>> I've never seen people more excited to talk about their lack of excitement.

You're not depressed because you still have hope.

You just feel a little bit joyless and a little bit aimless.

And I think a lot of us have been languishing because the world around us is standing still.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we're going to talk about work, how much fun and how it has been forever changed by the experience of the past 18 months.

Whether you spent the pandemic working from your living room couch or you didn't have that option because you were an essential worker or none of the above because your company was shut down, things feel very differently today and they may be for a long time to come.

What will the new normal mean for society, the economy, politics?

I'll ask one of the best organizational psychologists there is -- Adam Grant.

Then a look at parental leave policies around the world.

Spoiler alert -- we're not doing it in the United States.

Don't worry.

I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> All over singing "working nine to five, what a way to make a living" something, something with us living and-a-mivin'...

Anyway.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> The day -- March 26, 2020.

The time -- 2:53 p.m. Eastern.

And as the pandemic forced millions of Americans into a second straight week of working from home, journalist David Mack fired off a tweet.

"My boyfriend," he says, "has been wearing sweats so much he started calling normal pants hard pants."

Fast-forward to now.

And while the pandemic continues to ravage much of the world, the rich world is opening back for business.

Companies are preparing to bring their employees back to the office.

Thing is, quite a few of those workers don't seem thrilled about dusting off their hard pants.

>> Well, as more companies put an end to remote working, experts predict there will be a wave of resignations once people have to come back.

>> A recent survey of 30,000 Americans found that 3 in 10 never want to return to the office again.

Another poll found that one in three U.S. workers wouldn't want to work for an employer who requires them to be on site full time.

And in much of Europe and Latin America, where vaccine rollout has been slower and bumpy, to say the least, the return-to-work conversation is still months away.

And so recently, many big employers have been pretty understanding with companies like Zillow, Facebook, Twitter, allowing full-time employees to pretty much continue with remote work indefinitely.

The dating app Bumble -- you've heard of it -- even went so far as to give all their employees a full paid week off last month to recover from pandemic burnout.

But money talks and with workplace activity in financial hubs like London and New York still 50% below normal level, Wall Street's impatience is starting to show.

Take Morgan Stanley C.E.O.

Jim Gorman, who effectively told his New York City employees that they should expect to be back in their cubicles by September "or else."

As he put it, "If you can go to a restaurant in New York City, you can come to the office and we want you in the office."

So it sure looks like we're heading for more than a few awkward H.R.

meetings in the coming months.

But there's a larger discussion to be had as well, given that so many people have relied on remote work for the past year to meet a variety of needs, like taking care of their kids or their parents.

If employers are going to require that their workers return to the office, what should those workers expect in return?

Then there are all of the essential workers who couldn't work from home during the pandemic and who, despite the 7:00 p.m. pandemic cheers, never got a pay bump, and the street vendors in places like Kolkata who didn't have the option to stop working because not working meant not eating.

How does a new post-pandemic approach help them?

Renowned organizational psychologist Adam Grant is the perfect person to talk about the future of work after the pandemic.

His new book, "Think Again," explores how individuals, groups and institutions can rethink long-held mind-sets and skill sets to adapt to our changing world.

Here's our conversation.

Adam Grant.

The book is "Think Again."

And when we talk about the pandemic, thinking again about the way we work seems to be the one experience that pretty much everyone is going through right now.

How do you start to think about that issue?

>> Well, Ian, I'm amazed at how slow many leaders were to rethink how and where we work.

In the winter of 2018, I went to a bunch of C.E.O.s and start-up founders and I told them we already have extensive evidence that as long as people are in the office half the week, if you let them work from anywhere the other half, they're more productive, more satisfied and less likely to quit.

And there's no discernible cost to relationships or collaboration.

"So why don't we do a remote Friday experiment?"

And they all bucked.

"We can't open Pandora's box.

Everyone's going to procrastinate.

Our culture is going to fall apart.

That's not the way we've always done things."

And fast-forward two years.

