 Welcome to another social distancing social from Future Tense, Partnership of Slate, New America and Arizona State University. Today we are going to be talking about the future of work and specifically whether we are currently in that future here in our home offices with our Zooms set up. I'm joined by Bridget Shalty, who wrote the book about the elusive work-life balance and is also the director of New America's Better Lifeline. Hi, Bridget. Oh, hey, hi. Sorry, I was trying to take myself off of mute, but somebody did it for me, so thank you. Hey, great to be here. So you're kind of the perfect person to be talking to because you've spent years studying how people work. And obviously we're in the midst of a dramatic shift right now. Millions of Americans are working from home. I guess the first question is the biggest one, which is, is this your stay? You know, it's a great question. And I think the first thing too, that we all need to acknowledge is that not everybody is able to work at home or is working at home. And we really need to make sure that in this conversation, we also call out the healthcare workers who are not able to work remotely. The delivery workers, the grocery store workers, you know, that adds another dimension to this whole question of future of work. And you know, so a number of people can't work at home, can't work remotely, but a number of people can. And what's so interesting is I think that what we're, that this coronavirus really gives us an opportunity, you know, kind of to disrupt the old way of doing things. We've been able to work remotely for a couple of decades, but there's been a lot of resistance to it. And that's what's so fascinating is right now, we don't have a choice. And so we don't have that same kind of friction or resistance in a lot of the reporting that I've done and a lot of the social science research looking at work and work cultures. What is so clear is that in the United States, we have this FaceTime bias, that we think that the best workers work in the office, work all the time. You know, there's lots of research that shows that we reward the workers that we can see, that managers tend to think, well, if I can see you, then I know you're working. And how many of us have walked around offices late at night and seen people who are there, but they're playing solitaire or they're answering emails or like buying something online, they're not quote unquote working, but they know that that's what is valued in the workplace. And so they're there as almost like a performance of work. So I do feel like this virus gives us an opportunity to kind of strip off some of those really damaging kind of illusions that we were working under, that frankly really disadvantaged women, really disadvantaged anybody who wants it sort of in the current power structure. Anybody who needed to have caregiving responsibility, but anybody who needed to work flexibly, you know, for the last couple of decades, flexible work, remote work, it's been seen as an accommodation or a perk or a nice to have for a working mom or, you know, sort of a lesser worker, somebody who's not all in in the office. And this really gives us an opportunity to say, you know, it isn't, you know, that is not how we can use remote work and that those are not the best workers. It will really give us an opportunity to redefine what good work is and who does it. So I want to come back to a lot of those topics, healthcare workers, women in the workplace and this idea of being rewarded for being present. But I think the first thing I want to ask you is, this is not the first time that people had said, oh, work doesn't need to be done in the office anymore. I mean, this is a prediction that we see come along with every single technological improvement going back to the telegraph where people say, well, now there is no more need to congregate. You see these like absurd predictions with video conferencing, getting off the ground that this is the end of the city and that no one's gonna need to live here. And if anything, we've only seen increasing returns to agglomeration economies, more and more firms paying fortunes to get their workers or to get their offices into the places where the best workers are. So what makes this any different? That is such a good question, you know, when you started bringing that up, I remember when I started listening to Buckminster Fuller and the whole idea of the global village and that just sounded so ideal to me, like, wow, that you could live anywhere and you could do really cool work from anywhere. And I do think that our technology enables more and more of that, but you're right, we're very wedded to these notions that we need to be physically together, which is one of the reasons I think the social distancing is so very difficult for so many of us. But there is, I mentioned a FaceTime bias and I think it's a good question. I do think that the virus will change things, how much, how far and for how long, those are really excellent questions that I don't think we know the answers to. But I think anytime you think about change, there's always like little seeds that are planted and then pull back and then maybe change in certain areas. So I don't think that we're gonna see this massive sea change just because that's not the way change works. But I do think that we're gonna start seeing some changes that will be permanent in certain areas and then very stubborn places that will be very resistant to change. And I suppose also sometimes you need a massive disruptive event to force people to make changes that might otherwise have sat on the sidelines or seemed like too big a gamble. I mean, firms are conservative by nature and it would make sense that they would be