Does 'nothing beat in person work'?

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0:31This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Taisley. It's a good episode, this one, actually, from the start point where it actually was a book that landed in my inbox that I absolutely hated. It's a book called In Person, sort of business book that Darth Vader would be caught reading. It's sort of the, it's subtitled, it's by Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington. sort of like the manifesto for working on the Death Star five days a week. And it says how working together fuels creativity, productivity, and growth. Look, white jarred on me. It was, it was endorsed by a dazzling array of CEOs.

1:15And it felt like the book that CEOs wanted someone to write effectively says that anything that isn't in person is monochrome and ineffective, low quality and unimportant and that it work if it's going to be effective needs to be done in person and there was just a succession of data points in it there was like oh i'm not convinced that that's true anyway i said i didn't i didn't want to have a conversation actually natalia emmanuel one of the authors got in touch with me directly after so that was an approach from the publisher and i said i'll be honest with you i read it i didn't like it and i felt like it was a a book that CEOs were screaming out for.

1:57Look, after I said that, I felt so rude. Oh man, has someone's work that you said that to? Does it benefit in being direct? Anyway, I pinged her back and I said, look, listen, why don't we have a discussion about it? I don't agree with it. I don't agree with all of it. But actually the themes about doing work in person are such an important part of the discussion that we need to have about work right now that it feels like you should at least be able to make your case. So look, you're going to hear that discussion, a bit like the discussion with Rob Bryner a few episodes ago, which became sort of a bit of a ding-dong because it was like a pushback.

2:36There's disagreement in this. Hopefully it's respectful. Hopefully it's fair. I do question some of who funded the book, and I sort of raised that with Natalia. it's certainly that they give a shout out to what is described as a neo-conservative think tank in the notes she answers that question for us but look you know you I think you're going to hear a good discussion here Natalia's going to lay out all of the evidence that she's got for work being better in person actually the book if you persist with it if you get to the end it's got like a sort of a list of ways to determine how much time you should spend in person.

3:19I think that's an important context. In the US, the remote work discussion is often about people being fully remote, you know, headed off to their farm in Vermont, with a small holding of land and dialing into teams every day fully remotely. For the rest of the world, I think most of these discussions are about hybrid work. And in truth, it seems like the debate, the negotiation going on here is about hybrid work, about degrees of hybrid work. But look, you're going to get here a series of questions, a series of pushbacks about where the line needs to sit on hybrid working. And in that, it might inform your own interest.

4:04I've linked to a few things in the show notes, if you're interested in more of this, I've linked to their book. And you can sort of check that out. Appreciate the sort of the spirit where Natalia was very willing to come along and have a sort of challenging discussion. You're a dog barking at one stage for a few minutes. She assured me it wasn't her dog. No blame. There's no blame culture here. But just if you're listening to this somewhere and you're thinking there's a dog pursuing you, Then rest assured, it was merely a bit of ambient noise in the background of the discussion. Here's my discussion with the author of In Person, Natalia Emanuel.

4:50Natalia, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if you could kick off by introducing who you are and what you do. I am a research economist, which means I work with lots of big data trying to understand does one thing cause another? So lately it's been, what does remote work do for learning or productivity or mental health? And because of that, I ended up writing a book with my wonderful co-author, Emma Harrington, on remote work called In Person. This podcast has got a slightly unusual origin story in that I initially said to you, I didn't really necessarily agree with all the things in the book, so I wasn't going to talk to you.

5:27and then sort of reflected that maybe it would be worth having that discussion live and in the zone. So I appreciate you sort of taking it. And I welcome disagreement, so that seems great. Okay, good. Now, I wonder when you're writing a book like this, my first instinct is that a book called In Person, about all of the benefits of being in the office together, feels like a very helpful manifesto for bosses, suddenly to sort of drop on senior leaders' desks to furnish them with evidence. And I wonder if you could talk me through the start point of where you came from. Do you come from, you're an economist, you're an academic, you and your co-writers, PhDs, are very triumphantly signaled on the front of the book.

6:10Against our better judgment, I would clarify. Okay. But is the perspective that you wanted to explore these things open-mindedly, or you started with a hypothesis that you wanted to establish? I want to answer your question first, and then I want to circle back to a sort of piece that you started with. So we very much came at this with an open mind. It came actually by two pieces. Emma Harrington and I met when we were actually in our second year of graduate school. We were randomly assigned to the same basement office, and that's how we got to know each other, by sort of working together. And it was really, we started working together because we were both excited by how do we help people thrive?

