2021 NYU Stern Innovation Conference: Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere
[Music] so i really enjoyed the last panel and i think it's a great transition from this morning discussions about sort of great big questions of the nation and organizing uh for innovation to the questions that's burning for all of us and that that is managing um work in virtual space and it was that it's my absolute delight to introduce um professor tsudalni who i also know from back when she was a phd student for many years like professor valentine earlier today and am i lucky to have met you uh a long time ago professor neely is a nayla fitzberg professor uh of business administration at harvard business school uh she has uh her research focuses on leadership uh in um organizations implementing global digital strategies uh she is a world-renowned scholar of issues and working in virtual teams way before the pandemic and uh the reality of working on zoom became our new reality she has published widely on this topic of managing distributed work her first book which i read with great interest was about language like speaking the same language in this global teams and her brand new book just came out uh is about working from anywhere and succeeding now i must confess not only did i buy and read her book on the in april 2020 when i personally was stuck with the same dilemma all of your quest i thought who can help me who went directly to whatever professor neely was projecting uh in terms of her wisdom from harvard i listened to her great advice on for example getting up and brushing your teeth even though you are starting to work virtually i remember that and i shared her video immediately with my teenage children did not listen to it as carefully as i had but i still hope at least heard a little bit i just think that uh professionally is a guiding light for many of us in this difficult days of working in the virtual world uh now uh sedal i mentioned a little bit about boundary spinning and fault lines which you would find i think in chapter seven i also know some of the cases that you wrote are now in the book with the answers so i can no longer teach them but they're wonderful cases uh about global work uh we have great debates with my mba students discussing whom to fire if there is a person on the team who is not able to work remotely or work with cross cultures and i just can't wait for you to present some of the highlights of your new book and i truly think you all should buy it it's such a useful book so uh without further ado i'm welcoming our distinguished guest professor siddal neely from harvard wow thank you so much for that introduction uh it's incredible i was thinking about when we met as when i was a doctoral student it was about 20 years ago if you can believe that and you look younger and i'm going the other way so i don't understand what's going on here but i'm so delighted to be with everyone and i think what we'll do is i'll just present a little bit of uh material around not only my book remote work revolution succeeding from anywhere but also how should we think about hybrid work and the future of work some forward thinking and some of the things that we've learned along the way so part of what i do routinely is talk to organizations who are in the process of figuring out the path forward and i think there are some practices that we now understand are useful so i'll share a bit of that so a little bit on remote work but a lot on the future of work so i'll present this material and um for about 20 minutes maybe and then natalya will take questions i think is that is that is that the plan okay fabulous so remote work revolution why is revolution in this title and what are we talking about the reason why revolution is in the title of this book is because we in march 2020 experienced unprecedented scape school scope and magnitude when the vast majority of knowledge workers migrated to work from home and it wasn't just a change an incremental or or or small change in the nature of work inside of organizations but a radical change that is now shaping how people want to move forward so this concept of hybrid work where there's a mix of people working remotely and people working in person is one that many organizations are talking about some are using the term dynamic work so fidelity investment says hybrid work or hybrid the term hybrid feels like a commitment dynamic feels more comfortable little more fluid people coming in and out but the point is bringing flexibility into the nature of work is what people are looking for so i have a question for everyone here as you think about and we'll i'll ask the question in just a moment but as you think about hybrid work the image that you should have is like the one we're seeing here where some people are in person there's a lot of technology a lot of smart boards some are in the office some are not a lot of screens and there's this kind of mix uh taking place and these smart boards the like that you see here on this image are starting to grow rapidly with people who have now returned to the office because smart boards allow people to capture store and reuse information so the whiteboard is becoming less and less interesting to people so part of this hybridity is also influencing how people work when they're in the office but the question that i wanted to ask was around or is around productivity as you think about the last 19 months 18 months or so and in the remote format would you say that productivity has gone up a stayed the same or gone down what's the answer for you just say that to yourself to your neighbor uh uh answer that question in most places if i ask this question with members of any organization about 70 percent will say that productivity has gone up for them and it would not be surprising because what we know about remote work is that on average it increases productivity and so the question is why why does it increase productivity it's not because people are plugging in more hours although sometimes they do uh which in sometimes maladaptive ways it's because people love their autonomy self-governance or sometimes we call it psychological self-control they love their flexibility the ability to walk away from their desk start laundry come back and sit which creates this integration between work and non-work lives and this then increases their job satisfaction which therefore increases their productivity that's kind of the relationship between uh remote work and productivity and many have experienced this across organizations it won't be surprising by the way the people who are more satisfied and happier than those who get to work from home