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transcript

We’re Going Back to the Office. Should We?

Over the past year, the white-collar workplace as we know it has changed drastically. And maybe it should stay that way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

jane coaston

Today on “The Argument,” is the office dead?

For millions of Americans who’ve been working from their homes, apartments, basements, or closets for the past year, there’s been a lot of talk about going back to the office and whether remote work is over. The past year has made a lot of us wonder — do we really need to return to our offices? Do we work better in an office? Are we happier or more productive? And most importantly, does working from home just work for us? I’m Jane Coaston, and I’ve been working from my apartment for more than a year now. Not only that, but I live in D.C., while most of my colleagues are in New York City. So I’m always remote from them. But we’re still getting stuff done, like the podcast you’re listening to right now. And so are millions of others who were forced to work remotely. And now some of them don’t want to go back. Today, my guests disagree about whether you need to go back to the office. Anne Helen Petersen is a journalist who studies work culture and burnout. She writes the newsletter, “Culture Study.” She also hasn’t worked in an office since 2017. Sean Bisceglia is the C.E.O. of Curion, a consumer insights company that’s trying to get people back in the office currently 50 percent of the time.

Thank you both so much for joining me. So we are all at our respective homes, which is actually a great way to start. Sean, I know that your company is currently operating at about 50 percent capacity for all employees. But you believe that employees should be back full-time if possible. Why?

sean bisceglia

Yes, so our policy is 50 percent of your time on a weekly basis needs to be spent in the office. That’s different than 50 percent capacity. So if you’re a 40-hour week person, please spend 20 hours a week in the office. I’m just really passionate about culture. And I think culture is really hard to do digitally. I think it’s really hard to replace some of those nuances and some of those looks you get or some of those stories you hear. But what I also think, not being together and being in kind of the Zoom world that we all have been in for the last year, and we’re not a highly creative organization. It’s not like we’re an ad agency or a creative shop. We do research. But what we miss when we’re not together is that ingenuity, that creativity, that bonding. We’ve hired about 130 people in the past nine months. And a lot of them are new to the work world. And how they learn is super important.

jane coaston

Anne, your view, I think, leans more on that individual choice and giving workers the right to choose how they would like to work. Why do you think or do you think it’s better to be working outside of the office?

anne helen petersen

I think that everyone has different styles that work best for them, right? And sometimes that means being around other people. Those people don’t have to be your co-workers. A lot of people are like, I miss people. I’m so lonely at home. But are you actually lonely for your co-workers, or are you lonely for someone to talk to while you’re eating lunch or to shoot the breeze with while you’re taking a break? And there’s so many ways to have people around you while you work, whether that’s in a coffee shop or a library, a coworking space at your friend’s table, right? And I think that one thing that we have done over the course of the last 100 years when it comes to the office is really have a very firm understanding of what office work should look like and where it should take place, e.g., the office. And some of that is arbitrary, especially as the tasks that we perform have become really untethered from the physical office.

sean bisceglia

Obviously, the pandemic was bad. I mean, it killed people. I get it. And we’re coming out of it. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. You said 100 years. I wrote down 80 years. So why does one year or even two years change the entire dynamic of the work culture? And I’m trying to figure it out. Is it extremes because people are lazy or people are selfish about their time? What’s the boogeyman of coming back to the office?

anne helen petersen

I think that a lot of people do want to have that time in the office, right, and want to have that flex period of, maybe I don’t come in on Wednesdays, or I work from 7:00 to 2:00 every single day, and then I go home. And what I see mostly from C.E.O.s who are pushing back, they’re like, no, we don’t want any flex time. We don’t want any flexibility. We want people under our eyes all the time to recreate that surveillance. And that’s the struggle.

sean bisceglia

It is. So Microsoft Research did a study, found 54 percent of the employees over — this is during the pandemic. 54 percent of the employees overwork. 39 percent feel exhausted. However, their productivity is through the roof. I’ve been asked by employees, why are you so passionate about bringing everybody back to work? I’m actually trying to get you to work less. I mean, I don’t know what your day’s like, but it’s back-to-back to Zoom, and then maybe you get outside. Maybe you look at the dog. Maybe you go to the kitchen and make lunch. And you have little, teeny breaks, but our productivity, we bill by the hour. It’s like a lawyer or an accounting firm, right? We saw the productivity and profit — profit — go through the roof because our employees were working so hard. So one of the arguments I say is, look, come back to work. You’re going to add commute time. You’re going to add different things. Maybe you come in late. Maybe you leave early. But it’s actually going to lower productivity, and that’s what we want. We want the burnout to stop. We’ve had five people resign in the last month because of different reasons. But if you kind of peel it back, it was burnout.

