Episode 28: Erica Pandey of Axios on Returning to Work

All right, howdy everybody and welcome to The Distributed Podcast. I'm your host, Matt Mullenweg. Today's guest is a hard-working reporter covering the intersection of business, technology, and people. Erica Panthi is a business writer for Axios and author of the What's Next newsletter. The last few months, her covers has included biometric tracking, pandemic-driven migration patterns, and a subject near to my near to my heart, which is the fried chicken shortage. We follow her most closely for extensive coverage of the changing workplace, including diversity hiring, gender inequalities, and other trends surrounding the return to work discussion. Erica has been writing a lot about hybrid office culture, hybrid schools, and even hybrid concerts and weddings. So you imagine we're going to be talking about one of our favorite topics, distributed work. Axios is an exciting publisher as well, and Erica is right in the middle of some of the most relevant trends in reporting. So I'm excited to learn from someone whose work is all about learning from others in business, tech, and beyond. So, Erika, thank you so much for joining today.

Thanks, Matt. It is awesome to be here.

So, where are you joining us from today, just out of curiosity?

So, I actually am living out the trends that I'm writing. I lived in Brooklyn, New York. I was a classic millennial living in Brooklyn, you know, having that perfect hipster lifestyle. And after the pandemic hit, I have since moved to Hoboken, New Jersey. So, you know, New Jersey has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the pandemic-era exodus from New York, and I'm definitely part of that. It's— I never saw myself as a New Jersey person, but there's more space, and if I'm not going to be having to go to the office every single day, I don't mind being in a different state.

And how did you choose Hoboken?

A couple reasons. It's just cheaper, first of all, than Brooklyn, and I wanted to also— I'm one of those people who decided to buy during the pandemic. I had rented before this, and, you know, for the price of something in Hoboken, I'd be living in a studio in Brooklyn. And it's just, it's a little bit, you know, there's a little bit more space, there's a little bit, it's a little quieter, better place to raise a puppy. I also got a pandemic puppy. I'm really fitting all the stereotypes here. So yeah, a plethora of reasons, but yeah, not need, you know, New York kind of shutting down for a year made me realize that I don't need to be in the thick of it all the time.

How is it feeling over there? Like, I've heard New York is, is feeling a lot of energy and almost back to normal.

Yeah, it really is. I mean, everything from the restaurant scene to the entertainment scene is back, and, and some of the, some of the things that the city is holding on to I think are great too. Like, you know, all of those outdoor dining setups that people really grew to love are staying up through the summer, and I I think there's a real desire for that space that restaurants and people took over from cars in cities. So I'm hoping that the New York of the future will be a little bit more community-driven and a little bit less just cars and parking.

Huh. It also feels like restaurants that happen to have street front maybe disproportionately benefited from that, from like a restaurant in a basement or a second floor.

Absolutely. It's nice to see those kind of speakeasy-type spots coming back too now that people aren't, you know, really afraid to be in a cellar somewhere in close quarters with others, because that's also, you know, quintessentially part of the New York experience. But that outdoor dining setup is basically like free advertising. You know, you walk by, you see a well-decorated outdoor dining setup, it's covered, you just, you go right ahead. And one interesting thing that I've seen in New York, I don't know if it's happening as much in other cities, is restaurants, which, you know, as you and I know, have been battered by the pandemic, are using this, this new world to make money in new ways. Like, there's some cafes here in New York that open for dinner at 5 or 6, but during the day they rent out their table space to remote workers. So you can work from a place that's not the home or the office.

Wow. And have you tried this yet?

Yes, I tried it at a cafe in the East Village called Kindred. They're like Eastern European food. At night and, you know, a classic dinner spot. But during the day, for $25, you get a table for 8 hours. You get to have free Wi-Fi access. You have outlets right there and, you know, free coffee all day. And they've built in the outlets into the outdoor dining setup. So you can kind of sit outside, but in a sort of closed, you know, less chaotic space. And, you know, it's this rise of the third workplace because I like the flexibility of working in isolation on my own time sometimes. But, you know, you get sick of being in your house, especially if you're a New Yorker and being in your house means being with 3 roommates.

Are there any studies or surveys you've come across that say how many people want to do this or how often it's happening?

Well, there aren't really studies on this concept of the third workplace yet because it's so new. But the overwhelming majority of people, like around 60 or 70% across different studies want to do hybrid work. And what we're learning is that hybrid work doesn't really mean just home or the office. It means all sorts of things. So maybe you want to, you know, go to LA for a couple of days and visit friends, but you only want to take one of the days off, then you work there. Maybe you want to rent some space in a WeWork that's closer to where you live rather than, you know, commute 40 minutes to the office. So hybrid just encompasses all of these things where you're just taking your laptop and sitting down and work happens where you are. And then there's only about 10 or 15% of people who want in-person all the time or at home all the time. So it's very much, you know, those are the two extremes and everybody else kind of wants to be a floater.

