How Did the Pandemic Change Work for You?
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Learn more at Xfinity.com. Restrictions apply. Xfinity. Internet required. Actual speeds vary. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Something fundamental changed about Americans' relationship to work during the pandemic. Maybe it was white-collar workers' increased flexibility. Maybe it was the two-faced way essential workers were treated as expendable. Maybe it was something else entirely.

We're going to look back five years after the pandemic began, part of our series, at how jobs have changed. We've got a panel of experts, and we're going to hear your experiences about the feel of work. That's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. A job's always been a bit of a confusing category. On the one hand, it's a bundle of tasks completed for an employer in exchange for a paycheck, kind of being a human part in a great organizational machine. And on the other hand, a job is also an identity, a social world, even a culture.

It can really mean something to say you're a firefighter or an investment banker or a bartender or a tech worker, and that meaning doesn't fully rely on the tasks in your job description. That is to say, during the great upheaval of the pandemic and stay-at-home mandates and rise of remote work, it wasn't just worker productivity that was at stake, but the ways that a job could define or not define a life.

So today we'll be taking multiple paths to investigate how work has changed and kept changing through the long five years since the pandemic began. Part of our series on five years since the pandemic. We're joined in the studio by Aki Ito, who is chief correspondent with Business Insider covering workplace issues, including burnout, hustle, culture and the end of workplace loyalty. Thanks for joining us, Aki.

Thanks so much for having me. We're also joined by Nicholas Bloom, who is a professor of economics at Stanford and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Welcome. Thanks for having me on. We're joined by Joan Williams as well, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law and author of the forthcoming book, Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class. Welcome, Joan. Delighted to be here.

Aki, let's start with you. I mean, I'm interested in sort of the workplace vibe check here. You know, there obviously is this great change in sort of remote work and how people did their actual jobs, but they're also kind of changing feelings about how work might work. From your position five years on, what's the biggest change that we've seen in kind of the feelings of the workplace?

Yeah, I think so many Americans and probably people around the world really had this big reassessment of their relationship to work in the pandemic. I think for some people, it was just the constant reminders of mortality. I think for other people, it was just not being in autopilot mode anymore.

For other people, I think, you know, if you remember early in the pandemic, there was a tremendous amount of job loss and being laid off by your employer who you sacrificed so much for. A lot of people really sat back and thought, like, what was all that hard work and loyalty for? Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, there were a lot of physical things about work that changed. The biggest thing, obviously, being, you know, no longer being in an office. Right.

But I think, like you said, people had this really big philosophical moment triggered by the pandemic. And I think five years on, people are still having that reassessment now. And do you think that's still true, even though the job market has sort of gotten worse and there's a lot of uncertainty in sort of the future of the economy right now? Or was it...

The fact that the pandemic economy after the job loss was so strong that allowed people to sort of feel into their feelings and not just sort of stick with whatever job they had? Yeah, I mean, the vibes are, you know, like you say, totally different now. Back when I was writing about people's changing relationship to work first in 2021 and 2022, we were having the great resignation. The job market was super hot. And so workers had this feeling.

you know, swagger about them. They could afford to push the envelope a little bit, do things that, you know, maybe would be dicey in a weaker job market.

Of course, today, especially in the white-collar corporate world, the job market is very weak. So as a result, workers aren't able to kind of set up the boundaries with their employers the way they used to. But I don't think that economic status changes the fact that people do see their jobs differently than the way they saw their jobs back in 2019. Yeah.

Nicholas Bloom, I mean, you called this period during the pandemic the Great Transformation. Do you think we're done with the Great Transformation? Like, have we come to a new place or are we still kind of in the middle of it all? I mean, yes, some things are permanent. So if you like work from home, it's, you know, it's permanent for a lot of folks to typically be working from home one, two days a week. I have to say, you know, in 2020, there was the lockdown and many people, about half of Americans were fully remote.

That is, as Aki was saying, kind of receding into history now, but most professionals are now at least getting to work from home one or two days a week. A couple of things are cool out that I think are going to continue to change.

is working from home has been amazing for Americans with a disability. So it's drawn in about one to two million more folks into the workplace, and I think that will continue to grow. That is an incredible good news story. It's also pushed down a bit on city centres. So folks have thought, you know, I've only got to go into the office three days a week. I don't need to live in the centre of the city. I can move out to the suburbs. And that process seems to be ongoing. Yeah.

Joan, let's talk a little bit about your work in this realm, which had focused on kind of fighting for more flexibility in the workplace, more the possibility of work-life balance and some more remote work. How do you see where things actually shook out after that initial burst and then receding of remote work?

