Couch vs. cubicle: is the future of work hybrid?
24:23 Share

Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. I want to tell you about a new series we're launching at Pushkin Industries on the 1936 Olympic Games. Adolf Hitler's Games. Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, high Olympic ideals, craven self-interest, naked ambition, illusion, delusion, all collide in the long, contentious lead-up to the most controversial Olympics in history. The Germans put on a propaganda show, and America went along with all of it. Why?

This season on Revisionist History, the story of the games behind the games. Listen to this season of Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to hear episodes before they're released to the public, subscribe to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

Hello there, this is Smart Talks with IBM, a podcast from Pushkin Industries, iHeartMedia, and IBM about what it means to look at today's most challenging problems in a new way. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Today I'm chatting with Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School and author of one of my favorite books, Think Again. He's a longtime friend, and I love to disagree with him.

Well, I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right, which is as much as I can ever acknowledge around you being right. But you always challenge me to think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. This chat was a part of IBM's Think Conference, where leading innovators talk about technology that makes a difference and other intriguing conversations with global perspectives. Let's dive in.

He and I are going to have a conversation today about this moment that we're in, about whether something transformational has happened in the way we live and work. And do not expect us to agree. We disagree on virtually everything, but it's always with an undercurrent deep affection. Adam, welcome. Thank you. I don't know if we actually disagree on everything, but I kind of like the sound of that.

It's always important to start on, to acknowledge the fact there may be major rifts. You're so Canadian, but keep going. I am very Canadian. So I'm going to confess that I would describe myself as a pandemic skeptic. And I was a pandemic skeptic at the very beginning of the pandemic. And I'll define what I mean by skeptic in a moment.

I wavered in the middle and now I'm a skeptic again. By pandemic skeptic, I mean, I do not expect the pandemic to radically change the way we work or even live our lives. I think it's all going to go away. Where would you stand on that, on the continuum of radical transformation at one end, radical skepticism on the other?

Well, I hope you're wrong. I'm afraid you might be partially right, which is as much as I can ever acknowledge around you being right. But you always challenge me to think again, which I thoroughly enjoy. I think...

And I've already started to see some real changes, right? So let's go back to winter 2018. I went to a bunch of CEOs and startup founders and said, I think the future of work might be hybrid. Let's do a remote Friday experiment where people have one day a week to work from anywhere. And every single leader I pitched turned me down. They said, we don't want to open Pandora's box. We think people will procrastinate constantly and our culture is going to fall apart.

And a lot of those CEOs have started rethinking, right? Some of them announced they're going to be permanently remote. Many others are at least rolling out hybrid plans. And so I don't think that flexibility is going away, right? They've realized now I can hire anywhere. I don't have to maintain a really expensive giant headquarters office necessarily. And I've got to imagine that some companies, especially when you look at the national survey data suggesting that most people are expecting to work two days a week from home and most companies are encouraging that. That seems like something that's going to change, don't you think?

Well, yes and no. I feel like there was obviously a steady push in that direction over the last 15 years or so. But I have some specific questions. So the first would be young people. My sense from the young people who work at my company and my memories of my own thinking when I was in my 20s was that going to the office was the single most exciting thing

in my week, right? I wanted to meet, I was new, I wanted to learn. When I was at the Washington Post, I was 10 feet from Bob Woodward, the greatest reporter of my generation, was 10 feet away. I knew nothing about reporting, he knew everything. And I used to sit and watch him and listen. And I learned so much from that. Next to me was a guy named Mike Galissakoff, another

legendary investigative reporter. He was next to me. I would sit and listen. And I understood that the only way I would get, I would learn that way was to go to the office, right? I mean, there was just no reason not to go to the office. Now, do I feel the same way now at 57? No, I don't. But if you're a company that employs young people, can you really hire the best and brightest young people by saying, we're going to have you work out of your apartment or a Starbucks? Seems nuts to me.

