Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I'm really grateful that you are here. Today on the show, we'll speak with actors Christian Slater, Calista Flockhart, and Cooper Hoffman about the new production of Sam Shepard's play The Curse of the Starving Class. If you have a graduation, wedding, or event where you need to give a little speech and it might need to include a little humor, we have you.

Will speak with the authors of a new book called How to Write a Funny Speech. We'll hear from writer Sandy Frazier, who spent 15 years walking around the Bronx getting to know the borough, its history, and its people. His book based on those walks is called Paradise Bronx: The Life and Times of New York's Greatest Borough, which is now a finalist for the 2025 Gotham Booker Prize and a preview of our March Get Lit book, Mothers and Sons, with its author, Adam Haslett. That's the plan. Let's get this started with COVID's effect on work and office culture.

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Alison Stewart: This week marks the five-year anniversary of the week the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. We're reflecting on how COVID changed every facet of our lives. Today we're examining how the pandemic reshaped the way we work. It was five years ago this week that Professor Robert Kelly was on the BBC remotely talking about very important things when his kids burst in live on his international interview. Many people understood the terror in his eyes.

Our next guest coverage of the pandemic included reports on the challenges of working parents, especially moms, almost a million of whom ended up leaving the workforce entirely due to school closings. Joining us today to discuss it is Jessica Grose, who is an opinion writer at the New York Times. She's also published several books, most recently Screaming on the Inside: The Unsustainability of American Motherhood. Jessica, welcome to the studio.

Jessica Grose: Thank you so much for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners, we'd like for you to get in on this conversation. Were you a parent working during the pandemic? How did you balance remote work while your child was at home? How has your work life changed since the pandemic? Have you returned to the office? Are you fully remote? What do you feels different about returning to work after the pandemic? That's for both parents and non-parents. Our Phone number is 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Can call in and share your thoughts or you can text to us at that number or you can hit us up on social media @allofitwnyc. Jessica, how do you think the pandemic shaped how Americans think about work?

Jessica Grose: I think it made them reassess many things in their lives, the shape of their lives, how much time they were spending at work. I think we saw, especially among parents, a lot of burnout that I think still hasn't been ameliorated. I think we also learned that people can be incredibly productive working from home.

Alison Stewart: Do you think these changes would have happened anyway over time, or do you think they really were the result of the pandemic?

Jessica Grose: I think they would have happened anyway over time. Just much, much more gradually. A lot of desk work, white collar work, however you want to put it, can be done in multiple places. You were already seeing before the pandemic disparate offices. You would be talking to the London office and you're in New York or you're talking to the Chicago office. Everyone's talking at the same time. It was already obvious that people could do collaborative work in multiple places. But of course, it was a hard, natural experiment that we all live through willingly or not.

Alison Stewart: Live through.

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Jessica Grose: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: What were some of the challenges or particular quirks that came with working remotely at first?

Jessica Grose: I think people really needed to learn how to communicate effectively in a distributed workplace. I had worked on distributed teams, which is the jargon for teams in different places for over a decade. I was used to it. You almost have to over-communicate when you are not in person, be extremely deliberate, have times where you are meeting altogether, even if it is remotely. You just need to shift your practices a little bit. Again, some places and some workforces did this better than others. I think the tech industry was obviously incredibly poised to shift into that mode because they had been doing it already to some extent.

Alison Stewart: For Gen Zers who were just entering the workforce. They're a big part of the workforce. This was all they knew. They just graduated from college, they were 21 years old, now they're 26 years old. What effect do you think did the COVID pandemic have on their careers?

Jessica Grose: I really think it was toughest on them in a lot of ways. A lot of the early years of work in any industry are just learning the norms, how to behave, getting direct mentorship, and that is much more difficult to do remotely. Again, it's not impossible, but a lot of things that you need to learn, you won't see that you need to learn them unless you're witnessing them with your eyes. Again, good management of young people, especially people who are new to an industry, when done remotely, it can be done, but it just takes so much more effort and so much more intention. I do think it was hardest on those younger workers.

Alison Stewart: Now that they're entering the workforce hybridly, we'll talk about that in a minute. What challenges have they faced?

Jessica Grose: I think communication is a really big one and learning to be proactive. Those are two major ones that I hear from people who are managing early career folks. I think figuring out how to move up the ladder. I think there's other factors that are happening now. I think AI and nobody really knowing how that is going to impact multiple different industries in this moment might be making employers a little skittish about what they're teaching and how they're teaching the newest employees. That isn't pandemic-related, but I think is another complicating factor, let's say.

Alison Stewart: If you can put on your memory cap, how did people balance being at home but also being at work?

Jessica Grose: Not well, no. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: In the beginning, it was really strange. It was really odd.