I think it's important to recognize there isn't a receding of remote work. There has been a permanent change. People now feel entitled to hybrid work in many contexts, more at the top of the income range than at the bottom. You can't serve a french fry remotely. But if your job is remote capable, there's really been that change in expectations.

The other thing that I think is really a permanent change is actually I was talking to a reporter a couple of months before the pandemic and saying, you know, I've been working on remote work since like the late 90s. It ain't going to happen. The only reason it doesn't happen is because of a failure of imagination. But the failure is complete and it would take worldwide death to solve that problem. And then several months later, in three months...

The failure of imagination was over. So now people understand that it is completely possible to work from home in an integrated team. And employers that are trying in a top-down way to take that away from workers are in a really different situation than they were five years ago.

And that situation is in part because the sort of productivity of workers just didn't fall when they were at home, right? And so kind of the proof was in the pudding, like the experiment had happened, it had played out, and there we had it, right? Well, the productivity of workers, as Nick's great work has shown, did not fall. In some cases, it rose, right?

Also, you're tapping a larger labor pool if you don't have to have only people who are very close to you. So, for example, my little institute put out searches where we were open to remote. And we just got so many better candidates that we have people working in Rochester, New York, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And also, an engaged workforce is like 22% more productive. So the amazing thing is that, you know, to the extent that people are trying to roll back on hybrid work or remote work, this isn't about money at all. You think it's about sort of big boss energy. It's about identity. It's about where that if you get to that level of,

I mean, first of all... That is to say like the C-suite or kind of managerial level. Yeah. First of all, over 90% of those guys have stay-at-home wives. So they literally don't live the same life as the rest of us. And their entire identities are framed around work and devotion to work. Work is their happy place.

So it's an identity threat. So interesting. We are talking about the way that work has changed five years on from the start of the pandemic. We've got Joan Williams, who's a law professor emerita from UC Law School in San Francisco and the founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law, author of the fourth

coming book, Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class. We've also got Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford, and Aki Ito, who is chief correspondent at Business Insider covering workplace issues. We'd love to hear from you. I mean, how have your ideas about work or your job or just the sense of

what work should be in your life. How's that change? You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. You can email us, of course. It's forum at kqed.org. Come at us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera, or KQED Forum. Or, of course, you can get in on the Discord community at

Casey over on Discord says, you know, contracting COVID the first time set off a chain of events that would end in my resignation. I got sick for a month. I still tried to keep up with things and was punished for it. I spoke out and retaliated against. So I resigned. Nowadays, I value my flexible work arrangement and I refuse to pull extra hours unless it's absolutely necessary. And I look for work environments that value me as a person.

as a whole person. Aki, I feel like this is like a person straight out of one of your stories, right? That's exactly what I was thinking, yeah. Yeah, talk to me more about like, you know, what that kind of reflects in your reporting.

Sure. I mean, I think so many people have had this realization. I don't want to put in these 60, 70 hour weeks that I used to. I'm actually one of those people. I worked a lot of hours before the pandemic and it made me realize like, oh, that's not really the way I want to live my life anymore.

You know, I think back in 2021 and 2022, when I was writing a lot of these stories, that was actually motivated by my own experience. So I really, you know, the comment that just came in, I really resonate with that a lot. Yeah.

I mean, Nick, what do we see reflected in the stats on like workplace loyalty? I mean, do we see that people are just have different feelings in mass or is it just kind of individual experiences?

There was the great resignation. So certainly you saw, coming back to some of Joan and Aki's comments, there was an enormous churn in 21-22. So folks figured out, look, the economy's booming. You know, I can change jobs. Now's a good time. Some people didn't want to work those long hours. We actually see it in the overall data. Hours worked of Americans is down a little bit on average. But there are more people working. So it's kind of, you know, more people can work, but they're all working a lesser.

But then I think it comes back to, you know, there are a bunch of folks that just find it easier to work if you've only got to go in, say, two, three days a week. Yeah, I can tell you, I interviewed someone about a month ago,

um that had a you know horrible car accident was disabled from the neck down and he said look i used to go in every day now because i'm basically heavily disabled it takes me three hours to go into the office he said my carer has to come in she has to get me out of bed wash me dress me you know then my dad drives me into work he said now because i can work from home three days a week

I'm still with it, but that wasn't an option. I wouldn't work. So yes, we are seeing it's easier to work. And as a result, folks are more flexible. That's interesting. We're talking about how the pandemic changed work. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. We're talking about how the pandemic changed work. It has been five years since the pandemic began, and we've gone through a lot of different phases. We want to hear how those phases have changed your relationship to work. You can give us a call 866-733-6786. That's

866-733-6786. Get your feelings. Take the vibe check here. Forum at kqed.org. Social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, et cetera. We're KQED Forum. We want to bring in Sarah in San Rafael. Welcome, Sarah.