What feels tricky about the term hybrid is you can kind of bring to it almost anything. Like arguably Automattic, which has been distributed for 15 years, was hybrid because we would do meetups. So, so we would try to see colleagues sometimes. It was just, you know, once a year for the whole company and then a few weeks a year for each team. So I guess that's a form of hybrid. But I'm curious, like, if you were to describe the best possible form of hybrid and the worst possible form of hybrid, what would each archetype be?

So the best possible form of hybrid— and this is, you know, not just me, this is what some HR experts are trying to game out here— is every— like you're saying with, with Automatic, everybody meeting and everybody at home at the same time. So if you're really going to do a hybrid work week, what that would look like is everybody comes to the office on Mondays or Wednesdays, for example, and everybody's home on the other 3 days. The worst possible form of hybrid is when people just come and go as they please, which is unfortunately what a lot of companies are leaning towards. And I'll explain why each of those is the best. Works best because then, you know, the benefits of being in person, which is that social interaction, which may be rubbing shoulders with leadership, which may be the innovation that happens on the spot when you are talking with someone at the coffee maker, happens when everyone's there. And then when everyone's home, they can kind of work on solo projects or get longer-term projects done. If people are just coming and going as they please, you might come to an empty office or you might stay home on the day where everyone else is there. So it doesn't really work for anybody. And if you're, if you're trying to make it a little bit more structured, then you please your employees who want the social interaction, but you also make your employees happy who, who you want to be home more. If you just let people do whatever, you end up in a situation where maybe someone really wants to come to the office and then they arrive and they realize I'm coming in on days and no one else is here. I don't like this energy. I'm leaving and going to a different company. But obviously it's not as simple as that.

Can you Do you just ask your colleagues like, hey, are you gonna be there on Wednesday?

I've kind of been doing that with Axios, trying to set up like days where everyone comes in. But again, like I was saying, it's not that simple, right? Because there's some folks who wanna work from home all the time and hybrid policies do let them do that. So I have honestly no idea what the future is gonna look like. I do sympathize for my colleagues who have kids or who have moved, you know, deeper into Brooklyn or further away and they don't wanna commute to an office in Chelsea every day or ever. So we'll see, we'll see what it looks like, but I do think there's going to be some redistributing of people towards companies that have work philosophies that align more with what they want.

That's funny because what you said is the best, that kind of few days a week in, a few days out. I would actually say is the worst of all worlds.

Yeah. I mean, you have a point too, because right, if you have the few days in, few days out, then if I'm someone who really wants to move far away, I have to kind of have one foot, one foot in the door all the time. So that doesn't have its perks either. What you're saying is great too. I mean, if you want to be an all remote company, but then do very intentional big budget retreats where you bring everyone together in a way that's fun and cool, that also works. So yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll have to see where, where different companies land. Yeah. I don't think anyone really knows that. That's such a good example of how convoluted it all is that we have opposite ideas of what's good and what's bad.

Yeah, for me, so much of the power of working from anywhere is that ability to, like you said, travel for a week or two or even for a few days, or just leave that kind of commuting— what's it called— like the commuting geographic boundary of where that office happens to be. Because then you unlock access to all the talent that either never lived there in the first place, or all the talent that is thinking about something different, something further afield than Hoboken for sort of optimizing their life and integrating their life with their work and their family as best as they could. So when you kind of, when you make it so like there's no penalty for not being in the office, right? You're not missing opportunities, you're not missing socialization, you're not missing anything. That is to me the superpower of it and something companies have to do anyway, by the way, as soon as they get big enough where they're going to have multiple offices, or multiple floors on the same office. Like, how much of that benefit of in-person work, if your team is spread across, you know, 3 different floors and only sees each other now every now and then, are you really getting? I'm curious, like, the, the really objective challenge of these sort of hand-wavy benefits of in-person work, especially after we had a year, year and a half of companies doing pretty— some of the best ever, certainly by stock market performance. At a time when we literally couldn't see each other.

Yeah, I mean, I think also going a little bit back on what works, I think my perspective is a little bit warped just by my age too. I mean, I'm in that kind of mid to late 20s contingent and I really like the office. I mean, you know, 25% of people are still meeting their spouses at the office. And I think there's a lot of— and, you know, I talked to a lot of recently minted college grads who are finally ready to venture out into the world and, you know, have that daily commute in LA or New York, and suddenly it's like, oh, people don't really come in anymore. You can if you want to, but no one's really here. So I think you'll see a little bit of tension there too between people who are— have families, have established networks, who are very much happy to work from anywhere, stay home, or, you know, do their own thing, and then people who really are relying on coming into the office, finding a mentor, building a network, because they just don't have that yet.

