Reading "Out of Office" Will Make You Think Bigger About Flexible Work
I’m a fan of Charlie Warzel’s writing and am a subscriber to his Galaxy Brain newsletter. When I learned he was co-authoring a book on remote work, I had to get it.
The book ended up not being what I expected at all. And that’s okay.
Out of Office does talk about remote work but not in the same way that a book like Remote does (another book I recommend!).
Out of Office is not a best practices book on remote work nor does it get in the weeds on specific ways to be more productive in a virtual environment. At least not explicitly.
This book looks beyond that. Warzel and co-author Anne Helen Petersen look at how work flexibility - while a good thing - has also been used to take advantage of people. Examples of how some companies are more intentional with being a distributed workforce rather than trying to force-fit an office culture from your house.
My favorite chapter was the one on “Community.” If you read nothing else in this book, that chapter alone was worth the price of admission to me.
GitLab, Employee READMEs and Better Working Relationships
If you are a developer or at least work tangentially to software development, you are familiar with a README file. While it’s associated with software, GitLab took it a step further and had their remote employees (which is all of them) create their own personal README files. This allows you to learn more about how that employee works best, communicates best and will receive information best from you when needed. It may sound like a bottleneck and a time suck but level-setting communication style early may be more upfront effort but save a LOT of time in the long term.
Darren Murph, GitLab’s head of remote, says this about the README files each employee has on themselves:
“If somebody is telling you when they’ll be most receptive to your offer or idea, what they’re doing is giving you advice that makes you better at your job. So many of us don’t communicate, and we end up ultimately failing because of it. We waste so much of our own time talking to people when they can’t hear us. Even if you don’t have an altruistic bone in your body, it’s a better, more efficient way to do business.”
Murph also notes:
“If I ask you to take twenty minutes before a meeting to read my README, that’s a short term sacrifice that will pay dividends over time as our working relationship deepens over the weeks and months and years.”
While GitLab’s approach may not be ideal for everyone, it does highlight the challenge (and often inefficiencies) of poor communication.
Think Long Term and Defining Hard Work
Have you ever felt like you’re on a treadmill, working like crazy and not really moving the needle in any meaningful way? If you said no, you’re either a liar or have lived quite a charmed life.
This book addresses that well. In the beginning, it talks about management and culture. Management is often something thrust on a person without real training. While you can have a visionary leader and positive momentum at the top of the organization, it’s the employee’s direct manager that can actually burn them out. Most manager’s try to use a cookie cutter approach to how they work with everyone on their team - and it doesn’t work. Management is hard work! While this has always been a challenge in corporations, the book points out how the pandemic exacerbated things.
Take, for example, maintaining anything approaching work-life balance during the pandemic. A skilled manager will approach each remote employee differently. They’ll attempt to understand their employee’s individual needs: how they work best away from the office, what stresses and pressures they have in their lives, and how to work around them. They’ll offer trust and space or attention and guidance, depending on the employee’s needs. In short, they’ll actively, dynamically manage.
Remote Work’s Larger Community Impact
When you think of remote work, an image of someone staying in their pajamas tethered to a laptop and never really leaving their homes. While that may have been true in parts of the pandemic when businesses were closed and shelter-in-place ordinances were in effect, it’s not reality. Or at least it shouldn’t be.
Much of the focus on remote work involves optimizing home office setups, visions of less congestion on highways and less road rage. All of these are good things in my opinion! Not having a daily commute in Atlanta is a luxury that I don’t take for granted. The authors argue that while these are good things, a broader cultural shift to remote work requires broader civic planning.
What happens to those restaurants or coffee shops that relied on foot traffic from office workers? What happens when they aren’t around anymore? How does this affect things like mass transit? The book interviews Cali Williams Yost, CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group who has been advising companies on plans for a flex workforce.
“It becomes this reinforcing downturn,” Yost said. “And no one’s committed to figuring it out. There’s just a total lack of imagination. If you own a corporate office, you need to be calling up the transit people and saying, we see the data, we are seeing the research, this is going to be a new reality. So we need to partner with you: How can we build a compelling vision of what’s coming?”
Leading designers the past decade or so have built campuses for companies like Google and Facebook to make offices more like cities. Now, faced with this new reality, the book talks about how they’re flipping that idea on its head: instead of the office as a city, the city as an office?
Out of Office shows how this shift to a more remote culture is mostly catching people who own companies and office space on their heels. However, I am optimistic. I think it’s going to be a great time for urban planning. How can we redesign cities to not just be a single-stop destination but more of a lifestyle environment? How can companies play a part in not creating cube farms but using their office spaces to accommodate more needs? I’m already seeing Atlanta take some steps in that direction in small ways that are encouraging.
It’s going to be bumpy and there will probably be a bit more urban decline before we see a positive upswing. But I’m playing the long game and think there’s a lot of upside for urban development and using urban planning to better support work/life integration rather than balance.
This Book Is Great Primer to Future-Proof Your Approach to Work
The authors cover everything from work technology, company culture, community impact and our history of larger companies cynically using flexibility as a way to cut benefits for employees and not properly compensate for their bottom line. If you’re looking for a book to learn how to be more productive from your home office, there are better books for that. Honestly, there are probably too many books about that.
If you’re looking for ways to think differently about managing a team remotely and designing your life around the new realities of work, this is a fantastic resource. We’re in the midst of a big cultural reset in a lot of ways and how we work is a big brunt of that. Even if you don’t like it, you have to prepare for it and make the best of it.
Reading Out Of Office is a great first step in re-thinking our relationship to work moving forward.