are those who get to work from anywhere this is hashtag wfa work from anywhere their job satisfaction is even happier so think cafes or co-working uh places like wework uh and other spaces people tend to love doing that as well so what is this about loving autonomy loving a flexibility and to what extent connecting to the conversation that you just had when we survey people as did the gardner group or harvard business school online or jones lang and lasalle a commercial real estate property worldwide company or microsoft looking at 30 000 people if you ask them what do you want the future of work to look like these are the types of percentages that you get people who say from the gardner group 87 percent who say i want some kind of remote work in my professional arrangement meaning this hybrid work that we're talking about jones lang and lasalle was not happy to find that 88 of the people they surveyed said i want some form of remote work in my professional arrangement and you see microsoft 30 000 people that they surveyed about 70 said they want some kind of remote work in their professional arrangements this has created a dilemma for organizations because suddenly their workforce in these staggering numbers are asking the inclusion of some form of remote work in their professional arrangements and they've had to rethink their structures they've been many companies by the way who've said we want to go back to 2019 pre-pandemic this is not normal we want to go back to that normal and then they see data like this and a fierce labor market and they have to whether or not contemplate what this flexible work can look like and i think uh satya nadel the ceo of microsoft really captured the sentiment around what this means for organizations as they think about the future of work i would love to read this quote from satya because i think he captures it so well over the past year he said no area has undergone more rapid transformation than the way we work employee expectations are changing and we will need to define productivity much more broadly inclusive of collaboration learning and well-being which is increasingly important to drive career advance advancement for every worker including frontline and knowledge workers as well as for new graduates and those who are in the workforce today all this needs to be done with flexibility in when where and how people work this is what's a a a play here for organizations and for leaders now how do you go about doing this so it's important for organizations as they think about what this hybrid work might look like provided that's the direction that they want to go into and most are is to have some kind of centralized approach with guidelines design principles that says we want people in the office for these things such as collaboration innovation creativity work connection and bonding but when it comes to these other things these things can be done from home so having design principles in a centralized way and you see my hand over my head i'm saying centralized way that the leaders of organizations have to set this is really important to do because you don't want individual managers leaders and their biases and preferences to guide what they do in their uh divisions in their units in their departments because you're going to have such a mismatch and inconsistency inside of the organization and inequities so if i am cool manager a i'm like i love flexibility i love flexibility in fact flexibility everywhere work from home come in five times a month that's how we're going to do this in my team and you have manager b who loves to see people and says i want to see people in five days a week you have a problem right so that's why you need a centralized approach that then can get interpreted by each group in a way that connects with people's work responsibilities and deadlines the other thing that's important to do and smart organizations taught us this is that to try to look at work at the task level in a system approach what that means is if you look at an i.t department for example look at the work that needs to get done and truly determine what are the things that require physical presence so control rooms operations that are attached to buildings require physical presence but there are other things that can be done virtually so if you look at an entire system then you're able to do things like pooling and rotating such that every member of that i.t group can have some kind of remote work even if it's once a week or twice a week this is important because this allows you to create an inclusive process as many people as possible can partake in this flexibility if you think along these lines otherwise you're going to relegate individuals or particular individuals to always be in the office on site essential people we call them and never uh have the flexibility but if you have a systems approach then you can do some pooling and rotating and ensure that inclusion takes place i am firmly convinced that this kind of thinking or uh the ability to have some kind of remote work in people's work uh arrangements is going to become a diversity and inclusion issue for us we must think in inclusive ways and we need to broaden our thinking and think from uh systems approaches we have to cast whatever we do as experiments or phase one year one because adjustments will likely be very necessary experiment learn and iterate otherwise you'll be like uber uber said we want people in three days a week and the employees said no way backlash within a few months they had to come back and say okay so we just want people in 50 of the time wonderfully ambiguous right what does that mean we want people in 50 of the time they're actually seeding a bit of that control and they're letting managers groups figure out what does 50 mean it could mean we come in five days uh consecutively one week and we don't come back again for another two weeks so they they they had to loosen it linkedin went from a hybrid model to saying like twitter okay people can work remotely indefinitely so these changes are taking place because employees themselves are changing their minds doing that commute again and saying you know i thought i wanted this three days a week actually want this two days a week this is too much for me or companies themselves finding they have more needs or others or sales force found that people love to come in on thursdays to the point where there is no conference room safe places for people to work so adjustments are going to be absolutely necessary as will training training training training training on what training on how you develop trust in a remote environment training on how you connect in