Hmm. What does that say about the paucity of our social life as well? You know, the whole idea of bowling alone, like that the third place also has to be work-related. That maybe it'd be a good measure. Certainly as a manager, I'd prefer if less people met each other at work and had romantic entanglements. So maybe if that 25% went down, it doesn't necessarily need to be a bad thing. It could also mean that we're connecting more with community organizations, churches, volunteer organizations, sports, music, fun stuff that can be more interest or passion-based than necessarily happening to work for the same company.

That's such a good point. So many of our other relationships, like our friendships and our family relationships, we conduct remotely just so we can have our work relationships in person. So maybe it's a code switch that we as a society, you know, as a country, have to go through where work becomes the remote thing and family and friends and hobbies and interests become the in-person thing.

That's a really interesting way to put it. I wouldn't have used those terms, but I like it a lot. How about— I feel like journalists and reporters have always been a little more adapted to distributed work because often beats or your reporting is going to take you away from the office. So how did you see that with kind of your work and your colleagues?

Absolutely true. I mean, we've always had to have different bureaus and, you know, you know, the tech reporters are out in San Francisco. Some of the business people are up in New York and then you've got politics in DC. So we're definitely used to that. And also, you know, reporting involves work trips. But journalism, I think, also is so much about like the energy of the newsroom. A lot of people grow up watching those movies and TV shows, you know, about all the journalists on deadline at computers. So there's the camaraderie of that too. So I think when, when you're always distributed and you don't have, you know, maybe you do that, you do the work trip and you don't get to come back to your desk with all your colleagues typing away seriously, you do lose a sense of the team sport aspect of it. And journalists have been through a lot. I mean, you know, covering crisis after crisis, whether it's political crises or public health crises with the coronavirus, has been really, really taxing on journalists' mental health. And I think that sense of community being lost was, was not great. But, you know, we have Zoom, we have all these technologies that let us, let us connect again. And I'm sure newsrooms will be among the first to kind of have retreats and bring everyone together as soon as it's safe to do so. And some are already doing so.

I can't wait for people to experience a good version of work from anywhere, not where you're like isolated and fearing for your life or your loved ones, but where you can actually get out and really enjoy your community. Because that's at least, I would say, a qualitatively like order of magnitude different than, than certainly what I and many of my colleagues experienced in the past year.

That's so true. I mean, I hear this when I talk to people who have been doing remote work and remote teams before the pandemic, and I hear them, but I can't really relate because I haven't been there yet. But yet, you know, people said it's very simple. Working from home doesn't always mean working from home during a public health crisis. It's not always like this. So I think that once people start to loosen that negative association they have, it could be really great. And, and realizing that you can kind of do retreats and meet up whenever you need to. For example, we have this great thing happening at Axios right now where our editorial leadership, our editor-in-chief and other top editors are kind of doing like a tour to our different bureaus and coming to the reporters instead of all the reporters having to fly out to headquarters. And that's been great for them to have an ear to the ground. And it's been great for people to have the editor-in-chief come to their city. I mean, Axios has expanded into local coverage. So we've got a bureau in Northwest Arkansas now, we've got one in Des Moines. So having the leadership come there is great.

As a leader, I also found it also just you get a sense of the place so much more from being around the people in their home territory than, uh, than you would if they were visiting a headquarters or, or making a pilgrimage. Um, so I'm excited to hear that. I actually, I guess it was last month now, um, in New York, uh, I was on a visit for a separate reason and I realized that so many of my, the folks I worked more close, most closely with in the company were in the New York area or within like an hour flight. So I was actually able to have like, you know, 10 one-on-one lunches and dinners and things with some of these colleagues who I'm very, very fond of. And we worked very closely, but it was almost, you know, we probably talked about work less as a percentage than we normally do in meetings just because it was so nice to connect again as humans. And I really appreciated that.

Yeah, that, that's such a big part of it too. When those interactions with leadership happen kind of in your hometown, when you're showing them, you know, the local spot to eat rather than everyone at HQ and in a company retreat, it's a lot more generative and a lot more, like you said, it's a lot more fulfilling than just, all right, CEOs at the headquarters, you know, everybody report there and sit for meetings or seminars.

You had mentioned the verve of a newsroom, and it sounds like you might be based with— Axios has an office in New York?