Jessica Grose: Yes. This is my particular area of expertise, but I think if you had caregiving responsibilities of any kind and you immediately had the structure of help, whatever that looked like removed. If you had small children, that meant daycare disappeared, school disappeared. If you were caring for elderly family members, whatever extra help you had coming in that just went away overnight.

Figuring out how to get through every day, I think again, especially in those first six months, was really challenging, especially for single parents. I heard from them a lot. I at least had the luxury of having a husband who even though he had a full-time job, we could split ships with our kids who were three and seven at the time. But I think if you were a single parent, it just was incredibly challenging and there was zero break, zero slack in the system.

Alison Stewart: We're looking back at five years of COVID and discussing how the pandemic changed the way we work. I'm joined by the New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose. Listeners, we'd love for you to get in on this conversation. Were you a parent working during the pandemic? How did you balance remote work while your child was at home? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. This is for everybody. How has your work life changed since the pandemic? Have you returned to the office? Are you fully remote? Are you hybrid? We want to hear how your office has changed as well. Call in and share your thoughts. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692 or you can reach out on social media@olivet WNYC.

Let's talk about when they closed the schools. Mayor Bill de Blasio at the time, he said, "The city would move towards a remote learning model for all school days until spring recess." Oh boy. "That students will not report to school buildings for instruction until Monday, April 20th, 2020, or longer if necessary." [laughter] That gives me the shivers a little bit. What do you think was the biggest issue with having the kids at home while you were trying to work?

Jessica Grose: Just getting the mental space to fully concentrate when there was so much noise and just actual tasks to do. My seven-year-old was remote learning. God bless every elementary school teacher in the country. I think it every day because I was terrible at teaching. We were terrible at teaching second grade. It was the noise. Everyone had to get fed. It was just having multiple tasks in every minute.

I always think of a moment from the summer of 2020 when I was listening to a work call on my earbuds and I was moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer and my kids were whining because it was noon and they were hungry. I was just like, there are too many things in this one minute that I am trying to it's no one can do this. But I also want to be clear there are so many essential workers who obviously could not work from home and had to figure out childcare, whether it was given to them or some family situation.

I always want to be mindful of that as well and how really, really challenging that was for that first year, especially for those who work in healthcare, really worried about their own health, bringing things home to their children. I remember interviewing people who would talk about basically you wearing a hazmat suit into work and having to come home and undress in the garage and then take a shower immediately just because they were so concerned. It's hard to remember how little we knew at the beginning. I think if you were doing that and then you also had caretaking responsibilities, that just-- it was so much in those moments.

Alison Stewart: Talk about that Friday.

Jessica Grose: Oh, great.

Alison Stewart: [unintelligible 00:10:47] Essential workers are a big, big important part of the story. I'm curious about-- You write about motherhood, you write about work. How did the pandemic experience exacerbate issues that women were already facing?

Jessica Grose: I think things like the mental load and the emotional labor that you're doing from home every day, but then just all of the domestic work that women disproportionately do, I think it just was so glaring in those years when there was no way to get additional help, whether from family, friends, whatever, and the imbalance of it all. But actually, a bright note, which I plan to write about in the next couple weeks, men really are doing more childcare since 2020, and that has maintained, and we don't know exactly why. When you look at time use studies, they have maintained.

My optimistic loss on it is they spent a lot more time with their kids in 2020 and 2021, and they realized how great it was and how much they liked it because hanging out with your kids is actually awesome. That's my optimistic look at it. But still, disproportionately, women still doing more childcare, even with men doing more. In heterosexual relationships, I think just the sheer amount of things to do every day increased exponentially and really pushed some people to the breaking point.

Alison Stewart: Let's take a call. This is Alex calling in from Orange County. Hi, Alex, you're on the air.

Alex: Hi, how you doing? Thanks for taking my call. I was just saying, similar to what you guys have been discussing, I do presentations. I teach emergency preparedness. During COVID we had to do most of it online, virtually to schools and different organizations, and sometimes actually with elected officials. I remember having to do these presentations with kids who were at that time maybe three and four-year-olds, and my wife constantly chasing them around.

I was always terrified of somebody busting through the door, similar to that guy on TV. But we would always wonder, do you think they heard the kids screaming or you screaming at them to be quiet on the recordings all the time, we would always wonder that. It's funny listening to you guys talk about it. It definitely bring back those memories.

Alison Stewart: Thanks, Alex, for calling. There was something about that clip about Robert Kelly speaking so profoundly and having his kids barge through the door that really spoke to people. What was it about that clip?

Jessica Grose: I think it was just so relatable. Our kids are beautiful, chaos, monsters. I do think one aspect of the early pandemic at least, was a real understanding from many workplaces that their employees had lives outside of work. Even though I do think in the past year, we've seen pushback from management against all this in ways that I find pretty depressing and are not actually data-based. I think overall we have seen more understanding and embrace of people's full lives and the idea that, yes, sometimes you're going to have an emergency with your children, and that's just part of being a human being.