jane coaston

If you were making the case to me, the person who, in this instance, works for you, why I should go back to the office — because let’s say I worked through the pandemic. My productivity is amazing. I am the best employee that anyone has ever been. I’m doing great. I am making good money. And I actually am really enjoying working remotely. What’s your best argument for why I should return to the office?

sean bisceglia

OK, so I say, Jane, in your interview, Jane, I heard that you wanted to be president of the company. So in order to have that, we need to have you more interactive with people. I would say, if you want to stay at home for a couple of days, that’s fine. But why we want you here is that we think you’re really creative. We think you’re really smart. And unless we schedule a Zoom for you, we can’t get you to teach that to other people.

jane coaston

OK. I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of burnout. I think that burnout requires that at some point, you really liked that job. And now you’re just overwhelmed and over it. That’s a specific type of feeling about a specific type of job. But Anne, I know that you’ve thought about this a lot. What is burnout to you?

anne helen petersen

The World Health Organization defines burnout as something that is specifically linked to the workplace. And it’s in terms of overwork. And I think there are some connotations of losing that original passion. I don’t think it has to necessarily have to do with passion. So the way that I think about burnout is, there is no catharsis. There’s no end. There’s no recovery. You work really hard. And you keep working hard in every corner of your life. And that extends to parenting. And you never get a break, and you never recover. And you hit a wall, and you climb the wall, and you keep going.

sean bisceglia

Well, how am I going to ever beat that? She wrote a book on it. [LAUGHTER] Am I going to argue with her?

anne helen petersen

Well, no, but I talk a lot about millennial burnout, so I’m curious how you think about it.

sean bisceglia

Corporations, whether it’s me or really large ones, we didn’t know this was coming. We’re going to have to have training. Like, OK, this is how you work from home. This is how you don’t just have it all be consuming. And I’ve seen people get sick over this. And then it brings in a lot of issues. Do we need insurance for it? Do I have a liability for it? As a C.E.O., do I have a liability that you got burned out and now you can’t function.

jane coaston

Right, I know that for myself, when I worked remotely in previous jobs or now, I kind of feel like I am always working. My computer is always open. And then I might as well see what my computer is up to. To me, I did like that time of, I would walk home from the office, and I’d walk through a park. And I’d be like, yeah, it’s 6:15. Whoop, whoop. Work is over.

anne helen petersen

Yeah, totally.

jane coaston

And for a lot of people, there definitely is a, well, I might as well just be always on.

anne helen petersen

Right, totally. So many people I know who are not journalists go home, get their kids to bed, open up the computer, and then spend two hours dealing with their email because all day at the office was so busy and frantic and filled with meetings that they couldn’t attend to their email. So they’re actually doing more work. And there’s this work slippage that is a generalized American work problem. But yes, absolutely. During the pandemic, people worked so much. There was no ending, right? For me, I’m like, oh, it’s the weekend. What else am I going to do? Especially in the winter, there was nothing else to do but work. And that’s where you’re seeing a lot of these statistics about burnout and about people leaving their companies. But I do think that we are in a different moment as we continue to emerge from the pandemic in that there are other things to do. There are things to do at night. There are things to do on the weekend. And at the same time, the companies, we need to come up with better understandings of how to create guardrails against this idea that every time should be open for colonization by the work that we do.

sean bisceglia

One issue we found pre-pandemic, a lot of people can’t work from home, especially if you’re handy, you’re doing projects, you’re artistic. A lot of people, young, old, whatever, just have a hard time to have that discipline to work from home. I think it’d be really cool to understand what happened in the past year because everybody had to, right? They had to adjust. And I don’t know if they fully adjusted, or they just— maybe we didn’t know exactly what they were doing at home the whole time. But I think sometimes it takes a certain personality to be able to work from home or a certain discipline.