Hi there. I was listening to your comments and your group's comments on the pros of working from home, and I'm a more senior. I have 26 years at my job. I totally agree. I love working from home. But I don't hear enough talk about the other side of it, which...

I work for the state of California. My specific group has work that cannot be performed from home. We build things. And so we got completely hollowed out because we had a lot of people say, well, shoot, if I can work from home in my bunny slippers, then I'm going to do something different. And so we were hollowed out. And secondarily, the other point I'd like to bring up is

is the idea of what we do with our younger, more junior or brand new people. For us, it's engineers and the ability to collaborate and mentor just wasn't there either because it's really easy to walk from one desk to another and say, "Hey, I'm kind of wondering what you think about this."

but people don't make those phone calls and didn't have those meetings. And so I just think that there are downsides too. And that's why I prefer a balanced, a hybrid environment so that you can get a little bit of the benefits of both and ideally make everybody happy. Yeah. Thanks for that, Sarah. I'll leave my comment there. Okay. Hey, thank you. Joan Williams, what,

Let's talk about a couple of these things. I mean, one is the sort of knock-on effect as sort of people were able to change jobs to remote work in these different ways. Some people maybe left longer-term jobs where they might have felt stuck. And the other component of that question was about sort of, you know, young people coming into an office culture who maybe aren't having the identity formation that might happen otherwise. Yeah.

Well, you notice that what she advocated at the end, the caller, was hybrid work. And I think it's really important not to focus this on full-time remote.

Full-time remote works for some people. It doesn't work for a lot of people. The other thing that the caller points out, though, is that you have to actively manage a hybrid workplace. The hybrid workplace is awesome for people in the middle, especially with children, who, as Nick's research has pointed out, are moving farther away and have a lot of home responsibilities. It's fantastic for senior people. It's...

Full-time remote is not so great for junior people for these kinds of reasons. You don't get the kind of shadowing, mentoring, informal. And that's one of the reasons I think the economy has notched to hybrid because that provides an opportunity for all of that shadowing, mentoring sort of stuff. Mm-hmm.

And but that you also allow people to work at their homes a lot of the time. This is important for young people. It's also important for and it's important for parents, as we've said. It's also really important for people of color, because throughout the pandemic, I'm sure you saw this in your reporting. People of color reported that they were happier working from home on average than white people.

Because you know the water cooler is super comfortable for some people. It is not so comfortable for people who go around touching your hair. So I think that there are a lot of dimensions, but it's very important to actively manage because exactly the people for whom who would tend to choose remote mothers and people of color

also tend to have less access to opportunities in the office. And so unless you actively control for that and make sure that you don't use what a research assistant of mine used to call "hey you" tasking,

Hey, you tasking artificially benefits a very specific group. And hybrid work will make that worse unless you have active management techniques. Aki, talk to me about some of your reporting with young people specifically.

Pretty early on, I reported on some of Nick's research that showed that young people actually have a higher preference for hybrid work than older people.

older workers, maybe kind of, you know, like Joan said, middle age who have young kids who actually many more of them prefer totally remote work. And a lot of people were very upset about that story because, you know, young people or older people, young people, because there are still quite a few Gen Zers who like remote work, too. But the point I was making is that, you know, if you're straight out of college, you're

Going into the office is this really formative experience where you not only get the mentorship and the guidance from your older colleagues, but you also meet a lot of friends. A lot of people meet their romantic partners at work.

And so actually a lot of young people do know this and they say, like, I don't want to work at a fully remote company. Yeah. You know, Nick, one of my questions about this is whether, you know, people can get really good at Slack. You can make friends on Slack. I mean, is this partially just that people hadn't really adjusted to the ways in which workplace culture needed to exist in an online format?

Yeah, I mean, we clearly didn't have enough remote work pre-pandemic. So, Joan and Aki are totally right. If you look now in 2025, young folks typically do want to go in. So, you know, I teach 60 under, I just finished teaching 60 undergrads and I always poll them saying, you know, how many days would you like to work from home a week?

And they are typically saying just one or two. So the typical undergrad says, look, I want to go in because it's social. I get mentored and they'll say, look, my apartment, I'm going to be sharing it with four other people. Where am I going to, you know, where am I going to go? Interesting when I do exact head. So these are folks in their 30s and 40s. There's much more of a range.

