Kim Mills: This summer, many Americans are heading back to the office, trading sweat pants and shorts for button pants and business casual, hopping into their cars or onto the subway, and seeing coworkers after more than a year of working from home.
But even as companies reopen their long-shuttered offices, fault lines are emerging between some company's expectations and their employee's desires. In mid-June, for example, the CEO of the investment bank Morgan Stanley said that he expects his workers to be back in their New York offices by September, but a May Gallup poll found that 35% of all full-time employees in the US would prefer to keep working remotely. In some fields, including finance and consulting, that percentage is more than half.
So what happens next? How will our workplaces change? And how will we as employees or employers adapt? What will the new normal look like? How can both workers and companies thrive in what promises to be a new world of remote and hybrid work? What are the advantages and the potential pitfalls of a permanently remote or a hybrid workforce?
Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills.
Our guest today is Dr. Tsedal Neeley, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. She's been studying remote work since the 1990s, long before the COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us to turn our bedrooms or kitchens into home offices. Her book, “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere,” published in March, offers lessons distilled from those decades of research on how employees, managers, and organizations can be productive and build a culture of trust and inclusivity, even when they're not located in the same physical space.
Thank you for joining us today. Dr. Neeley.
Tsedal Neeley, PhD: I'm so thrilled to be with you today.
Mills: As I just said, you've been studying remote work for many years. What was your reaction as you watched the mass transition to telework last year? Were you surprised by how quickly we managed to do it?
Neeley: I was stunned because for two decades, I did look at technology-enabled work, global work, remote work, virtual work, but it was always 25-30% of organizations that participated in any kind of virtuality, sometimes because they were globally distributed. The adoption of many of the digital tools that people picked up in days have always been a source of frustration for companies. We have all these tools, people don't adopt them. So to see people having to use them and for the technologies to become lifelines within days across industries was extraordinary. Never in my lifetime did I think that we would see such scale or magnitude. But we did it.
Mills: What changed since you first started studying remote work that made the transition go so smoothly?
Neeley: It's not anything related to the technology, it's the necessity. Listen, we were in the middle of a global pandemic, a contagious virus, a deadly contagious virus. So we knew, organizations, institutions, knew that the only thing to do is to go into our homes for the sake of safety. But we also needed to continue working. So the necessity motivated individuals, teams, and organizations to use these digital tools. It was a no-choice matter, right? The thing that's been surprising to most people that I've talked to over the last 15 months or so is how at the end of the day easy it was to use all of these digital tools to communicate with others, that it was actually doable. Now, no one would say that remote work was easy, and it's no panacea, but it was doable, and it helped all of us with our continuity.
Mills: As I mentioned in my introduction, there are some mismatched expectations emerging now between employers who want people back in the office and employees who want to stay remote or work on a hybrid schedule. How do you expect this to shake out? And who's going to have the bigger challenge to adapt?
Neeley: Do we ever. The numbers are staggering. Eight-one percent according to Harvard Business School online survey want to retain some kind of remote or virtual work in their repertoire. The Gardner Group would cite 87%. And you said that according to your Gallup poll, which is consistent with all of the surveys and polls that have been gathered over the last few months, up to 35% want to do it full time. Companies on the other hand, to the tune of 68 or 70%, depending on which survey you look at, would want people back in-person, full time. And this is the tension, and this is the dilemma. What we're seeing is that companies are being forced to contemplate the mix of virtual, non-virtual, remote, non-remote, some call it hybrid, some call it dynamic, but to contemplate new work arrangements because I do believe that in this time, in this time in history, employees have the power.
Mills: Wow. That's good to know as an employee.
Neeley: Yes.
Mills: One of the worries expressed, and I think you've alluded to this, by some leaders is that remote work will erode office culture. I think that's part of why a lot of companies want people back. Here in Washington D.C., for example, the CEO of Washingtonian magazine wrote an op-ed arguing that up to 20% of employees' time in the office is spent doing things like helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone's birthday. These are the things that make up office culture. But she even suggested that people who don't want to come back to the office will be easier to fire because they won't be doing those things. And that got a lot of people at the magazine pretty annoyed, and they went on strike for a day. How valid are these concerns? Does remote work change office culture? And if so, is that really a bad thing?