jane coaston

But you mentioned that you think that burnout can be prevented by coming into the office, by having those perceived boundary of you are at work, you are not at work. But I know that there are some people that you’ve worked with who have chosen to quit over coming back into the office.

sean bisceglia

We had this big bad boogeyman of coming back to work in July. Like, oh my gosh. And people really started internalizing it. What does that mean? And I’m really comfortable. And I don’t want to. And instead of talking to their supervisor or their boss, like, look, I have a problem, I don’t want to do it, they went and searched for another job. Or, frankly, recruiters were recruiting them, saying, hey, our work is 100 percent remote. And that was very appealing to people that were very worried about coming back to work. And oh, by the way, the people we did on exit interviews, like, why were you so scared about coming back to work, it wasn’t health reasons. It wasn’t that the pandemic, they might get the virus. It was like, no, I just like working from home. I like taking my kids to the soccer game. I like not being tethered to the commute. I like not being tethered to a desk. I like working at 9 o’clock at night. And what we have to do, as companies going forward, is, have more open minds about what does a workday look like. I think that’s something that we’re trying to figure out, is, how do we bring some life balance back and maintain along with still coming to the office for the core principles of ingenuity, bonding, learning for our employees.

anne helen petersen

Yeah, I think this is really important because the traditional workday for office workers, 9:00 to 5:00, which is actually oftentimes 9:00 to 6:00 or 8:00 to 5:00, is really still oriented around the idea that there is one person who works a full-time job and a full-time caregiver at home for people who have families, right? There is very little accounting for the fact that school doesn’t run those hours, right? School does not respect those boundaries. Kids’ needs and demands or our elders’ needs and demands don’t respect those boundaries. And there’s also so many things that people have to do over the course of the week, all of these little tasks that you have to fit into your day. And I have so many memories of taking the subway home at 6:15, getting home at 7:00, 7:15, needing to go to the bodega down the street to get something to try to cook, getting it on the stove at 8 o’clock, and then, oh, it’s 9 o’clock. Got to go to bed, right? There’s not time to do the things that you need to do, particularly I think for people who are having these hour long commutes in either direction. And what working from home, not necessarily every day but several days a week, does is it opens up the schedule to be flexible around your needs as a person, instead of you always bending your life around the needs of work.

jane coaston

And I know you haven’t worked in an office since 2017. Is there anything you miss about that, though, per the notes that Sean had about kind of having people that are close by, getting to have conversations with people about your work, having it be a little easier to get in touch? I think that’s something for me that I do kind of miss about being in a workspace. Is there anything that you miss about being in the office?

anne helen petersen

I do miss the chocolate covered pretzels that were readily available in my office. And I miss seeing people and having that camaraderie. But the thing is, is I could get that camaraderie from being in the office twice a week, from being in the office once a week. I think that the parts of it that people, when they talk about, we can’t do remote work, or we can’t do flexible work, we have to all be in the office, what they’re really talking about is a core number of hours for specific collaboration. And they’re expanding that desire, that need, onto we all must be in the office all the time. And I’m not saying that Sean is saying this at all. But there are people who have published various op-eds and that sort of thing about people going full-time back into the office, who oftentimes hold up this god of creative collaboration and the drive-by moment, where you come up with an innovative idea. And there was a great article last month in The Times by Claire Cain Miller about the paucity of evidence for those creative collaborations actually happening in office spaces. And then, also, offices can be incredibly exclusionary. All of those cues in terms of picking up on how someone looked at you across the room or even someone’s tone of voice, those are often neuro atypical people. They also can be really exclusionary for people who aren’t part of an office’s monoculture, which is oftentimes built around this very bourgeois masculine whiteness, depending.

jane coaston

Sean, you’ve mentioned previously that your company policy has led to mostly women resigning. And I know that last September, about 865,000 women left the U.S. workforce. And I think that a lot of that is because of that seeming lack of flexibility. The implication in so much of American work culture is, wouldn’t it be cool if you were always at work? Is that something you’re thinking about with your own work culture and a work culture in general for families and for parents?

