‘Out of Office’ with Anne Helen Petersen

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

NBCNews

News, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 August 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The pandemic has transformed the way work is done. For many, gone are the days of dressing up, commuting to an office, and working in-person five days a week. But with the broad availability of vaccines and boosters, as well as relaxed COVID guidelines, employers are increasingly encouraging employees to return to the office. Yet, not everyone wants to go back to the way things were. 87% of workers who have the chance to work flexibly take it, according to the American Opportunity Survey, conducted by McKinsey. Anne Helen Petersen is the author of four books including “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home,” which she co-wrote with Charlie Warzel. Petersen joins WITHpod to discuss why the future isn’t just about where we will work, but how. She also discusses the history of working from home, people returning to “ghost offices,” why reverting to pre-pandemic workplace norms could be problematic and more.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Some people still have not regularly gone back to the office.
0:04.0	You have people who have figured out how to make this work.
0:07.0	How are you going to convince them to change how they're doing things now?
0:14.0	Hello and welcome to Wise. It's happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
0:24.0	You know, I have been watching. I just finished the first season of the Apple TV show Severance,
0:29.0	which I highly recommend. Maybe you've seen it, maybe you hadn't.
0:32.0	It's one of those shows that has a big premise, capital P premise, at the core of it.
0:37.0	And the premise is there's a company that offers people in their employment this opportunity to get severed.
0:44.0	And what that means is there's a chip that's implanting your brain, which means that your non-work person,
0:50.0	like the non-work version of yourself, has no memories of what happens in work.
0:54.0	And then the work version of yourself has no memories of what happens outside.
0:59.0	You just remember work. And every day you show up at the office and you go down this elevator
1:04.0	and when you go down the elevator, you switch from one to the other.
1:07.0	In fact, in the show they call it the Audi and the Inny.
1:09.0	The Audi is the person who's out in the real world who doesn't remember work.
1:12.0	The Inny is the person who's in the office and doesn't remember the outside world.
1:16.0	Now, I think a show like that with a premise that sort of like looming can feel very over-determined and plotting,
1:21.0	but the show is fantastic and isn't that way at all. I think it's really brilliant.
1:26.0	But one of the things that's so interesting about watching the show in this moment
1:31.0	is that office culture, which is what in some ways the show is about, feels incredibly remote
1:37.0	because for I think a lot of people who are office workers, they're not in the office that much.
1:42.0	In fact, you know, the data backs us up.
	...

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