Yes, we do have an office in New York, right in the Chelsea, right by Penn Station area. And one of my fears in the middle of pandemic was that we were going to shut that down because our headquarters is DC, New York was always a side office. But I respect that our founders seem to have a great you know, desire to have a presence in New York. And even if, you know, most people want to work from home, or they— because the New York office here at Axios tends to be more design and tech and engineering folks, so not necessarily people who are craving the energy of a newsroom. But yeah, we're going to keep it open, and I think we're going to keep expanding the team up here. So that's great for me.

Yeah, I think especially New York's one of those cities where for a lot of people working from home or the third workplace options are not the best.

Yeah, exactly. And you're seeing new things, like WeWork has tried to become the Uber for the office market, which I think is interesting. You know, they— you can book WeWork space by the hour now instead of getting a long-term lease for lots of money for your company. You can just go in as a single person and say, I'm gonna have a desk there for 4 hours today. And then this restaurant model that I'm telling you about, so I do think there's some opportunities for businesses to get creative here to accommodate the rise of this third workplace. You might see it improve. But for now, you know, we're trying to set up shop in a coffee shop in New York where you're probably not going to have an outlet. You might get glares from people saying, you know, why did you buy one croissant? Now you've been here for 3.5 hours. So as of now, not great. But I'm hopeful for the future.

I also think about the privacy of conversations. Like, what if you're having a sensitive conversation with a source or something like that? Like, do you want to do that in a coffee shop where there's 10 people listening to you?

Absolutely not. And even if you know that no one's— no one can listen or no one can hear you, just having the source hear the hullabaloo in the background and realizing you're in public is just not a great look.

You know, I, I've always been such a fan of journalism and journalists. And you mentioned kind of, you know, watching movies or that idolization that might have caused people to get into it. I'm curious, what was your moment where you decided this might be something you'd want to pursue as your career and as your passion?

It's really interesting because it wasn't really a movie that got me excited. Most of the movies that I watched, the journalists were the annoying guys or the bad guys. You know, I'm thinking about The West Wing, which I loved, and the journalists were always the one that came and spoiled all the fun by telling everyone the secret thing that was happening at the White House. But for me, I just, I just kind of, I never really latched on to one subject at school. I kind of liked a little of everything, and that kind of made me confused, you know, what am I going to go into? And then I realized that journalism is the kind of profession where you can become an expert in a different thing every week and then just completely move on to something else and revisit it when you want to. And that idea of just floating around and diving into these micro passions, I think really, really landed well with me. Like you were saying, I mean, I wrote about weddings a couple of weeks ago. I've written about surveillance. I've written about China. I've written about stuff that I personally find interesting. My family's from Nepal. I wrote a story for Axios about Nepal's geopolitical role in Asia as kind of between these stalwarts, India and China. And then I moved on to a business beat and was able to cover remote work and all kinds of stuff. So fun stuff, serious stuff, and just the range of things you can do rather than just like, you know, doing the same thing every day, I think is what really appealed to me.

As a funny aside and a correlation, I've, I've realized, you know, because we've hired thousands of people over the years and we definitely have hired some who thought they would enjoy distributed work and ended up really wanting to be in a company with an office, which, you know, I think that's a completely fair reason and good reason to leave automatic. But I noticed that a really high percentage of the folks who wanted that office experience were obsessed with the show West Wing. Like, could quote the episodes. I love the show as well, but there's something about that energy of that fictional West Wing, which was definitely infectious. Like, who wouldn't want to live in like a place where, or work and spend all your hours in a place like that environment?

That's, I mean, you know, we were just talking about work being life and that show was about work being life and they made it look pretty cool.

And there was such fun. I did notice some of those folks as well, like they would just make everything a little more exciting on the good end and a little more dramatic on the bad end. It's kind of like the show does, you know, like normal stuff would happen and it would be, you know, clever and funny. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't running into a tree, it was a sudden arboreal stop. And you're like, ah, that's so good, right?

Exactly, exactly. It's, it's just you become kind of entranced by office politics, um, with, with that show. And then there's a few others like it, but it's just so, um, yeah. And journalists are like that too, you know. When you're a reporter and your whole job is about seeking out information and learning things you realize that you want to do that about your own colleagues in your own company. So I think the office politics and office gossip in newsrooms is a cut above everywhere else.

Ah, and how the media covers media, I've noticed as well, is I think with added vim and vigor than almost any other topic.

Absolutely. I mean, some of the, some of the most voraciously consumed content by journalists is media journalism, because what's more interesting than your own, your own life? I mean, all of my colleagues have become obsessed obsessed with the show Succession for the same reason. You know, it's about media, it's about the business of media, which is just so interesting.

Oh, is that the one loosely inspired by the Murdoch family?

Yes, yes, that's the one.

Gotcha. You mentioned moving between these topics, which is very different than many, many roles because you are sort of writing authoritatively as part of the first draft of history on could be a different thing every week. So how do you approach like bootstrapping your knowledge and the fundamentals of an area to write about it in that authoritative way?