reluctant to try outside a big experiment and now we've basically forced it on. Well, but the interesting thing is, you talk about an experiment and I think this is important to remember just how strong this resistance is to change. There have been fabulous, amazing controlled blind trials, really well-constructed social science research about new kinds of work systems, remote work, flexible work, results-only work environment, a family supportive systems that encourage flexible and remote work. Great research by amazing practitioners out there and researchers. And I will tell you that almost every single one has found great benefits, more productivity, better communication, better work-life balance, greater health, reduced stress, more connection with a family at home, more work-life balance, but really great measurable benefits at work and at home and with health benefits. And just about every single case, once new management has come in, all of those programs have gone. They're just, they're flushed. They're like, oh no, all hands on deck, we're going back to what we know. So even in this pandemic, in this crisis, it's almost like it'll act like a gigantic exposure therapy for a lot of people who've never had this kind of experience before. I think, honestly, I think workers have known that they can work this way. They've needed time to have concentrated work. You know, in some of my reporting, we end up talking to people who say that they will take vacation days or sick days just so that they can get their concentrated work done at home because they can't do it at work, which is crazy, but that's the way that we've set up kind of our work systems has contributed to this kind of endless overwork where we're never done because we're always so interrupted in the office so that if we're gonna really do our concentrated work, people do it in off hours so that work kind of has spilled over into all aspects of our lives. And so this gives us, this is another opportunity to see how work spills over when you're here in my home office, you're in your home. It's very difficult to set those boundaries. And yet part of what's happened is that we have these old systems which value face time and coming together and the old fashioned meeting, clashing with these new systems of email and tech where you can work in asynchronous fashion. You don't have to be together to do good work. And what we've done in the last probably 10, 20 years is that we're doing both of these systems at the same time they're clashing. We don't know how to do them either one of them very well. And that's what's contributed to so much overwork and craziness. And so maybe this gives us an opportunity to see their two different systems and maybe we can learn how to work more strategically and effectively and recognize we need to toggle between collaborative time, being together physically or however, and then also time off in a way where you can actually put your head down and actually get your work done. I was reading a study that suggested that one of the reasons that firms keep asking employees to come to work and employees keep coming to work and basically this system of office work developed in the late 19th century persists almost without any change to this day is not so much that people get into a room and have this kind of magical moment. It's not like a movie scene, but rather, and I'm pulling this from this study that Google did, they talk about how their best teams propagate in person what they call psychological safety. And it's the idea that you feel comfortable expressing ideas and maybe even criticism around your coworkers because it's easy to read them and understand that you're still in balance here and that you're voicing something that's acceptable. And that when you work online, it can become a lot harder to read people to understand where those boundaries are and as a result, you see a kind of self-censorship in ways that I'm not saying that people won't necessarily criticize a project that's gone wrong, but it's just this low level of trust that gets propagated by people seeing each other in person is not something we've been able to replicate online yet. Not yet. I think that that's really true because we haven't really... There are some totally distributed teams. There are some places that work totally remotely. Like I'm thinking of Basecamp as one example. Artemis is in Seattle, that's another example. They tend to be tech firms or consulting firms. So there are some that have figured out how to work remotely and they have to work at creating that very important element that you talk about psychological safety. How do you create cultures of high trust? And that takes work, that takes effort and you're right, we haven't figured out how to do that. A text can sound very odd and email if you're kind of in a bad mood, even if you don't mean it can come off very badly or very poorly. So it really takes skill to be able to communicate effectively in a remote setting. But that aside, where we go from here whether we're all gonna be distributed and always working from our home offices, I don't know that that's the future. I think in some certain industries and companies that certainly will be. But for most people, when you think about, you talk to workplace consultants and kind of looking at work redesign, most what they consider high performance, flexible cultures are a mix of in-person time, collaborative time and remote time. There is sort of like this toggling back and forth that really leads to me as probably more of a hybrid going forward, taking the best of that in-person time. I miss my team, I really like them. I really like when we get together and whether it's brainstorming or finding connections