Co-Author of Remote Works book || MDiv Candidate '26 at Harvard || Ex-IDEO, Google, Automattic, & Oliver Wyman
As someone who loves to study #workplace #cultures and has experienced several renowned ones firsthand, I appreciated this article unpacking Silicon Valley's culture. Several of these insights I've observed myself, but I was never able to piece them together into a coherent thesis. For example, "Employers began seeing the benefits of subsuming in workplaces the nonproductive aspects of their workers’ lives—whether relationships, self-esteem, dieting, spirituality, or hobbies—as a way of curbing self-sabotaging tendencies. Investment in these areas could prevent burnout or physical ailments that would reduce productivity." Or, "Workers report that they get more pleasure from dining with their coworkers than through social ties with those outside their workplace. This insularity is reinforced by regular socializing with colleagues after work and on weekends and even coordinating vacations together." And, "Chen views this novel configuration of control, community, and spiritual development through a number of lenses, but the favored one is religion. Work is both replacing religion and becoming religion, she contends." The catch? "The result is one of the things that worried Alexis de Tocqueville in his investigation of early-nineteenth-century American democracy: the withdrawal of individuals from larger civic engagement into a “small circle of family and friends”—or in this case, a small circle of coworkers temporarily cast into such roles. Reckoning with the effects of such a withdrawal will require ongoing investigation of the ways organizational, social, and political lives intersect both to serve and weaken the common good." I try to steer away from thinking in binaries (this is good, or this is bad). Instead, it's interesting to observe how well-meaning changes meant to help the worker can have second-order consequences down the road. Agree, Disagree? What's your ideal workplace culture?