sean bisceglia

Yeah, we don’t think it’s cool to be at the office. So, now, yes, 100 percent of the people who resigned have been women. I think it’s a little different, Jane, because all of them just went to another job that offered 100 percent remote possibility. We lost them because they didn’t communicate to their supervisor or even to me to say, look, I love this company. I want to stay. But here’s the issue. This is what I need. I think people just got really scared of the unknown, of coming back to the office. So some of these folks moved to Michigan. Some of them moved to California. They did that during Covid, right? They just didn’t want to come back. And that’s another thing. They went and relocated. When we said come back to the office, they thought that they had to go sell their house or get a van and move all their stuff back. And there was never a lot of communication. That was probably one of the biggest things that I think we could have done a better job at, is to open up that dialogue of what was important to folks.

anne helen petersen

Sean, can I ask you a question?

sean bisceglia

Mm-hmm.

anne helen petersen

What would you have done if someone who had moved to Michigan, if they were like, how can we make this work, and I can still be in Michigan?

sean bisceglia

Yeah. Oh, by the way, we’ve had a lot of people come back. I’ve had emails. Look, I love the company. I’m not moving back from Michigan. And what can we do about it? We’ll look at it, and let’s wait till January. Let’s look at it in January. So we kind of kick the can. That’s one strategy. The other strategy is, OK, can you be here for really important meetings? Could you come in once a month? If we fly you in here, we pay you for all the expenses, can you come in for once a month? Because we have this issue because if we’re encouraging everybody to come back 50 percent of the time, we have a lot of outliers. We have a lot of exceptions to it. We have to kind of balance that.

jane coaston

You mentioned you would ask people to fly in, and you would cover that, which sounds great. I like the idea of just rolling up once a month for a meeting and just being a total bad [BLEEP] coming in from California.

anne helen petersen

That’s what I used to do. I would come in from Montana, which is maybe not as cool as California. But I’d come in once a month.

jane coaston

No, no, no, Montana — still cool. There’s a financial cost to renting office space and to having a physical office. And there would be a financial cost, obviously, to flying people in or something like that. Sean, is that something that you think about? Because there’s part of me that’s like, oh, if we went 100 percent remote, wouldn’t that be so much cheaper for x business?

sean bisceglia

Jane, it is the biggest fear. So let’s just imagine this for a second. I have about 300,000 square feet around the country. We have five locations. We have nice beautiful corporate offices. We have five-year leases. And they all expire at different times, and they’re all stacked together. Do you think if I’m at 50 percent, I’m going to renew that lease? I’m not going to renew that lease. I might just completely go zero. I might go to 10 percent. And then what happens is if imagine all the businesses did that. And by the way, all the REITs that hold all these big office buildings in their portfolio, they’re paying interest on it, and now they’re not getting rent, they’re not going to be able to pay the interest, there’s billions and billions of dollars of real estate debt on these buildings in Manhattan to Chicago to L.A. And they’re sitting empty. So the management, the boards, the stockholders are not going to let them renew. So unless we have this huge economic growth, where we have Uber and WeWork, where everybody is coming in and is taking little space, all these micro companies are born and everybody needs office, by the way, why would they do that because they’re going to work at home? So I think there’s a macroeconomic issue to the behavior of these large corporations getting people back in the office. And maybe they’re hiding. I’m not hiding behind creativity, ingenuity, and culture. So I’m very worried, Jane, yes, about this, but nobody’s listening. So we’ll see what happens, you know.

anne helen petersen

What’s going to happen to cities is something that there are people sounding the alarms in terms of transportation, right, in terms of tax base, all these different things. You need to start planning for it now because I actually think the ship has sailed, right? These leases are going to come up. And if you don’t start planning for it now, companies are going to have to try to become competitive. Like yours, in a 50 percent occupancy, you’re going to seek out a different style of offense space. But there’s a ton of space that’s going to need to become something else if it’s going to remain profitable.

jane coaston

Something that I’ve been thinking about is that one of the challenges of remote work is that we are dealing with people on the internet. If someone tells you to your face in person, hey, I think that the thing you did or this thing, it didn’t work as well as I would have liked it to. Here’s what I think could have been done better. Let’s talk about that. That comes across way differently than just getting screamed at on Twitter or on social media. And then you get on Slack, and everyone is also angry. But they’re angry in a way where you can’t detect what their tone is. Do you think that if we work remotely more, we are more reliant on the forms of communication where tone and attitude are completely lost, and everything’s flattened?