that helps you bounce ideas off each other and it motivates you. There's definitely a value to that in-person collaboration. There's also a value in then coming and finding that time and space to do your own work. And then I think that finding that balance between toggling is really important. And what's unfortunately what's happened in so many workplaces is there's way too much, what I would call over-collaboration. Like it's ballooned like crazy. And I'm talking about all those, excuse my language, can I swear on Zoom? God damn meetings. I mean, oh my God, you can get nothing done and you'll have your whole day just going from meeting to meeting to meeting. You get to the end of the day, you've been really busy and you don't know what you've done. And maybe you've answered a couple of emails. We're in this kind of like just a death spiral, I think, in kind of new and old ways, just clashing in our modern workplaces that I really hope that this corona situation helps us realize that meetings are important, but to be really strategic about how you have them. I wanna share with you an email that got sent out to employees at the Wall Street Journal. Now, a newspaper is in some ways the classic workplace where you want people to be in the room. You know, if you've seen old movies, all the president's men or posts or something like that, you see a copy editor is yelling across to the managing editor, phones ringing all the time, reporters jabbering on and then shouting across the room. It's classic office work. Now, here is what the editors of the Wall Street Journal told their employees when the coronavirus shutdown happened. They said, when you're working from home, you should respond within just a few minutes to Slack or Google Hangout messages. Make sure your cell phone number is readily accessible. Keep your phone's ringer turned on and answer it when it rings. Now is not the time to be screening calls and so on. Keep your camera on during Hangouts and it'll make me think that they really think that we, the employees, are going to take this opportunity to just not get dressed in the morning and wake up at 10.30 AM and not do any work. So this is what, OK, so the first thing that I will say is that I worked in newsrooms for most of my career. I was at the Washington Post for nearly 17 years. I never worked in the newsroom. I was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize and I wrote that story at my kitchen table. So I don't think that you have to, I've seen all of those old movies, but I didn't work that way. And frankly, it's really difficult to concentrate when you've got people yelling and slamming down phones. So I think that some of that is a nostalgia for how we think we should work. And I think that you raise a really, really good point. When you send out an email like that, you really infant, I'm not sure I'm going to pronounce this right, infantilizing your employees. You're not signaling that you trust them. You're not signaling that you think that they're going to do the right thing and do good work. Who cares if you get up at 10.30 in the morning? Who cares if you're in your pajamas? If the mission of your work is to write a report and write a kick-ass piece and get it in by the five o'clock deadline, who cares if you're in your pajamas when you do that or not? I think this is what I'm hoping that the coronavirus will help us strip away some of these really outdated notions about what we need in order to do good work. Have you seen any examples of employers trying to keep tabs on their employees as they work remotely, trying to find a way to basically replicate in the home setting what they've been able to do in the office, which even if you think is basically BS, they can still kind of look out from the corner office and see all the heads in the cubicles and know everyone's at work. Well, there are examples. I've spoken with people who are doing a lot of consulting with companies and they're trying to figure out how to make this change. And that's the first thing that these consultants will say that a lot of managers, a lot of CEOs will say, it's like, well, how will I know? How will I know people are really working? And then the response back to them is like, well, how do you really know they're working when they're in the office? Yeah, how do you really know? How do you measure what work is? And I think this is what the coronavirus is showing us, that in so many of our workplaces, we don't really measure work. We measure face time and presence. So if you're there, then I assume you're working. And then we measure hours. So if you're there for a long time, then I assume not only are you working, but wow, you must be working really hard. This is something that I ran up against because I did, I have worked remotely. I've worked in bureaus and then I've worked on my own. When I had kids, I would sort of sneak around and work remotely. And I do think that it hurts you, in our face time culture, there's a lot of plum assignments that get handed out in hallways. There's a lot of that kind of interstitial chit chat. So there is a value to that. So I recognize that I made a calculated choice in doing that. But at the same time, what is my mission? My mission is not to kind of have chit chat in the office. My mission is to do really report and write great stories. And so that's what I think coronavirus is forcing managers, it's forcing them to think much harder about what are realistic metrics in terms of how to measure good work. I see myself in the monitor and I sound angry. And it's because I am angry because this is really what's kept women back. This is what's kept people with caregiving responsibilities back. There's research that shows that if you walk by a