by Michael Blanding
When the pandemic forced employees to flee offices and work from home in droves last year, many business leaders worried that productivity might take a dive. Would remote workers be too tempted by the lures of Netflix or too distracted by laundry to get much work done? As it turns out, the opposite occurred.
“As the decades of research on virtual work would have predicted, productivity has gone up for many organizations,” says Tsedal Neeley, the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, who has researched and advised companies on virtual and global work for nearly two decades.
Indeed, studies from around the world consistently show that companies see productivity gains after allowing employees to choose their work locations. Remote work offers many other benefits, too: “Commute times disappear, operational costs get slashed, you can tap talent in other cities and other countries,” Neeley points out.
Despite these upsides, however, shifting to working remotely is not without its challenges, especially when it comes to communication and coordination among managers and employees. “People can easily get into an out-of-sight, out-of-mind, out-of-sync, and out-of-touch mode,” Neeley says.
Another challenge, especially during the pandemic: The lines between work and non-work times can get blurred, so managers should be concerned less about productivity dropping and more about employees working too hard. “I worry about what I call hyper-productivity, where people are working more hours and getting burned out,” Neeley says.
These are all wrinkles that companies can and should iron out, she says, since remote work is here to stay in one form or another. A 2020 Gartner survey of 5,000 employees found that 87 percent prefer to work remotely either full or part time, while only 13 percent said they don’t want to work remotely at all post-COVID-19.
In fact, the pandemic has accelerated the virtual work trend, acting as a no-going-back turning point for many companies, according to Neeley’s new book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, which publishes March 30. The book acts as a “blueprint” for long-term workplace transformations, providing evidence-based advice for navigating the virtual work world, including dos and don'ts from companies that have embraced geographically distributed workplaces for years with great success.
We recently caught up with Neeley—over video chat, of course—to help make sense of this new virtual work world.
Michael Blanding: Your book seems so timely, given the way work shifted for many people in the past year. Why did you choose to write it, and especially why now?
Tsedal Neeley: The book was actually in the works for almost three years before COVID. Having been deeply involved in the issues of virtual work and global work, I was convinced that people needed an action guide that they could use as part of a team, or even as an individual, to really internalize the lessons of how to work in a distributed environment. And then COVID hit.
Blanding: How did the pandemic change or inform the topic as you were writing it?
Neeley: The pandemic accelerated the completion of the book. I was able to distill the key questions people had as entire workforces migrated to remote work and emphasize answers to those recurring questions. They include: How do you measure productivity? How do you trust people you barely see? How do you even think about digital tools?
Blanding: One of the recommendations you make in the book is that remote teams “relaunch” every six to eight weeks. What do you mean by that?
Neeley: Work groups are not static. They are dynamic, including our sentiments about our experiences within them. With virtuality, we need to work extra hard to ensure that we are all on the same page. That is, it’s very important in a remote environment that you map out shared norms and how teams will communicate, how they will work together, and how they will ensure psychological safety is established and maintained.
It’s not as scary as it sounds; it’s usually a 90-minute or two-hour meeting where you are trying to get alignment about those shared norms, shared goals, and resources. Based on the work of pioneering sociologist Richard Hackman, regularly relaunching can increase the likelihood of success of a team by 30 percent or more.
Blanding: You make a distinction between cognitive trust and emotional trust. Can you explain the difference? And how can you develop emotional trust in a remote environment?
Neeley: Trust is the glue that binds a team together. It drives performance, enables collaboration, and coordinates all the things you need to do. But people think trust is monolithic, that it’s one-size-fits-all and that it’s binary, and it’s not. Cognitive trust is grounded in the belief that your co-workers and leaders are reliable and dependable. It’s a resume-like competency, and you can confer it right away; it is typically referred to as “swift trust.”
But emotional trust is grounded in the feeling that co-workers and leaders have care and concern for one another. It takes much longer to gain or earn. It comes from frequency of contact, and from self-disclosure during more informal interactions and unstructured time. It’s about, “How do I get to know your heart?”
Blanding: Speaking about frequency of contact, you talk a lot about the fatigue people feel from the technological environment, and always being connected through video chat. How can people minimize that?
Neeley: Tech exhaustion is a symptom of us overusing video for meetings that are edge to edge and far too long. We need to incorporate more asynchronous means of interacting. In fact, for each interaction, we need to determine what we are trying to achieve and what’s the best means to get there. The choices include: synchronous, asynchronous, rich versus lean media, one to many versus one to one and whether we need to capture, store, and reuse content. It’s complex, but once we have a framework, we will not suffer that exhaustion again.
Depending on the work you need to do, you need to think about what digital tools to use. Do you need to be on video or could you talk on the phone even if it’s voice-over IP? Do you need to work together on a shared document, or could you send an email? Rather than select in an ad-hoc way, we need to choose the tool that facilitates work.
Blanding: You also talk about strategies for working with global teams. What are your top tips for collaborating across cultures?
Neeley: When you are talking about a global dimension, you are bucking up against some natural but detrimental aspects, including an “us versus them” dynamic by the sheer fact you are in various geographies or cultures. It’s very important to bridge that divide by developing mutual adaptation and learning-by-questioning skills, so you’re very explicit about what you are communicating.
You also need to work hard to shrink the psychological distance through language. When you have disparity in terms of fluency levels in English, you have to make sure fluent speakers are dialing down to enable less fluent speakers to engage in communication. You can’t take that for granted. Leaders have to consistently manage and balance for inclusive communication.
Blanding: Now that we may emerge from this pandemic soon, what do you hope people take away from your book?
Neeley: I hope that people better understand the best practices that you need to adopt to be successful as a remote workforce. We need to change our mindsets. We need to increase our skill sets. And we need to make sure we're very clear about the tool sets that we're using. We need leaders who are adept at leading a distributed workforce.
When all is said and done, and the pandemic goes away, we're going to end up with a very different world, where we will have more hybrid organizations in terms of people working in the same space or not. Hopefully this book provides a blueprint for how people can successfully collaborate and work with other people who are not always with you.
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