anne helen petersen

Well, I think we have to get a lot better at them. And some people really are, right? Something that happened in my workplace when we adopted Slack, is managers had to start their messages with, no big deal, right? Or they’d start with— and I’ve seen this a lot now, too, is, please, whenever you get a second, no hurry at all on this, right? So setting the framework for the interaction before the ask comes. One thing that I always come back to is someone told me that what the pandemic is actually going to force people to do is, especially managers, is, it’s going to force them to manage, right? It’s going to force them to rethink the interactions that they’re having with the people that they manage, that it has to go deeper than just, like, I see you in the office, and I see the work that you’re doing. It’s hard work. But as Sean was saying, if we value culture in our workplaces, it is important work. And I think it will actually make people better managers overall. I will also just make a brief plug as an elder millennial for the value of the telephone call, which —

jane coaston

Whoa.

anne helen petersen

— gives you —

jane coaston

Whoa. That is a separate episode of “The Argument.”

anne helen petersen

But it gives you all of the dynamism, right, in terms of voice, tone, and that sort of thing, without the Zoom exhaustion and the fact that you have to stare at your face all day. So I’m a huge —

jane coaston

And hold it up to your ear, and it’s so tiring.

anne helen petersen

Huge proponent of the phone call. And you can go on walks while you’re on a phone call. It’s great.

sean bisceglia

I have a question for Anne, though. What I found with the pandemic and Covid is that everybody has just worked. We talked about it. Everybody just worked, worked, worked, worked. If everybody stayed in the same rhythm as we’re now with Zoom, and everybody works from home, never went back in the office, aren’t they just going to work more, and then — or am I missing something?

anne helen petersen

No, well, I think if we did continue to work the way that we did during the pandemic, that’s a huge problem. But part of the reason that people are burning out is they worked that way for a year. But for me, personally, now that I am able to go places because of Covid — I can go to the store or whatever. Before I did this podcast, I went and dropped off some books at the library. I went on a walk with my dogs. And I went to Target to make a return that I otherwise, if I was going to the office, that’s the sort of thing that would have been on my to-do list for months because I could never figure out a time that I could go make a return. So I’m able to arrange my day in a way that allows me to do concentrated batches of work, but also have a midday break to do things that either need to be done or that I want to be done.

sean bisceglia

Right, so let’s say you were on a salary. Should I be paying you for that? I mean —

anne helen petersen

Yes, absolutely.

sean bisceglia

I should be paying you for doing that?

anne helen petersen

If you’re doing the same amount of work, how does it change?

sean bisceglia

Well, I don’t know if you are. You might be doing six hours versus—

anne helen petersen

Well, this is it.

sean bisceglia

— eight hours.

anne helen petersen

And this is where you come — I mean, but if you’re producing the same amount of work, if the productivity levels are the same— I mean, a lot of waste is in the workday, especially at the office. There is a lot of clock watching. There is a lot of surfing the internet. There’s a lot of shooting the breeze, right? There is —

jane coaston

Those are the best times.

sean bisceglia

Yes. [LAUGHS]

anne helen petersen

Right, and my best time at home, instead of doing those things at the office, I’m going on a walk with my dogs, right? It’s something I want to be doing. [MUSIC PLAYING]

jane coaston

As we begin to emerge from the pandemic, work culture as many of us know it might never be the same. And so over the next three weeks, we’re going to be diving into what work could and should look like. We want to know more about who you are at work. How much of yourself do you bring to your job? Have you ever felt like you couldn’t be yourself at work? Tell me all about it in a voicemail by calling 347-915-4324. And we might play an excerpt of it on a future episode. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Anne, one thing that I’m thinking about is that the growth of remote work for some would not mean the growth of remote work for everyone. Because in order to do a lot of the work that I’m doing from my home right now means that someone sent me my computer. And the people who did that, God bless them. And people sent me office supplies. And there are people who will deliver me groceries. And there are people who will make it so that I can work from home and who will make it so that a lot of people can work remotely. Is there something that you’re thinking about how to make working remotely for whom it’s not available, how to make it still work for other people, too?

anne helen petersen

Yeah, I mean, this is all labor questions, right? And so —

jane coaston

Right, it’s all a class issue.