man's empty office, you automatically think, oh wow, he must be out on an assignment. He's out with a client. You walk by a woman's empty office and you automatically think, oh, she's home with her kids. She's a slacker. She's not working hard. You know, and when I worked, I still work remotely quite a bit, the research shows you actually work longer hours. You actually work harder and you're actually more productive when you're working remotely. And I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I think part of the reason that happens is because you know that you're at a disadvantage in a FaceTime culture. And so you're trying to overdo it to show your commitment. And so maybe this is another thing that coronavirus can also strip away this kind of ridiculous mask that you can do good work in your pajamas. You know, and on my team, we say we have, I try to, you know, walk the talk. So I believe in a flexible and remote work environment. I believe in coming together just to collaborate. And the way that you have to operate is be really clear on what your mission is, be really clear on what your priorities are, be really clear on your roles and responsibilities and who does what, when your deadlines are and what your standards are that you expect. And then you trust people. You have to have a high sense of trust to let them go and do their thing. I had an intern who came in one day and she'd been at the doctor and she was really stressed out. And she goes, I'm so sorry I came in late. And I looked at her and I said in a high performance flexible culture, there is no late. Just do your job. I wanna ask you about this, the gender issue here. The typical working pattern in this country has been since the rise of the dual earner household that American women have made career sacrifices for childcare. Do you think that the perceived acceptability of working from home would help women in that position maintain their professional ambitions or I guess at the same time, would that help men spend less time in the office and spend more time doing the domestic work that they often neglect in favor of their professional lives? Well, I think what's really important to remember here when we're talking about remote work and why there's been a resistance to it, not only there's this FaceTime bias, but a lot of remote work policies sprang up in the 1990s as part of women's initiatives. Once we had the technology, if you look in most work environments, it was sort of thought of as an accommodation like for people on the mommy track, oh, we've invested in these women, so maybe they're not gonna get to the C-suite, but we don't wanna lose them and our numbers are gonna look better if we keep them. So the remote work was sort of seen as a way to kind of sort of throw a bone to women, so to speak. I have no idea. Well, then what ended up happening is then that it became really siloed and it became so gendered that if you were a man, you were actually more punished if you actually asked for those kinds of policies. So they became so associated with gender. So really honestly, when you say what needs to happen now, and I think what coronavirus is showing us, it's not just women who are working at home right now, it's everybody because we have to, because lives are on the line. And so what really needs to happen is to move the idea that remote and flexible work is only for women or only for caregivers or only for like restless millennials that it's really something that everybody can take advantage of. And when you look also, women tend to use the more formal policies, but when you ask like BLS and other surveys, like who's working remotely or who's working flexibly, you know who does is men. Men do a lot more flexible work when you think about the CEOs, they're off on the golf course, they work very flexibly, they often work from home. And so I think we need to kind of have this reimagining of what flexible and remote work is and make it available to everyone. That changes the way that we think who's a good worker. It also enables more people to share more fairly at home because the research is clear, women are still doing twice the amount of housework and childcare that men are. And a lot of times people blame men for that and oh, aren't they terrible? But you know what? It's very difficult for men to make any other choice right now when our workplaces are demanding that they be all in 24 seven or that they face this kind of flexibility stigma or bias. I wanna ask you about something you said earlier which was that you told someone there is no late and that makes me wonder as we shift from a nine to five culture which is about showing up at the office, being there for a certain amount of time, putting the work in and then going home towards one that's more oriented around fulfilling tasks and actually showing accomplishments. When does the work day end? Especially for people who have maybe less defined the tasks to finish and are in less of a leadership position, less of a position to decide when their day is done. I know that France passed a few years ago this law that made everyone very envious over here which was I think was for government workers prohibiting them from looking at their email over the weekend. And I'm wondering what you think as workers what we should be asking for here in terms of ways to make sure that we're not responding to Slack and email at 7.30 in the morning or 10 at night. Yeah, well, I think one of the first things that I would say to that, who works nine to five? Even in a FaceTime environment, there is no nine to five anymore. There hasn't been for a couple of decades. Americans work among the longest hours of any advanced economy. The numbers on the whole don't look as