Episode 61: The True Promise of Remote Work

WiseTalk

Sue Bethanis hosts culture critic and author, Anne Helen Petersen. A former senior culture writer for BuzzFeed News, Anne now writes about the future of work, celebrity, burnout, and more at her newsletter, Culture Study, as a full-time venture on Substack. She is the author of four books, most recently Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home (co-written with Charlie Warzel) and Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Her previous books, Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud and Scandals of Classic Hollywood, were featured in NPR, Elle, and The Atlantic. She received her Ph.D. in media studies from the University of Texas and lives in Lummi Island, Washington.
Sue and Anne discuss these four key aspects of tapping into the promise of remote work:

1. Flexibility – the future of work has to be guided by a new form of flexibility in which the work, not the workers themselves, becomes more malleable.
2. Culture – a company culture can be shifted, but it has to start with a dramatic rethinking of what management actually looks like, in and outside of the traditional office.
3. Technologies of the Office – so much of office culture flows from our technology, tools, and design. Here we can see the most profound changes the quickest.
4. Community – if work were not the primary organizing factor of our lives, we could restructure our relationships with our community outside of work.