6:52And it felt like the biggest lever there was on work, that we spent a huge amount of our day in work. And so we wanted to sort of think about what's going to help individuals. And then it was sort of the pandemic, and we ended up having the right data to ask what happens when you are working side-by-side with your colleagues versus not side by side. And what was important there was that we were looking at teams where some people were literally next to each other and others were all in the office, but separated by 10 minutes. And so the distance there we were thinking about was not in office versus not, but next to your colleagues versus not.

7:32And so we were very much sort of thinking about what is the importance of being in person, in some ways motivated by, for us, the fact that We were in this dingy basement office together, and that was interesting and sort of constructive for us. And I think the part that is seemingly boss-centric is the title, that it is in-person. But for me, that's a big distinction from in-office, that most people, at least Americans, that when they go into their office, they're thinking about their most recent day in their office. You know, 71 % of them are not with their team. 50 % of them don't have an in-person meeting and 15 % don't even have like a casual hello conversation with each other.

8:12And that is like a huge, huge loss. And so I think there's in some ways a big critique of the modern workplace, which is that it's not delivering in-person connection. And in-person connection is what sort of jazzes people. And so I think, you know, if you just think of in-person the way corporate organizations have been using it, like as synonymous with being in the office, then for sure, this seems like a RTO manifesto, whereas I think this is actually a critique of many offices. I asked what your start point was and what your perspective wanted to come by. Could I just ask, you're giving the acknowledgement, you give thanks to the Smith Richardson Foundation for supporting the project.

8:53And I wonder if you could just outline how they supported the project. They're described as a conservative or neoconservative think tank. And I just wonder if that support meant it came with any conditions or any priors? No. So I would say they have supported simply by allowing Emma to take time off from teaching and me to take unpaid leave to work on the book. And there's no conditions at all with that. They would say they also support other scholars whose research, I think you have cited, for example, Nick Bloom. So they've supported a lot of scholars with different perspectives and there's absolutely no conditions at all.

9:37So you don't normally work with them? No. Right, right. Because just the thing that I would worry in my head was that would that determine whether they were willing to be supportive of it? Obviously, we've seen neoliberal and neoconservative bodies effectively try to get involved in this argument. And I just wonder whether that influenced your start point. No, this actually came long after most of the research already existed. This was purely a book grant, and it was only for the book. but the research already existed. I would also say that the grant officer himself told us that he had been fully remote up until he started reading some of our research and then, you know, decided mostly to start going into the office himself.

10:24So I don't perceive that to be a problem. Your book takes the sort of, slightly confusingly, in the first half, it takes like the very avowed position of sort of saying in person is very hard to substitute. And then later on, you get, I guess, you know, the interesting thing outside the US, but most work is done hybrid, in truth. You know, we don't have a lot of workers working fully remote. So the amount of fully remote is far less here. But effectively, your book goes in, I think you even say there's no point arguing about the fifth day in the office quite often, you know, that effectively, we're talking about some degree of hybrid.

11:05Obviously, your own endeavor, you described at the start of the book sitting side by side with your co-writer. Did you write all of the books side by side with your co-writer? We were very lucky that we had many, many decades together. The book itself, we were experiencing long distance work ourselves for part of it, where she lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. I live in New York. And so even though we were both in the office, we were not actually side by side. And so we did have scheduled doses of being in person so that we could manage to sort of resolve conflict and align on vision and, you know, just be human beings together.

11:44Does that produce any sort of frustration? Any what could it have been? Had you been in person with your colleague, you would have got the benefits? For me, absolutely. I think there are definitely moments where, yes, absolutely. I think that There was one chapter where I was trying to write the first draft, completely stuck on it. This was a chapter focusing on mental health. We had just written an academic paper on mental health, and I couldn't get myself out of academic ease. And I very much think that if I had been in person with Emma, it would have been a very easy thing for me to be like, help get me unstuck, help jumpstart me.

