WLP383 All the World's a Workplace season kick off: Work is location agnostic. People are not.
An introduction (or more of a taster) to the season on All the World’s a Workplace, which is in the publishing phase. I (Pilar) celebrate finishing the book and realise half-way through the recording that while the work is location agnostic, the people are not. (It took me over a decade to articulate this!)
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Below is a polished transcript, in case you prefer to read than listen. For listening, you can press PLAY above, or listen to it in your favourite podcast app.
Hello and welcome to the 21st Century Work Life Podcast. My name is Pilar Orti, and this show — I think I'm going right back to the original tagline from 2014 — is a show about how the world of work, and our attitudes to work, are changing. Of course, if you've listened before, you know the focus is very much on remote work, but I wanted to pull back and bring that tagline back. Because our attitudes to work are also changing, and the mindset around us — sometimes in ways I'm really happy about, and sometimes in ways that make me think, really?
Today is an episode where I talk to you about my book, which might be out by the time this goes out, or maybe not. I'm recording it because I felt like recording it right now. The book is called All the World's a Workplace, and the subtitle is Rediscovering Remote Work's Humanity Through Shakespeare's Dilemmas. I hope you like the subtitle — it took us a while to get to it. It's being published by Blue Goat Books. Right now, as I'm recording, I've sent off the last of my changes, the big ones. And that's it. That's why I wanted to do this episode: to celebrate that. For me, it's done. Now comes another part of the project, which is getting it out to you and talking about it. If you know of any podcasts that might want guests talking about remote work, the future of work, management and leadership, or writing, then get in touch. Or even better, if you know the hosts, let them know I'm available.
Today, what I wanted to do is talk through some of the things I've written about in the book. I don't know how much detail I'll go into on each one, because what I'd love to do — it might happen, might not — is have a short season of episodes where I touch on each chapter and build on what I wrote.
If you've been following the show, you'll know I've had to cut a lot of words as we've gone along — even in the editing, not just the creating. I've also changed my mind on some things through the writing of the book. That's why it's so wonderful. And there's still so much news around remote work, in all kinds of ways. There's the Remote Research Institute, if I remember the name correctly, which I think is an American venture in partnership with the LSE, the London School of Economics. I'm really delighted they've set up. That's something I slipped into the last draft, because it's part of the last chapter, where I encourage you to take action. One of the things I say is: keep an eye on these people. Because we're still — and it's fine, it's just how we work, I work like this a lot of the time too — we're still hearing "this is being done," when what we really want to be able to say is "this is being done. Fact." For a lot of things, we still don't have enough proper research about what works and what doesn't when people are away from each other, in this culture, in this type of team.
We've got to the point where we have to be very specific about the context we're talking about: what kind of individual, what kind of team, what kind of working processes can or cannot be supported by remote work, and when being in the office together works better — for what kind of work, for what kind of team. This is the problem. This is why the book is so long. As some hybrid arrangements change, we've got to remember that what suits one person doesn't suit another. We know this, but sometimes we forget it when we're just talking about location. As I was writing the book, I was trying to find research to support one of my thoughts, and research to support something different. Sometimes I was finding it, and sometimes I was thinking, oh, wow, that's interesting.
And to really understand that we went through a huge transition — a lot of organisations, and maybe just individuals too. You go from abandoning one location to moving to another, and that is a big change. Like all change that's imposed on us, it affects our sense of identity, it affects our sense of belonging — quite apart from all the cognitive effort it takes. It's really important to understand that we're being asked to change from one location to another. And it's not just about location.
I was speaking to someone yesterday, and they said, well, what is it that home workers lose so much when they go back into the office? And I thought, well, they lose control over their environment. Again, something that's quite obvious in All the World's a Workplace: location matters. It does. But it matters in many different ways to different people.
Just to give you an idea of how important I think this is: the first section of the book is about collaboration practices. We talk about online meetings, asynchronous communication, team transitions, technology, loneliness, visible teamwork, and leadership. The second part — Act Two — is about working from home, hybrid arrangements between home and the office, the office itself, and co-working. Because these locations matter. They matter a lot. Oh, I wish I'd thought of this earlier. Editors, if you're listening — Mike and Andrew — please, can I put it back in? Or maybe it's there already, I don't know.
