Review by Booklist Review
Universal workplace upheaval provides an opportunity for workers and leaders to shift expectations and establish sustainable work/life balance. This balancing act is impossible for workers without systemic change improving workforce stability and productivity. Based on a historical review of workforce expectations, journalists Warzel and Petersen focus on four key areas for strategic change to improve working conditions, employee satisfaction, and wellness. These are flexibility: workers schedule workflows to accommodate personal commitments; culture: external commitment to valuing employees matches internal experience of employees; office technologies: productivity technologies streamline to benefit employees (think shorter work weeks) rather than adding additional work without additional pay; community: work-time guidelines allow employees to participate in communities, enriching society. Prior to the pandemic, worker burnout, transience, and dissatisfaction were culminating in a call for change. The pandemic and remote-work chaos heightened awareness of the need for change, the return to work now occurring provides the opportunity, and this book provides a roadmap. Recommend for business schools and academic- and public-library collections.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
While remote work "promises to liberate workers," write journalists Warzel and Peterson (Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud) in this insightful and timely survey, "...in practice it capitalizes on the total collapse of work-life balance." To dig into a shifting employment landscape in which "work has taken on such a place of primacy in our lives that it has subsumed our identities, diluted our friendships, and disconnected us from our communities," the authors explore four key concepts as they've evolved: flexibility (considering "how many days we'd like people to be in an office, and for how long, and for what purpose"), workplace culture, office technologies, and community. They discuss how the ubiquity of laptops and email, for example, have resulted in increased pressure for "performative work," such as sending emails and arranging meetings that aren't especially productive, and they make a case that remote work can be a boon to inclusivity as it takes into account individuals' different abilities, home lives, and work styles. Passages of advice for bosses ("stop thinking short term) and workers ("what do you actually like to do?") round things out. Never sacrificing meaningful analysis for easy answers, this is a remarkable examination of the rapidly-changing workplace. (Dec.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
This book is not solely focused on remote work as its title might imply but on a holistic system through which employers give their employees more control over all aspects of the way work gets done and where they place their jobs in the hierarchy of importance in their lives. Journalists Warzel and Petersen (Can't Even) refer to their proposal as a "work renovation project" that encompasses four concepts: flexibility, culture, technologies of the office, and community. In sections devoted to each of these concepts, Warzel and Petersen discuss ways that employers and workers in the U.S. can reform policies that give too much weight to bolstering the bottom line and shoehorning job responsibilities into more hours in the day. They recommend new practices based on trust and respect that let workers have a say in determining the most necessary parts of their jobs and how best to get those done. Warzel and Petersen's proposal is intriguing, but it will require a mighty shift in mindset among organizational leaders to bring it to fruition. VERDICT Will appeal to company leaders looking for new organizational models and workers looking to advocate for change in their organizations.--Sara Holder, Univ. of Illinois Libs., Champaign
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