No, I don't think you can. But I also don't think you're going to get the best and brightest young people by saying you have to be in the office every day and we're going to measure not your results, not your contribution, but the amount of face time that you contribute. That seems ridiculous. And I hope that that's one thing that the pandemic erased.

I think, you know, I guess we have precedent for this in some ways. So think about what Ricardo Semler did at Semco as an interesting example, right? Originally in Brazil, now in 20-some countries, very traditional manufacturing company. They say, we will let you buy back one day a week for 10% of your salary.

And they're thinking this is an early retirement move that will appeal to the baby boomers who say, all right, I want to enjoy a day a week of retirement before I get really old. But no, it's most popular among their youngest employees in their 20s and 30s who want that day of freedom.

And I think this is going to be a competitive advantage for companies moving forward. The organizations that are willing to give you that little bit of flexibility are going to do a much better job attracting, motivating, and retaining people than the ones that say you have to be here all the time. Well, but there's two things we're talking about here. One is workplace flexibility, and the other is dislocation.

Right. A remote work. And they're very they're quite separate. So I am quite like I practice flexibility. I've been practicing it for years and years and years. I love the office. I don't go into the office every day, nor do I expect all of our employees to come in every day.

At the same time, for certain key events, like for a podcast, the crucial moment in the creation of one of my episodes, The Revisionist History, is the table read, where we reenact the podcast that we're working on. I read the narration. We play the tape. I have a team of six people, and we've been doing those on Zoom.

And I'm sorry, it doesn't work on Zoom. And I actually said to our staff, the minute we're all vaccinated, we are meeting again in person because this is creative work. It can't be done. I need your feedback in the room. It doesn't work on Zoom. So that

That idea, I don't mind flexibility, but if someone said to me, I'm in Denver, Colorado, and I'm your producer, and I'm going to work from Denver from now on, I'd say, you can't work in Denver. I'm sorry, you can't. You need to be, unless you're willing to fly in two days a week and then fly back, fly into New York and fly back, it doesn't work. Malcolm Gladwell, you are one of the smartest and most creative people I know.

And yet you can't bring yourself to imagine doing a table read for a product that's audio only without seeing people's faces. When you yourself wrote in talking to strangers that we overrate seeing people's faces. No, no, no, no. Interesting. Interesting. Why do I need them in the room when I'm doing a table read? I need them in the room because it's imperfect.

So I'm creating a product for audio, but I'm only in round one of what will be four rounds. And I mean, I'm handing in something that is very much a work in progress. I need immediate high quality feedback. A. B. I have found I also need my entire team to pipe up. And I have found that people's responses are inhibited online.

And that doesn't work for me. I need everyone. I want to say, I want to, I keep telling them that this even dumb comments are useful. And I feel, I feel maybe this is incorrect. I feel that on zoom, people are editing themselves more. And even one, when I'm doing a table read one comment, even a dumb comment can be transformational in the final script. So I can't afford closing their mouth when they should open it.

I accept the whole premise. I think all of it makes sense, except the basic idea that you can't create the psychological safety you're looking for, that freedom to take risks and point out problems and let ideas fly, that you can't create that in an online environment. So let me throw out a couple examples of how I think this works. Adam, position heal thyself.

Are you trying to tell me that you're going to give up on teaching in person now that you're so in love with online that Wharton's going to go, going to turn into a digital platform? Is that what you're saying? That's exactly where I was not going, but sort of going. Let me say a couple of things here. The first one is that I just came from a table read of a work-life episode that we did over Zoom.

And I got better feedback than we did when we did these face-to-face because we know, you know the science of brainstorming, right? In group brainstorming, and this is true in group feedback too, you run into production blocking where we can't all talk at once and you lose ideas. You run into ego threat where people are worried they're going to get judged and we lose ideas. And you run into conformity where the hippo, that's you, the highest paid person's opinion, as soon as that's known, we all jump on the bandwagon.