So I think it's just about talking to the right people, and you have to kind of go from the, the top down. So, you know, say you're writing about the effects of, of virtual learning, uh, on students with learning disabilities, which is something I've done, and you have 2 weeks to kind of pull together a story on it. Obviously my beat is not education primarily, so it is not something I am too well versed in. So I would start by talking to education professors who are really looking at this from the big picture view. Then you go a level below that. You talk to teachers and nonprofits, you know, people who run nonprofits on this issue. And then you go, you know, right to the source, and you talk to families or students who are dealing with this on a day-to-day basis. And I think getting those 3 perspectives from the 30,000-foot view to a level down to right on the ground, really helps you form a picture in a way that you can write authoritatively on any topic. And that, yeah, that method has worked for me well. And it also, I also love talking to people. And I have friends who say I could not cold call all day, or I could not spend my day talking to strangers. But it's, I think, one of my greatest joys is being able to talk to different people, especially the families who are dealing with this. Or, you know, for my, what, my story on the future of weddings, I spoke to an actual couple who had a hybrid wedding and people just sharing their stories is the most interesting part of it. And so many reporters now just talk to the experts and ignore the people. So I think doing both is the perfect balance.

What do you do when the experts and what you're hearing on the ground isn't congruent?

That's why you keep the numbers and you go back to them. I mean, I've had experts tell me remote work works for everybody. It's great. And you know, you kind of take that in. This person has been studying remote work, they've been doing remote teams, they probably know what's what. Then you talk to someone saying, you know, remote work is driving me crazy. I'm sitting, my two roommates are taking meetings, the Wi-Fi never works. I feel like I've lost my sense of self. You go back to the experts, say, you know, but some people are saying this, what do you say? And then, you know, the experts can usually riff right there on the spot and say, well, You know, it might not work for everybody. Here's, here's, you know, some examples that I found that I didn't share with you on that first call. So just taking your sources back to each other. So they're almost having a conversation through you also, I think, makes any story better.

And how about the role of, of studies and surveys? Like, it seems like when an article comes out, it gets covered very extensively in journalism, and that becomes sort of common knowledge. But also, like, studies are constantly being reversed, like social science findings that were, you know, maybe they don't replicate or that changes. And often that doesn't get picked up as much. Or surveys might have flaws in their methodology. So how do you balance that? Like, do you have to be like a, a stat— an amateur statistician as well?

Or I think with the rise of Twitter, we've just become such headline-oriented news consumers. And so you see so many people just taking a stat from a study, pasting it at the top and publishing that. And that has its place. But I always think studies should be reported with a lot more context. I don't think they should ever be, you know, in the first sentence of the story. You should— if you have that study, you should add in a few more unless it's something like a, you know, a big, big paper that came out in a scientific journal. But there are so many studies that are done, for example, saying how many people want to do remote work versus hybrid work. And there are different stats in each one. And I think including a few I like to wait until there is a few that have the same trend line, and then you can kind of write about it in a more qualitative way. And most newsrooms now have data people on staff who are there to gut-check and make sure that, you know, what we're reporting is, is the methodology kind of stands and is reportable and has integrity. And newsrooms are also doing their own surveys. So I feel like surveys should be taken with a grain of salt. But once you start seeing 4 or 5 surveys that are saying the same sort of thing, then maybe it's okay to to lean into it a little bit.

Yeah, also, as a journalist, you know, the incredible power of a question, and I've definitely seen it while running surveys. Phrasing a question, even a word or two differently, can drastically change the outcome and how people respond to it.

Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, so sometimes you ask people, do you like hybrid work, for example, and they'll say, they'll say no, but you forget to ask them, like you say, would you like hybrid work if you weren't stuck at home because of the pandemic? And then it completely changes.

Yeah, I wonder that about the 15% that say they, they want to be remote all the time. Does that truly mean never ever seeing your colleagues ever? Uh, 15% almost seems high there. Like, who would— you want to see them at least maybe once a year, once a decade, something.

Yeah, I mean, you're so right. Well, do those people think that this is a world without any retreats, or do they think, you know, this is a, this is a world where the holiday party still happens. I just don't have to go into the office. And you don't know that until you conduct the survey yourself. So I think you'll see more and more newsrooms do that, do that too. But, you know, my feeling is that the people who say they want all remote are people who say, I don't want to even live within commuting distance of my workplace. You know, I want to be able to be anywhere, whether that's move across the country or move to a different country. And still be a part of this. But I'm sure, like you said, those people do want that occasional meetup, even if it's once a year or once every 6 months.

