Charlie Warzel, an author and Atlantic newsletter writer, made the switch from in-person to remote work in 2017, years before the pandemic hit. Soon, he found himself getting cold sweats, watching Netflix at the end of the day, burned out and unable to ever fully unplug as the boundary between work and life blurred.
Warzel joined Boston Public Radio to talk about the issues with modern work, what improvements could help remote workers, and his new book, “Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home,” co-authored with his partner Anne Helen Petersen.
Warzel believes that the state of work in the United States is fundamentally broken, allowing work to creep into every aspect of our lives. “Even the technologies that claim to liberate us and make us more productive — that's supposed to free up more time to do things that we want to do or care about, or what we value — instead it frees up more time for us to then fill with more work,” he explained.
Another issue comes from middle managers. “Most middle managers aren’t trained very well,” he said. “They're promoted because they were good at their job and sort of asked to take on a role of leadership and maybe they aren't even skilled in that way. They're not empathetic, they don't even know the job that they're supposed to be doing.”
With remote work, managers have to work a lot harder to have healthy communication with the employees they oversee. “It forces you to be more intentional,” Warzel said. “You have to call people and ask them how they're doing. You have to sort of treat them more like humans instead of cogs in a machine or input for productivity.”
Warzel emphasized that young people starting out their careers during the pandemic are particularly vulnerable, and lack opportunities for mentorship and to learn informal rules of the workplace. “They said that they were very unmoored,” he said. “They felt that they didn't know what the organization was or what their job was, and they expressed a lot of concern.”
In their book, Warzel and Petersen call for mentors for young people, increased flexibility, fewer meetings, management training and a variety of other fixes they believe will allow people to plan work around their life, as opposed to the other way around.
However, they recognize that a lot of these changes cannot come without structural intervention as well. “None of this stuff works without larger policies,” Warzel asid. “People need to feel like their lives are not so precarious, they have a little more of a safety net.”
Despite the many problems with the state of work, Warzel believes the pandemic brought an opportunity to make changes for the better, and enabled workers to ask for more.
“The office is sort of a bully in a lot of ways,” he said. “For years, workers had been demanding that kind of flexibility and then told, ‘No, no, no, if we leave the office, everything's gonna fall apart.’ Well, that's BS. And so now I think workers are questioning, ‘Well, what else? What else was a lie or a convenient fib told by my employer because that's what they wanted from me?”
Charlie Warzel is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and the author of Galaxy Brain, a newsletter about technology, politics and culture. He co-authored "Out of Office" with Anne Helen Petersen.