And we know that if you can give people multiple channels for voicing their independent ideas, they're better off. There is a chat window in Zoom. I don't know if you're tech savvy enough to have discovered it yet, but I will tell you that I have had both in teaching online and also in the group table reads of my podcast and in actually getting feedback from my students on the early drafts of Think Again, I have had more honest conversations

more, I would say, diverse comments than I've ever gotten before because there are all these people who would not speak up out loud, but we have this very active chat window going.

and it allows me to get everybody's participation in. So no, I don't want to leave teaching online only, but I would sure love, like I've been able to do online, to call on someone who's going to bring up a relevant point or debate me on something as opposed to the random hand that happens to be willing to speak, which is usually a white male extrovert and least likely to be the person that I want to learn from.

Wait, are you just conceding on this? No, I'm not. I'm saying you and I are probably in agreement in the sense that I have that mode as well.

As we go through the drafts of my episodes, we move from an in-person to an online thing and people weigh in, editors weigh in. It's a Google doc. People can make all the comments they want and they do. So I have that. I'm just saying there's a particular moment in the creative process where the room and the energy in the room is important to measure and to feed off. But let me say something else. Okay.

Wait, before you leave that, before you leave that, I think I think that's an important distinction to make here. I think so. You're talking about what Anita Woolley would call burstiness. Right. That sense that the room is literally bursting with energy and ideas. And I don't know how to recreate that online. Right. I feel like we're violating one of the laws of thermodynamics every time I have a Zoom session where I put in a ton of energy and less comes back.

And I think that part is very hard to replicate in the online environment. But I think sometimes the flow of ideas is still worth it. Yeah. The second and more important point, though, is about fun. So I have had you've had more conversations, but I've had, you know, a lot of conversations with college kids over the last year. And I have yet to find a single conversation.

college kid who found the last year more pleasurable than the year before it, right? Or high school kids. They all hate it. Why do they hate it? Because it's not as fun. Now, I suspect the same is true of employees. Sure, even if you convinced me that Zoom was a more efficient way to get feedback from my employees, you cannot convince me that they're enjoying it more. And ultimately, if they're not enjoying their jobs, we're doomed as a company.

Simple as that. The whole point, the founding principle of Pushkin Industries from the moment this company was, I'm now talking about my company that started two and a half years ago. Jacob and I, when we sat down to start the company, we were like, we're going to make cool things. Number two, we're going to have fun.

If everything is online, it's not fun. As far as I'm concerned, we failed. I want to have fun. Is that wrong? Adam, why are you standing in the way of my employment and my employees' enjoyment?

I'm standing in the way of your enjoyment because you would never be allowed to run a company. Can you imagine Malcolm Gladwell, CEO? You know what? We're going to make cool stuff, but almost as important is we're going to have a lot of fun. That would never work. Wall Street would laugh you out of your job in a day. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on, hold on. Adam, in the course, don't count pandemic year, in how many years have you been teaching? Teaching, I don't know, 15 maybe. Okay. Do you have fun doing it?

Of course, that's part of the fun. Hold on, hold on, hold on. If you didn't have fun doing it, would you have left your job as a professor by this point? No, because I think it's meaningful and I'd rather bet on purpose than pleasure. You would have gritted it out for 15 years, even though it's like every morning, like, oh, do I have to do this again? And you would have like looked at your wife and she would have said, Adam, there's no way around it.

Just grab your hard hat and go off to the salt mines, please. I'm not buying that. You could have done a million other things you could have done that could have made you a good living that you could have found fun. You would not have stayed a professor if it wasn't fun. Okay, maybe it depends on how you define fun. So I'm thinking now of Dan Coyle's distinction between deep fun and shallow fun. And when you say fun, I'm thinking about shallow fun, which is we're going to go and party and we're basically going to revert to our college selves. That is not my idea of fun. My idea of fun is deep fun.

which is we're working on hard, interesting problems. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we're really puzzled and confused and we're trying to get to the bottom of an important question. And I think you can have that kind of deep fun in a virtual world. In fact, it's the same kind of deep fun that I have when I'm writing books. And I think you have it too. Isn't that fun? Are you saying that the time you spend sitting in front of your computer writing New Yorker articles and bestselling books is not fun? It is fun, but...