There's a global pandemic.

Some of those leaders have now decided to be remote-first companies indefinitely, and most of the others have gone to hybrid.

And one of the things that drives me crazy looking back is they were stuck thinking like preachers, basically defending their existing views or they went into prosecutor mode and they attacked my data instead of thinking like scientists and saying, "I've got to look for reasons why I might be wrong, not just the reasons why I must be right.

I need to run more experiments to test and learn."

I don't know that now is the time that we ought to be making a permanent commitment when it comes to how and where we work.

But it is the ideal moment to think more like a scientist, run more experiments and test and learn to figure out what might work for your organization, your people or your culture.

I will tell you, though, Ian, I am sorely disappointed in the number of C.E.O.s who are coming out and saying, "You are not engaged if you're not in the office and we can't really get things done unless we're all physically in the same place."

Last time I checked -- and we've been studying this for over half a century -- productivity is about the purpose and the process that you bring to your job.

It's not about the place you happen to be doing it in.

And of course, if you're in a manufacturing job, it's not that easy to work from home.

I don't think you want your E.R.

physicians and nurses trying to work from home 24/7.

But most Americans work in service jobs and knowledge jobs, and so many of those jobs can be done effectively, efficiently, even creatively from home.

And I think that leaders who are insisting that everybody has to be in the office all the time are probably in danger of becoming obsolete.

>> Where do you think you're going to see, as a consequence, business being the most disrupted as a result of that kind of thinking?

If companies were willing to move on it.

>> I think we'd see the most disruption to jobs where there are real multiplier effects from collaboration.

So look at creative industries.

How much of Hollywood freaked out when they realized we're not going to have a bunch of writers in a writers room or we're not going to have a bunch of designers if you're in the tech world who all sitting together?

And I think that there's a huge opportunity to reimagine that and say maybe your people don't even all have to live in the same place.

Maybe you let them work from anywhere.

And then once a month you have a retreat where people come together and they blitz for two or three days and then they divide and conquer again.

>> Now, Adam, when you're in a hybrid situation, you've got 10 people that actually are part of a team and six of them are in the same location and four of them are remote.

How do you organize a meeting?

Does the fact that it's half and half basically mean that everyone goes remote?

Or do you try to put those six people in one room and they're all sort of talking to four screens?

>> That is an experiment waiting to be run.

I haven't seen the data.

Would love to.

My hunch right now is we should probably all be in Zoom because inevitably the people who are in the room together are going to end up dominating the conversation or it's going to end up becoming too stilted as we try to draw in the virtual people.

I think if we can move into a hologram world, it would be completely different.

If we all have our Oculus headsets on and we can feel like we're physically walking around the room, I think we start to treat the virtual people a little bit more like they're in the room.

We are nowhere near that right now.

>> So if that is true and actually my sensibilities in very limited data around this are close to your hunch, that implies that actually we're going to end up much longer virtual and Zoom irrespective of what the office place ends up looking like.

>> I think that's probably true.

I think a lot of people are going to experience Zoom fatigue, as we have been already for the past 16 months.

But I think where you get smarter about battling that fatigue -- Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford did a great analysis of what's causing Zoom fatigue.

And he says, you know, it's not always the technology itself.

It's the way that we use it, just like any technology.

It's, you know, it's exhausting to sit in the same chair for nine hours, whereas if we were face to face, we'd probably get up, we'd move around more.

So we need to do that.

You don't often in real life have to stare at your own image, so turn off the self-view.

You're also not used to dealing with a giant virtual head where most people's first instinct is to flinch when they see that on the screen.

If you could sit twice as far away, you'd be better off.

And I think more of us are going to -- I hate to say this -- we might reinvent the conference call.

>> That is a horrible idea, Adam, but thank you for bringing it up.

>> Wait, wait.

Hold on.

Hear me out.

Hear me out.

I have to make the case.

>> Why?

>> So, I think this is obviously -- the coordination complexity gets too high when you have eight or nine people or more in a group.