Neeley: It's interesting because she also had to write an apology, right? "Please come back–"
Mills: Yes.
Neeley: "–I'm so sorry." Going back to the point of who has influence and power at this point, she needed them, so she apologized. "Oh-oh, I'm so sorry. Come back, please."
Here's the thing, what I've been saying for several months now, and I still feel the same way about this, is that the cultures of our organizations as we've known them have shifted and changed. Remote work's presence starting about March 2020 has changed how people work together, how people communicate, how people solve problems. What is culture after all? Culture is defined as, what are our shared values? Which means what's important to us. That's typically fixed and unchanged unless we are growing along those dimensions, we're augmenting our shared values. But the other part of culture is, what are our shared norms, the attitudes, the behaviors that we espouse in order to get work done? People talk about culture is how work gets done.
Now, there's no doubt that how we've been getting work done since the pandemic hit has shifted. We don't have people down the hall any longer, so we create opportunities, structured, unstructured opportunities to mentor. We've been onboarding virtually, which is a thing. A very effective virtual onboarding practice can set people up for success in their organizations. We've been collaborating, innovating, creating, solving problems, and bringing value to our stakeholders and shareholders in our virtual environment. So to believe that the only way that this can happen is through in-person is a mistake. To believe that we're still the same people of 2019 who want that same life and that same kind of commute and office culture is a mistake. It's about how do we now take our changed individual needs and preferences and recreate and revise cultures that meet the moment? This is, I think, the fundamental question that organizations need to think about.
Mills: Another thing that some companies and managers worry about is that they can't effectively monitor workers' productivity. You have a discussion in your book about companies that have tried using digital surveillance methods such as monitoring keystrokes or requiring the cameras always be on and how workers absolutely hate these methods. Are those worries about productivity valid and are there better ways to promote productivity?
Neeley: They're not valid. What some call awareness technologies, the monitoring, that's the kind of nice way of describing the surveillance systems, not only do they not work, not only do employees hate them, they feel humiliated by them. That's the term that you hear, "Humiliated by them." And they also say, "As soon as the economy improves, I am leaving this job." So there's no future in that. But in terms of productivity, there's 30 years of research on the fact that productivity actually increases with remote work. It increases with remote work. It first started in 1993 by a study conducted at Cisco where they started to actually experiment with the hybrid work format. They didn't call it hybrid then, but that's exactly what it was. They saw a rise in productivity. So other companies started to experiment as well.
Sun Microsystems, later acquired by Oracle in 1997, experimented with remote work and working from anywhere models as well. Not only did they see productivity shoot up, but they saw that they needed to make changes to their real estate holdings because of wanting to make things permanent. So the fact is productivity increases not because people are plugging in more hours, it's because people value their autonomy, their flexibility, job satisfaction is higher in a flexible environment. And when job satisfaction is higher, people perform better. The bottom line here is, when we are in a virtual hybrid or remote environment, we don't look at process and monitor for progress. We need to focus on outcomes after we equip people. So it's not about butts in seats, it's about outcomes, team cohesion, and helping to equip people to get there.
Mills: So it sounds like some of what you're talking about is trust, trust in the employee. And I know you've spoken about two different types of trust that exist in workplaces, the cognitive trust and emotional trust. Could you explain what you mean by those terms and how they're important to the effectiveness of workplaces, as well as to the workplace culture?
Neeley: Trust is at the heart of everything related to the future of work. The first thing is the cognitive trust, sometimes called cognitive swift trust, is a type of trust that's been identified to be incredibly effective when people are not co-located. And it's grounded in the understanding that collaborators have the competence, meaning they're qualified to do this work that we're engaged in together, and that they're also dependable. The two things that are absolutely knowable, they're observable, they're knowable, you can get references around those. Once you understand that, the idea is you confer trust right away. You give trust by understanding those two things; reliable and qualified.