I rest my case, Your Honor. So let me tell you about a conversation I had this weekend with an old college friend of mine who's now a senior administrator at a big hospital system, very large hospital system. And he was talking about what the last year has been like. And also, every time I've seen him over the last five years, he has...

registered a long complaint about electronic medical records, which are part of this conversation, right? So as his role has gotten more digital, he will tell you he's now in charge of, he's the chief well-being officer for his hospital system. And they have a serious problem with morale in their ranks. He will be the first to tell you this. Why do they have a serious problem with them? Among other reasons, because

The people entered the profession to do something and have an experience that they're not having anymore. My friend can, he can track when people are online late at night doing their electronic medical record. And they're logging on 11 at night too. And it's just not, he's like, that's the death of,

I'm not going to be able to retain those people. They're not going to do good work. They're going to burn out. That's the daily reality of his job is that they're trying to do something very important in society. And the people who are charged with doing that are not enjoying themselves. What do they enjoy? They enjoy sitting down and getting to know a patient. That's why they became doctors, right? And so this last year, when everything's been done remotely has been hell.

Correctly. That's not why they became physicians. So like, they're not going to want to do we want to continue this for them? No, there'll be no one left in the hospitals to cure patients. Give them their patients back. Because that the deep fun is gone when they're on computers all day long.

Yeah, I think we're in strong alignment there. I definitely do not want to take somebody who got into a profession to help people and say you're going to spend 40% of your time entering information in electronic medical records. But I think that's the presence of an unpleasant, pleasant task, right? Not anything inherent to working electronically or virtually.

I think there are, I've met surgeons over the past year who have said, you know what, going remote has been the best thing I've been able to do because I can spread my expertise around the world more efficiently. I don't have to travel to go and do a grand rounds. I can reach patients who, you know, otherwise wouldn't be able to benefit from my care. And that's been a really meaningful change to my job. And so what I want to do is I want to keep that connectivity and meaning. And I want to subtract out some of the things that are clearly a source of burnout and a chore for too many people in too many jobs. Yeah.

So let's talk about your job for a moment. We alluded to it earlier, but so you're at a school which is very selective and which charges a lot of money, right? For presumably because of an expectation of a certain kind of experience. So what do you do? What do you guys do next year and the year after? Do you cut your tuition in half and go 50% Zoom classes or what are you going to do?

Don't know yet. I think it's an open question. I think the first thing we should be doing is running experiments, which, you know, look, I'm obviously like everyone else devastated by the pandemic. But given that we're stuck with it, it has been a good excuse for us to do a lot of rethinking and experimentation. So I mentioned the chat window earlier. When I started teaching online, some colleagues and I said, all right, we're going to use hashtags.

And we had students put in hashtag question if they had a question, hashtag on fire if they had a burning question or comment. And that means if I see on fire, I will literally stop in mid-sentence. Floor is yours. And that way, you know, you can jump the line.

I then added #aha if you had a eureka moment, which helped me track what people were learning. And sometimes I realized I hadn't gotten my point across. Other times I saw that I clearly made a point that I didn't even realize I was making it. And then in some cases too, it was kind of a guide for students to track the learning that was happening as it went. My favorite thing that was #debate.

where if somebody wanted to disagree with me or one of their classmates, I could get them into the conversation. And I think that it's such a small innovation, right? But I don't want to lose that when I go back into the classroom. I want to keep that dialogue going. I don't know what that's going to look like yet, but I want it to happen.

And then the other thing that really opened up that I've never been able to do before is we brought guest speakers from all over the world. Instead of just asking the people who live in or near Philly, I was able to go to people in multiple countries on multiple continents in lots of interesting places and say, hey, would you come to class for half an hour? I think I might go guest speakers fully and permanently remote now because it means we can all go on Zoom and we can have an awesome conversation with somebody who would never show up in my class.