But if we're just talking about a two-, three-, four-person conversation, empirically, we're better at reading other people's emotions if the cameras are off.

Tone of voice is a pure and clear signal of what people are thinking and feeling than seeing their random facial expressions and body language.

There's extra cognitive load from trying to read all of those over a glitchy Zoom screen, and then also Anita Williams just published some research which shows that if you are in a pair and you have cameras off, you actually have more even balance and talk time, that there's something about just hearing somebody's voice that makes you sensitive to making sure that they get brought into the conversation, whereas if you're looking at the other person, it's easier to end up sort of dominating all the airtime.

So I do think we need -- we don't want to be in conference calls all the time, of course, but we ought to have cameras-off zones and some meetings where that's the norm.

There's been a bunch of research on what happens when we go to Zoom for job interviews, which I think are the opposite of knowing someone well.

You're meeting a complete stranger.

It's an artificial interaction.

The stakes feel very high.

And judgments of somebody's future job performance are not any more accurate if you see the person over Zoom as compared to if you'd done a traditional phone call.

And I think one of the things we're going to see happen pretty quickly is, as the world reopens or just whatever version of that we're now expecting to happen, we're going to see that power shifts much more toward talented people.

Temporarily a lot of people were hanging on to their jobs for dear life, just trying to get to the end of the pandemic.

And now that everybody who, you know, who is highly marketable, has lots of options.

The companies that refuse to be flexible, that refuse to give people the kind of freedom that they've had a taste of now are really going to struggle with attracting and recruiting very impressive people.

And over time, I think that might precipitate a shift where more and more organizations say, "You know what?

We weren't that excited about remote, but we at least need some kind of hybrid system."

Otherwise, a lot of people in the creative economy are just going to become entrepreneurs or freelancers.

>> Leaving the creative economy and talking about essential workers for a moment, I mean, it has to be one of the most extraordinary misnomers of the pandemic, the people that in principle we truly rely on in the front lines who have the least flexibility in terms of how they work, when they work, whether they work and are also completely not remunerated, as if that work is essential to the way we live our lives.

Do you see us doing anything about that?

>> I don't know.

I think this is a moment where we ought to be rethinking our national policy on essential work.

You know, I think about hazard pay and how how much that's been a norm in dangerous occupations for decades.

Well, where was hazard pay for all the teachers, for all the medical professionals, for all the warehouse workers who put their lives at risk to keep the world running and to try to keep the economy alive as well?

I think we need a conversation about that.

I don't know what it looks like yet, but I sure welcome it.

>> Do you think principle takeaway from the pandemic in terms of workplace is actually more inequality of opportunity?

>> I'm afraid that you might be right.

I think the amount of opportunity net is going up, but I don't think it's going to be distributed evenly.

And I think that the people who have flexibility, to your point, the knowledge workers, the creative workers, the people doing sort of white-collar, high-end professional services are going to be the ones who benefit from most of that flexibility and opportunity.

And that could probably, in some cases, will amplify the divisions that already exist in our radically unequal world.

>> Do you think that the Protestant work ethic, such as it has been sort of mythologized in the West is something we actively need to get rid of?

Do human beings, in your view, need to be seeking so much purpose in their employment?

>> I mean, we're an outlier on the world stage when it comes to the primacy of work in our lives.

And I think we do it at our own peril.

I think we are -- we're just seeing extraordinary levels of burnout in workplaces across the U.S. We're seeing some people burn out because they're being forced to work extraordinary hours or face unreasonable demands by their employers.

We're seeing other people burn out because they are workaholics -- not the healthy, engaged kind, but the chronic, compulsive kind where you feel guilty if you're not working and you're stressed that you're going to fall behind or lose your job.

And over time, we know that undermines the quality of work you do.

And I think that just expecting people to be engaged in the job if they don't have quality of life feels like something you would have expected maybe half a century ago.

It's about time that our leaders catch up.

>> I mean, it's a very sensible and humanist perspective that you offer.