12:22and instead I sort of sent her the pretty shoddy draft and she was pretty disappointed by that. She was like, I expect better from you, which is great. It's wonderful to have colleagues who are like, this is below your standards. But I think if we had been in person, that would have been a collaborative process. I could have signaled early, like I know I'm sucking here. But because that wasn't in person, we had a little bit more friction around it that I think was unpleasant, costly, just not ideal. So I guess broadly, let's go on to the evidence and the research you go through. So broadly from a non-US perspective, broadly we're talking about the benefit of our in-person time in a hybrid mix broadly rather than – it doesn't appear that the majority of the book and the sort of recipes that you give at the end, it's not really advocating five days a week in person for most workers as far as I interpret it.

13:16And you didn't work that way yourself. So I wonder if we could just delve into some of the research then that gives us maybe some of the benefits, some of the upsides that we're getting. What are we losing when we work exclusively remotely? So my favorite set of studies is actually a set of neuroscience studies where what they did is they put sort of beanie caps on people that are kitted out with electrodes so that they can check out people's electrical impulses of their brains as they're doing certain activities. And they have people having conversations with each other. And what they see is that their brains literally light up in rhythm with one another.

13:56Sort of the same way that, you know, if you and I are talking and you're fiddling with your pen, all of a sudden my pen starts twirling. You see the same thing in brains. They're lighting up in synchrony. And so these scientists call it neural synchrony. And they've correlated neural synchrony with many wonderful downstream things like enhanced creativity, really feeling a connection to the person, greater friendship, greater learning. But when you have that same conversation, intermediated by Zoom, about 90 % of those neural connections actually fade away. And that then suggests to me like, yes, when you're talking over Zoom, you still have some connection.

14:36It's just not as deep. And those types of things that we see correlated with neural synchrony, you also see showing up in studies of the workplace. You see greater learning. This is some of the research Emma and I started with back in the day. You see more creative ideas that are come up with when people start iterating together. And so those are some of the pieces that we think are really valuable to have prioritizing those when you can be face-to-face with colleagues. Yeah, the neurosynchrony, I was really interested in that, and I've seen that research before. And it is contested, isn't it?

15:10It is contested. There is some degree of challenge to that research. The thing that I saw when I was looking at it was that the 90 % isn't really a fair representation. It was slightly, let's just argue about the effect size. The 90 % wasn't necessarily representative of how much more in sync people were. But look, I take your point. I think all of us have witnessed when we're in the presence of someone, when we're locking face to face and we can sort of feel their presence. There is something that feels more connected, more trusted, more human about that experience. I think we can argue about effect size, but I think intuitively we know that that effect is the right direction.

15:55And, you know, you can think about this when you're thinking about your kids, right? That you want to see that gummy first smile of your baby in person. You don't really want to see that over Zoom. And I think the same thing that exists there, you can feel that when you're connecting with colleagues, that it takes a lot more effort to have a meaningful connection over a screen than it does if you're in person. Yeah, most definitely. I guess, you know, the lesson of your writing of your own book with your co-author, though, is that sometimes that sort of kinetic combination of getting together and learning them actually does carry forward into periods of remote working.

16:31And I just wonder if you've seen any sort of suggestions, advice that we can learn from that. How much face-to-face time is required to get this benefit before we then do some degree of work remotely? I think what you're asking for is what in the medical space they often call the dose-response curve of like, how big of a dose of this medicine do we need in order to get the benefits? And I don't think we have a great dose-response curve yet. And almost certainly it depends exactly on what your team is doing, how collaborative it is. But we can see there's an excellent RCT that sees among Turkish call center workers going from fully remote to even one day in the office.

17:10You see large productivity benefits. You see that they are learning from one another. You see that they feel connected to their team more. And because of that, you have less attrition. So going zero to something is good. You also see there's another study that looks at equity analysts that sees when they have more time in the office, they tend to have slightly more accurate forecasts. And that's particularly focused on your young workers and on new organizations that they don't know so well. And so I think it is almost certainly the case that having anyone who says that they have a one size fits all is probably making things up.

17:45I don't think we know exactly for each type of work exactly what it should be in order to get the maximum value. I think one of the frustrations I felt with the book was that there were a series of anecdotes. You definitely used anecdote when you wanted. I felt the Pixar story, for example, was incredibly dated, but that portrayed the story that you were trying to sell. But then when other people's firsthand testimonies contradicted what you wanted to say, you discounted them. And the vivid example of that is that the parent that you gave who had a two-hour commute and had to deal with the tradeoff of not seeing his family anymore.

