Tsedal Neeley, professor at Harvard Business School, has been studying remote work and global teams for years. In episode 732 early in the pandemic, she shared how managers could lead their teams while many team members worked from home. Now, as more people return to more in-person work, she’s back on the show to help managers lead their teams effectively in a hybrid workplace, a mix of working from home and the office. Neeley is the author of the book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, and the HBR article “15 Questions About Remote Work Answered.”
CURT NICKISCH: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Curt Nickisch.
The sudden shock to the workplace of the Covid-19 pandemic forced many companies to transition to remote work. They had to quickly figure out how to function well amid a lot of uncertainty. And now many of them are transitioning back to more in-person work. And they’re often trying to blend some old and new ways of working as they move forward. For employees who’ve been through this, it’s a lot to deal with. Many people feel out of sync or even out of sight. They want to build trust with their coworkers, they want to maintain connections, but they also want to keep a proper work-life balance.
Meanwhile, managers want to know how to lead teams effectively within this combination of in-person and remote work. They want to help their employees with this too.
Today’s guest studies remote and global work, and she’s here to help us navigate the hybrid work that seems to be here for the foreseeable future.
Tsedal Neeley is a professor at Harvard Business School. She’s also the author of the book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere. Tsedal, it’s great to have you back on the show.
TSEDAL NEELEY: It’s so great to be with you Curt.
CURT NICKISCH: We spoke to you over a year ago, just as the pandemic was beginning to take hold and people were scrambling to figure out how to navigate working from home. How are things different today? What have we learned from this experience?
TSEDAL NEELEY: How vividly I remember that time when we were having conversations around will remote-work work? And here we are today where most companies have not only discovered that remote-work works, productivity is in fact increased for most organizations.
And now because remote work has become a fundamental part of how they achieve their goals and how employees want to move forward, today people are asking, “We want some kind of flexibility in our work repertoire.” So we’ve learned we can achieve a lot without being in the same physical space. We’ve learned that you can actually have a work-life flexibility approach, where people segment their days in ways that’s effective for them personally, as well as professionally.
We’ve also learned how to use digital tools in ways that we never fathomed before this time. And all of this is setting us up for this future. Some people call it hybrid, some people call it dynamic work environment, but it’s a future that incorporates some remote, some in-person for most, and for many others full-time remote.
CURT NICKISCH: Are you definitely in the camp that this new system, new flexibility is here to stay?
TSEDAL NEELEY: I am. And the reason for that is because the historical arguments and concerns around can you have a productive workforce without having everyone in the same space, and having fears and concerns that you can have been eradicated. We have full evidence that you can have an organization with people not co-located be quite effective. And the second thing is that people have tasted what their lives can be without the commutes, without the challenges of figuring out their work and non-work responsibilities.
People have tasted the ability to be more effective without all the transitions that the in-person calls for. Now, I am also a big believer in some in-person collaboration or social bonding or innovation type connections as part of our professional arrangements. So what I think is here to stay is a smart, inclusive work context that has both remote and in-person work.
CURT NICKISCH: You have said that we’re heading towards hybrid 3.0, what does that mean?
TSEDAL NEELEY: Hybrid 3.0 is the time when people no longer need to worry about collaborating, as I say, with Sal and Sally, but actually collaborating with an AI bot. So hybrid 3.0 is where the world is moving. And our participation and our willingness to take some risks with hybrid 1.0, the type that we’ve been talking about, actually can prepare us for a time where the digital revolution that includes AI, machine learning, robotic processing automation, or RPAs integrated into our work.
So it’s the nature of work that’s changing today. And that nature of work is only going to be more digitized and will include human-machine collaboration, in addition to human-human collaboration. So if we are open to take risks today, we’re actually setting ourselves up for the digital revolution that’s right around the corner.
CURT NICKISCH: One question people have often is whether technology is really good enough to replace in-person contact. Are we getting there? What new tools and techniques have emerged in the last year?
TSEDAL NEELEY: Digital tools or technology for virtuality, our insights and understanding on how to use them effectively have been around for the last 50 years. So some people say in-person or face-to-face is the gold standard for communication, but the reality when you look at all the data on this, that’s not true.
The key thing that we are learning, and I’m not sure if we’ve learned it because we’ve been quite reactive as opposed to proactively learning some of the best practices. The key thing that we need to do is to make sure that we’re matching our digital tools for the work in front of us. We are over-indexing on certain technologies, or video conferencing for example, and experiencing things like tech exhaustion. Curt, tech exhaustion should not exist if we matched our intentions with the right digital tools in a balanced way, including asynchronous modes of communication. Those are the things that we need to continue to refine in our repertoires.
CURT NICKISCH: Let’s talk about the human side of all of this. Beyond logistics and technology, managers and leaders really need to be thinking about how this affects the relationships that connect their workforce and the feelings that people have when they work together, whether it’s in-person for however many days a week, whether it’s remote for however many days a week. What do you think managers and leaders should be on the lookout for?