So I want to see us do more of those kinds of experiments, but I don't want to give up on the burstiness or the connection that happens in the physical classroom. Is that fair? Yeah, I do think it's fair. A couple of caveats here, which is that I wonder whether there isn't a great deal of nuance and variability in different audiences' responses to digital environments. So

I need an answer to a question. Suppose I have a room full of kids in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood. They're in fourth grade. What is the right mix of online and in-person for that group versus your students are not only are they much older,

but they are, you know, they're the best and the brightest. They're the cream of the crop. Is it, does that make a difference? Are they, is a more mature and disciplined and intellectually engaged group of students better suited for online experiences than kids? You know, I think both of us have suspicions about the answer to that question, but I wonder whether

We need to get a lot more nuanced in what mixes work best for what kinds of students and what kinds of situations.

Yeah, I think that's such an important point. I haven't seen good data on it yet, but I had the same intuition that tech savvy and also some degree of intrinsic motivation is a huge set of contingencies for determining whether online is going to be even remotely engaging, no pun intended. I also think the type of work and the type of learning we're doing really matters. So in general, I hate sports metaphors when applied to work.

but I'm going to use one here. Normally, I think, okay, we haven't agreed on how to keep score. We haven't agreed on all the rules and we don't have a referee. We're also leaving out maybe half the population. But this is a rare exception where when we study interdependence in organizational psychology, we distinguish between pooled, sequential, and reciprocal interdependence. Say that five times fast. I prefer to think about them as individual sport, relay sport, and team sport.

So if your job or your classroom is basically an individual sport like gymnastics, where everyone's going to do their own floor routine and their own bar and their own vault, you don't need that much coordination. You can do a lot of independent, individualized remote work and learning because the whole will basically be the sum of the parts. If you're in a relay sport though, the person who's handing the baton to the next runner needs to actually talk to that runner. And then also the person at the start needs to talk with the person at the finish to make sure they're going in the same destination or the same direction.

I think the most important context for really getting real synchronization of time and space is probably when we're playing a true team sport like basketball or soccer, right? If I'm going to pass you the ball and then you're going to send it back to me and then I'm going to send it to someone else and then it goes back to you again and everybody has multiple pairs of eyes and multiple touches on the project or the lesson, that's when it becomes really difficult to substitute for the face-to-face in-person experience. And I don't think we've had enough of these conversations in our organizations or in our schools asking,

what are we doing right now? Are we playing individual sport, relay sport, or team sport? Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. Adam, as always, this was delightful. I'm still slightly baffled that we seem to have so little to disagree about.

But there's always hope for next time. Next time, I hope both of us are, you know, bloodied and torn by the end of our encounter. But in this case, this is not the case. So but thank you very much for joining us. And thank you to IBM for for bringing bringing us together and sponsoring this lovely conversation. Thank you. Thrilled to be here. This is great fun. Thanks for having me.

Thanks again to Adam for having a great chat with me about the ever-present cubicle versus couch debate. And thanks to IBM for setting up such an informative conference. Smart Talks with IBM is produced by Emily Rostak with Carly Migliore, edited by Karen Shakerji, engineering by Martine Gonzalez, mixed and mastered by Jason Gambrell and Ben Talladay, music by Gramascope.

Special thanks to Molly Socha, Andy Kelly, Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Hedda Fane, Eric Sandler, and Maggie Taylor, and the teams at 8 Bar and IBM. Smart Talks with IBM is a production of Pushkin Industries and iHeart Media. You can find more Pushkin podcasts on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. See you next time.

Hello, hello. Malcolm Gladwell here. I want to tell you about a new series we're launching at Pushkin Industries on the 1936 Olympic Games. Adolf Hitler's Games. Fascism, anti-Semitism, racism, high Olympic ideals, craven self-interest, naked ambition, illusion, delusion, all collide in the long, contentious lead-up to the most controversial Olympics in history. The Germans put on a propaganda show, and America went along with all of it. Why?

This season on Revisionist History, the story of the games behind the games. Listen to this season of Revisionist History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to hear episodes before they're released to the public, subscribe to Pushkin Plus on Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.