn't going away.
SPEAKER_10: Like we found like a different sort of hybrid for what life is probably going to be like in the future.
SPEAKER_11: Okay, so here's my interview with Anne Helen Peterson, where we discussed the promise and some of the unintended consequences of remote work. Hi Anne. So we've had this great kind of proof of concept for working from home during the pandemic. And now there's a rush to go back to the office. Does it feel like a missed opportunity to make remote work a normal part of our work life?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I will say that there are a lot of companies that are and have been for the last, you know, I don't know, year and a half have been thinking about this in really interesting ways. But even a place like Microsoft, which before the pandemic was very much like, you must live in Seattle, you must come into the office, even though it's a horrendous commute every day to the suburbs. You know, like they had had previously been very, very stringent about allowing people to work from home and in most positions. And I think from everything that I've heard, they are completely reconsidering that position. And part of it too, is that they realize that they have to compete with other tech companies that are offering more flexible work scenarios. But then there are other companies like Apple right now that is apparently like a very big stickler in terms of like, we have this beautiful office and you will come into it.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I feel like the other side of that is I was reading about designers who believe the office has to be less homey now, like things like free snacks, it's keeping people in the office too long. And that maybe if we got rid of some of those amenities, it would be healthier for people because they're not staying at the office for 14, 16 hour work days. And I just thought that was really interesting.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I think that that is a gesture or an attempt to think about things like equity. Because if you have a group of people who are going to be working from home more in order to attend to caregiving responsibilities, I'm not talking about like, watching your kid and also working. I'm talking about my kid gets done with school at three, and someone needs to watch him for half an hour until he goes into after school care, you know, whatever those things are, a lot of those people are going to be parents, and a lot of them are going to be moms. And so we don't want to have this split workforce that's, you know, the secondary workforce is working from home. And then the primary workforce that is getting the face time with managers and executives are the ones that are in the office who don't have caregiving responsibilities, right? Like that's going to lead to a lot of inequities. And so they're trying to think about how can we make the office less appealing?
SPEAKER_11: I've been working remotely through all this. I understand you've been doing that too. There's a lot of things I find really healthy and satisfying about it. Like I don't miss commuting for two hours, which I used to do. But what are some of the unintended consequences of remote work for people who've had to make that switch?
SPEAKER_03: I think a lot of people have found just how slippery work is, right? It can ooze into all of the different crevices in our lives. And some people kept that at bay previously through the natural on and off ramps of commuting. So my work starts when I get into the office, or at least when I leave the house and start checking emails on my phone on the subway or whatever, and my work ends when I come back. But even most people, I think actually, that was not a very clear delineation. Like they still were checking emails when they got home. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of people were very anxious about their jobs and about demonstrating their commitment to their jobs. And that turned into habits of rollover, start working while you're still in bed, looking at your phone, work all day. And then at the end of the day, you don't have a social life because you're not seeing other people. So you keep working. So I think that there are habits that were put in place during that time, but we haven't really figured out how to create any sort of boundaries around where work is in our lives or any sort of buffer space. So when people say to me, I miss the commute, do they miss being packed on the F train for 45 minutes during rush hour? Do they miss being in stop and go traffic on a freeway in the rain? No, they don't miss that at all. What they miss is some sort of transition period. And you can make that transition period in your life, you really can, but it's there. And it can be going on a walk, it can be doing the crossword puzzle, it can be meditating or doing yoga. Like there are so many different things, depending on your personality that can function as this sort of buffer space.
SPEAKER_11: Yeah. I want to ask you about the physical consequences as well, because I'm talking to you today for my kitchen. You know, I'm sitting on a kitchen chair. I can't imagine that's good for my back. Like a lot of remote workers, I haven't invested in, you know, an Aeron chair or an ergonomic office chair, which can be pretty expensive and take up a lot of space. Has anybody been talking about this kind of physical consequence of people working from home and not having access to good office furniture? Yeah.
