The New Rules of Work

Chronicle Books published our book Stop Tweeting Boring Sh*t after a poster series we made took a viral trip around the internet and caught their attention. The book takes a humorous look at how people work in today's office environment. Besides creating some guidelines for the modern office worker to follow, we also studied the behavior of 750 actual office workers around the country. And we gathered statistics to quantify such important topics as, "The most vile office smells and "The percentage of people who steal office supplies."

The dream wasn't to write a best seller, just to get on the table across from the check out at Urban Outfitter.

The dream wasn't to write a best seller, just to get on the table across from the check out at Urban Outfitter.

STOP TWEETING BORING SH*T

The New Rules of Work started when Division of Labor needed an employee manual outlining the type of workplace we expected at the office. We hung a few posters, got some good reaction and quickly had an idea. We hung some more posters in the main window of the agency and suddenly we had people walking into the office asking to buy them. So we got to thinking…

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We designed an even larger collection of posters outlining the rules of the modern workplace and they started selling online. Third party retailers beganing buying the posters and reselling them and quickly we had an online ordering platform and posters were shipping all over the world. Keep in mind, Division of Labor is an independent advertising agency in San Francisco. We never planned on being in the retail business. Division of Labor develops marketing strategies and brand campaigns for startups, large brands, B2B companies and Bay Area institutions. We’re not a retail store. But then Chronicle Books came around.

Chronicle Books gave us the opportunity to package up all this modern workplace insight and write a book. We partnered with our strategy group, Paragraph Project and did an actual research study with 750 workers. All this was written into a coffee table-style book that sold at Urban Outfitters and other independent retailers.

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Division of Labor is one of the busiest advertising agencies in San Francisco working with startups and estabished brands alike. So finding the time to write a book was difficult, but as we’ve often said, “You can make tens of dollars in publishing!” So it was worth it.