a remote environment and there are ways to do this uh based on frankly 30 years of research the two areas that have been most studied in a virtual space first productivity second trust so we know how to do this and having training along these lines very important another area that requires training are digital tools um tech exhaustion for example a term that we know so well uh some people call it zoom fatigue i called it zoom fatigue for a little bit and then i abandoned that when eric uh yoon the ceo of zoo endorsed my book i no longer use the term zoom fatigue but the idea is this idea of tech exhaustion is when we're cognitively overloaded we're staring at the camera for hours we're even beginning to slur our words why is that we're scheduling meetings edge to edge to edge does this resonate are you saying that's me that's me sometimes too believe me and i write the book on this so this edge to edge just because we can doesn't mean we should that's one we need to build in transition time we need to use more asynchronous means of communication so the next time someone emails you about a zoom meeting say could we do this over email that's going to be like your favorite line ever and they're going to feel relieved as well like proof easier for me and tech exhaustion the other problem is there's this thing called parkinson law where we tend to fill the entire time we allot for any meeting so if you say we're gonna have a meeting for 60 minutes to address this guess what's going to happen you're going to spend 60 minutes to address this if you say we're going to spend 45 minutes 45 minutes will be perfectly fine if you say half hour guess what half hour will be perfectly fine meetings have gotten longer and longer and longer also contributing to tech exhaustion so reducing the number of meetings and um building in transition time is going to be very important because tech exhaustion actually should not exist if we treated digital tools in the way that they were designed and used synchronous and asynchronous media much more deliberately you will never have tech exhaustion again i promise i promise try this try this and i detail all of this in my book as well chapter four another thing that's really important and where we've seen a lot of companies struggle is cyber security so cyber security meaning that now we're no longer bounded to physical buildings in our organizations and so the perimeter that needs to be protected has grown and we're using devices our own devices to do work things much more than we did before and that makes uh data protection and privacy more difficult so i recently did a round table with members of microsoft and amazon a number of companies talking about the topic of cyber security and this has been something that's giving so many companies a big big headache and it's just unwittingly someone making a mistake clicking on a phishing email because they haven't been trained on it they don't know how to recognize it executives of companies are getting targeted as well because uh of using personal devices giving people access to more data and information than necessary gets in the way as well because some of these companies are finding that their own people their own employees their own workers are causing a lot of reaches sometimes because they're disgruntled as well so data protection cyber security incredibly important to think about and to prioritize as a training training area a couple of things and then we can take uh questions so what is hybrid 2.0 for me hybrid 2.0
is when we begin to change our physical spaces and many designers and architects are very busy thinking about this future of work and uh how do you design new spaces where people are fluid coming and going and when they do come in it's so comfortable as comfortable as working from home these are some of their design principles and putting people and technology at the heart of whatever you do so why is it hybrid 2.0 uh we don't recommend people ripping furniture out and starting to put collaboration spaces because no one may use them it's important to understand the patterns of work in this hybrid environment before we start bringing in construction teams but there's some few things that you can keep in mind one is create spaces where people really want to come in other things that we're learning is that people are finding that their home setup are superior than their in-office setup lighting is not great sound is not great cameras are not awesome all of that so much better at home so they feel like they're going to work and going around looking for places for great lighting for their zoom calls or microsoft teams calls because those have not let up and they're going to continue into the future as convening mechanisms even if people are all in the office so physical spaces are going to be important to consider a couple of trends to mention um as i close is that the nature of work changing is the most important thing that we need to understand and it's not just as we think of it today that we are not necessarily in all in the same physical space and we need to think about time differently the reality is companies like spotify are spending five days training they're non-technical people non-technical i'm talking about accountants and everyone else in their finance groups how to use robotic process automation or rpa tools in order to drive out routine work as they continue to sharpen their work or as they talk about finding ways to do human augmentation so hybrid work today we think it's time and space it's also going to include data and technology and it's preparing us for this digital revolution that's right around the corner because as covid has accelerated the virtualization of work it has also accelerated our collective adoption of digital tools and technologies and that's accelerated as well so if we don't lean into this hybrid work and understand it as a revolution on the nature of work how we work how we think how we connect how we collaborate how we learn we're actually not preparing for this digital revolution that many are already starting to ride some of it i say we're so worried about collaborating with sal and sally we'll be collaborating with aibatsu so that's how we need to think about this and lean into it so that we're truly prepared for this future of work that's actually already upon us so with that i will uh close and natalya perhaps we can take some questions and chat a little bit uh sure so thank you sadala as usual very insightful i'm looking for questions from others but i actually have a few myself and some one thing that you said like struck me i was like nothing as you said everything was like