The second type of trust, emotional trust, takes longer to achieve. But emotional trust is grounded in the understanding and the belief that people care about you, that they care about your interests, that they care about your difficulties, that your concerns are their concerns. They care about your aspirations. The way to develop that, it's actually quite simple, is to be able to have mutual self-disclosure, people sharing of themselves. Psychologists have shown that when we exercise self-disclosure, people find us more likable and approachable. Go figure, Kim. So if you disclose more people will say, "Oh, this person is approachable and likable." But the second part is also critically important, it's about empathy. Not only empathy, being able to see the perspective of others or be in the shoes of others, but also reflect it back to people through your words and deeds. So if people feel you care about them, and if people feel that you understand them, emotional trust emerges. Leaders must earn emotional trust in a remote environment. There's no choice about this.
Mills: So are we building emotional trust by basically bringing our coworkers into our homes? I mean, when I'm zooming with people, I see their artwork, sometimes their kids come into the room or they've got a dog in their lap, but it's very, very human in a way that I would never have known these people. Are we building emotional trust that way?
Neeley: Absolutely. Isn't that self-disclosure when people get to see a glimpse of our lives through video? When we bring people into our homes, they see our pets, they see our children, which has happened to me. Big meeting, super, super intense, big decision meeting, my eight-year-old child passes me a note, completely visible on video and says on this note–I look at this note, you want to know, is this an emergency? Let me look, and it says, "We're out of fruit, can I have a cookie?"
I actually was so surprised that he showed up that I told the people that I was meeting with, I said, "I just have a note here to share with everyone." We laughed and laughed and laughed. But it was a bonding moment, right, when Daniel showed up in that way. But here's the thing, Theodore Roosevelt famously said that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. And this is what emotional trust is about, caring and demonstrating that you care. And that's what you need to do in a remote environment.
Mills: Are there extra challenges to remote work for new employees, whether we're talking about young people who are just starting their professional lives or even more experienced workers who are starting new jobs? And what can companies do to make these transitions go more smoothly?
Neeley: Yes, indeed. I do think that an all-remote format or arrangement can be challenging for new entrance in an organization if we're not deliberate and intentional on how we are bringing them into the fold. It's like, how do we bring the corps d'esprit into their hearts? How do we make sure that they're meeting the right people across the organization, not just the team or the group that there'll be working with? But you have to facilitate their meeting and connection with others across the organization. Provide lists, pair people up with onboarding buddies where they can go and ask questions that they may not feel comfortable just asking anyone, having them learn with others. There are all of these methods, which is all about deliberately opening up the organization so people can feel like they have actual contacts, that they feel connected, and a lot of learning.
One example, one company that just does this magnificently well, they actually make sure that for the first three weeks when someone joins that they're never spending a day alone. They're always connected in some kind of activity, whether it's learning, meeting, attending, observing, virtual lunches, virtual tea with others. So very quickly people feel, "I feel like I'm part of this."
Mills: That's a great plan. Well, let's talk a little more about the hybrid office. Many companies right now are not planning to go fully remote but they're considering allowing employees more freedom to telework part-time, which of course has challenges. How will meetings that have been on Zoom or Teams for the past year plus, how is that going to work when some employees are in the office and some employees are home?
Neeley: I think the concerns around how are we going to ever engage with one another effectively if not everyone is in the same place? All or nothing is easy. We're all on Zoom or we're all in person. It's the mix that makes people nervous. So let me be the first to say that this kind of mix is a normal in global environments where geographical distribution is by definition part of how people work, right? Global teams, global collaborators are not in the same place. But the picture of this is you might have some people in the same room, you need the digital tools and technologies, whether it's individuals bringing their laptops into the space if they all have one. If not, you're going to need large monitors so that those who are on Zoom or Microsoft Teams, whatever method that they're using, can be visible.
And so whether you're in the room or you're not in the room, the onus is on the leader to ensure that there's inclusive, equitable communication among all the members of that group. The leader also has to set norms. Now that we're working in this way, in my book I talk about launches and relaunches, you have to explicitly have a conversation of, how are we going to communicate with one another given the fact that this is our new structure? So let's ensure that everyone has the opportunity to contribute. How do we make sure that happens, no one dominates, those who are in person are not going to be privileged more than others? You have to have rules of engagement. And once you do, you'd be surprised how well it works.