So some, you know, as Joan said, some of them, you know, have very nice, comfortable backgrounds. They probably chauffeur driven in. They maybe have a wife that work. This is typically older men, CEO types. They're like, I want to go in every day. There are others that live a long way from work and want to be mostly remote.

Yeah, we've got a comment on this exact question. Listener writes and say, I work a hybrid schedule four days a week from my home in San Francisco. One day a week, I drive into the office in Sacramento. I really like this format. I find I get more, quote, real work done at home, which involves complex thinking and writing. My time in the office offers me the chance to connect in person with colleagues. And I really value that. The work from home orders that pop up from time to time seem more about control than performance issues.

and productivity. I will never go back to work full-time in an office hybrid forever now. I mean, let's bring in Michael with a sort of an adjacent point here. Michael in Brentwood. Welcome. Maybe not. Michael's point, I believe, was going to be returning to something you were talking about earlier, Joan, which is about sort of the motivations of managers for bringing people back to

into the office. I think everyone kind of is trying to figure that out. Is there, just to play devil's advocate here a little bit, is there evidence that management works better in some way when you have everyone in the office? I think the things I hear about are either management or that there's sort of more spontaneous creativity or something like that, but it always has seemed a little...

especially for people who always seem so focused on metrics. Exactly. Suddenly the numbers don't matter. The numbers about engagement, about productivity. I,

I think that if you think about most jobs, first of all, there are some jobs that are not remote jobs. I mean, again, you cannot fry a French fry and hand it to me remotely. You cannot do a medical operation remotely. So there are some jobs that are objectively not suitable for remote. But most jobs, and even part of those other jobs, jobs are a complex package.

And this caller, I've forgotten what the caller or somebody wrote in, is a perfect example. A lot of knowledge workers, we need intense time to figure stuff out.

to execute on a plan after it's been decided. And then we need collaborative time. And that's true of many, many people. And for many people, that intense figure stuff out or execution time is far more efficient outside of the office.

which is why I've always said to my staff, if you can do something more efficiently outside of the office, this was way before COVID, I do not want you in here. But then you do need some time to collaborate. Now, you can do that on Slack.

If you engage in active management techniques, you can totally set that up in a full-time remote environment. But the traditional way to set up that collaboration is on-site, particularly if you design the hybrid schedule so that a whole team comes in at the same time. Yeah.

You know, Aki, I think that for me, the number one worst thing about full time remote work was having to stare at your own face all the time on Zoom. Like, is there I mean, it does seem like meetings are like massively worse because everyone is sitting in a thing. There's no real time feedback. You kind of want everyone to be muted because otherwise there's all this excess noise. But then there's no reaction. You know, jokes are sort of like no.

don't work. Have you noticed any companies trying to sort of make meetings better, essentially? It feels like part of that collaboration is this technological barrier.

Yeah, there's an entire category of B2B companies that are trying to make this happen right now. I think, you know, when we talk about how management is harder in remote environments, we're talking about that in the context of the technology that we have today in 2025.

who knows what that technology is going to look like in another five or 10 years. Nick's done some great research showing that the patent applications around work from home technology spiked in the pandemic.

And so probably a lot of those tools are coming to market just around now. Right now, being on Zoom is awkward and cringy. Oh, it'll always be awkward and cringy as far as I'm concerned. But, you know, maybe we won't be using Zoom in five years' time. Maybe we'll have some crazy virtual reality, augmented reality thing that's really going to make it feel like people are right in front of us. I don't know if you've seen these metaverse things. You're sort of like,

Billions of dollars. We still don't have legs. Like, what's going on in the metaverse? Nick, talk to me about some of these technological tools. Like, do you think that there will be a tool that supplants Zoom slash Microsoft Teams? Yeah, absolutely. Totally on board with that, Keith. I mean...

You can go back, actually. I've been looking at the history of work from home. You know, I'm one of four kids. I grew up in London. Both my mom and dad worked. And so occasionally they would have to work from home. And I was growing up in the 80s and I interviewed them about it. And they said it was terrible. It was like carrying piles of paper, phoning in on a really expensive phone line.

And my mom said, look, in the 90s, we've got a personal computer, a little old green screen. She said it was revolutionary. Go to the 2000s, you got the email. 2010, you got Zoom, cloud. So looking ahead, I was up in SF about nine months ago.

I went to visit a company which has these thing called portals. What they are is they're 12 foot by 12 foot, effectively Zoom screens. And the amazing thing is I did a test run. This was a startup and one of their co-founders, she was up in New York and we had a call. And what was cool is I could see her whole body. I could like see her trousers. I mean, I guess I should say pants for American audience, you know, all the way down to the bottom. I could guess her height. It was kind of like, Alexis, you know. Somewhat like being in person.