yes yes somebody needs to well like love your idea of centralization because yeah i've already hoses excellent without it i was thinking of what you said about rotating and responsibility sharing and it immediately rang a bell with issues related to um work life balance and just having more women in people with children in the workforce before the pandemic and i remember um as a you know a mother of three kids i often try to engage people in these conversations about you know how could we transform work uh to allow more women to have successful careers and i bring in this question of rotation and job sharing to which for example talking about this to health care my recent research setting has been held there the independence is there's like the knowledge loss the knowledge integration is so humongous this you know this is such a huge productivity loss sort of not necessarily captured in maybe some of these other statistics what do you say to that because what i heard you say is that like this is the future we need to enable it it will help diverse tissues yes how do we go about accepting it and convincing others that that this needs to happen listen i i always go back to data as you know i grew up where melissa valentine is i grew up in a world where you look at data and one of the things that made my head explode is the fact that over three million women have left the workforce according to the us labor of statistics and this is because they were disproportionately more responsible for caretaking in their households whether it's small children or the elderly so they ended up opting out of the workforce of that number close to 600 000 of them are mothers now this is a diversity alarming problem that we've seen and if we embrace the idea of flex work or flex time which means that segmenting the day in ways that accommodate people's lives this could be so much better we've seen the experiments in iceland where they were working four day weeks and still productivity uh goes up and work continues quite smoothly the other important thing is to understand diversity when it comes to racial minorities or people with visible or invisible differences in terms of their physical abilities the future forum which is a slack think tank did a study and discovered that black professionals and brown professionals and other marginalized groups truly found remote work the period in their organizational life where they experienced the most inclusion their sense of belonging in their companies went up when they went remote this is important to understand because for all of these people they no longer had to take the psychological commute on a regular basis in order to integrate in mainstream culture it was a relief valve of sorts so for so many of these groups if their inclusion experience is superior when they're remote it's important to include some remote work into their uh professional arrangement because that will connect them to their company more and then one last thing i'll say about this on the topic of diversity remote work or flexible work augments or expands our pipes so this pipeline problem that people talk about with diversity our pipes have grown there's so many more pipes from which to choose if we're open-minded on how to structure work that's very interesting yeah i mean that data is always like surprises and you have to know about the data that's great because i was thinking recruiting the part of your book about fault lines right there is uh fault lines uh for those who are not familiar this idea when lots of differences align right so from our prior research on uh virtual work that you and others have done right i was thinking this could worsen the diversity problem if you end up with a fault line along but there's no particular reason the diversity has to align with other differences if we're talking about in which case i could see what you're saying playing out favorably well speaks anyway we could have had a debate about it but the daytime so there is another question and i really like this question because i also heard from friends uh there is this pressure right the question is how do we get managers to be comfortable with management performance remotely like i'll just add a little bit to it i hear some of my friends saying well my manager wants me in the office because they believe i will be really working hard which is not necessarily the case especially for knowledge work and you just mentioned autonomy so starting from the proposition that flexibility is important to workers how do we get managers to be comfortable with this new world you know it's interesting because this period has been quite strenuous for managers and we have to remember that we were part of a global pandemic some people say we've moved from a pandemic to an endeavor i don't know i don't want to get into that i i just don't know you know i let me let me stay focused on this but we have to remember that for managers and leaders this has been probably the most stressful period of their professional careers several companies have looked at the stress levels the well-being and the burnout rate of their workforce and uh the findings of these companies is that their senior leaders are the most burned out uh and stressed out uh followed by their i.t organization especially cyber security folks kind of makes sense right um and so they're stressed they're tired they're burned out and now we're telling them okay go through yet another radical change completely append everything that you know about working and leading and managing and performance measurement and create a workforce where it's not black or white it's in the gray zone good luck if i was a manager this is like oh my gosh this is hard so we need to acknowledge the difficulties uh that leaders and managers are going through at the same time this is a period where each and every one of us have to level up we need to increase our skills we need to develop new skills communication skills leadership skills working skills and so this is where managers really need to make a difference and so you ask the question how do individuals how can individuals uh um convince their managers to give them a more remote so the first thing i'll say is to have a conversation about this to have a conversation about this about this is really what i need and this is what i want to do and is there any way we can make this work because at the end of the day we know that leadership doesn't always require a title or authority but it requires initiative and so to propose this uh is the first thing to do but i also think that managers whether they like it or not are reluctantly going in this direction because