[6:27] The work is location agnostic. The people are not. A lot of the time, when we talk about remote work, we forget that the work doesn't exist without the people — and the people are now at the centre of our work. I think this is one thing that has really changed. Sometimes it's more prominent than at others, and for some people it hasn't changed and still isn't acknowledged: that work is such an important part of building the individual in society. If the work really supports the individual, then the individual is happier, then society is happier, and so on. Unfortunately — and you might not hear me say this often, but coming from a privileged position I can say it — there are lots of jobs that won't bring satisfaction, maybe because of the location they have to be done in, or the circumstances, and sometimes because of the tasks themselves, which are thankless and often not thanked. But, going back to location again: location absolutely matters. And sometimes what I'm hearing — and this is anecdotal, because I'm not even going to listen to the news, I'll tell you why in a second; there's a piece of research that says in the UK at least there's not that much going back to the office completely — anecdotally, a lot of the decisions are about bringing people in more days, or full-time, are being made by people who are very comfortable there and who can't see the drawbacks. They understand why people don't want to commute. They understand people might want to do some personal things during the day, so they want to work from home with a bit of flexibility. They understand that. But I don't think they always understand just how much the office had become the place by default — the place everyone had no choice but to be. It's now very difficult for people to understand why they're being made to be there, and the reasons sometimes aren't that clear. Anecdotally, I've heard: no, it's just the best place, because A, B, C. Okay — for you.
But I've seen, and you'll have seen — you might even be one of these people — teams and organisations thriving without an office. You've probably got a hybrid arrangement where you are, and you're loving it, and the work is just as good, even better. People are maybe happier, or the same. Of course, not everyone's always happy. But we're coming from this narrative of "no, no, no, of course the office is the best place." Well, it isn't, necessarily. And we're forgetting sometimes that maybe some of the work looks like it could be done better in the office — but if you're going to lose the person eventually, then you've got to make a decision. And that's fine.
[9:23] The other thing — and this isn't even a conclusion from writing the book, I came to it very, very early on, when hybrid first started to be a word, and a lot of you will agree — is that hopefully we'll go through this transition: having worked from home, having been told to come back one day, two days, three days, having negotiated these new policies, and then leadership changing their mind as we go along. Once that's ironed out, once promises aren't broken any more — or all the promises have been broken already — it's almost like a reset button for businesses. Then you decide. "We are going to be a five-days-in-the-office business." If that's what you want, and you're leading this company, and that's how you and your leadership team work best... Some of the leadership team — because we always talk as if all leadership teams are against remote work, and that's not true, because they're also people, so there'll be diversity there — but anyway, if there's been an agreement at leadership level that this is a place where you come to work and we're all together five days a week, you buy into that. Like everything, when you go for a job, you know the conditions, and then you can decide whether it's for you or not. Same with fully remote. There might be some people who are stuck at the moment in fully remote jobs, because the company they were part of when they joined decided to let go of its premises. Same story. Maybe they're not happy, maybe it's really crushed their world. Well, from then on, remote companies that set up as fully remote hopefully won't be ashamed to say so, and will be very open — because now we've all accepted that it works well, haven't we? — and they can say: no, this is how we operate, we don't have an office, our policy around co-working stipends is this, and this is what we do to support you to work from home. Or: we're sorry, we can't support you to work from home, and the conditions of the contract are these.
And we take jobs. Sometimes we're happier, sometimes we're not. Sometimes the conditions aren't as good as we'd hope. And then the hybrid thing — please, with the hybrid thing — we know this already: as long as we're clear about what hybrid means. It's not just about location. It's about what kind of work we're expected to do, and where. Is there schedule flexibility with that hybrid? How flexible is that schedule? Do teams get to decide? Maybe when I join, the contract is three days a week at home, or not in the office, but then the team changes, or the team's goals change slightly for whatever reason, and suddenly we're thinking we might need more time together — or more time further away from the office. Who knows? It's that clarity we need, that before we didn't, because before it was: okay, you're going to come into the office, from this time to that time. Great.
But hybrid is completely different, and we just need a lot of clarity so that people's psychological contract isn't broken all the time, and so people aren't working on assumptions. The bit of research I was going to mention — I think it was the CIPD, from last year, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development — to give you the headline, they were basically saying: there have been so many headlines about X and Y company making everyone go back to the office, but they haven't really found much change since 2022. Maybe a matter of days — you can be one day more or less there. Again, it's a very interesting space, because it's still evolving.
[13:05] Because now we have LinkedIn and the internet in general, so we hear more. One thing I did want to tell you, which I talked about a little in the book and then had to update recently: you might remember that the CEO of Netflix at the time, Reed Hastings, just after the pandemic, when everyone was talking about continuing to work remotely, said remote work was a pure negative (note: I made a huge mistake and misquoted him in the episode, but this is my chance to correct myself.). And that made the headlines. A lot of us were like, oh no, Netflix — you know, the "no rules" company, because they trust their employees to make the right decisions, all of that — and it was a big headline. (You can read an article on Netflix’s current take on remote here: https://wfa.team/blog/netflix-remote-work-from-anywhere-policy/
Of course I remembered it. I stuck it in Chapter 10, which is about... what did I call it? It's not called the tyranny of the office.