18:25But, you know, you said, well, look, he needs to understand the data and the data says that work is better. And it felt like, okay, well, you were willing to dismiss that anecdote, but you're willing to sort of linger on certain anecdotes or chief execs' perspectives. And I just found the balance of that to be jarring at times. It felt like this was the book that chief execs wanted to press into their hands of middle managers. It felt like the book that was a sort of convenient tool. And I wonder if you could sort of reflect on that. Do you think, let's talk about that parent, that parent who had a two hour commute.

19:01Why were you so willing to dismiss his experience? You said that he wasn't representative of a lot of workers. Why were you so willing to dismiss the benefits of remote working? We're clearly, in your own sort of acknowledgement, we're in something of a trade-off. So we're actually working out, it's not yin or yang, it's somewhere in the middle. But for me, the dismissal of people's lived experience made it feel like a neoconservative text, actually. It made it feel like it started with an agenda. I very much acknowledge that sort of being with your kids is essential, right? I have four amazing kids myself.

19:39I have a two-hour commute per day, which is half as long as that person does, right? I go an hour in, an hour back. He goes two hours. But I think it is totally essential to be able to have your in-person time with your kids and your in-person time with your colleagues. And then it's just a matter of how we do that. I think that that is not our intention to sort of suggest that this person's value of their time with their spouse, this person didn't have kids, is not important. Not at all. I think it's very much the case, though, that it's simply a matter of if you're going to be in person with your colleagues, how do we make that happen so that you also can have time with your family?

20:23Can we look at the mental health side? I mean, it's astonishing data. And, you know, as I was sort of reading and rereading it, it's sort of, you know, look, it's partly recognizable. And the benefit of data is if you see a story that partly to some extent matches some evidence that you've seen in the outside world. I'd love you to sort of summarize it and then sort of go on to talk about it. So do you want to give us the mental health story? Totally. So what we're doing is we're looking at basically, this is my and Emma's original research, along with our co-author, Mandy Pallas. And so what we're doing is we're looking at over half a million Americans.

21:03And we are looking at people who are in remote-able occupations. So things that could be done remotely, regardless of whether they are, and comparing them to people who are in in-person occupations. So imagine a software engineer compared to a mechanical engineer. and we're comparing them what happens what they look like before the pandemic to then what happens after the pandemic where the key thing is that you see a rise in the remote work and the reason we're doing the comparison is because both people who are in person and not they all live through the pandemic they've all lived to this rise in you know social media they're all have um you know lived through more political polarization and upheaval and so we're trying to difference out all of those things that were common among both groups.

21:47And so what we see then is we see that people who are in remote-able occupations, regardless of whether they work remotely themselves or not, they have a deterioration in their mental health that's self-reported on a validated metric. That's the Kessler 6 that looks at how often in the past 30 days you said that you felt worthless, you felt hopeless, you felt like you were so sad that nothing could cheer you up, that everything was an effort. And there you can see a 9 % deterioration in the mental well-being of the people who are in remotable occupations. And we're focusing on everybody who's in remotable occupations because we wanted to capture both the people who are working remotely themselves and also the spillovers to other people who are in a lonelier workplace.

22:35And so that's one of the sort of key pieces. And we think that that's related to you also see a massive increase in people who are alone. They have about an hour per day increase in time spent with no one else there. 50 % increase in not seeing anyone. And so that's concentrated often among people who are not living with spouse and children. But not only then, it is among other people as well. So that's sort of in a nutshell, the summary. Now you can critique it. I'm intrigued. Why would you, in your hypothesis, if you wanted to hypothesize that, why do you think it's causing mental health challenges?

23:13And then we'll go into sort of what some of the pushback has been. I am not no physician, but you do see a large body of medical research associating being isolated with ill effects. You know, you see this both in the positive and the negative. You see the people who tend to be 100 year old and longer. One of the key things that, you know, you see in many, many of those instances is that they tend to live very social lives. One study that says that people who are socially isolated, it's equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. I don't know exactly how they got that, but I trust it simply because the U.S.

23:48Surgeon General cited that and believes that that's valid research. Also that it decreases your life expectancy by eight years. But I think there's like an interesting piece here of like, how do we reconcile this thing that people say on a day-to-day basis they like with, you know, maybe not having that sense of loneliness? And I think that there is sort of the piece of you don't know what you are not seeing, right? That I don't know necessarily the conversations I'm not having because I'm not in person. I don't know the frayed relationships that, you know, would have been more robust had I actually bumped into people.