We've experimented so much with this over the decades, really, and ended up in a place where we said, hey, you know, work from anywhere. Like, literally, we could care less, and we want you to be ultra productive, but expect 3 to 4 weeks of travel per year. And it was really important to communicate that upfront because people might need childcare or pet sitting, or someone to water the plant, they might need a plan for being away from home for 3 or 4 weeks. And I also want them— we don't have any special subsidies around that. So I want them to take that into sort of account with their, their compensation. Like, at this salary, knowing that you'll need to be away from home for 3 or 4 weeks per year, is that something you want to accept? Because we're not going to like say, pay for pet sitting or any of those other things that might cost, you might incur from being away from home.

And, you know, speaking of subsidies, like you're saying, we also have to figure out the new model for how we pay for the actual office, right? Because a lot of people have dealt with the cost of their office being offset onto them, whether that's through Wi-Fi or electricity or having to buy a desk or a setup or whatever it is. And lots of companies have given stipends for this kind of thing, but If this is going to be— if remote work is going to be a big part of the working world moving forward, companies are going to have to figure out what helping people set up their offices and keep their offices running looks like when they're not in the central office building.

Yeah, we've actually for many years had remote ergonomics consultants as well. So people who you can go on Zoom and walk them through kind of your, your home setup, the monitor, the chair, everything like that. And it can make a huge difference. You get that stuff for free in an office, sort of. But the downside is you also get lowest common denominator of the desk and chair, etc. So, you know, we just say a budget— I forget exactly what it was, maybe it's $1,000 or $1,500 or something— to set up your home office. And you can get whatever chair you want, whatever desk you want, etc. So there's a lot more variety and personalization in how people can configure it, given that they have sort of the space and autonomy to do so, which, you know, if you have to commute in to a certain location, you might be making trade-offs to be within a reasonable commute time because I don't know the survey here, but almost no one is like, wow, I love my 2-hour a day commute. It does feel like one of the most, you know, under— or overrated things about any sort of office work is that commute time.

Yeah, that's kind of become the truth of the times is that people might like the office, but they definitely hate the commute. And so I think that's going to influence decisions going forward too. I'm curious though, from what you're saying, have you thought about the third workplace before the pandemic? I'm sure it's come up because I'm thinking about, you know, employees of yours that may be sharing apartments with people or not able to set up the ideal home office. I wonder what strategies they have.

Yeah, it's worth saying because we do very few, um, sort of paid stipends or benefits at Automattic, partly because it's difficult to administer across 80 countries, but we just also want to give people choice, right? We don't want to be too paternalistic, so we want to pay people fantastic salaries and then they can kind of direct that as they choose. But Two exceptions are obviously the retreats or meetups, which we have a $250, $250 per person per day sort of budget for lodging and everything while you're there. And the $250 also shows up one other place, which is we have a co-working stipend. So up to $250 per person per month you can put towards like a WeWork equivalent. Um, or we have had a lot of people do exactly what you described in the past. So, you know, find a bar or a restaurant that's closed during the day and just get access. Or we allow you to put that $2.50 towards if you need to buy that croissant to not get kicked out of the coffee shop. That's kind of all included. It remarkably, it's not used as much as you would think. So, but we, we're not like work from home evangelists. We're kind of like work wherever you're going to be most effective evangelists. And giving people a choice and autonomy there. So if you're— if that's a WeWork for you, like, awesome. And I actually love that there can be sort of creative juxtapositions of folks working on not just different teams for different companies, but interacting, grabbing lunch together, and sort of what those collisions, creative collisions, can inspire.

Absolutely. I think that the other hard part for a lot of people during the pandemic, uh, experimenting with remote work has been every day is something new. You wake up, your dog might be feeling particularly loud today, and that, you know, throws a wrench in your plans. Your kid might be having a particularly tough day at school. You might try to go to a coffee shop and find there's no seats. So I think the more people are a little bit more intentional about this and figure out what they like and figure out a routine for them, the better it works. You know, I've been— my parents recently moved to Manhattan during the pandemic. They were the rare move-in. And I've been picking a day a week to go and work from there, from their apartment and be with them. And then just kind of knowing on Sunday that I'm gonna do that on a Tuesday makes me feel better than waking up and just kind of seeing where the day takes me.

That must be really beautiful for them as well. So that's cool you're able to do that.

