- Insider is taking you behind the scenes of our best stories with our series The Inside Story.
- This week we're spotlighting Insider senior correspondent Aki Ito who covers the labor market, work from home, and the economy.
- You can read Ito's reporting for Insider here.
Tell me a bit about your background and how you came to develop a "future of work" beat?
I joined Insider in January, and before that I was a reporter and editor at Bloomberg News for 10 years. At Bloomberg I covered economics and tech, so I was already writing a lot of stories at the intersection of these two topics – for example, how new technologies were changing the labor market.
With the shift to WFH in the pandemic, it felt natural to double down on the changing nature of work.
What are some of the biggest workplace trends that you're following right now?
Anything related to the permanent transition to WFH. That's involved not only employers' overarching policies of whether and how often they'll let employees work from home - but also changes in pay practices (will they reduce the salaries of workers who move away?) as well as perks and benefits for a remote workforce, and things like flexible work hours too.
I think a lot of things about work and the workplace are up for grabs right now, so it's been really interesting watching companies announce all kinds of new policies. A lot of these initiatives haven't been tried on a large scale before. I think we're going to learn a lot about what works and what doesn't over the next few years.
What's a day in the life of Aki Ito like?
It depends on whether I'm writing or not. On days I'm writing, I'm holed up in our guest bedroom, where I've set up my home office. I try not to take any calls, and I try to stay off of Slack and email and Twitter (with varying degrees of success). My wife hates these days because I'm heady and grumpy when she comes home from work. I worry a lot that my story's never going to come together. I read all my first drafts out loud to her before I send them to my editor, and she has the incredibly unpleasant job of telling me whether she thinks they're any good or not.
When I'm not writing, my days are a combination of reading other outlets, talking on the phone with sources, catching up with colleagues, brainstorming new story ideas with my editor, and reading and replying to email. These are the days I take our puppy out to our local dog park more often too.
Tell me about a story that you're most proud of.
I think it's my recent story about the war over WFH. I had been wanting to write about companies backtracking on their post-covid WFH policies for a number of weeks, and it was when I saw the data from the economist Nick Bloom's survey that I found a way to clearly articulate what's going on - that workers, who want to work from home more often than their employers want them to, are winning.
What excites you about your job?
There's so much about work that's changing right now, and because of that, there's been quite a bit of chaos, controversy, and confusion too. So it's been fun and rewarding to be on this beat where so much is happening. My hope is to help our readers make sense of all this change in their jobs and their lives.
You can read some of Aki's stories here:
Employers hold the key to ending the pandemic - but they're afraid to use it
Sick of working from home? These companies are reinventing work for a post-office world.
There's a bidding war for jobseekers, and it's getting crazier by the day