The surprising ways hybrid work changed people’s grooming habits and notions of personal time | Canada Voices

When Vijul Patel works from home, his mornings have an air of dignity.

Mr. Patel, a 30-year-old engineer at a large tech company, rises at 7. He leaves for the gym, five minutes from his home in Kitchener, Ont. After a workout, he showers, prays or meditates and eats breakfast. At 9 a.m., he retreats to his home office to begin the workday.

The morning ritual transforms completely when Mr. Patel commutes to his Toronto office – a journey spanning 2 hours and 10 minutes one way. He gets up at 6 a.m. There is no workout. Grooming takes centre stage: teeth brushing, beard trimming, showering, moisturizing, picking out ironed Oxford shirts, matching socks to chinos and polos, belts to shoes. Flying out the door by 6:45 a.m., he drives to his GO train station. As he pecks away at e-mails and listens to podcasts on the train, he sees women applying makeup for their own day at the office.

Although the commute is long, and office grooming a “chore,” Mr. Patel finds it refreshing to be at work in the city. Still, he suspects more than two in-office days a week would become unfeasible.

In this moment of negotiating how, where and when we work, more employees are contemplating their minutes and hours this way, between days they can shape, and days they can’t. On office days, they’re paying closer attention to how much of their personal time gets gobbled up by grooming for an office setting – the work around the work.

Between July, 2022, and July, 2023, remote workers spent 24 minutes less a day than in-office staff on personal hygiene, grooming and getting dressed, according to Statistics Canada’s 2022 Time Use Survey. Similarly, American teleworkers cut down time spent on showering, shaving, applying makeup and digging out fresh clothes, according to the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes from WFH Research, a Stanford-led, cross-university team studying every wrinkle of remote and hybrid work in these peculiar times. Surveying nearly 29,000 people between April, 2023, and March, 2024, they found women especially valued this “no grooming” aspect of remote work, along with work flexibility and no commutes.

The time saved on these daily ablutions is helping assure the staying power of hybrid work, experts argue.

“The pandemic was incredibly difficult in many dimensions. But one of the things it did was force a reckoning on how much of our life is our work,” said Andrew Penner, a sociology professor at the University of California, Irvine, who along with Jaclyn Wong has studied gender and grooming in the labour market.

“The amount of time we spend making ourselves fit for public consumption, it’s not worth the amount of time we’re given,” Dr. Penner said.

Hybrid workers’ pushback against “beauty work” follows a grooming hiatus that arrived with pandemic lockdowns. With beauty salons shuttered, employees juggling work and child care had to learn to live with themselves. And many did: Men grew out beards, women their grey hair. Sales of makeup plummeted, replaced by skin-care routines. Years later, some workers haven’t resumed beauty regimens with the same rigour of the Before Times.

While employees with public-facing roles should be presentable, rigid expectations around appearance are making less sense in emptied-out offices, according to Cheryl Thompson, an associate professor in performance at Toronto Metropolitan University.

“We’re still in a Mad Men-type era of thinking about the office, that people should look beautiful and put on their best aesthetic to go to work,” Dr. Thompson said. “For a lot of people, when they realized they didn’t have to do it, it was this break from appearing in public as your ‘public self.’”

Doing a phone interview while working from home, Nicholas Bloom is wearing “a scrappy old T-shirt.” The Stanford University economics professor co-founded WFH Research, unearthing all kinds of telling details about contemporary work life.

With grooming, the research team found revealing gender gaps. On office days, women spent nearly half an hour getting themselves ready. But on days worked from home, women were actually less likely to shower than men, spending markedly less time on various grooming tasks.

The disparity was most pronounced for women 50 to 64 years old, who put in the most primping time ahead of their office commutes – 30.4 minutes daily. On remote days, they trimmed that down to 16.9 minutes – the shortest grooming ritual of any other group of women or men.

“Women, particularly in the older age group, save an enormous amount of time working from home compared to young men,” Dr. Bloom said. “It’s clear this is about society’s expectations about how much preparation men and women need.”

Shaving was the biggest time-saver for men, makeup for women, though 40 per cent still applied makeup at home, likely for video calls conducted in unforgiving close-up.

The aesthetic realities of remote work are colliding with older stories we’ve been told about personal upkeep, according to Katherine Ashenburg, author of The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.

“All the propaganda which we were fed from the soap, deodorant and shampoo advertisers was about not offending – their favourite word – other people,” Ms. Ashenburg said. “It was all about how you appeared to other people. This kind of fear of offending – if nobody’s home, who are you going to offend?”

She views the time saved on becoming office-presentable as liberating, leaving more space for actual work and other, more important parts of life.

The Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes tracked what people do with their time when not commuting and grooming for an office setting. Forty per cent poured the extra minutes back into their jobs, 30 per cent spent the time on child care and chores, and 30 per cent refocused on exercise and leisure. Remote workers slept, snacked and multitasked more than their in-office counterparts, even as the groups’ paid work hours clocked in evenly, according to Statistics Canada’s figures.

Research has found this type of “schedule control” eases work stress and burnout. Studies also show flexible hybrid work is especially prized by women, racialized workers and those with long commutes – these cohorts often overlapping. When bosses yank hybrid work away, these are the employees most likely to quit.

“I know a lot of Black, racialized people who love not having to go to the office every day – just for mental health, and not having to answer questions like, ‘Oh, you changed your hair again,’ or, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting outfit,’” said Dr. Thompson, who wrote Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture. These comments leave some racialized employees feeling unduly scrutinized at the office, Dr. Thompson explained.

“Working from home, people had some reprieve: ‘Finally, I don’t have to keep feeling like I’m being watched every day.’”