If I'm looking top down, my response to you is the outliers in terms of the places where individual work ethic is the most intense, forced upon it by society and driven by the individual are China, the United States and Japan, the three largest economies in the world.

So, I mean, if anything, you know, you would think, given that lineup, it is going to be really hard to address.

>> I think we're confusing the number of hours you work with the importance and quality of work that you do.

I don't know -- I mean, empirically, if you look at the data, I don't know that many people who can focus and do their best work more than five to six hours a day.

And even those who can, right, you start to see their productivity trail off.

You start to see them make more errors.

The data on physicians are terrifying on this, right?

Where we see that if if you work an 80- or 90-hour week, often your error rate will double or triple.

And we're talking about medical errors!

You could amputate the wrong leg!

You could give someone a drug that's supposed to save their lives and they're allergic to it.

And if we drop people down to working 60, 65, 55 hours a week, that error rate plummets.

>> There's plenty of talk about people having burnout, Zoom burnout, sick of remote burnout, lockdown burnout.

You write about something else.

You say that the real problem is that people are languishing in their jobs.

What did you mean by that?

>> I've never seen people more excited to talk about their lack of excitement.

Languishing is a term that was coined by a sociologist which captures the void right in between depression and flourishing.

It's basically the absence of well-being.

So you feel like you have a sense of emptiness and stagnation.

You're not burned out because you still have energy.

You're not depressed because you still have hope.

You just feel a little bit joyless and a little bit aimless.

And I think a lot of us have been languishing because the world around us is standing still.

That's the bad news.

I think the good news is that the opposite of languishing is progress.

There's evidence that the single biggest driver of daily energy and joy is just a sense of forward movement.

It doesn't have to be a big triumph.

It could be a small win and just a little moment of mastery, a jolt of connection, even just a sense that "I helped one person today" seems to help people move from languishing toward flourishing.

And I think we could all use more of those moments right now.

>> Okay, so, lightning round while we close up, I'll give you a bunch of quick questions.

You tell me first thing that comes to your mind.

It should be amusing that way.

Start off, since it's connected to what you just said, how do you disconnect from work?

>> I play "Words with Friends" and I go on water slides with our kids whenever possible.

>> Do you think happy hours make employees happier?

>> [ Laughs ] No.

And during the pandemic, I think happy hour has made people extremely sad because we're all still a little bit isolated.

And now it's yet another thing to add to what was already a two- or three-hour longer workday.

>> How do you bring back fun that's not mandatory in the work space?

>> I love the distinction between deep fun and shallow fun.

Shallow fun is the happy hour.

Deep fun is "I'm working on a meaningful problem with people who make me better."

And I think we need those kinds of problems to solve.

>> When's the last time you accidentally replied all to a work e-mail?

>> [ Laughs ] I think it was about three months ago.

>> Was it super embarrassing?

>> No, it was an inside joke that no one else got.

>> When people say things like "circle back," "close the loop," "hard stop," can we kill those things now that we're killing the regular work environment?

>> Let's kill them.

My colleague Bob Sutton calls them jargon monoxide, which I think is a great way to describe them.

And I don't know why we need these buzz words.

They don't seem to help anyone.

There's some hilarious research by Zach Brown which shows that people use that kind of jargon because they're insecure and they want to sound smart.

>> And could we have done this interview by e-mail?

>> Probably.

>> Adam Grant.

The book is "Think Again."

It's something he does all the time, even a bit in this interview.

Good to see you, my friend.

>> You too.

Thanks, Ian.

♪♪ >> Working used to mean long hours spent in an office and away from your family.

2020 brought the opposite -- 24/7 lockdowns with the kids.

Parents were teachers and babysitters overnight, while many of them continued to work full-time jobs.

How will the changes we've experienced in the pandemic impact our demand for time at home with the kids?

And what will it take to make that feasible?

Here's a look at how other countries do it and how the United States stacks up.

>> It's time to pass paid family leave.

>> Paid family leave.

>> The merits of paid family leave.