24:23And that sort of amorphous counterfactual means that it's harder to weigh that against the fact that like now I don't have to commute. And, you know, the commute is people's number one most hated activity, according to Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner. So, you know, I think that is sort of a hard tradeoff when one of them is very obvious and very palpable and on a day to day level. And the other is it's harder to see and it accrues over time and it's hard to pinpoint on is this because it's remote work or not. One of the things as I was going through the book, I wondered if there are not bigger systemic issues about work.

24:59And so I think the reason why it jarred with me, I've been candid with you, is that it felt like at times it was portraying a version of work that wasn't recognizable for most of the people who are actually doing work. Actually, it made me immediately check both of your own backgrounds, whether you'd worked outside of academia, because it felt so disconnected with the reality of work. And look, if I was going to characterize what some people come at it from is they say, my boss told me to come into work for all of these great interactions and collisions. And in fact, we're on back-to-back meetings.

25:34We don't get a chance to see each other. Work intensity is off the charts. There's no attempt whatsoever to reduce the burden of electronic communication demand upon us. And so actually, the reason why a lot of people are found working from home so delightful is it allows them to make some progress on the digital burden of clearing Slack messages or Teams messages. You know, they just want a moment's peace where they can get work done. And for me, that feels systemic because your book goes into, you know, it describes at one stage, if you leave Bloomberg before four in the afternoon, you get a message asking for you to account for why you'd left the office.

26:14And that's given us a good thing. And I can only imagine in an experience of work where we're robbed of any sense of agency, someone leaving at 3.45, either to go to a meeting or to get something done, would feel so supervised that it actually creates a version of work that feels supervisory, untrustworthy. And I think it's things like that that really jarred at me. I wonder, you know, I've covered a number of things there, but I'd love you to reflect on the systemic challenges of work and whether this approach actually addresses them. I do think that there is something extremely valuable about when you are able to say, OK, the time we're going to have in the office, that is time we are going to be in person.

27:00I totally acknowledge that many of us, when we go into the office, you're just in back to back Zoom meetings and that feels like a completely pointless commute. In fact, you know, in October, just after the book dropped, we also released a paper that sort of talks about remote working from the office and how you're not getting that in-person connection with people. And you're just having that sort of you're still only having Slack messages. And so then why did you commute? I think the hope would be that you can have a version where you are encountering people and there is both space and time to have the casual conversations that end up sort of feeling rejuvenating rather than this sort of relentless flow, the relentless ping, ping, ping, ping.

27:42But I agree. Many, many workplaces have that feeling that you're drinking from a water hose. Absolutely. Yeah. That was definitely one of my experiences in one job that I sort of didn't pursue after an internship there because it felt very much like I would just live inside my computer the whole day. And the Bloomberg 4 p.m. message, you painted that as a positive thing. I think what is important there is like, can we have coordination? In sort of one version of a workday that I love is like, I would love to work in the office until 3 p.m., go hang out with my kids and then come back after bedtime to finish my day.

28:21But the key in order to make that work is to be able to be coordinated, right? If it means that then I'm actually still on because, you know, I haven't told people we're off during this time, then that ends up being sort of bad for the kids, bad for work and bad for my sort of peace of mind. And so I think the piece there is, can we make sure that we have clear expectations and that we are then coordinating with each other so that it's not just, well, it was convenient for me to grab my laundry at noon. And so, yeah, I'm out of the office. But again, it's a matter of can we all be coordinated on what our expectations and our reality there.

28:56There, they have a fairly demanding in-office culture, but it's something that you know from the get-go and you sign on to. I understand. Can we talk a little bit about work quality? One of the things you mentioned is that work quality, I'm confused about some of the data on this, but you said that work quality is higher than when people are face-to-face. In fact, that one about analyst reports, I was really confused by actually, because that's a heads-down activity. But, you know, I'd love you to go through that. So you really advocate that work quality is better when people are face-to-face with each other.

29:27And you gave a few examples of that. You gave some data on that. I'd love you to sort of talk us through the data on that. I think one of the places where we first became attuned to that was we were studying Fortune 500 workers and we were looking at what happens when you have teams that are sitting nearby one another. And we were, again, interested in how they got their work done and how much did they produce. This is sort of a classic way of starting for economists of just productivity. And what we saw is that when they were sitting side by side, they actually gave each other more feedback, more comments on their work.