That's probably what I wanted to call it, but I'm not anti-office — you know that, if you listen to this — it's just that the way it's being presented and mandated leads me to talk about it like that. It's called Return to Office: Reclaiming Presence in These Office Days. The reason it has that strange subtitle is because it's from a Shakespeare monologue — it's Richard III. Anyway, when I was researching for this book — a big chunk of that chapter has examples of return to office — I thought, oh, Netflix, I wonder what happened. And you know what happened? Kudos to them. Kudos to whoever was making these decisions. If you go to their jobs section, there are about 28 jobs listed as remote — remote US, or whatever. They still, like many companies, require you to be in a certain country, but it's still remote. It depends on the role, the team, a lot of things, whether they can offer a post as remote — but it's there.
We don't hear about this. That's the issue: a lot of the time we hear the big "oh, they're ditching remote," and then we never hear that they've changed their mind. And kudos for changing your mind. It's also all right if you decide the opposite way — that you're ditching the office, and then eventually it might not work. Again, location is important. If you haven't set up the right systems, if you haven't role-modelled the behaviours that work best online, then it might not work. Or maybe the workforce is a certain kind of personality — because this is really important, more than whether you're in the office or not — maybe you don't have the personality best suited to a certain type of work. Again, this is fascinating, and it's why we ended up talking about the human experience and the dilemmas. I think it was Andrew, the editor, who came up with that word.
And if it was me, I'm a genius. If we came up with it together, then we're such great collaborators. I don't know. But I think it was him. It really is the way I've been using the Shakespeare — the Fakespeare, which is Shakespeare that's gone through at least one pass of ChatGPT to get it to talk about remote work, and then gone through lots of passes by me. And then I brought original Shakespeare back in, because it worked better. Again, that's the process of writing. If you're interested in it, let me know.
[16:28] We realised that the pieces that stayed in the end — except the very first, Chapter One — are all about dilemmas. Is this a Zoom link which I see before me? To work from home, or not to work from home? Let me see — the asynchronous communication monologue talks about the tension between the almost complete productivity heaven that async can bring you, and the missing of being connected to others; asynchronously, that's sometimes difficult to feel. Or the silence — how wonderful the silence is sometimes when you're relying a lot on async.
But how awful that silence can feel, and how it can overpower you without your realising it. Anyway, we look at that. What else — which other one... These are long chapters. Or the Jailer's Daughter, who says: oh, what a world, what a world of apps, a blessing and a curse, a delight and a burden. To navigate the sea, to master these tools, is a task Herculean, a labour of love.
It really does feel like a labour of love sometimes, doesn't it, to master the technology? Anyway, you see what I mean — it's all about the dilemmas. And the dilemma, for me, of hybrid: whether we should call it hybrid or just accept it as a version of remote, and why the word hybrid seems to be sticking. Sometimes these are just my opinions. As you know, I have an opinion on everything. And sometimes I've got research, or other sources, that confirm some of what I'm writing down. But it's a balance. It's a balance.
[18:12] I'm going to start to wrap up here, because I'm thinking this is quite fun. I'll come back to this. I'll be talking a bit more about the themes coming up in the book — maybe a bit like today, a little more focused on some of the topics. It will not be a how-to. The book is how I think — and also, this was my experience. The editors have been very good at pulling out the learnings, because you know me: I just talk, and hope that you get something from it — because you're all creative, and can listen to something being said and go, oh, yeah. Sometimes we need a bit more guidance, which is also the purpose of the book, of course. If you, my dear listeners, have any questions or comments — and especially any new research you think would be interesting to talk about — let me know, because I want to evolve this book. In a way, I'm doing the opposite of what we did with Connection and Disconnection in Remote Teams, which came from a podcast season and then evolved into a book. (I wrote that one with Bree Caggiati; it's out, and it's been shortlisted for a business book award — we're waiting.)
In a way, this is different. The book's been written, and now I'm updating it with the podcast. If you have anything to add, anything to say, get in touch. If you want to buy the book — well, as I'm recording, it's not ready for pre-order, but you can find a sign-up page over at virtualnotdistant.com. Look for the "coming soon" tab, click through, and there's a little box where you can put your email address, and I'll let you know when it's out. The newsletter — I don't know. I'm sorry if you're expecting the newsletter, but I haven't written one since January, I think. I need to get back to it, but I stopped. You know me. I stopped being so involved in the outer world and became very involved in the inner world, and now I'm coming out, burrowing my way out of my brain. Thank you so much for listening. If it's the first time you're listening, well, welcome. My name is Pilar Orti. I'm on LinkedIn if you want to connect. You can also check out virtualnotdistant.com. And I'd love to hear from you. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, whatever the weather's like where you are, have a really good time.
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