Alison Stewart: I wanted to ask you about women leaving the workforce. That was a big issue between February and September of 2020. Something like 3% decline in women leaving the workforce more than men. What has happened to this segment of the population? Have they gone back to work? Have they not? Are they staying home with their kids? What's going on?

Jessica Grose: By and large, they have gone back and that happened actually pretty quickly. The downside is a lot of them were going back without adequate childcare. We're still not seeing childcare at the levels that we did pre-pandemic. There's not as many staffers. There's a lot of different reasons for that. Obviously, the pay is low. Childcare is a broken industry in many different ways.

The big X factor in which I think we need more research is what was happening to their kids when they were coming back to work. There was an under-investment and under-resourcing in childcare that was worse than pre-pandemic. I did some reporting around that. Honestly, it was a lot of patching things together, leaving kids with neighbors, putting kids in daycare situations that parents did not feel great or safe about.

If you look at it one way, it's good that people are able to earn the money to support their families. But when you peel back the surface of those statistics, which can be a little sterile, it was more of a mixed picture because childcare is still-- I don't have the latest numbers on it, but it didn't come back as quickly as women went back to work.

Alison Stewart: My guest is New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose. We're looking back at five years of COVID, how the pandemic changed the way we work. Do you work at home? Do you work at home now because of the pandemic? Or maybe you've returned to the office? We want to hear from you. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. How do you feel the pandemic changed the way you work? Call in and share your thoughts. 212-433-WNYC 212-433-9692. We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In studio with me is New York Times opinion writer Jessica Grose. We are looking back at five years of COVID and discussing how the pandemic changed the way we work. Let's talk to Danielle from Watchung, New Jersey. Hi, Danielle. Thanks for calling All Of It.

Danielle: Hi, thanks for having me. I just wanted to comment on the point that was made a moment ago about hoping that men enjoyed spending more time with families during COVID and that has perhaps changed how much parenting they do and say that that was the case for my family. My daughter was three when COVID happened. Prior to that, my husband would leave for work.

It wasn't his choice, but just the career that he had chosen. He left for work before she got up in the morning and would often come home after she went to bed. COVID changed all that. It gave them a relationship that they didn't have prior because of his work life. He has since reset his career goals and his priorities in order to keep up the parenting and the relationship that he developed during COVID and it has changed his life.

Jessica Grose: That's lovely.

Alison Stewart: I was going to get your thoughts on that.

Jessica Grose: I think people really reassess in a major way. It gave them a moment to say, is my life working for me? Is my balance of work and family working for me? A lot of people moved. A lot of people moved to be closer to family and remote work enabled that again. I am sad to see so many companies in our federal government say we need to be 100% in office when all the data I have looked at show that hybrid and remote work is just as if not more productive than full-time in person because a lot of people really reorganized their lives in a way that was more sustainable for them.

Alison Stewart: We've got somebody who pushes back on that. This comment says, "Once the height of COVID passed, I was disturbed by continued complaints that employers had the nerve to ask us to return to the office again, even though once COVID dangers had generally waned. Fact is, we enter into agreements when we take a job. They give us a salary and benefits in return. What do they ask of us? Sure, employers can learn to give workers more flexibility, but there's nothing wrong with employers expecting us to be at our place of employment. We have been doing it this way for decades without thinking it cruel of employers to expect this of us."

Jessica Grose: I guess I would say we've been doing it for decades isn't necessarily a good reason to do anything. If by that logic we would still be using typewriters and we'd have a whole department at the New York Times where people were cutting out pieces of paper [chuckles. Things evolve, the technology evolves that allows workers more flexibility. Now again, every job is different. Every workplace is different. There are absolutely kinds of work that need to be done in person. There are occasional in-person touchpoints that absolutely need to happen even in full remote offices. I think there is real value to being in person together at some points. But butts in chairs 9:00 to 5:00, well now it's usually like 8:00 to 7:00, five days a week. Why?

Alison Stewart: You've spoken with several people who believe in the hybrid work week, spending a few days in the office. Why does the hybrid model seem to be the preferred one?

Jessica Grose: I think because it gives you that mix. When those in-person touch points, meetings, things that just get done better and faster because they are done in person, you can have those happening, but you can still cut out a commute a couple days a week and get those hours back to yourself. But also to do work more productively. I've heard from so many people that the office is actually very distracting. You have people interrupting you, you have meetings that could have been an email. Sometimes to do serious concentrated work, being in a quiet, protected environment is actually allows for greater efficiency. I think having that mix for many roles is ideal.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Linda, who's calling in from Manhattan. Hi Linda, thanks so much for calling All Of It

Linda: Hi. It's an interesting conversation. I'm an actor and COVID completely changed the way that we get work. Our admission process completely shifted to taping yourself in your apartment with your own camera and your own backdrop. We no longer go in person. The upside is that you can do the audition on your own time and do it as many times as you want to, like what you're sending in.