30:01And that's written comments. And so then you imagine that also verbal comments go up as well. And what that translates to is particularly your young workers ended up getting more feedback and produced more, sorry, produced better code. So for software engineers, there are fewer bugs. It means that there's also fewer dead-end projects that get deleted after a short amount of time. But the trade-off there was that your mentors, the people who are giving that feedback, had a little bit less time. And so when they were at home, they were doing less of that mentorship but then producing more of their own code.

30:36And so for them, we ended up seeing a bit of a trade-off of you could get a little bit more work from your already qualified people, the people who already know what's going on. But you get lower quality work on average, which is driven by your younger workers who don't know exactly what's going on. And that's sort of just to sort of go full loop. Why I think when we think about that dose response curve, it matters a lot about how experienced your workers are, how much learning do they need to be doing. But so anyway, that's what sort of got Emma and me focused on, okay, we can't just look at the number of boxes you tick.

31:09We also have to look at the quality of work. And it seemed that when we were looking at a bunch of these studies that did have both or focused only on one, that you saw that often the number of things being produced went up, you know, but the quality of them went down. Another example when you can see this is actually in the Manchester police, you have the way that sort of, I guess in the UK, it's 999, their emergency call system. You call in and there's a call handler who says, you know, hello, what's your emergency? And then there's the police deployers who then sort of tell the police officers, where do you go?

31:46And you can imagine, maybe you should have them sitting separately. Maybe you should have them sitting side by side. When they sit separately, they handle more calls. They pick up more of them more quickly. But when they're sitting side by side and they can communicate, oh, this is exactly what I'm hearing. This is where they should be going. The police get there faster and ultimately solve more crimes. And so, you know, you might think that sort of picking up more calls more efficiently, that's like a really good thing. But at least, you know, if I'm the person who needs the police there fast, I kind of want the quality measure.

32:16And so that's really, I think, the piece where it ends up mattering a lot of exactly what you're measuring and how nuanced you can be in the quality piece. Could you talk about the mentorship? That seemed a recognizable, very valid point that mentorship declines, partly because mentorship isn't necessarily easily scheduled into a 30-minute catch-up. Can you talk about mentorship? And I'd be interested if you see a solve for it, because in the context that we've recognized that hybrid work is a factor of work to whatever degree. And, you know, any sort of pragmatic solve for these things would be interesting.

32:57Yeah. So what we see is that if you're sitting side by side, and again, this is about being in person, it's not about just being in the office, right? If you're going into an empty office with no mentors there, that is not going to solve your mentorship issue. But, you know, when someone's new to a company, they need to know how a company works. When they're new to their occupation, they need to know the sort of on the ground, how I do my job piece. And you do see that this happens in person. This is one of the, maybe you're going to be upset by my telling this story. This is, again, a sort of anecdote, but it's one that I found very helpful is we were talking to a lawyer and she said, you know, on my first case out of law school, there was a partner who had a real flair for the theatric that on certain negotiations, he would sort of come off with, you know, confidence rolling off him in waves.

33:43And in others, he would sort of shrink into himself and that she could see that that really worked well for the different negotiations he was doing. And she said, look, law school was great. It taught me a lot. There was no theater component. I didn't even know I needed to understand theater. And that's something that you learn by watching other people and that you can get that sort of direct feedback of someone saying, hey, you did not handle that well. Or this is a way that could have been less alienating to our partner or what have you. those small interactions tend to happen in person and they're as you say very hard to schedule and so you see we had focused on written comments because that's what you can see in you know codifiable data but when you then assume that if you're sitting side by side it's much easier to ask questions like that was one of the pieces that we saw in the written component the people who are sitting side by side they even wrote more follow-up questions to sort of say did i get this right?

34:36Is this responsive to what you were suggesting? And the sort of difficulty in having that follow-up conversation when you are afar is not, I think, exclusive to the written medium. I think that happens in person as well, in like verbal contact. I am a little bit discouraged by what I see in the data of sort of if we just schedule mentorship calls or we schedule group happy hours with some leader, you get a much more generic sense of, you know, pithy graduation speech aphorisms, but I think you don't get the tailored component of, hey, you're really knowledgeable, but the way you're saying things is super annoying, or you're always making this mistake.