of what we talk about the great resignation is actually real turnover rates have gone up for many organizations so there's a fear about hiring amazing people but also retaining amazing people so it is kind of a workers market uh frankly and so at the end of the day uh trying to to to get folks uh to listen to you will be important but there will be industries as we know some very much in new york uh who are being resistant and i think uh the market uh will determine how that plays out yeah it's that's true when in this transition period right so we have to kind of just work through it that sounds like there is not going to be a magic bullet solution but having those conversations more and more would help i'm trying to make sense of the next question and i don't know if you see it i'm just going to read verb i don't see it so oh okay i can try to look how would you suggest approaching hr to update policies that the employees are not eligible for telework if they have children under five at home without another adult in the home to take care of it i haven't heard of such policies i'm very privileged i guess i have um not sure if others have is this illegal i didn't know this is way beyond uh the scope of what i think i can talk about i i children under five at home yeah i don't i don't know i'm going to skip that one i i get in enough trouble that was in the back of my mind as well so having read your book last time i had an all-day kind of meeting request i said i am asking for breaks and two things happened which might have it was a like on campus visit except virtually right they said oh but so many people want to talk to you can you also make time available another day so i basically killed another half a day in conversations and secondly all the meetings that i talked to went over so and thirdly my kids were interfering right in those breaks we know that a question is about managing boundaries like with being working from home what are some of the things you can tell people about managing this work family boundary or more broadly the boundary between even sort of different work tasks right because i was thinking in the breaks i built i'll catch up on email that didn't happen yeah you know it's interesting because um the part of the discipline that's really important when we work from home is being clear about when we start work being clear about when we end work and if we're managers and leaders so important not to send notes and emails to your team all hours of the night and on weekends because you're signaling uh to people that we're on 24 7. and so it's really important to have that discipline because what you end up seeing is with the productivity that we talked about not only does it plateau it begins to go the other way i call this hyper productivity productivity gone wrong when we begin to blur these boundaries when we don't add the transition times you have got to insist that they exist because the transition times are work times because if you don't do that what happens they pile up right and at the end of the day you have all of these to do things and then you're putting in two three extra hours uh to do that work and then you're doing it again the next day that's not sustainable to the point that in europe uh uh i don't know if you've heard this they're they're all of these lobbies talking about the right to disconnect to the point they're looking to enshrine in law the separation between work and non-work because the other thing phenomenon that we're seeing is people's well-being people's mental health and emotional well-being so if there are no boundaries you're exhausted you're stressed you're not renewing you're not taking care of yourself you're not going to be effective in the long term the other thing is you talked about your kids when we look at the conditions for strong performance in remote work one is you have to have space right you have to have adequate space to get work done so if you're kind of huddled in the corner of a bedroom it's actually a terrible experience for people so that space the second thing is if you don't have distractions or or a lot of ambient noise turns out children and pets can be problematic for people uh by the way anytime there's a pet when i'm on a video call i want to meet that pet i mean it's like it gives me complete joy but for people who are working having children and pets can definitely get in the way as well so we need those boundaries and we need to be very disciplined about them because this is a marathon this is not a remote works print for many it's going to be indefinite i see melissa hello hello you are such a dynamic speaker i'm gonna let natalia thank you first and i want to thank you after that but i'm sure natalia wants to say thank you first it's like hey i must say that's one of those stocks where we all you know throw so many notes i'm taking this home like [Laughter] kids and husband and like this is something we all need to know and try to practice and really really delightful delighted that you could join us uh anybody who stayed with us till uh for until 3 20 p.m got this beautiful
gift of your presentation oh boy yeah very much thank you so much by professor nilly's book it's a it's a treasure yeah thank you so much i just want to say i feel so fortunate you were able to come i've never seen you speak live before and it was just such a treat and i have to say i don't think i've ever watched a talk where i was nodding so much and the thing is you know i realized that you couldn't see me but i couldn't help it i was like yeah oh yeah yeah yeah so much through your entire talk and now i was going to add one thing on the kids things i love working at home i love having that autonomy when you were talking about that i'm like yeah it's exactly that the ability to to work in the times and places that i want and go get a snack when i need a snack and things like that is awesome but my kids are so funny i actually have an office space set up with a door and everything but they think they can come in and if as long as they're whispering to me it's okay like i can be teaching and they will come and whisper to me like i'm supposed to be able to multitask and it's it's pretty funny it's insane it's insane you know i'll close with this i had this meeting with the dean it was this big time meeting three of us pow wow and my son daniel who's eight comes he doesn't know he's on camera and he passes me a note now look at the note we're out of fruits can i have a cookie exactly so i read the note and the dean said give the boy a cookie and now or we [Laughter] good to see you [Music] you
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