Yeah, that's, I mean, that's another trend I've been following is, you know, the, evolving of family relationships during all of this. And it was kind of a renaissance for families at the beginning of the pandemic with you, you had multi-generational households for the first time in a long time, at least in the US, and people were loving it. You know, grandparents were loving spending time with grandchildren, even if it was just because parents didn't want to deal with childcare during remote school. And you had a lot of young kids, obviously, uh, recent graduates having to move back in with mom and dad rather than start life. And some families hated it, but others loved it. So there were definitely some perks there. So I think it's been a good time for families. And I think you'll see a lot of those, those boomerang folks, those people who moved away, you know, before the pandemic, but then maybe moved back home to a smaller town so they could be close to their parents for childcare. You'll see a lot of them stick around because childcare is expensive and hard. And if your mom and dad are close by and you trust them and they're, they're good with your kids and, you know, both parties are happy, then, then why, you know, why move back and why not just keep working remotely from your hometown?

Yeah. You know, one thing you've written about that I actually found very alarming was the sort of difference in experience between genders, men and women, on experiencing the pandemic, wanting to return from work, remote work, etc. What's kind of the latest there? What have you found and what do you think that bodes for this kind of return to normalcy that hopefully we have over the coming year or two?

Yeah, I mean, the big trend right now that people are talking about is this idea of the Great Resignation, right? You know, upwards of 40% of people might leave their jobs or considering leaving their jobs. And that's been painted as such a positive story. It's an era of worker power. There's open jobs. You can decide to go to a different job if you like a working style better or if you want to switch careers. But the dark The dark side of that is, like you said, a lot of women have really suffered. About a million mothers have left the workforce due to the pandemic and due to childcare burdens. And it's unclear if many of them will go back. There's a lot of remote work— remote school that's continuing, that's keeping people at home. And a lot of times, specifically for women, I mean, we've seen this with maternity leave, it can be hard to reenter at the same salary are at the same level if you leave and try to go to a different job. And, you know, it's maybe hard to get back into the swing of things if you have a kid now and you can't go to that after-work drinks or, you know, those happy hours where a lot of that networking and rubbing shoulders happens. So the pandemic has just made that worse. And I think, you know, if you'll see a future in which families have realized that staying home is better for childcare and they decide only one parent is going to go back to the office, the other parent's going to pursue through remote work, it's typically going to be, you know, in heterosexual couples, the husband going back to work and the wife staying home with the kids. And I worry about an out of sight, out of mind culture in these hybrid workplaces where typically women are staying home and they're losing out on raises or promotions or work.

Hmm. Well, that would be terrible. Definitely. We don't want a regression in that. We've had a lot of progress. Century there.

And then, I mean, one more thing on this, like, that's why I think one of the biggest challenges HR departments are gonna have to tackle, and one of the, the best ways to recruit and retain, is going to be beefing up your childcare benefits in the workplace, you know, giving, giving parents actual money to put towards childcare, or giving them flexible schedules, and making sure that having a kid isn't something that you just don't talk about anymore. It's more front and center. That's been one of the sad things about covering specifically childcare during the pandemic is I don't have a kid, but I've talked to so many colleagues and sources, and they said, yeah, this is just how it is. Finally, people are paying attention now because the numbers are so stark. And, you know, people are on Zoom calls, they're seeing what my kids are like in the background. But childcare has always been a problem. The pandemic just spotlighted it, and hopefully something now will be done about it.

I think there's also an opportunity there for companies that can be truly distributed, where you don't need to be at the after-work drinks to get ahead. And we've seen the flexibility being the key thing there. So even a hybrid, you know, one version of hybrid is you don't have to be in an office at all, but you have to work the same hours, you know, kind of like 9 to 5 standard hours in a given time zone. And I think that also loses a lot of the benefits of that true flexibility. So if you are able to design, you know, accomplish the same in a given week as someone who works at the office 9 to 5, but, you know, slice and dice it however best fits your schedule— maybe that means off a bit in the morning, off a bit in the afternoon to like take your kids, pick your kids up, those types of things. But we found people do that very naturally. I think this is something that parents have always done, which is, you know, kind of figure out how to make things work. But it's in an in-office environment, it's, I think, just culturally the social mores of like leaving the office in the middle of the day, even if company was supportive of it, would feel weird to do because people, you know, equate being in the chair or being in meetings with working.

Right, and, and that was such a given, you know, up until the pandemic. And I really do think that a lot of these norms are breaking down. Who knows if they'll stay that way, but it's a good thing to see, you know, not just are we rethinking what— where we work from, we're also rethinking the hours we work. One great point I saw made in The Economist by Adam Grant, who's a work psychologist at Wharton was why is it that the workday ends at 5 and the school day ends at 3? That makes no sense. You know, like we've, we've had this forever where parents have these 2 hours, 3 to 5, where they're constantly worried, where do I put my kid? Do I pay for afterschool? When, why don't we just have the workday end at 3 and start earlier if it needs to, or just have a shorter workday? And I think rethinking just everything from the place to the times to the structure of teams. That the pandemic has allowed us to really do is a great thing.