35:14You got to fix that. And so I think the scheduled version of mentorship is harder to realize something that's going to work. Yeah. Thank you for that. The reason why I take objection to some of the anecdotes is that, for example, the Avon Tversky and Daniel Kahneman story, You say, oh, the moment they were together, they worked really well. The moment they were separated, their relationship collapsed. And I'm sorry, but it's so well-documented, there's a book about that, that that was something far more substantial. That was about one of them feeling the absence of credit. That was not that they were not sitting together and all of a sudden the issue was gone.

35:50Or the Pixar story is, I think a lot of people, if you work in an accounts department of a big firm, Pixar seems a long way away from you. and someone telling you that you've got to be in the office to have the collision of ideas and innovation, it just feels something that comes from a business book. It feels like something that comes from an HBR article and it bears no relation whatsoever to the lived experience of people who actually do jobs. So that's why I take issue with some of the cutesy anecdotes, because I feel that at times they're used in service of trying to back up your argument, And sometimes in the absence of data, that was why I took issue with it.

36:29You can definitely tell that we are more used to writing academic papers where there are no anecdotes and it is simply the numbers. So I'm sorry about that, but point well taken. Thank you. A couple of things I want to finish off. Look, probably one of the big audiences who would feel that remote work has transformed the experience of work is people who have either care needs, and that might be self-care needs or familial care needs. people with disabilities or people with family responsibilities. And I'd love you to sort of lean into that because I guess there's a version of work where we say that actually the enabling benefit of having people who don't have support staff to help them, enabling them getting into the workplace and enhancing the inclusive factor of work is a huge part.

37:24And of course, a chief exec who maybe has a parking space at work or gets into the office every day and feels like the main character when he's surrounded by a lot of people might very casually make decisions that don't necessarily take into account those with mobility needs or whatever. And I'd love you to sort of reflect on that. How do you perceive that trade-off, that ability to bring sometimes invisible workers into the workplace? I'll speak to sort of those perhaps separately of sort of caregivers and self-care needs. But one of the things that I think has been huge is you see a rise in both of them employment, right?

38:02So that remote work has meant that people with physical disabilities are much more able to be in the workplace. you will likewise see that parents, particularly mothers, are much more able to be employed. This can have sort of long-term consequences of, you know, it's very hard to take 3, 5, 10 years out of your career and then sort of jump back in when, say, your kids are all in school, for example. And so this can have really great benefits. And I think it's nice that it allows people to focus on the work rather than perhaps the conditions of work. The part that I think needs thinking about is how to make sure that remote work doesn't become child care.

38:40There is a recent paper that was released just a month ago in September of 2026 where what they're documenting is that people who are working remotely themselves are using a lot less paid child care, that you see people doing this. Here's, again, an anecdote for you where, you know, a friend of mine bumped into somebody who she knew from her son's school and asked, what are you doing for summer camp for your kids? They have three wonderful kids. And the friend said, oh, we both work from home, so we're not doing summer camp this year. Right? These kids are one, three, and five. Right? Not doing summer camp means that somebody is not doing their work.

39:21And I think that's a version that ends up being very stressful for parents, that you're not present with your kids. You're not present with your work and you're sort of setting yourself up for failure. And so I think that version of remote work doesn't make a lot of long term sense. There is, I think, a version where you have this sort of this flexibility that says, sure, you're going to have your core hours until 2 p.m. You go home. You can still have time to throw the stuff in the laundry, have dinner in the oven, have time with your kids. But then you're going to have a long rest of your time after work.

39:50But we have coordinated on that and we know that you're off during these hours and on during those slightly later hours. and that might work. And so I think it's a matter in my mind of how, not a matter of should this be something, this accommodation that really works for some people. I'm, you know, in no way advocating that, you know, we should have nine to nine, six days a week and that's the only way to work. Definitely not. It's just a matter of can we coordinate so that you do get in-person connection, both with your kids in the case of parents and with colleagues. As a labor economist, can I ask one question sort of in closing in there?

40:24But as a labor economist, Do you see yourself as a protagonist defending the interests of business and capitalism and neoliberalism? Or do you see yourself trying to understand the lived experience of labor? And it's really interesting for me that the American-centric aspect of this, sometimes from the outside world, from outside the US, sometimes the experience of America looks hellish, actually, from the outside. But sometimes the testimony here feels so relentlessly focused on the shareholder value, you know, like relentlessly pursuing that it loses sight of the experience of work. Because albeit you mention laundry a lot in your book, but you also mention the fact that parents have to shift times and work in the evenings.