high as they are because we've got really what's happened in our workforce. We've kind of got this bifurcation where you've got knowledge workers, really when you look at the time diary data from the 1980s on, the hours for knowledge workers have just gone up and up and up crazy. Like we do more overwork than most other places. And then lower wage workers, the hours have gone down. So that now we have this sort of fictional middle that nobody works in between, but you've got a lot of underwork for lower wage workers. But to that point of like, when does the work day end? You could say that right now, when does the work day end? When you have these overwork cultures that are expecting FaceTime and then expecting you to log back on in the evening. So I think it's a bigger question that it's not just the coronavirus, it's not just remote work. We need to be asking of our work systems, our workplaces in general, how much is enough? When are you done? I think that these are all really important questions. We don't work at factories anymore where we've got the whistle that tells you your shift has ended. It's like we need to find those ways in ourselves and we need to get buy-in in our workplaces and in our managers to try to figure out what is reasonable within a 24 hour window so that we're not always on. Because that kind of bleed of work into life, it's just, it's robbing us of everything that makes life worth living. I wanna ask also about the class divide here. I pulled up a paper I found this morning that's looking at the share of jobs that can be done from home organized by metropolitan area. And you see it's really, really uneven. It's more or less what you'd think, which is that the more knowledge worker heavy metros, the top five are for working from home. For the share of jobs that can be done from home are San Jose, Washington, D.C., Durham, North Carolina, Austin, Texas, and San Francisco. And those are all between 40 and 50% in terms of the share of jobs that could be done from home. But what's really interesting about this paper is that it shows that the weighted by wage, it's way higher. So if you look at San Jose, 63, only in San Jose, 48% of the jobs can be done from home, but 63% of the wages are part of those jobs that can be done from home. And that trend persists across the other cities as well. So I'm wondering what you make of this idea of working from home as a privileged thing, as a class marker, that the commute becomes something that is considered a kind of a sort of lower status activity to have to actually leave your house to go to work. And that's a, you know, I think it's so important and that's why I opened with like, let's recognize here that not everybody can work at home. It is a sign of privilege that you can do it. It is something that knowledge workers can do, something that requires education. It requires the ability to, you know, to have technology, to have, you know, to be able to have wifi, to have, you know, the resources to have a home office. So that is not everybody. And I think it's so important as we, as so many of us are doing this kind of remote work to recognize that we are in positions of enormous power and that right now the people who are going to work, I spoke with a woman who works at Walmart, she's terrified. She's terrified to go to work, you know? And so think about that. You know, here we are, we're staying kind of safe in our bubbles and the people who are going out to work are literally putting their lives on the line. So I think it's a very important thing to remember that this is a marker of class and moving forward, what is that going to mean? You know, I think that in a larger sense, you know, I know we're talking about remote work, but I think that what this virus is doing, it's really calling into question work on such a huge level. So how we do remote work and how we effectively use technology as one, what it means for low wage workers. I mean, we've got three million people in the last week applying for unemployment benefits. And now they're all going to lose their healthcare. So what is that, you know, we've got the rise in what I call like the crapification of jobs. We've got so many of these jobs that are poorly paid that people get stuck in, that there is no kind of exit. This gives us an opportunity to really think about, you know, how did we get here and how do you create decent work with good pay and benefits? You know, this gives us an opportunity to think about the social contract. We have now shifted, you know, risk from, you know, companies that would take care of people or the sense that government was there with a safety net. We've shifted so much work in the last risk in the last 40 years to individual workers. We're going to reap that problem right now as people through no fault of their own are losing their jobs and through no fault of their own are losing their healthcare. So that's another area that really requires, we'll be thinking about a third area really briefly as it's really forcing us to really rethink the role of government. We just now have emergency paid sick days legislation that passed after years of recalcitrance and reluctance to do anything. We've got emergency paid family leave because we are in this emergency. So I think it gives us an opportunity to really rethink what is the role of government? And then finally, and probably most importantly, what this virus is really making us do is think, what is the economy for? You know, right now it's all about profits and it's about markets. And we are seeing how that is completely broken and failing. Will this give us an opportunity to think about what it is that we value and how do we create systems around value, the value of life, the value