OOO
Out of Office:
A Survey of Our New
Work Lives
Yellowed newspapers. A mouse who met its end on a glue trap. Wilted plants.
These were the scenes we photographed this summer at three New York City offices — including our own — amid a pandemic that has left millions of people out of work and millions more working from home.
At The New York Times’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, to see a newsroom silenced during the busiest news cycle of our lifetime was both eerie and poignant. The dusty, yellowed newspapers piled high on desks, floors, coffee tables — most of them dated March — gave the space around them an almost sepia tone.
A few blocks away, at a nonprofit theater company called Ars Nova — a launching pad for artists such as Lin-Manuel Miranda, Annie Baker and Billy Eichner — a rehearsal for a new play called “Wet Brain” had been abandoned mid-session. The scripts have remained open on desks — notes in the margins — for six months, seemingly frozen in time.
At the Collegiate Academy for Mathematics and Personal Awareness, a charter school in Brooklyn, chairs are stacked on desks and lesson plans from March 12 still hang on the wall. Teachers and students will return virtually in September.
So what does the future hold for the office and the workers who once inhabited it?
As it turns out, most workers do not miss it. In a survey of 1,123 remote workers by The Times and Morning Consult, 86 percent said they were satisfied with the current arrangements — even when that sometimes meant working from their bedrooms or closets. They reported feeling less stressed, more able to take breaks and that they were spending more time outdoors.
In the following stories, we explore what becomes of gossip, or handshakes, or the work attire collecting dust in our closets. We profile different types of workers, including the office addict (he’s still going in) and the new hire (he’s never met his co-workers). And finally, almost a year after studying the office as it once was, we ask: Is this an opportunity to change how we work once and for all?
This is an exploration of our lives OOO.
— Jessica Bennett and Anya Strzemien
① American office workers were miserable and burned out. Why not rebuild our work lives from scratch? By Claire Cain Miller
Work May Never Be the Same
In the Before Time, Dan O’Leary, a director of business partnerships at a tech company, commuted two to three hours a day and flew on weekly business trips. He adhered to a strict schedule: His alarm was set for 5:30 a.m. to fit in a Peloton ride and shower before catching the train, and his workdays were jammed with meetings.
Since the coronavirus upended office life in March, his workdays have been very different, even idyllic.
“Work is totally now for me something you do, not somewhere you have to go,” said Mr. O’Leary, 37.
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In a survey of remote workers by The Times and Morning Consult, conducted this summer, we found that:
Survey results based on a poll of 1,123 remote workers representing a range of jobs, demographics and income levels, conducted this summer.
② The routine made him feel like the pandemic wasn’t controlling him. By Katie Rosman
He Can’t Quit the Office
At the very beginning of April, Steve Swanson drove from his home in Glen Ellyn, Ill., to his office in Chicago. He told himself it was just a one-time thing, a visit necessitated by his need to collect files not accessible by computer.
But it was more than that. It was a fix.
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③ He’s been furloughed from a job, interviewed for jobs and started a new job — all since March. By Lindsey Underwood
Meet the New Guy
José Goicoechea had just left his apartment for a quick trip to the grocery store when he got a calendar invitation. The other invitees included an HR person and his manager.
“I was like, ‘Uh oh, this is not good,’” said Mr. Goicoechea, 29.
“I think I was furloughed on a Tuesday and my last day of work was on a Friday,” he said. “So I had three days to wrap up and leave.”
Now what?
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④ Is the age-old office greeting dead, or is it simply hibernating? By Alex Williams
Will We Ever Touch (Professionally) Again?
The handshake has been through a lot.
Forged in antiquity, the preferred office greeting of the corporate era has survived the peace-sign-as-hello 1960s; the deal-clinching high-five 1990s; and the bro hug of the past decade (a manly-man micro-Heimlich ascending all the way from the playing fields to the Obama White House).
But will it survive the coronavirus? The short-term prospects do not look good.
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⑤ One mom’s journey into the new, childcare-free normal. By Charanna Alexander
Three Sons, One Job, No School
Tricia Dilley’s carefully designed morning routine used to begin with the “quiet car” — one of two designated cars of the 6 a.m. train where she would do her makeup, listen to a podcast or maybe read during her hourlong commute from West Orange, N.J., to her office in Manhattan.
Talking and cellphones are verboten in the quiet car — a respite Ms. Dilley, 40, an executive assistant at a data company, anticipated daily, as a mother of three young boys: Wesley, 8, Grayson, 7, and Darien, 4.
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⑥ Just because we’ve stopped going into work doesn’t mean we’ve stopped talking — specifically about each other. By Reyhan Harmanci
Office Gossip Lives!
As the saying goes, if you don’t have something nice to say about anybody, come sit by me.
Seriously, sit by me.
Like Alice Roosevelt Longworth — to whom that quote has been attributed, and Olympia Dukakis’s Clairee in “Steel Magnolias,” who famously repeats it — I have a weakness for juicy, interpersonal information, a predilection that has followed me into my professional life.
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⑦ What will we wear come fall? By Vanessa Friedman
Behold, ‘Workleisure’
Let us consider, for a moment, the Zoom sweater. Or rather, the ideal Zoom sweater. Will it be thick and reassuring, or thin and wrappable? Pullover or cardigan? Round neck, V-neck or high-neck? These are not immaterial questions.
The Zoom sweater is, after all, the seasonal next wardrobe step after the Zoom shirt: the garment that stays draped on a chair and tossed on for meetings as the long, hot, summer of the pandemic segues into cooler, more unpredictable months.