anne helen petersen

Right, well, it’s a class issue, but also labor protections. And so for office workers who have been historically very reticent to unionize, this is how people are advocating for better labor conditions, is saying, I want work to be different. Here are the ways that I want it to be different. And I think that sometimes we get in this position where we’re like, well, but this doesn’t work for other types of workers. So maybe we shouldn’t talk about it for office workers. But when we talk about specific health precautions and protections for people who are working in the fields right now in Washington state and are subject to smoke, those sorts of things, we’re not like, oh, we shouldn’t talk about this because this doesn’t apply to office workers, right? We should be very particular and strident, I think, when we talk about labor protections. But also, they are intertwining conversations, but also, they’re different in very meaningful ways. So what I tell people when they’re like, OK, if I’m really concerned about this in my own life, but I also care about the person who comes in and cleans my office, what should I do about this? Should I stop advocating for myself? Of course not. But also, how can you advocate for labor protections for people who are subcontractors, right? Which oftentimes are not unionized workforces for various reasons.

jane coaston

Right. Sean, Anne, to close this out, I want to hear, starting with you, Sean, what is your ideal vision for the future of the workplace? For me, it’s a space where I could be there or not be there. I mean, my ideal workspace would be if we could recreate the University of Michigan Law Library, but somehow have the University of Michigan Law Library be located about 15 minutes away from my apartment in Washington. So if we could get that worked out, oh, that would be fantastic. But I’m curious, Sean, what’s your ideal vision for the future of the workplace that you want to create?

sean bisceglia

One, I think it has to be a hybrid approach. I think it needs to be at work in the office with other people, whether or not it’s spontaneous learning, whether or not it’s picking up on those cues. I also think it should be measured by productivity. If we could come up with metrics or KPIs and said, Jane, we don’t care how many hours a week you need to work. We’re going to pay you this salary. But here are very clear things that you need to deliver. And you deliver them in the time that you need to deliver. Now, if we have an unreasonable request, obviously, all those have to be balanced out. And I would say, lastly, the future would be based on whether or not your early career or your late career or your middle career. Early learners, people learning, getting into the job force for the first time, I think they would have a real hard time working from home 100 percent. And we’re seeing that with college kids. The graduating class of last year and this year, they want to be in the office because, remember, their entire college career was ripped off. So now they’re like, well, wait, I want to join a company because I missed my last year of college. And I want to be with people.

jane coaston

Anne, what do you think? What is your ideal vision for the workplace of the future?

anne helen petersen

I think that it will be flexible. There will be spaces where we can collaborate with one another, with our co-workers. We will all have universal healthcare so we won’t be tethered to jobs unnecessarily. And we’ll work less because we’ll work better, right? Our productivity will stay high, but because we’re not dedicating every minute of our lives to work, the burnout will be less. And our performance will be better.

jane coaston

Hooray.

anne helen petersen

[LAUGHS] It’s my ideal.

jane coaston

Well, Anne, Sean, thank you so much for talking to me about work, remote work.

anne helen petersen

Yeah, it was a pleasure.

sean bisceglia

Well, thank you.

anne helen petersen

And thank you, Sean.

sean bisceglia

It was a pleasure.

anne helen petersen

This was so much fun.

sean bisceglia

Yes, Anne, it was fun. And I don’t agree with much of what you’re thinking, but I think it’s great we all can talk about it. I think this is what’s awesome. And I actually learned a few things, too. So I’m going to go get your book and pass it out to everybody about burnout.

anne helen petersen

Give it to your kids.

sean bisceglia

I’m going to give it to everybody in the company, I think. [MUSIC PLAYING]

jane coaston

Anne Helen Petersen is a journalist who studies work culture and burnout. She writes the newsletter, “Culture Study.” She also hasn’t worked in an office since 2017. And Sean Bisceglia is the C.E.O. of Curion, a consumer insights company that’s trying to get people back in the office currently 50 percent of the time.