of care, the value of thriving? You know, I think that there are opportunities now to have much tougher conversations that weren't going anywhere before this. One of the things that I am working on when I'm not at sleep is a book about parking. One of the interesting things about parking is that parking is provided in such a way that it's designed to be more or less a mirror of society. So you see the estimations of how many people are gonna need to park at, say, a movie theater go up in the summer because of summer blockbusters and at the mall they go up in December because of Christmas shopping. And in offices, they are always, always designed to provide more spaces than anyone needs because it turns out that very rarely is every single employee at the firm in the office at once. I'm wondering if you have seen physical modifications that stem out of early remote work experiments either at the office or at home or maybe more broadly in the way the city is shaped. One thing that I know about in commuting is that the transit service remains very much oriented around the nine to five job in such a way that basically works to the advantage of people who have that typical, but as you say, basically outdated job structure. Many people, especially in retail work, work all kinds of odd shifts and anybody who runs errands or sort of does odd jobs during the day finds that the bias of service towards nine to five doesn't make that much sense. So outside in the physical world in terms of changes with cities, offices, houses are designed, any impacts of remote work visible now? Yeah, that's such a great question. Wow, a book about parking. I haven't thought about parking other than when I'm like swearing when I can't find a place. But so one of the first things that a lot of studies have found out of remote work is that companies, you know, when they were looking for places to cut and particularly after I'd say the 2008, the last economic implosion that we had, they realized that they could save on real estate costs if they had much more remote work or they had a certain portion of their workforce working from home. You know, so I think that was part of it. I think another thing that you started to see was much more open office plans and the idea of hot desking that you wouldn't necessarily have a desk. You would kind of, you know, kind of like you could come and go and sit and be in this kind of like open space, which I think that subsequent research has shown is actually really terrible for actually getting work done. You know, I think the research that I always point to is that in the modern work environment, the average knowledge worker is interrupted every three minutes and it takes you about 20 minutes to get back to where you were. So when you think that that's how we spend so much of our days, you know, anything that would disrupt that, I think, is welcome. But going back to your point about physical changes, you know, I do think that you saw some firms think that they could realize real estate savings. But again, you know, the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that about one in four Americans worked remotely some of the time. So it certainly hasn't been this like massive sea change. And so, you know, you could be in part of that statistic and work remotely like once a month. So I think there's been some changes and certainly in more tech-inflected areas. But it has, you know, there's still plenty of places that expect people to come into the office and have huge fancy offices. Right. All right, so I think we're gonna move to take some questions now. Here's one from Margaret that's sort of related to what I was asking, but asks more of the question of how we can plan around this. And her question is, if we are in fact seeing a change in how people work, buy stuff and communicate, how should cities look at this regarding planning and revenue generation? Excuse me, this is from Robert, not Margaret. Also, if density is problematic for disease spread, does this dovetail with the ability to work from home? And I guess those are two pretty separate questions, but the first one is, should we plan differently? And the second one is, should we plan differently based on thinking about disease or is this, or is the sort of reckoning we're having now more or less actually independent of the sort of virus problem that we're dealing with? Well, I'll let you take on the, you know, that you're the expert on cities and planning, but what I will say is I think that this really shows, and this is not the first time that we've gone through a pandemic where this has been the case that's been made. We need to have much better infrastructure to enable people to work from home more easily, to enable schools to continue, because we have, you know, there are natural disasters. There are, you know, there are storms. This was a lot of the discussion during the H1N1 flu pandemic. You know, we've been here before, we're going to be here again. It really behooves all of us to have the infrastructure and the, you know, physical infrastructure with wifi and all of that, but also the planning infrastructure for teams to do the hard work to try to figure out, well, what does that look like when we transition? How can we still do our work and get our important things done? I think it behooves all of us and particularly managers and CEOs to be, to have a pandemic plan ready to go, because this is going to happen again. And then I let you take on the physical city space that I defer to you about your expertise. Well, of course I have no idea what the answer is, but I will say that many activists have long thought that nine to five transit planning oriented towards weekdays and towards white collar office