Yeah, I was thinking if I'd walked out and passed her on the street five minutes later, I'd recognize her. Whereas on Zoom, you've no idea. I mean, I always joke to my students in the pandemic when you had to teach online. I said, you know, my head is really long at the back. And they're like, really? But I had no idea because you only see two dementia. It's like you're 2D and you only see this bit of your body. And so, yeah, I think... I don't know. This sounds horrible to me, I have to say. I want less realism when it comes to my face on Zoom. I don't know. You know, it's just...

There there's something about like, you know, I saw during the pandemic, this just boom in all the skin care stuff and all these things. And I do think at least part of that was like, we're not meant to stare at our faces like this all this time. You know, I really I do feel like there's something fundamentally inhuman about it a little bit.

Do you know what did? I was about to say, do you know, if you look at the numbers, what you see in from retail is the expenditure there exploded was alcohol. Alcohol went up. I have to say deodorant spending collapsed during the pandemic. So I don't quite know what that tells you online, but yes.

I wanted to jump in and just say, I don't think Zoom is cringy. As by far the oldest person here, I'm completely comfortable interacting with people on Zoom. I worked with one person for 25 years

She was never in the same city. I felt awkward when I was with her in person, not when I was at that point, that was I was with her on the phone. So it's a matter of what you're used to. But also, I think for me, the key thing is that I'm focused on is how these young people get integrated into an office environment if they're permanent remote or largely remote. And, you know, there are very concrete ways to

Young people come into the workplace because they want to see often whether that's what they want to do when they grow up. So if you have a program of active shadowing, of inviting people to meetings to listen in or take notes, that's the way you can provide that kind of mentoring and training in a virtual environment. And again, I think we should...

It's a matter of what you're used to, and we have to always watch against the failure of imagination. Yeah, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal here. We are talking about how the pandemic changed work. We're joined by Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law, also author of the forthcoming book, Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class. We've also got Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, studied a lot about remote work over time, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

And we have Aki Ito, who is chief correspondent with Business Insider covering workplace issues, burnout, hustle culture, the end of workplace loyalty, quiet quitting, et cetera, all the things. I would love to hear more from listeners who did have to keep going in of all kinds of different jobs. Are you a

Are you a nurse? Are you a doctor? Do you work in the trades? Do you have all those kinds of... I'd love to hear more about if you think work culture changed a lot during the pandemic as well, not just folks who moved remote in some way or another. The number is 866-733-7333.

six, seven, eight, six. That's eight, six, six, seven, three, three, six, seven, eight, six. The email is forum at KQED.org, uh, social media, blue sky, Instagram, et cetera. We are KQED forum. And of course there's conversation going on on the discord. Let me run through a few comments before we get to the break here. Uh,

Vivian says, I finished grad school in 2022 and my job, the first one I got out of school, is still fully remote. I like a lot of things about it, but I do worry I'm not building all the social networking skills that I would in person. This one is so interesting because I had been wondering about some of these like kind of cohort effects, people who went into the workforce in this time. It does seem like they're going to have a wildly different career experience than folks who, you know, just,

started in 1998 or whatever. Yeah, definitely. And these people who are entering into the workforce now, they spent their high school years, maybe the beginning of college in the pandemic as well. So they're already lacking in some of that crucial social interaction time that older people like us got a lot of. So that definitely makes a big difference. Yeah.

Another listener reflection, you know, I've been working hybrid since 2007 as a new mom. That was my condition to go back to work and they accepted it. I'm in sales and I do appreciate the importance of in-person work. There's nothing like the physical connections and what they contribute. I really enjoy my team and almost look forward to being in the office on those office days. Yeah.

Another listener writes, you know, working from home allows people to be more productive, especially when it comes to tasks that require concentration. On the other hand, out of sight is...

out of mind. When people see me, they remember what they wanted to discuss with me. Ernst writes, I worked from home for the majority of the last 30 years. Every time I've had to go into an office, my productivity plummets. Worse, I have to interact with my boss, which is generally both dispiriting and a waste of valuable time. Ah, management at its finest, Ernst. Alexis Madrigal here with Aki Ito, Nick Bloom, and...

and Joan Williams. We were talking about how the pandemic changed work. Loving hearing your reflections on this. You can email us, of course, at forum at kqed.org, or you can give us a call at 866-733-6786. We'll be back with more right after the break.

