The Happy Hour - Laborious

Managers largely stopped questioning when their employees were in the office or whether they were sufficiently accessible while at home. The focus shifted to whether or not clearly defined work was actually accomplished by the negotiated deadline. Even meetings became optional: if you wanted someone to attend your PowerPoint presentation, you had to convince them that it was worth their time. Ressler and Thompson called the setup a results-only work environment, or ROWE for short.

The rise and fall of ROWE at Best Buy suggests a worrying aspect of our return to in-person work: the degree to which we’re focussed on policy. How many workers can be remote? Which days must you be in the office? How will compensation differ depending on your location? The central lesson of Best Buy and ROWE is that policy is the easy part. If you want to radically change when and where work happens in your organization while still achieving results, you also have to change the very definition of “work” itself, moving it away from surveillance and visible busyness, and toward defined outcomes and trust.

So Hastings decided to spin out the division to Roku. Wood received an unfinished device, patents, 20 to 30 Netflix employees (more than doubling the size of Roku) and some cash. In return, Netflix received about 15% of Roku’s equity.

Netflix would later sell its Roku shares to venture capital firm Menlo Ventures to avoid the perception of being conflicted by favoring one streaming distribution manufacturer over another. When Netflix sold its stock in 2009, it claimed a $1.7 million gain on a $6 million investment. If Netflix had held, its stake would be worth nearly $7 billion today. Roku has been one of the pandemic’s big winners. Shares have have gained more than 480% from March 17, 2020, as the media world shifted to focus on streaming video. Today, Roku’s market capitalization is more than $45 billion.

“Many companies just don’t really understand the attitude people have when they’re watching TV. People want to sit there, drink their beer, and watch TV.”

The shortcomings of email have only been exacerbated by the pandemic because it has replaced too much: Decisions that were once made by stopping by a co-worker’s desk have been relegated to inbox ping-pong. Some people wrote about feeling a sense of guilt for not being able to reply faster or for adding emails to their colleagues’ inboxes. Others described how responding to a barrage of emails caused them to lose track of other tasks, creating a cycle that’s at best unproductive and at worse infuriating. “After the email is sent, I have to think hard about where I was and what I was doing. It’s the digital equivalent of walking into a room only to forget why you went there,” wrote Vishakha Apte, 46, an architect in New York.

In April, in response to a reader callout on pandemic burnout, The New York Times received dozens of messages specifically about email, or what one reader described as “the eternal chore.” Another said: “It has, on the worst days, brought me to tears.” Others put it more bluntly: “Every time I get an email, it is like getting stabbed. Another thing for me to do,” a student wrote.

According to a 2020 study from the consulting firm Creative Strategies, there’s a generational gap in primary work tools. The survey found that for those 30 and above, email was among the top tools they used for collaboration. For those under 30, Google Docs was the app workers associated most with collaboration, followed by Zoom and iMessage.