We asked you to share your thoughts on returning to the office. And honestly, you’re just as divided as Anne and Sean.

voicemail

Hi, Jane. My name’s Aaron. Hi, my name is Michelle. Hi, this is Josh. Good morning. My name is Alfred. I live in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. I am in Boise, Idaho. I live in Washington, D.C. Right outside of Detroit, Michigan. Hi, Jane. This is Leah from Atlanta, Georgia. So I’ve been working remote for the past year. And I absolutely never would like to see another office again. I was hired during the pandemic. And I actually just left the company for another job because they were going back to the office full-time with no option for hybrid work. I don’t enjoy being in the office at all. I can complete my work without losing hours of my life each week to commuting to a job that has been proven to — You know, I can successfully do this from home. Besides the constant fear of catching Covid, my quality of life went up 100 percent in quarantine. I get probably twice the amount of sleep. I eat more consciously and healthfully. And the biggest change is that my blood pressure is the lowest it’s been in 15 years. I’ve actually gotten fitter during the pandemic just because I can rep out some pull ups. I can rep out some pushups during a meeting or between meetings. I can cook healthier food, as opposed to kind of having a groupthink of, we’re ordering sandwiches and cookies for the office or whatever. Since we’ve been back full-time, I am so happy. I just — I really realized, oh, I was in a little minor depression all by myself here. It’s been pretty awesome. So I was completely surprised by that reaction. I am a clinical psychologist here in Maine. And as a therapist, for me, the very essence of what I do is in personal relationships with people. That’s what heals in therapy. The reason I’m excited to go back to the office is because outside the office, I feel like it’s impossible to get to know people and to kind of do the politicking that’s necessary to advance in my career. I’ve never stopped working. I’m an attorney, and I’ve gone to my office every day since the Covid ordeal started. And it really hasn’t changed. I actually got into medical school this year. And I am so excited to go to school in person. I think a lot of the stories of people that enjoyed work from home are mostly 30 plus year olds who already have established friend groups and are probably married or have children. And I just think the pandemic was a lot different for people that are in a stage of establishing themselves. I’m excited to return back to work. I have an internship this summer. And the one thing that I think is really great about it is having to come back with all these adults and all these older people working with me. And I’m very interested and very eager to see how it turns out. You know, I wore heels every day to work. There was an attack on being a woman and constantly wearing wakeup and having to get my hair done as a woman of color, having to navigate respectability politics all day. So I feel much safer working at home. My husband and I have had twin babies since the pandemic started. And my work-life balance has dramatically shifted. And so I think especially as a new working mom, the ability to work remotely, I think, will be a dramatic shift in how we view women and their career trajectories. [MUSIC PLAYING]

jane coaston

I’m not racing to go back to the office full-time. But I appreciate hearing from people who disagree with me. So for the case for going in, I recommend the piece, “Why Some Companies Want Everyone Back in the Office,” published in May by CNN. You can also read more from Anne Helen Petersen in her piece, “Imagine your Flexible Office Work Future,” published in her newsletter in March. And listen to, “So What Happens to Work From Home Now?” on the Slate podcast, “What Next: TBD.” You can find links to all of these in our episode notes. “The Argument” is the production of New York Times Opinion. It’s produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez, and Vishakha Darbha; edited by Alison Bruzek and Paula Szuchman; with original music and sound design by Isaac Jones; mixing by Carol Sabouraud; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; and audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks this week to Kristin Lin.

You might be someone who has spent a majority of the past year working from home. A survey from October 2020 found 71 percent of American workers turned their apartments into office spaces. But starting this fall, companies are opening up their offices again. The C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley made it clear that its employees have to be back by September. Amazon is hoping for the same.

But is returning to in-office work the right move for everyone?

[You can listen to this episode of “The Argument” on Apple, Spotify or Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]

Over the next three weeks, we’re going to be focusing on what work could and should look like as we begin to emerge from the pandemic. This week, Jane Coaston is joined by Sean Bisceglia, the C.E.O. of Curion, a consumer insights company, and Anne Helen Petersen, the writer of the newsletter “Culture Study” and the author of “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation,” to debate the pros and cons of returning to the office.

(A full transcript of the episode will be available midday on the Times website.)

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Credit...Photograph by Haruka Sakaguchi for The New York Times

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“The Argument” is produced by Phoebe Lett, Elisa Gutierrez and Vishakha Darbha, and edited by Alison Bruzek and Paula Szuchman; fact-checking by Kate Sinclair; music and sound design by Isaac Jones; additional mixing by Carole Sabouraud; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin.

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