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Greetings, Boomtown. The Xfinity Wi-Fi is booming! Xfinity combines the power of internet and mobile. So we've all got lightning-fast speeds at home and on the go. That's where our producers got the idea to mash our radio shows together. ♪

Through June 23rd, new customers can get 400 megabit Xfinity Internet and get one unlimited mobile line included, all for $40 a month for one year. Visit Xfinity.com to learn more. With paperless billing and auto-pay with store bank account, restrictions apply. Xfinity Internet required. Texas fees extra. After one year, rate increases to $110 a month. After two years, regular rates apply. Actual speeds vary.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here. This is part of our series on how the pandemic kind of changed so many things over the last five years, not just the beginning, but kind of through this whole period. We're joined by Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford University, done a bunch of research on this. We're joined by Joan Williams, founding director of the Center for Work-Life Law. Also, her forthcoming book subtitle is actually How the Left Lost the Working Class at the

and how to win them back. The book's called Outclassed. And we've got Aki Ito, who's chief correspondent with Business Insider. Let's go to Bonnie in Woodland. Welcome, Bonnie.

Hello. Happy to be on. I'm a therapist in Davis, and I am just a much, much better therapist in person, I realize. Not only did I have little, little kids during the pandemic, so if I could hear them screaming in the background or just know that they were in the house, half my brain was not present.

And, yeah, it's just much less draining for me to be in the office with my clients. But what I did during the height of the pandemic was I would see my teenage clients in my backyard because I just couldn't bear to expose them to more screens when they were already, you know, doing the online learning. And that was really nice, and I was really lucky to be able to do that.

You know, it's so interesting. Therapy seemed like it went very hard online and that like remains like lots of therapists like feel like they're in. And it struck me as, yeah, I mean, almost the hardest thing to do online. I mean, I just feel like when I've been in therapy, either on a screen or in person, it feels like a totally different experience to me. Do you think you're going to have gone all the way back to in person? I.

I am 99% in person. I'd say I have like maybe one or two clients that I'll see sometimes online. But yeah, I agree with you. I'm a somatic therapist as well. Oh, geez. Yeah, yeah. You can do it. And it's better than I ever...

thought it would be, but in person is just such a different experience for me. Just the reason we laughed is, right, somatic therapy focuses on sort of the reactions in your body, right, and thinking that way. Yes. So it seems like...

Bonnie, thanks so much. I appreciate that. Are there other jobs, Nick, that seemed, even though they could have gone remote, seemed like they were uniquely difficult to do online for one reason or another?

The therapy comment is fascinating. I've seen, you know, I have the same thoughts of you. I've seen it shift. And I know a bunch of people on both sides that shift online and kind of only semi-shift back. I'll give you two examples that were kind of interesting for me that jobs have changed a bit. So one of my neighbor's

as a doctor and she said look pre-pandemic I'd see folks she's a family doctor five days a week she now says I have one day a week online because there's a bunch of patients that want things like prescriptions renewed tests back they actually don't want to come in and so she's happy to do that so she has a mix yeah and not there's a great example actually about fast food so as you know as Joan said pre-pandemic

Pretty much all the fast food is fully in person. So, you know, cooking, cleaning, serving food has to be in person. If you go through drive-through restaurants, so this is the bit that's gone fully remote, which is when you put your window down to shout into that little cone to give them your order. The person taking that order used to be in the hut like 20 feet along. And then, you know, they write it down and hand it to the cook that will cook it.

Now they are often in national centers. So you can drive through in San Francisco, order your Big Mac and fries and some of the Mississippi is typing it in at home into a computer and then they're frying it for you. So, yeah, it's a weird world where little bits of jobs here and there have gone fully remote. But, you know, mostly in these industries, they've stayed in person.

You know, the interesting thing about the comment from the therapist was she fully recognized herself that she could do her job better if she was in person. And that's the thing. I think most...

Workers actually know if they do better at home or if they're better in the office. I think bosses have a tendency to not trust their workers when they say, I'm more productive at home. But I'd say listen to them. I think some of it is because of the actual day-to-day work that they do, their job function. Part of it is also their personality.

But I think it's smart to listen to the workers and ask them, you know, what would you prefer? There's actually some research on this. People have been asked, do you prefer sort of 9 to 5 rigid schedule or do you prefer to sort of fade in and out and mix work and family? And not surprisingly, people are different. And also not surprisingly, if you don't have the match that works for you, you are less engaged and less productive.

And so I want to echo what Aki says. I mean, this is one of the costs of command and control workplaces that people typically forget about. Well, I think, you know, sometimes I think people think, oh, well, introverts must want to work from home. But believe it or not, like I'm a person who basically does all of the work for the show at home.