41:10And actually for a lot of parents, albeit you say they're, you know, somebody's not doing their work. actually a lot of those parents will find themselves at 9, 10, 11 o 'clock answering emails and getting their jobs done. And the question for me would be, is their employer measuring if the job is done rather than nickel and diming about where were they at 3pm or did they do this famous batch of laundry? I wonder your perspective, do you see yourself thinking about the ecosystem of labor or are you thinking about how shareholder value can be maximized? I don't really look at shareholder value.

41:46This is very much about individuals. I think that's why you end up with or we ended up looking at mental health, because I think we are very interested in how individuals can be thriving. And, you know, when that aligns with companies thriving, I think that's the best of all worlds. But we are very much interested in individuals. I think their second point there is about how we measure work and that you have seen remote work have a massive increase in performance pay. And in some ways, that's great because it means that we're not necessarily focused on when you logged in so much. And in some ways, I think that that's a little bit costly, that that means that then I'm focusing on, have I checked the boxes?

42:27Have I produced this report? And then it actually sidelined some of the things that made work feel good of, you know, did I have time to have lunch with somebody and that somebody might have sort of had a nice relationship and had a nice conversation? And maybe that conversation was productive. Maybe it wasn't, but maybe it's going to sort of gel later. And so I think when we're only focused on have you checked all the boxes, that ends up in some ways moving the goalposts a little bit and making work feel like it's only about what I can produce, not also about am I contributing to a meaningful culture?

42:58Have I invested another person? Have I learned from another person? So I think you get some of the good and some of the bad there. Is there anything that you wish I'd asked? No, as in I think the sort of the dream is really focusing on like, can we just have our time when we're in the office actually in person? And I think the sort of hellscape that you describe is very prevalent. I can't say I know the UK nearly as well as I know the US. But that's I think our counterfactual to working remotely right now is not appealing. And that's I think the bummer. I think the problem we've got is that, you know, like if you look at the Edelman Trust Index, people don't trust their organizations anymore.

43:37And actually, of all the changes, getting everyone back into the office is the easy one because it's just, you can mandate it. You can send alerts, you can send badge notifications to people. Actually, there's no attempt to reinvent the way we're working for a new era. And, you know, organizations haven't thought about systemic culture change or changing the way that everything is a meeting. Every need becomes a meeting. And because those things haven't been done, I think workers have got like an absence of trust. And they find that quite often it's about status. buses want to use their power to summon them back rather than deal with the knotty and more complicated things.

44:18I think that's why there is weariness about, you know, another return to office mandate and things like that. And I think exactly the situation that sort of is most painful is when you don't really enjoy your workplace and then you have to be there, right? That people, especially if they have an unpleasant workplace, this is actually one of my favorite statistics that you have when we ask people sort of how much of your income would you give up to avoid x situation it's like if you have a hostile workplace people say they'd give up seven percent of their income to work remotely um you know so it's like you actually have to solve your culture issue long before you think about calling people back into the office like if you haven't solved culture it's it's just not worth being there listen i appreciate you you sort of taking my my contrary questions and my sort i appreciate you're asking them i feel like it's much worse some people just sort of spout out and don't sort of give you a chance to respond.

45:11So I very much appreciate it. Oh, good. Well, that's good. I'm tired. Sometimes the conversations that are a bit of a proper pushback actually are a more fulfilling listen afterwards. So I've certainly enjoyed it. Thank you. I appreciate you giving me the chance to chat.

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46:05the book in person how working together fuels creativity productivity and growth by natalia emmanuel and emma harrington is out now and i've linked to that in the show notes not a recommendation for me personally i wasn't convinced by the the data in it but if you want to sort of pursue that certainly if you want to get everyone back to the office uh this is the the tome to drop on the desk of middle managers. But not least because the stat that you need to know about books is that most people read about 5 % or 10 % of books. It'll just seem like it's an endorsement. I read it in a book, they'll say, having not read it.

46:41Thank you, Natalia, for being a good sport. Always good to have your company here. If you like this and you want to see more, you can get a hold of it at the newsletter and you'll get that in the show notes. I've been Bruce Daisley. See you next time.

46:58You