>> 12 weeks of paid leave and medical leave, family medical leave.

>> Democrats and Republicans are talking about it.

So why don't we have it?

America is one of only two countries in the world that offers no guaranteed paid leave for new parents.

In 2019, President Donald Trump approved a measure that gave federal employees up to 12 weeks.

A step in the right direction, but not much of one when you consider that most of the U.S. workplace is excluded from that policy.

To put things into perspective, mothers in other OECD countries receive an average of 18 weeks off.

Sweden -- I know you always talk about Sweden when you're talking about this kind of stuff -- They've been offering a parental leave program since 1974 and gives both parents up to 480 days to care for each new child.

What if you have twins?

No idea.

And it's not just new mothers who use this benefit.

Eight out of 10 fathers in Sweden take at least four months off to help raise their children.

The policy has been viewed as a success and has led to one perk that might make other moms around the world kind of jealous.

>> When you're both at home, do you change as many nappies as your wife?

>> Yeah.

>> More.

>> More?

>> Yeah.

She would let me know if I didn't.

[ Laughter ] >> There are tangible benefits to this policy too.

One study found that for every month a father took a paternity leave in Sweden, the mother's income increased by 6.7%.

But women, even in the most progressive countries, still face what is called the motherhood penalty, the perception that working mothers are somehow less competent than their childless counterparts, which can lead to lower salaries and fewer promotions.

In 2017, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern became one of only two female elected heads of state to give birth while in office.

I mean, not literally in office, and the only elected leader to go on maternity leave.

And the six weeks she spent bonding with her new baby was met with controversy.

>> It is a woman's decision about when they choose to have children.

It should not predetermine whether or not they are given a job or have job opportunities.

>> You were saying that I would therefore -- that would prejudice my decision.

>> Why would you ask if it wasn't going to prejudice your decision?

>> Questions like this may explain why one in four American mothers return to work within two weeks of giving birth -- one fortnight.

President Joe Biden's American Families Plan includes 12 weeks of paid family leave but pays for the benefits through taxing the wealthy an unpopular move for Republicans.

Nine U.S. states have enacted their own paid leave programs, but the question remains when will the United States catch up to the rest of the world?

And now to "Puppet Regime," where some of the most powerful puppets in the world are also taking a long, hard look at the old work/life balance.

Roll that tape.

>> Folks, we're back.

The economy is back.

Workers are back all over singing, "working nine to five, what a way to make a living," something, something, with us living and-a-mivin'...

Anyway, that's why America is convening this summit about work/life balance.

This is no joke, folks.

First up, Angela Merkel.

Take it away, girl.

>> Work/life balance.

Yeah, okay.

I have a little riddle for you.

What did the German chancellor do after winning four terms, serving 16 years in power and leading the European Union through not one, not two, but three major crises, huh?

Do you know the answer to this riddle, huh?

The answer is nothing!

Nix!

When I retire this fall, I will finally enjoy some of those austere Mediterranean landscapes myself.

Yeah?

Okay, truce.

>> Look, as I was just telling my close personal nemesis, Alexei Navalny, for past 40 years, I have dedicated myself to this work/life balance.

That is, I consider it my life's work to put your life in the balance.

[ Laughs ] >> What am I, chopped liver over here?

You know, you folks in rich countries are carrying on about whether to return to the office, how many days a week, blah, blah.

Let me tell you something.

People in the rest of the world, they know I am still working pretty freaking hard out here.

Alright?

>> Sure.

You've heard the stories about my workers.

Well, look.

To address all that head on, I've decided that I, too, am going to spend some time in a small vehicle, peeing in bottles, and just kind of floating around precariously.

>> Wait, hold on.

Hold on.

Does that mean you'll be delivering packages for Amazon yourself?

Because I ordered this doggie bath, and I'm just waiting to see if it -- >> No, no, no, no, no, no, certainly not.

It means I'll be living and working where I belong -- in space.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see, you're thinking about work, the future of work, you're sick of work, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

You know you want to.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...