SPEAKER_03: And this is a really interesting question for companies that get rid of their leases, right? Are they going to take that money that they spend on the office and are they just going to put that towards their bottom line? Or are they going to say, we're going to take a chunk of this money and we're going to direct it towards our employees to outfit their home offices. Now in my situation, I have a really small home. I don't have a place for an Aeron chair unless I wanted to put it at like my kitchen table. Do you know what I mean? Like it would be a little bit obtrusive to have an Aeron chair at my kitchen table. And so it's something I've been thinking about in terms of, and I think a lot of people who live in smaller, smaller spaces have been thinking about this as well. Like what are our solutions? And this is where I'm reminded of the fact that like working in a flexible style does not mean forever working in your own space. And this is what I say to people who say, I'm so lonely working from home as well, is that this is not the future, right? The future is not working during a pandemic where you can't be around other people or where it's not as safe to be around other people. The future is going to be tons and tons of coworking spaces that will have good chairs. That won't hurt our backs. It'll be working at other people's homes. It will be working at libraries and coffee shops. Like there'll be all sorts of configurations that we can think of. But that I think is like the biggest thing to remember that whatever we're doing now is not what we have to be doing in the near future.
SPEAKER_11: I mean, it feels like there is a lot of promise to remote work for improving work life for a lot of people. But something we're also seeing is this divide between the people who can work remotely and the people who have to physically go in for their job, like high school teachers and people who work in hospitals and most of the people in the workforce, actually. Do you think that divide has grown worse during the pandemic? And where do you think that's going?
SPEAKER_03: It's a really important question. I think that we are slowly figuring out which jobs do demand presence. There are some companies that I think are forcing people to go into the office for very hierarchical reasons. A lot of law firms during the height of the pandemic, all the lawyers stayed at home, but they made paralegals go into the office. And that is just hierarchy in place. That is just trying to say, we can control where you go. And we think that you probably do better work if you are in an office. But it has little connection to the necessity to be in an office. So that's part of the question is that I do think that there are some jobs that need to be reconsidered in terms of presence. But when we think more largely about what we generally consider essential workers, which are people who had to go into the office or into a workspace every day, the last few years is evidence that we've treated them as inessential and disposable in so many different ways. And this is true of whether someone's a health care worker or a teacher. And I think a lot of those workers are incredibly, rightfully frustrated with people who have no understanding of the sort of risks that they undertook every single day in order to continue to make society function. And moving forward, unless we address some of these things, I think that we have to start thinking about these questions in terms of actually demonstrating that the work that essential workers do is essential. And this means pay, this means support, this means paid sick leave, like all sorts of different components that make it more possible and sustainable for people doing this work to keep doing it. Otherwise we're going to see the continued mass resignation from a lot of these fields where people feel continuously undervalued in their day-to-day jobs.
SPEAKER_11: And thank you so much for talking to us.
SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much.
SPEAKER_10: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, edited by our executive producer Delaney Hall, music by Swan Riau, sound mix by Amita Ganatra, fact checking by Francis Carr Jr. Kurt Kohlstedt is our digital director. The rest of the team includes Vivien Ley, Joe Rosenberg, Christopher Johnson, Emmett Fitzgerald, Loshma Dawn, Jason De Leon, Martine Gonzalez, Sophia Klatsker, and me, Roman Mars. Special thanks this week to Mark Gruther at the Henry Ford Museum, Amy Ochsherman for providing access to the Herman Miller archives and to all the 99PI listeners who spoke to us about their experiences with the office. It really helped us shape this story. Thank you so much. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love as well as every past episode of 99PI dot org.
SPEAKER_10: Thanks again to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for their underwriting support of this special episode. You can find an eye out for each episode in this four-part series, The Future of... The next one will be looking at broadband communication as an essential public utility. All the episodes will be appearing in the 99PI feed over the next few months. If you like thinking about the future of things and have a hunch about what it will take to build an equitable future, share it at shareyourhunch.org. I'm submitting my own hunch that comes to me from all the years of doing the Con Law podcast with Elizabeth Jo, so I'm going to shareyourhunch.org and selecting the prompt, I have a hunch. I have a hunch that different states in the US will continue to diverge when it comes to basic rights and the notion of federalism and state sovereignty will become more and more hallmark of political progressives. That's kind of a heady one, but it's what's been on my mind. Check out other hunches and submit your own hunch at shareyourhunch.org.
