Out of Office Quotes

“When we work all the time, we volunteer less, we spend less time hanging out with people who are and aren't like us. We might love the place that we live, but we don't manifest that affection through actual involvement.
Flexible work, done right, means working less and directing far more time, investment, and intention into the greater community.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Increased efficiency means more of the most precious commodity: time. But time for what, exactly? Usually, to do more work.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“This example from the retail world should be instructive: if you have only enough employees to barely get the work done as is, you’ve engineered a scenario in which employees may have theoretical permission to take time off, but understand that they’ll shoulder the burden of that time off in some way. Either they try to keep doing part of their work while on leave, a colleague takes on an even larger work burden, or a portion of essential work goes undone, slowing everyone on a team.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Many employers will attempt to ignore these best practices. The most shortsighted will resist change completely, forcing employees back into the office full-time. But many others, perhaps feeling the competitive pressure, will begrudgingly allow for some remote or hybrid work. They will likely frame flexibility much as they have before: as a benevolent corporate perk or, worse yet, as an opportunity only available to those who’ve earned the privilege, suggesting that it could be revoked at any time.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Working from home can be a meaningful act of control and resistance.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Every year, Gallup releases a wide-ranging study of the effects of “lack of engagement,” which it measures through a twelve-question survey asking employees to gauge their agreement with various statements, from “I know what is expected of me at work” to “At work, my opinions seem to count.” Within Gallup’s conception, “engagement” is a measurement of how much employees themselves are invested in the work but also of how much their managers and leaders are investing in them.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Work will always be a major part of our lives. What we’re suggesting, however, is that it should cease to be the primary organizing factor within it: the primary source of friendship, or personal worth, or community. Because when work envelops our lives, our intimate community shoulders the consequences. We give and receive less: less care, less intentionality, less communication. But genuinely flexible work—and the de-centering of our jobs that accompanies it—can liberate us to recultivate and”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“When work becomes truly flexible to our needs, that’s when we’re able to carve meaningful, consistent, nourishing space from our days: for ourselves, but also for the people who make this life worth living.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“When the haze of burnout begins to clear, fight the urge to feel *productive* and channel that into beginning to explore your own pleasures...Whatever your *thing* might be --and maybe there are many little things --the most important component should be aiming to make it as little like *work* as possible. This means resisting the very contemporary capitalist urge to commodify it in some way, even when people say to you, "Oh, you're so good at [this thing], you should sell it!" But it also means resisting the urge to master it, or display it in a way that transforms it into some mode of performance. You can want to *improve*, or to make something for others, but that's different from trying to be the best, and beating yourself up (or giving up entirely) because of you inadequacies.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“The “curvilinear informality” of the Schnelles’ design was formalized into workstations with shelves, cabinets, and dividing panels—what would eventually devolve into the cubicle.12 (The development, like so many in American history, was facilitated by the tax code: The Revenue Act, passed in 1962, allowed for a seven percent tax credit on property with a “useful life” of eight years. You couldn’t deduct the cost of a fixed wall. But a partition? Go for it.)”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Same for the open office, which was first proposed by a pair of German brothers, Eberhard and Wolfgang Schnelle, in 1958. In place of rows of desks and corner offices, the Schnelles saw dynamic clusters and movable partitions: an office landscape, or Bürolandschaft.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“the cult of efficiency in”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“as we discussed in the previous chapters, this sort of “flex” has a dark side: the ability to take your work anywhere means the ability for work to infiltrate all corners of your life,”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“A healthy work culture creates the circumstances for all employees to do their very best work. But a sustainable, resilient one understands and eagerly invites them to have lives outside it.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Treating your organization as a family, no matter how altruistic its goals, is a means of breaking down boundaries between work and life, between paid labor and the personal. When you’re assaulted by powerful feelings of familial obligations from all sides—your actual family, but also your manager and your colleagues—it’s all the more difficult to prioritize. And in these situations, your actual family, which is often more forgiving, more malleable, and more attuned to your needs, will always suffer. The”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“The company was using post-work functions to provide the connective tissue that management should have provided.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“COVID has given them permission,” Olson told us. “They can see that remote work is possible, and a real way to address their DE&I problem.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“They’re evidence of a holistic misconceptualization of DEI, in which trainings and metrics ultimately function as a panacea for white guilt instead of a blueprint for enduring cultural change. So long as companies continue to approach diversity within this framework, they’ll continue to waste time, money, and employee patience. The shift to remote and flexible work won’t solve the problem entirely—not even close. But it can begin to disassemble structures that have long felt immovable and start to build new, unexpected, more inclusive ones in their place. —”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“You’ve heard these statistics, or something approximating them, before. No matter how many diversity, equity, and inclusion workshops your organization requires, if your leaders and managers aren’t truly diverse, then the monoculture will prevail.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“In 2020, 92.6 percent of CEOs on the Fortune 500 were white.36 A survey conducted that same year of more than forty thousand workers at 317 companies found that while white men make up just 35 percent of the entry-level workforce, they compose 66 percent of the C-suite.37 For every one hundred men who were promoted to manager, only fifty-eight black women and seventy-one Latina women were promoted. Only 38 percent of respondents in entry-level management positions were women of any race.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Managing has been pegged to promotion for so long it’s eclipsed what’s actually vital about the position. It’s not about power. It’s about figuring out how to actually create the conditions for your team to do their best work. That work is often invisible, but your company should be treating it as invaluable.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“But as a recent study by Harvard Business Review pointed out, the skills associated with high productivity—including knowledge and expertise, driving for results, taking initiative—are almost all indications of individual-oriented competencies. Management requires skills that are other oriented: being open to feedback, supporting colleagues’ development, communicating well, having good interpersonal skills.34”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Productivity is the by-product of a workforce that has had its essential needs met.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“better work is, in fact, oftentimes less work, over fewer hours, which makes people happier, more creative, more invested in the work they do and the people they do it for.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“But instead of making us work efficiently - and, by extension less - all of this tech has mostly just made us work more.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Sublimating your desire for activities that don't involve your children does not make you a more impressive parent; it just makes you a more exhausted and resentful one.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“A lot of us have only the faintest traces of those childhood and early adult activities in our lives - what we might dare call hobbies. They largely exist as conversational markers and rhetorical placeholders of who we once were.”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Once you've established a baseline, you need to get more granular and detailed in your conception of diversity. Too often executives take the wrong approach here and begin to try to "collect" an employee from every race. Instead, try the following questions: Is everyone in management able-bodied? Do you have a mix of parents and nonparents? Straight parents and LGBTQ+ parents? Is the majority of your workforce from one generation? What percentage graduated from Ivy League schools? From HBCUs? Maybe you've upped the number of women in the C-suite? But are all of those women white?”
― Charlie Warzel, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Finance execs know they should be figuring out new ways to work, but those who rose through the ranks one way, and endured a particular form of suffering and overwork, are reluctant to change their ways, no matter how much evidence is presented of the benefits of abandoning them.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home

“Workers are desperate for more autonomy over their lives. They crave more balance and less precarity. They also, crucially, want to work. But they want to work for places that treat them as human beings and that invest in them and their futures. They want to be a part of organizations that recognize that meaningful and collaborative work can bring dignity and create value but that work is by no means the only way to cultivate satisfaction and self-worth. We know that workers who are overextended become too tired, frustrated, and anxious to do their best work; they’re too busy trying to tread water, look busy, and keep poorly communicating bosses happy.”
― Anne Helen Petersen, Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working from Home