computers makes no sense and puts service workers at a huge disadvantage, childcare workers at a disadvantage, people who work out hours. So there is a movement to try and move away from that kind of planning. I will also share an anecdote that I heard the other day from Robert Fogelsen, who's a historian. He wrote a book called The Great Rent Wars, which was about the rent strikes in New York City in the 1910s and 20s, which led to the nation's first rent control laws. And one interesting thing that happened then was that the laws were only applied to residences and not to offices. Now the landlords trying to raise the rents would often say, but you use this apartment as an office because in those days you did have many people who would work from home. Obviously they weren't knowledge workers, they were more likely tailors or naked makers or all kinds of weird early 20th century jobs that people did from home. And landlords would spend a lot of time trying to root out exactly who was working from home because if they were working from home then they could raise the rent. Oh wow, that's really interesting. Let's see, so we have another question here. This one is from Gabriela. She asks, what about not having supplies or technical equipment to work from home? Academics are suffering from that right now. Yeah, I think this is all part of being prepared for something like this to happen. I think that's who's manager, CEOs, workplaces to be thinking, to be thinking like what do your people need at home and how can you help them get that? So it's not, my neighbor next door right before I live in Virginia so we just had our stay at home order that came out last night and then ran out to go get a printer and I'm sure that wasn't something that they had planned on doing but we are scrambling right now and I think I'm almost out of printering myself. So how can we come up with systems and plans? And I think this is part of really being serious about taking pandemic planning in workplaces. Here's a question from Leah who asks, I was in management consulting until the travel to be in person four days a week got to me. Do you think we'll see a shift in that way of work coming out of this situation or is the value of face-to-face too valuable for this high value strategic work? Too valuable in who's mind, you know? I'm sorry, I'm getting so angry again. But I think that that just really shows so much of the FaceTime bias that a lot of workplaces have. There is no doubt how important it is to have some face-to-face connection. Relationships are really important. Building those relationships particularly in management consultant. You want to build relationship and build trust because then you can get your work done. But does that require you to be on the road four days a week? Again, that's something that has really drummed a lot of women and caregivers out of those positions. I think it's time to have a reassessment of that. There's just a lot of work that's been done and people keep doing it because it's the way we've always been doing it. And there's a real status quo bias. And I think maybe this is the time to really take a hard look at some of those biases. Yeah. William asks if expanded work remotely arrangements will result in a shift towards a higher percentage of gig engagements and I guess away from full-time salaried workers. Well, that's already been happening. Certainly not as fast as some people predicted but there is a rise in gig and contract work. There is a rise in the kind of work where the risk is shifted away from employers onto employees. And if you're a software engineer and your skills are in high demand and they're up to date, the flexibility that comes with gig work because you can probably command a high salary so that you can cover your own benefits like healthcare, maybe that flexibility is worth it to you but not a lot of people are gonna be in that kind of position. And I think that this is part of, these are sort of these grand questions that were already on the table sort of around future of work that I think coronavirus has just brought into really stark relief. I think that's a really important question to ask what kinds of jobs are gonna be created in the future and who's gonna bear the risk? And if we leave it all on the workers like gig work and contract work does, I mean, just look what's happening now when you've got employer provided healthcare. Now you've got three million people who are gonna be without healthcare. So if we're gonna move to more risk on two gig workers or contract workers, then we really need to rethink the social contract. Do we have portable benefits then? Do we have a different kind of safety net? You look at Denmark, they have what's called flex security. They give companies great flexibility to hire and fire kind of at will like we do here. But then the flip side of it is they have this incredible safety net. And when I've spoken to people there that Denmark is supposed to be one of the happiest countries on earth. When you ask them why, it's like because I know that no matter what happens, I'm never gonna be sleeping out on a bench. And you know what? We can't say that here in the United States. If there were ever a case for seeing healthcare detached from employment, I think we're seeing it right now. You're absolutely right. Here's a question from Ty who asks, body language and nonverbal communication is powerful in an in-person environment. How can we make sure there's space for emotional communication on the web? And I think this gets what I was asking earlier. Like video conferencing is good. We're having a nice conversation, but it's still no substitute for reading someone's language in person. And what have been the best