The other thing that's really important to keep in mind back to the leadership question is, leaders cannot unwittingly start having water cooler conversations with those who are there in person that maybe provides information, quick bonding, et cetera. Leaders have to be very careful about that, that because people are not there in person doesn't mean that they don't deserve the casual interactive type of moments with them. So they have to ensure that they're doing the same things with those who are not in the room, even if it's at a later time.
Mills: One of the interesting things about working using Zoom is that everyone can't talk at once, only one person can be heard, and that's been very difficult, I think, for a lot of people who think that they have a lot to say.
Neeley: Indeed, indeed, that raising-hand function, huh?
Mills: Yes.
Neeley: But you know–
Mills: Just like being back in school.
Neeley: Back in school, back in school. Many people say that the video conferencing modality has been democratizing for some people, particularly people who'd felt marginalized or not enough opportunity to speak in the past. People have felt like they've had more opportunities in this type of environment. So for me, the lessons that we've gained over the last 15 months, whether we're in person or not, we should carry forward, give everyone voice, give everyone the opportunity to contribute.
Mills: There's been a lot of discussion over the course of the pandemic of the idea of Zoom fatigue. One thing that you discuss in your book is the importance of choosing the right digital tools when you're working remotely, so not everything needs to be a video call. Can you talk about that? I mean, what are the differences between synchronous and asynchronous and rich and lean communication tools?
Neeley: Absolutely. You've read the book, Kim, I love this. This is amazing. Listen, I am firmly convinced that tech exhaustion should not exist. People call it Zoom fatigue, but since the CEO of Zoom has endorsed my book, I no longer use that term. But, no, the tech exhaustion occurs when we over-index on certain communication tools that are video or we schedule meetings edge to edge. Just because we can, we absolutely should not. And then on top of that, we have video calls when, in fact, we should be sending a simple email. So the rich versus lean media and asynchronous and synchronous media are various ways to categorize the features of technology. So lean media's something like email or Google Docs, where you don't get context, you don't get nonverbal cues. It's text, it's rapid, different than a video conference where you do get context, you do get nonverbal cues, but you don't always need those. Sometimes lean is exactly what you want.
The synchronous/asynchronous speaks to real-time live versus delayed. On many occasions, for example, if you need to process complex information as a group, the worst thing you can do is get on a video call to talk about complex information that needs to be processed, digested. The most efficient thing to do is you send it through some kind of lean medium, and then perhaps talk about it in the end. So there's so many efficiencies that we're losing because we tend to choose technologies that are easiest for us or based on our preferences. Some people say, "But I love seeing people, and I love video." It's like, actually, you may love video, there's also a lot of data that suggest that certain people in certain cultures and geographies have very different preferences. So it's not just about you, it's about how effective you want to be. And to mix it up, you have to mix it up.
Mills: We've been talking about remote work as if it's universal but, of course, it's not. Many jobs have to be done in person. And some economists and political scientists have written that remote work is going to contribute to the already dire problem of inequality because the financial and work-life benefits of telework go mostly to high-income office workers. Do you worry about that aspect of remote work? And is there anything that we can do to compensate for this?
Neeley: I do worry about this a great deal. And part of the reason I worry about it is sometimes we look at work or tasks or job roles and immediately say, "Well, this person's job or this person can be a remote worker or that person needs to be what they call on-site essential people." The reality is if we are redesigning our environment to be more hybrid and to give people more flexibility so that they have some at-home workdays, we need to have a system-level view at what we need to get done in an environment. And what I mean by that is not categorize individuals as on-site versus remote people, but look at the work and how we can distribute the work so that we can give people the opportunity to have flexible work.
I'll give you an example of this. So say you have six to seven people that have to be on-site essential people because either they're attached to major servers in your organization, mainframe rooms, et cetera, that they need to... control rooms rather, that they need to make sure work well. The question is, how can we think about the six people and say, "Well, we actually need to be pulling and rotating so that three people can come on-site and the other three can work from home on these different things."? We have to be thoughtful and creative to, first of all, understand what can be done remotely or not.