But the downside is we just don't get the feedback we used to get from the casting directors. We don't get the same community of seeing each other in the rooms that we used to see each other in. It's something that's I think made life easier for them. I don't think the in-person auditions are going to come back. It really shifted everything.

Alison Stewart: This text says, "I'm a pediatric speech pathologist and I saw all my kids remotely while my first grader did her schoolwork upstairs. My two-year-old played at my feet. A little piece of me died when she asked why I was being so nice to the kids on the screen. The silver lining is that my husband was home because he works at a theater and was unemployed. Having all that family time was really amazing." Thank you, Karen, for writing in.

As we're talking about office culture and people coming back, how is it reorganizing itself? Because it doesn't quite look the same to me five years later. The office isn't quite the same.

Jessica Grose: I think different industries are handling it differently. I think some places are really trying to use a carrot effect and saying, oh, we're giving you these new amenities and these new rooms and food and whatever. Other places have not really adapted at all. Some places it's they're requiring people to come back, but they don't even have a place to sit, which doesn't seem like--[laughter]

Alison Stewart: The best move.

Jessica Grose: The best move and it makes it seem arbitrary. I think we're seeing all over the map.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Naomi, who's calling in from Springfield. Hi, Naomi. Thank you so much for calling All Of It.

Naomi: Hello. I love your show.

Alison Stewart: Thank you.

Naomi: I am a cello teacher, and I had students that came to my house. But when COVID came, I decided to teach online through Facebook video or-- not Zoom, too complicated, or FaceTime. I had as many as 11 students. Now I have two. I lost a whole bunch of them, maybe four this year because they're now going to someone's house. The teacher comes to the house and she just teaches one after the other.

I'm a little bit sad about that, but I haven't made a big play. I'm 80 and I'm a cancer survivor. I love my students. I might get one more this week. I love the ability to see them close up and to have a relationship with them where their parents don't have to drive them and wait on the couch and pick them up and all kinds of reasons for not having a lesson. I love it. I love it.

I've gotten my kids into New Jersey Youth Symphony, and they're very talented. Some people say, "Well, if you don't have hands-on, then you're not going to teach as well." I haven't had that experience. I have a sister who was a symphony player and had as many as 55 students a week. She likes teaching in person. Although I like it, there are definitely benefits to seeing a child's fingers close up on FaceTime.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling in. Let's talk to Jim calling from Manhattan. Hi, Jim, thanks for calling All Of It. You're on the air.

Jim: Hi. Thank you very much. I'd like to follow up with what I guess it was Linda said. I'm a theatrical lighting designer. For me, of course, I didn't work for two years. The biggest change was that work came back, which was a blessing. I thought I might have to retire. That's the first change. Then second change is I feel that-- Of course, the audiences haven't come back nationally as well as in New York, and that's threatening, at least, the American institutional theater now.

I find in preparing productions, we used to have production meetings in person and all gather together to plan the production. Now I find that we do much more of it on Zoom. Some of that is useful and economical and a good idea. But there's nothing that replaces all being together in the room to work on the project that you're working on. I miss that often in the preparation time. Then we have to come together, of course, to do the work.

Alison Stewart: Jim, I appreciate you calling and I'm so glad you're working again. This text says, "At the same time as we talk about productivity from work from home, we also need to talk about the dangers of increased isolation that Americans are experiencing. There's no collaboration better than in-person interaction. What do you think about that?

Jessica Grose: I think that's right. I really do think that you need a mix. I think being alone in your house endlessly, obviously, we saw that that was not great for a lot of people in 2020 and 2021. Again, I just do think overall flexibility and treating workers like adults will go a long way and is the best way to have a successful work environment, whatever that looks like. It's hard to say hard and fast rules for every industry since the tasks that need to be done and the way that they're done is so different.

Alison Stewart: If you had one thing you'd like people to keep in their minds as they head back into work remotely, whether it's hybrid or whatever your mixture is, what would you want them to keep in mind?

Jessica Grose: I would like employers, since they hold the cards, to focus more on outcomes than they do necessarily on how the work is being done. Because if you're seeing that the work is worse because people are not together, well, that's absolutely something to look like. But just to arbitrarily say full remote, full hybrid, full in-person, I just think if nothing else, I would hope that what happened in 2020 allowed us all to reassess the way things had been done.

Alison Stewart: Jessica Grose is a New York Times opinion writer. We've been discussing five years of COVID and how it affected the way we work. Thank you for coming to the studio. We really appreciate it.

Jessica Grose: My pleasure. I love being here.