ways you've seen that sort of recreate that vibe and allow people to sort of ascertain what those cues are and so forth. Well, I think you're absolutely right. There really is no substitute for that in-person communication. And human beings were social creatures. We will always crave that. That is how we communicate and connect best. So I think that we have to recognize that right now we're in a real, we're in a crisis situation. So we don't have the opportunity to kind of toggle back and forth between remote isolated work and collaborative in-person work. I think that kind of hybrid work is honestly some kind of hybrid is really the ideal. While we're in this bizarre and awful pandemic situation, there are some things that you can try to do to kind of create hallway moments or those kinds of connections. And people are already doing it and that's hosting virtual happy hours where you're not talking about work where maybe you're not in your office. If you've got a laptop, you go somewhere else. If you're in your pajamas, you stay in your pajamas. You have a beer, I'm drinking tea. Make it informal. You can even, there are some teams that are really good at it. They've had like baby showers online and they play games online. There are ways to kind of create connection, recognizing that it's imperfect and that it is different than in-person and it can't replace it, but that there are things that you can do to try to create more of that psychological safety and connection that are really so critical for trust, for being able to work together. And also of what we humans need. Here's maybe a final question from Nabina who asks, can you forecast a bit about the care economy? For those who relied on daycare for children while working, why is it assumed now that they must care for their children while working at home during the pandemic? And is there a smart solution for working mothers that doesn't involve having to resume childcare responsibilities when they work from home? Yeah, no, this is a really important question. And I would say that it's also interesting, it's also important to see how things are shifting. That past research would show that if women worked at home, they did all the childcare and housework too, and that if men worked at home, they didn't. That's actually beginning to shift. So I think it's important that when we're talking about childcare options, clearly women are still the default parent and the primary caregiver in most instances. But I think it's time to start kind of expanding that expectation and recognizing that most children have more than one parent, if you're lucky enough. There are a lot of single parents out there that we also need to be recognizing and including in our conversations about this. But when it comes to the care economy, I think again, just like we're finding so many of our systems, the kind of these market-based systems in a pandemic, we're seeing the complete and utter inadequacy of them. We have a care economy that does not work right now with parents paying way too much for childcare, with providers who are like working on razor thin margins and caregivers who are earning poverty wages. That is not a market that works. And it doesn't work normally in non-pandemic times and during a pandemic, it's just showing how broken it is. And if nothing else, then it's an opportunity to have these conversations about like, well, what kind of system would work? And then on the flip side, you look at the elder care, you know? And you've got, we require, we need so many of these care workers. And again, they're making poverty wages, they're not, we don't pay them well, we don't treat them with respect or dignity. How can we, again, reshift what we think of as valuable and how can we create decent work for the caregivers? How can we value the mothers, the parents and the work that they do as well as the unpaid labor? I think right now in a crisis where you've got so many kids at home and you've got people who are expected to work and take care of or homeschool their children, well, then I think that managers need to understand and this is not happening. I was just talking with a single mom whose work said, oh, you should be able to manage working and caring for your kids and they're one in three. And if anybody has been around a one in three year old, you know that there's no way that you can work full time and careful time for a one in three year old. So I think this also is time for management leaders, CEOs to step up and recognize the workforce has changed. We are not in the 1950s and that good work can be done, but we are in an emergency in a completely unprecedented time period and you cannot expect people to be super duper productive and still try to take care of all their kids. And so I think we all need to take a breath and ratchet our expectations down a little bit. You know, don't try to teach your three year old how to read. This is not the time to be a crazy intensive parent. You know, this is not the time to take on like a massive new project at work. You know, we are in a pandemic. We're trying to stay inside so that people can live and let's remember that this is unprecedented. And there are things that we can learn from it, but let's not expect to be super productive and super crazy, you know, caregivers and it behooves managers to be part of the conversation. That message that we should not try and be super productive during this pandemic and everybody should just relax a little bit seems like a great one to end on. So thank you so much Bridget and thank you to everyone for joining us. There are more future tense social distancing socials coming up on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Goodbye for now. Well, thanks, bye.