In part because I am so attuned to other people that when I'm in the office, I'm like, oh, hey, what's going on with this person? What's going on with this person? I'm doing nothing the whole time. And so, well, now I've revealed this on the air, so now everyone knows. But I like working at home. I'm so much more productive and so much more focused on that. Most of my producers are telling me, yeah, we can attest to your social butterfly. Yeah.

I just want to make sure everyone's having a good time in the office. That's all, you know? All right. Let's bring in Catherine in San Rafael. Welcome.

Hi, thank you. I'm a health care worker. I'm a speech pathologist, and I worked in acute care for the first 15 years of my career, including during the height of COVID and the burnout and being forced to work, obviously, in person in the health care setting was so real that I did make a switch about two years ago to working in home health care, which is the most

work from home option that you can get in the healthcare profession. So I go to see patients at their houses and then finish my work at home. And I've never been happier in my career. And I know that there's limited positions available, but there's definitely like the work-life balance of being able to do some component of your work at home is just remarkable for mental health. Yeah.

Thanks so much, Catherine. Let's get another story from Max, and we'll take these together. Max in San Ramon, welcome. Hey, Max. Hey, Max. Hi. Oh, go ahead. You're on. Go ahead. You're on. Yeah, well, I was a person who, after a long struggle to kind of find the right career and place, after sustaining a form of...

chronic traumatic brain injury in the military operating speedboats for special operations. I got my brain rattled and presumptive CTE problems that are prevalent. There's been about 11 suicides of men with these conditions.

there's a struggle in daily life and a struggle against those symptoms and conditions. But I found a place in nursing after an initial struggle on the floor where I was kind of a disaster due to memory problems and

the type of efficiency and multitasking that were required were difficult for me. But I found that the one-on-one work in home hospice as a nurse in the field put me out with a kind of a flexibility out there that I could deal with. And for a while, I kind of excelled by making myself available, and that kind of made up for my shortcomings and

You know, managers understood. People I knew understood. And I did okay. But at some point, I think with the pandemic, things became a lot crazier. Several bouts of COVID myself, it hit me very hard because I have a chronic leukemia from toxic exposures in the Persian Gulf War. My immune system is not great. I think that COVID was so bad, it might have...

damage my brain. So, um, that and the pressures of conglomeration of healthcare put a

put a lot of pressure on the workers for efficiency and profit being more important than patient. The quality of patient care and the lifestyle of people working in healthcare become very difficult and that's forcing a lot of people like me out of that line of work. I've stopped work. Max, thanks so much for sharing quite a difficult story with us. I think it's sometimes when we're talking about big numbers of people, we're talking about macro movements of the economy, there's

There's also just individual stories of people, you know, making it with their own particular configurations of mind and body. And Joan, I mean, for people who maybe are struggling in this particular, you know, economy, how have you thought about improving, you know, just life at kind of all levels?

All kind of realms of the socioeconomic scale. I'm assuming there are some solutions for the working class in your book. There are solutions in this book. I'm curious about them.

I think that the real opportunity for people on the left is to recognize that the working class has really been hurting for a very long time, so much so that they've lost faith in democracy and no longer give a flying you-know-what because it hasn't worked for them. They've basically seen their futures disappear. Over 90% of Americans used to do better than their parents.

And now you just got an even shot. And then you have the young people, even young people in sort of with college degrees. They can't afford child care. They can't afford a house. And the economy, you know, what Elon Musk and Doge is doing is making people with college degrees have lives as precarious as the working class have had for over a generation. That's our coalition. Yeah.

Let's bring in Leontine on the phones. Welcome. Hi, thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to mention the artist perspective on this. I'm an actor working in the Bay Area. And when COVID hits, we obviously all lost our jobs, except for some theater companies managed to pivot to online. And so we were performing online.

in live, but alone in our living room, each of us alone in our living room. And then they, they, they put us all together on screen and, and streamed that. The benefit of that was that more people got to see us. But certainly as an acting experience, it was not,

It's not ideal. And so certainly we were all really happy to go back to being in person. But a theater company was born out of that, and we now are able to keep going as a theater company because we use Zoom for our meetings, even though we perform, we

We like to perform, obviously, in person. So, yeah, it works. It works and has its disadvantages for for actors as well. I mean, also, no audience, just all by yourself. And they're so tough. Yes. Yes. It's a very, very lonely experience.

And going back to live, just being able to look somebody in the eye and getting that response from people that, you know, that psychologist was talking about, the somatic experience, just being able to see that and how people are actually responding in person is so important to the experience.