TSEDAL NEELEY: First and foremost, one phenomenon that I’ve observed through this transition phase is that not every manager believes in hybrid work, not every manager believes in remote work. In fact, there’s a lot of conflict inside of organizations.
And I would urge managers to think quite deeply about leveling up their expectations on having to manage groups where some people may be in the office in-person. And some people may be dialing in remotely.
At the same time, managers have also to interpret to their company’s centralized approach or policies on what hybrid will look like for them. So when you bring people into the office, it better be for collaboration efforts where you’re working together, standing side-by-side, looking at a smart board together. It better be for creativity work, it better be for innovation work, it better be for social bonding. Because I think what’s not going to work is to ask people to come in the office to do exactly what they would be doing at home, sitting in front of a screen by themselves. People are getting quite resentful very quickly when they’re asked to come back to the office to just sit there.
CURT NICKISCH: Those managers just need a question, why are they even bringing the people in in the first place? Why aren’t they just letting them work from home?
TSEDAL NEELEY: I think that’s really important. The in-person activities have to help nurture relationships among people. And it also has to be connected to work activities that could be done quite well when everyone is around, if that’s possible. Because hybrid also can mean that some people may not be in the room with everyone else.
But it’s true, to bring people back just for them to sit in front of their computers, screams control, screams disempowering, and it’s adding burdens to people’s lives. Listen, you when I talk about people desire work-life flexibility, it means that their experience as a whole, this holistic view of individuals has to be taken into account for every leader.
So when people come into the office, there’s a lot of stress and strain that we’ve tolerated for decades, but now we know better. So we need sensitivities around that from a leadership standpoint. So leaders need to empower their teams to succeed and not get into this butts in seats mentality. I think that’s going to get people in trouble, particularly in an era when the war for talent is going to be fierce, and it is fiersce.
CURT NICKISCH: So what new skills does a manager need to develop?
TSEDAL NEELEY: A manager needs to rethink how to evaluate performance, and they need to focus on outcome versus micro processes. They need to focus on developing and cultivating team cohesion. They need to focus on understanding how to hold conversations and meetings that are very inclusive so that people don’t feel left out or experience FOMO, fear of missing out.
They need to understand that people will be worried about proximity bias to the organization and to the leader, which by the way, the evidence on it is quite mixed. The people who are not in the room will not necessarily suffer. There are some studies that show that there’s no difference in terms of promotion and career advancement if you’re not in the room, if you’re the remote person. And there’s some evidence that suggests that you might be penalized if you’re not in the room. So the evidence is mixed. And what that tells me is along the lines of your questions is leaders have to do their work in thinking about what leadership means, which is empowering others, equipping others, cultivating team and team process, and ensuring that every individual in their groups has the skills and the wellbeing to perform well for the organization.
CURT NICKISCH: How can managers ensure equity and inclusion in this kind of environment?
TSEDAL NEELEY: Equity and inclusion is a big deal. It’s an important question and equity and inclusion on a couple of levels. One is we have onsite essential employees that tend to have to be in the physical space, much, much, much more than most others. And one thing that managers need to do is to actually look deeply at people’s tasks and work in order to determine, “Are there things that people can do virtually so that we can give people an opportunity to partake in virtual work or remote work, even if it’s once a month?” So really look at that and think about pooling, rotating, and think about a systems approach to make it available for people. If they cannot do that, they have to find ways to give people remote days like remote learning days. Otherwise, virtuality becomes an issue of diversity and inclusion in organizations.
There’s another important topic around equity and inclusion that’s been quite interesting because the remote work year or more, the remote work period has unmasked for black professionals or other marginalized groups in organizations that being away from the office has actually been much better for them in the sense that they’ve experienced much less microaggressions. Or they’ve had to do much less cultural code switching in order to fit in. Or they’ve had to do – they didn’t have to take these psychological commutes in order to work well in an environment where they don’t have a lot of diverse colleagues.
So this understanding is really important because what this means for this hybrid environment is to think more deeply about the culture of the environment, so that it’s more inclusive and finding ways to democratize people’s contributions in new and important ways.
So continue to use Zoom for example, even if people are around for short meetings that you can convene, that feels much more democratic for a lot of people. That’s just an example of how inclusion can work, particularly for marginalized members who like the remote experience much more than they do than the in-person experience.
CURT NICKISCH: One of the things that everybody’s looking forward to, to more in-person work is just re-establishing connections, reconnecting with people and just deepening relationships with coworkers, especially ones that they’ve been out of touch with, or new people who’ve come in, who they don’t even really know yet. And one of the things that you talk about in your work is trust, what’s the importance of that as companies and managers start a new hybrid work system?
TSEDAL NEELEY: Yes. Trust and connection, and they’re so closely tied, are crucial for performance, particularly in hybrid or virtual environments when we’re not in the same space all the time. So there are two ways to think about trust. One is called cognitive swift trust. And cognitive swift trust is grounded in the understanding that our collaborators or coworkers or our managers are reliable, that’s very knowable.