The second thing is there is no doubt that there will be people who will need to be on-site. And that's where we need to share the privileges and the rewards that flexibility can offer with them. Smart companies do things like give people 10 learning days that they can do remotely, they can use however they want, once a week, two consecutive weeks. But give people some of the privileges that people are experiencing and a little bit can go a very long way. So I think we need to be creative. We need to rethink how we pool and rotate. And we need to be very honest about what are the things that we can do from home or not. So I'll just pause there.
Mills: You were working on your book, Remote Work Revolution, for several years before the pandemic, and also you've been studying this whole concept for a couple of decades, as we said. What got you interested in this topic to begin with?
Neeley: I was convinced in the late '90s that technology was going to completely change how we worked. I am someone who loves technology. I am myself a social scientist. But at the center of everything that I've ever done, I've believed that technology would reshape how people connected, interacted, how we expanded our markets. This belief is what led me to go into a PhD program that looked at the intersection of work technology and organizations. What I didn't anticipate is that it would unfold in the way that it did. I believe that COVID has accelerated the virtualization of work by a decade or more, maybe even 20 years, but I was always convinced of this. And so, my work always looked at the business practices at the top level all the way down to the micro, the everyday work activities that would be shaped by a global economy, that would be shaped by digital transformation. I believe that this accelerated pace that we are in now is only beginning.
Mills: So did what you observed over the last year change the book? I mean, you were in the middle of writing it, correct, and here the pandemic hit? Was there anything that surprised you and then you had to sort of rip up a whole chapter and start again?
Neeley: You know, it's interesting. The book ultimately was designed around a set of questions that came up when I did a Q&A session with managers and leaders with Harvard Business Review. Interestingly enough, there were 15 top questions that everyone had. And so, we wrote an hbr.org piece. The title was "15 Questions About Remote Work, Answered." The moment that went live, I think we had something like half a million downloads in just a few days, which showed that this was not only what managers were worried about, but there was an audience for this. So the book ultimately was organized around these key questions, around productivity, around trust, around digital tools, around the global framework that people need to think about. And so, it was really informed by today, but I used all of the work of the last 50 years, 5-0, 50 years, on virtuality and remote work to answer these questions in the book.
One of the things that I would have loved to be able to do but there are such things as word counts is to try to think about how remote work might affect certain professions, whether it's teaching, whether it's sales. We do have a section in there: how do you do the emotional trust development in a sales context, right? It's not just within the organization, but outside of the organization. I knew I had to add a piece there. But I would have loved to elaborate more on those things. But there's always future work.
Mills: Any advice, just to wrap up here, advice for workers and employers as we venture into this new world?
Neeley: Yes. The new term that I think captures all of the things that employees want is work-life flexibility. The reason productivity goes up in remote work is because people can enjoy work-life flexibility. We used to talk about work-life balance as an aspiration for people. No one could ever achieve work-life balance. And then we started to talk about work-life trade-offs, where you lose in some places and you win in other places. You decide where you want to have your wins and losses. Today, we can talk about work-life flexibility by incorporating some remote work in people's professional arrangements. My deepest hope as we end our conversation today, Kim, is that people approach the future work as leaders with courage and looking at their organizational needs and the needs and preferences of their employees rather than with the fears of the unknown. Remote work, hybrid work can be extremely effective so long as we set the right framework, equip people, and move forward with courage.
Mills: Well, thank you for those wise words and for joining us today, Dr. Neeley, it's been very interesting talking with you.
Neeley: Thank you for having me.
Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. And please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. That's speakingofpsychology, all one word, @apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan.
Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.
Tsedal Neeley, PhD, is the Naylor Fitzhugh professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. Her work focuses on how leaders can scale their organizations by developing and implementing global and digital strategies. Her book, “Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere,” provides remote workers and leaders with the best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. She received her PhD from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, specializing in work, technology and organizations. Prior to her academic career, Neeley spent ten years working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various roles.