Yeah, thank you so much for that. Here's a comment from Lauren coming to you, Nick. One cool thing about the pandemic and realize is that realizing more can be done working remotely is now our small law office can accommodate almost double the staff because they must choose to work from home some days a week and people can share office space depending on schedules.

Obviously, we've seen this with the big tech companies to kind of changing how much office space they have available. How much do you think that's going to stick? Like, do you think whatever I don't, you know, I'm not a corporate real estate person, however many like square feet you needed per person has that changed? Like, is that just declined substantially?

Yeah, absolutely. It's why, in a sense, the office market is struggling a bit. I mean, I wanted to put a pitch out there for anyone that is trying to persuade, you know, a boss or a CEO to allow them to stay typically hybrid, as, you know, John and Aki have mentioned. It is it's very profitable for companies. So I put out a paper last year in Nature.

And we did a big A-B test for the company's trip.com. And we randomized basically whether you got to work from home two days a week or you had to come in all five days. And what you saw is there's no effect on productivity because once you're in there three days a week in the office, it's kind of enough mentoring, FaceTime, creativity. But you saw quit rates fall by a third.

And for firms, quits are really expensive. Every person that quits costs them about $50,000. They said to look, you've got to go out, re-interview, re-hire, re-recruit. So I think the big, you know, if you have a tough boss that's trying to force you back in is to tell them, look, it turns out it's profitable to be hybrid. And it's why 80% of Fortune 500 companies are now hybrid. And it's profitable because it reduces turnover. As you mentioned, it saves office space and it really doesn't seem to impact productivity.

Real quick comment before we go to Doreen in Oakland. Claire on Blue Sky writes, nothing sucks more than going into the office only to have to Zoom with your colleagues for all the meetings. With flexible scheduling, going into work doesn't mean everyone else is there at the same time. Coordination is key to making in-person work time meaningful. Doreen in Oakland, welcome.

Yes. I just wanted to say I'm a public servant, and I wanted to say that I really prefer working in the office. And I also think that I work in government, and I also think that people needing services –

I realize that people can go on the computer, but I don't think that there's nothing that replaces in-person service. And, you know, and I know people, you know, sometimes there's difficulty accessing the services online.

online or submitting documents on online. Uh, but I just think there's nothing, you know, to meet with somebody face to face, I think it's more personal, but I also think it's more efficient and people are able to get their, um, business done, uh, better. Uh, I know, I know it would be a lot easier for me, but work is work and home life is home life. And, uh,

I'm for going back into the office for the type of work that I do. Yeah. Doreen, really appreciate your perspective. Thanks for being a public servant. I want to just pick up with you, Aki, something Doreen said at the end there, which is, you know, work is work and home is home.

I feel for me, just to sum up this entire conversation, I feel like it may be that that changed for a lot of people that work with no longer work and home with no longer home. But instead, everything got sort of blended. Yeah. And there is some research showing that when you have those when those lines blur, people tend to, you know, be tend to work longer hours, right?

They're less satisfied with their jobs. And I think we saw that a lot early in the pandemic when a lot of white collar professionals suddenly started working from home for the first time in their lives. They didn't know that.

how to manage those boundaries, you know, so they ended up working really long hours and maybe after like a year, year and a half of that, they were like, oh, this is unsustainable. I need to set up these rules. I need to set up these routines. So I'm not working all the time. And so

I think we're much better working from home or working in a hybrid way now than we were back in 2021. That's the other thing. I think, you know, as a world, we learn to work more effectively at home, too. There's also a class difference. People in sort of college-educated, white-collar jobs are much more likely to want a blended work and home environment than people in lower-level jobs because for them,

People in lower level jobs, it's just like another name for exploitation. Often. Not always, but often. Well, I think it's, you know, in the pandemic that a lot of white collar workers started to feel that too. You know, they don't want to be exploited. They don't want their enthusiasm and their commitment to work exploited by their employers either. Yeah.

And comments here. Stephanie writes, working from home while parenting is not a luxury. No other generation was expected to simultaneously work and raise kids at exactly the same time. People believe parents get more time with kids now, but that time is not devoted to the child. Oftentimes we feel we are failing at work and at parenting because we're expected to do both at the same time.

at the same time. That is why parents are so burnt out now. Hey, Stephanie, you're doing great. I promise. We've been talking about how the pandemic changed work. We've been joined by Joan Williams, founding director at the Center for Work-Life Law. She's got a new book coming out called Outclassed, How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win the Back. Thanks for joining us. Delighted to be here. Been joined by Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford. Thank you, Nick.

Thanks so much for having me on. And Aki Ito, chief correspondent with Business Insider. Thank you so much, Aki. Thank you so much, Alexis. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.

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