And whether they’re competent, that’s very knowable as well. So, the social scientists who’ve looked this discovered that if you can figure those two things out, then you should automatically confer trust, and collaboration and work can happen quite well if you do.
The second form of trust though is called emotional trust. It’s grounded in the belief that others care about us, that other care about our concerns, they care about our preferences, our interests. They care about our difficulties as well. And emotional trust develops through one self-disclosure, meaning people sharing of themselves, something that can happen quite well in an in-person setting. It can happen quite well in a virtual setting as well. But it’s a great thing to do when you’re together.
The second way that you develop emotional trust is by demonstrating empathy. So not only having empathy, being able to put yourself in the shoes of others, your colleagues, your coworkers, the people who report to you, but also to reflect that back through your words and your deeds. Great things to work on, to invest in when you’re in-person, although you can also do this when you’re in a virtual environment. For managers, emotional trust is key. You have to earn emotional trust in order for your employees to feel good and comfortable, not only about themselves, but about being part of your team and also being part of their organizations. Great things to invest in when you are all in-person.
CURT NICKISCH: So if your workplace gives you flexibility on maybe how many days you come into the office, or when you do, how should you think through some of those choices?
TSEDAL NEELEY: First of all, whatever choices you make, be unapologetic. The worries around, “How will I be perceived if I don’t show up regularly.” All of that should go away.
CURT NICKISCH: And why do you say that?
TSEDAL NEELEY: I say that because people are concerned about perception, they’re concerned about, “If I’m not in the office and these other people are in the office, does this mean I’m conveying that I’m not as committed?” All of those things are paranoia, particularly if you’re in an adaptive healthy culture and environment. So be unapologetic. That’s the first thing I’ll say. The second thing is you have to do some coordinating. So if you want to select certain days to come into the office, or if you have the freedom, coordinate with others to make sure that when you come into the office, you’re doing the type of work that requires physical presence.
When you’re in the office, walk around, talk to people, connect with people, have lunch with people or walks with people so that your presence there and the activities that you engage in are those that requires movement from you as opposed to being focused on your screen alone.
So some coordination, some deliberate, intentional reasons to come in the office. And be unapologetic about this because otherwise, if everyone is worried and looking at what’s the next person doing, back to that social comparison, they will begin to set up a system that’s not theirs, but made out of fear as opposed to intentional means to connect and work with others.
CURT NICKISCH: Yeah. Otherwise we just have presentee inflation, right? Or presence inflation where some people start coming in more and then other people feel like they’re staying home too much, so they feel like they come in more. And then all of a sudden everybody’s in the office five days a week.
TSEDAL NEELEY: In some strange way, right. But the other thing is we have to remember that we can be fairly present. Our presence could be felt very deeply even where we’re not physically present. So there’re emails, there’re all sorts of digital tools that people can use to make sure that they’re contributing and that they’re present without being there physically.
CURT NICKISCH: I mean you talked about spending the time to catch up with people and walk around and interact. And that, to some people feels like it’s more work, or not necessarily more work, they might really enjoy that but they’re not getting their ‘work done’. What advice do you have for people who feel like when they come into work, they’re not getting work done and they might recognize it’s important, but it just doesn’t seem so evident is what they are able to get done when they’re at home.
TSEDAL NEELEY: I actually think people are going to be very excited to go to the office to see people, to connect with people, to spend time with people. And I also think that with all of these hybrid policies that are shaping and forming, where people are talking about when we ask people to come in the office, whether it’s prescribed or not, we want this to be an occasion for people to connect with other people, professional activities that pulls them together and ensure that people are having the informal contact that always fosters the work that we do. So I think that the idea that going into the office, meeting with others and walking around is actually going to feel quite natural, very natural for people as a way for them to have that encounter with others that also promotes their work advancements.
Early reports have indicated that people are enjoying this a lot. It’s a treat to see people. And they’re able to talk about work and advance their work goals quite nicely, and love the opportunity to go back home and stay there for a day or two before having to come back out. So I think that people are going to view these as part of their work imperative, as opposed to, “I do my work when I go home. And then when I come in the office I’m just floating about.” I don’t think that’s the case.
CURT NICKISCH: And I suppose what I’ve been hearing from you is that this is also a phase.
TSEDAL NEELEY: I think that’s right. I think it’s going to take some time to the tune of a year or two before organizations and groups figure out what’s the right rhythm for them. I also think that it will be determined by industries and ecosystems and shareholders and stakeholders wanting and needing different things.
So all of these things are emerging, but what I think is at the heart of how things will flow is this notion that time and space as we’ve known them in our professional work environments are much more dynamic for us. So where we work, how we work, when we work with others is what’s going to shift and change over time. And organizations will also begin to adjust their infrastructure to meet those goals.
CURT NICKISCH: Tsedal, this has been great. Thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about this.
TSEDAL NEELEY: Thank you so much for having me, Curt. I always enjoy it.
CURT NICKISCH: That’s Tsedal Neeley. She’s a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere.
This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast, I’m Curt Nickisch.