Takeaways from Out of Office

Productivity Culture:

• The authors assert that productivity culture is about the performance of work, rather than getting work done; and that we should focus less on what work looks like, and more on encouraging each other to work in our own ways.

• Productivity culture is rooted in performance work and leaves no room for creativity, thoughtful management or mentorship…it’s “getting things done.”

• Efficiency and long hours might seem at cross-purposes, but they’re the twin pillars of the ideal flexible worker: obsessed with productivity, but instead of trading the productivity for less work, they work all the time.

• The book introduces the concept of working from home as a skill that we need to be trained on, not something that can just happen.

  • What aspects of working from home are you doing well? What do you need to improve on? Where can your colleagues or supervisor help?

• Re-conceptualizing the workday:

• When it comes to flexible work: What sorts of tasks and collaborations need to be synchronous? What can actually be done asynchronously? How many days would we like people in the office, and for how long, and for what purpose?

Flexibility:

• We live in a time where our schedules are filled with back-to-back meetings. The book doesn't say we should get rid of all meetings but it prompts us to ask ourselves if everything requires a meeting and really plan and communicate the purpose of a meeting.

• An example shared in the book was how a company started asking employees that attended a meeting the following questions: Was there an agenda? Did you know what was expected of you? Were there clear next steps? Was the meeting satisfying? Was it important for me to be there? Did it start on time, or did it start late?

• Things to keep in mind about meeting:

  • Some meetings really are important-usually about 20 percent of the ones you're asked to attend (MeetingScience)

  • Some could be accomplished via an email or phone call

  • Some should be a conversation between two people, instead of a conversation between two people and eight other people there as an audience.

  • Some meetings (like silent ones AKA working meetings" are really blocking off time so that people can actually read a document, presentation or report and talk very briefly about it, which they couldn't do before because their days were filled with too many meetings

• They had to get everyone including managers, to buy into the project and collectively agree to waste less of each other’s time.

• The real innovation of a four-day work week is the conscious exchange of faux productivity for genuine, organization-wide collaborative work.

Guardrails:

• Establish guardrails, not boundaries

• The authors assert that “boundaries” at work are not enough, because they put the onus of responsibility on the employee to regulate and enforce. What are some “guardrails” that we can set up as a team that are structurally present rather than individually asserted?

  • The way we set up meetings, blocking off time, meeting availability.

• When you never actually allow others to do something, there’s no room to develop trust that it’ll actually happen. When you think yourself essential to a process, you become so.

Culture:

• “Work will always be a major part of our lives. What we’re suggesting, however, is that it should cease to be the primary organizing factor within it: the primary source of friendship, or personal worth, or community. Because when work envelops our lives, our intimate community shoulders the consequences. We give and receive less: less care, less intentionality, less communication”

  • What are some positive ways that your relationship with your immediate community would improve by decentering work? What are some non-work activities and endeavors that you would like to have time to commit to?

• Inclusivity also means understanding and attending to the needs of people with different abilities, different home lives, different work styles

• The problem isn't hat these companies are wrong in calling their employees "family" since they are reproducing this familial feelings. "What's important to recognize is that family relationships can just as easily be manipulative, passive-aggressive, and endlessly confusing. Family members can be racist, exploitative, sexist, transphobic, and emotionally abusive, but because they're family, it's often considered impolite, or uncivil, to confront them about the very real injuries they do to others."

Technologies of the Office:

• "Work friendships can sometimes function as Trojan horses for work to infiltrate and then engulf our lives. These relationships didn't make work-life balance more difficult. Instead, they eclipsed the idea of balance all together, because work and life had become so thoroughly intertwined that spending most of our waking moments with some extension of our corporation didn't' seem remotely odd or problematic. It was just...life."

• LARPing=Live Action Role Playing-your job

  • Increases in direct proportion to the amount of anxiety you feel about your performance, your place in the organization and your relationship with your manager

  • Massive time suck

• Transparency enhances belonging