Yeah, it's not often we get the opportunity to make these experiments, go through it all at the same time, right? Usually it's like, I've heard this so many times, like, oh, that stuff works for Automattic, but it would never work for my company or something like that. But I was amazed actually at how quickly so many companies that that probably never thought they could operate without people going into the office were able to adapt in this emergency situation. And I think it's actually something I'm just really proud of the world on is that, given a crisis, so many people really made it work.

Yeah, I mean, we think about it in the news, like the New York Times still came out every day. They never missed a beat and no one was in the office. And so, it really can be done under pressure.

What do you see around the corner? You know, you, you cover so many things, you probably get hints of, of what's in the future more than most. So what do you think listeners should, uh, keep in mind for what's coming up?

I think the, the— I mean, there's so many little things, but the big thing is just we're just gonna lead much more tech-infused lives, uh, than we did before, uh, because— and, you know, we've done the pandemic a lot, but, but it is because the pandemic has accelerated it. You know, when you think about things that you didn't think of having a tech component in the past, they will in the future. One of my most favorite stories I've written most recently is the one about weddings, like I told you. So many people want to have a small intimate wedding, and they can't because, you know, their parents or their relatives want all these people to be invited, and they feel this pressure to have the wedding that everybody else wants wants them to have rather than the one that they want. So now you have that intimate wedding and then everybody else gets to be a part of it for free via Zoom. You don't have to pay that per plate cost. Concerts is a huge one. Dua Lipa had 5 million viewers at her concert. You know, she's the next big thing in pop. 5 million viewers at her virtual concert. And not only was that a great success and it had a huge budget, but just that online concert raised ticket sales for her in-person concert by 75%. So, you know, not only was it a way to get her music out there, but it was a way to market her in-person show, which is, you know, how artists make money through, through tours and shows. So you'll see a lot more virtual events for people to raise the hype and get the word out there, and get more people to be a part of their music without putting all that all that effort into a stage and close quarters and, you know, limited amount of tickets. And the other side of this is, think of all the charity galas where they spend almost as much money as they raise because it's all fancy and you've got, you know, a big venue booked. There were a lot of charity galas during the pandemic that raised the same amount of money just over Zoom. So you'll see a lot more of that too, you know, more of the money going towards the cause rather than towards the fancy dinner. So I feel like tech is going to be a part of everything we do more and more. Another big area I cover is the future of payments and stores, and contactless payment was this niche thing. And, you know, you saw more and more people downloading Apple Pay or getting touchless cards because they didn't want to— you know, they want to minimize their touch points at a store for safety. That'll keep going. More of that just walk out Amazon Go technology. Really, the pandemic has been an accelerant for tech everywhere.

Yeah, I started to see the just walk out, and I think it was JFK or Newark, I forget which one, but they had it in one of those kind of like airport convenience stores. I was like, wow, like I expected this from a tech company. I didn't expect this from, you know, what's it called, Hudson or whatever it is that always has those little stores. Right. I guess that the concert thing is also really counterintuitive to me because as a musician and also a lover of music, it's always been that energy of being in the room. But now when you started saying that, I also started to think about movies. I used to love going to movie theaters. I guess I still do a little bit, but that at-home experience, if you invest a little bit more in a TV and a sound, and then you can have your friends, your own drinks, your own food, your own comfort, you can pause it, all that sort of stuff, is actually really much, much nicer. And I've become so attached to that. I don't feel like I'm missing that much from the slightly bigger screen or better sounds.

Right. It almost becomes like two different experiences, right? Like obviously going to the concert is a big night. It's fun in and of itself. But Brandi Carlile did this Christmas show where she was in her living room in like the Christmas sweater and everything and live streaming into other people's living rooms. So that's a whole other type of experience where it's way more intimate. The artist isn't in this crazy cool costume on a stage. They're right there with you. Feels a lot more, you know, like I'm just in your house with you. So fans of hers can, you know, enjoy her in that way and also go to a show and enjoy the big production of it.

Hmm. I also hope that makes, you know, as a lover of people learning to make music and being participatory in music, I hope that also makes it a little more accessible. Right? You see like a Beyoncé show and it just seems so unattainable. But you see a few folks singing on a couch in the living room and it feels like something you and your friends can do too, which I think would maybe be a good outcome as well.

Right. Really lowers that barrier to entry.

Yeah, makes it more accessible. Well, I appreciate it that we were able to end on that note of some exciting things coming around the corner. And Erica, thank you so much. Like, you know, But already your coverage has been influential and I really appreciate following your work. And thank you so much for coming on The Distributed Podcast.

Thanks. Thanks so much, Matt. This was a lot of fun.

All right. Have a good one. Take care. And all the listeners, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye.