 Good afternoon from Dublin and a very warm welcome to our webinar today on the future of remote working, working from anywhere, and also looking and imagining the future of remote working. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the, at the Institute of International and European Affairs. And it's my great pleasure to welcome our distinguished speaker today, a leader in his field, Professor Raj Chowdery from Harvard Business School. Thank you for being with us today Raj. You had a very early start and we appreciate that very much. And we look forward to your presentation. Raj's question. Thank you very much again. And Raj's presentation will take around 20 to 25 minutes. And I look forward to receiving your questions for Raj through the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are on the record. And please join in our discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIA. I think it's true to say that the pandemic changed our relationship work forever. This webinar is timely as staff are called back to the office, employers are having to adapt old ways of working to provide more flexibility and a better work like balance. Here in Ireland, as you know, we have a draft legislation to provide the right of employees to request remote working. And it's currently being debated in both houses in the Shannon and the Dahl, the Irish Parliament. Before 2020 remote working was on the rise through the global economy, particularly within knowledge work organisations. A history of remote working shows that a large scale transition to remote working, believe it or not, began in the 1970s as soaring petric prices caused the 1973 OPEC oil embargo, which made computing or commuting more expensive. Indeed echoes of what's happening today. Workers could work at home or other locations and have more control of their work schedules and they save time by commuting. Yes, of course, with the advent of personal computers, the internet, email, cell phones, laptops, the adoption of working from home has increased, you know, since the end or since the turn of this century. And as we all have experienced this trend, accelerated dramatically following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Chowdhury, who's research in this area dates back to 2015, will argue that individuals, teams, entire workforces can perform well while working remotely, entirely remotely, or mostly distributed. His current research examines what has happened during the pandemic. He will also assess what is the future, and I think we're all going to look forward to that, what is the future of remote working and the continued prospects of working from anywhere. Professor Chowdhury is the Lumory Family Associate Professor at Harvard University Business School. Prior to joining Harvard Business School, he worked as a system professor at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He is a doctorate from Harvard and has degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Management. Prior to joining academia, Professor Chowdhury worked at McKinsey, Microsoft and IBM. He is widely published and is seen, as I said, as a thought leader in this area. His research is focused on the future of work, including the productivity effects of remote working practices, the geographic mobility of workers, and the causes of geographic immobility. Raj, we look forward to your presentation. Thank you so much, Joyce, for those kind words. I'll share my slides. Are my slides visible? You can see my slides, right? So thank you everyone again. It's an honor to be talking to you. I'll take 20 to 25 minutes to briefly summarize my entire research agenda. I could be talking on this topic for the whole day, but I have essentially four key messages, and I'm going to go drill down into each one of these areas and provide you with more details. The first message is, I believe, work from anywhere, which I will define very, very carefully, is the future of work. The second message I want to get across is we've all been talking about hybrid. I know there are lots of terminology, so I'm going to try to carefully define a few things. In my opinion, flexible hybrid, which I will also define, allows for work from anywhere. And in my opinion, flexible hybrid that allows for work from anywhere is the equilibrium solution that companies should think about. The third point I think with Joyce briefly alluded to is that a flexible hybrid model that allows for work from anywhere for that to successfully be implemented, you need to change a lot of organizational processes. This is not just about getting new technology. It's about changing how the organization works, the processes and habits of people and managers, and I'm going to talk about that. And finally, my final message pertains to the policy dimension of this debate. And here I would like to impress upon you that indeed there is a global race to attract remote workers. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about what's happening around the world with legislation. So with that I'll dive in. I've been studying this topic for many, many years before the pandemic, as Joyce mentioned, and I've studied both large organizations, such as Unilever, which has a really interesting pilot going on in how to think about remote work for a factory. As time permits, I'll tell you about my work with Unilever. But on the other hand, I've worked with a range of startups, which have been organized without any physical offices, and all of them started before the pandemic. Before the all remote startups, such as Zapier and GitLab and Doist, and I have learned personally a lot from these all remote startups. So I've looked at the range of organizations in government. I've studied the US Patent Office in business, large, small, across industries. So what is work from anywhere? It is not the same as working from home. In working from home, which we have all experienced, I believe, you are working from your house, but you're still living in the same city where the company or the organization has an office. Work from anywhere is a form of remote work that allows the worker to relocate, to migrate to a location of her choice. So this map I'm showing you on the right side of the screen was where the US patent examiners were living in 2013. They implemented work from anywhere back in 2012, if you can believe that. And so each dot is an individual examiner. And though the office is close to Washington DC, you can see the examiners were now living all over the country. In fact, you see a lot of dots in Florida. And those were interestingly the older examiners who had moved to Florida for an early working retirement. So work from anywhere lets you live in a location of your choice for most of the year. And I'm going to talk about when we have to also meet in person with the team. So this is what I've been calling geographic flexibility. So let me tell you a little bit about the US patent office study. They were implementing work from home where you could work from home but still live in the physical location of Alexandria Virginia close to DC in 2006. And then they went to work from anywhere in 2012. So I studied that very, very carefully, and I'll spare you the details to get causal findings, and we found productivity rose by 4.4%. When the examiner moved to a location of her choice productivity rose 4.4%. And then the question is why. The thing to think about work from anywhere is it benefits individuals in lots of ways. You could move to a cheaper city. And if your organization is paying you the same wages, you have more money in your pocket, you have more real income. You could move closer to family to parents to friends, you could move to a location where you like the food or the climate. You don't have to worry about dual career situations, finding two jobs in the same location. And so when I interviewed the patent examiners, all of these stories came came came about, but the cost of living story was the most prominent. And so one of the examiners, a woman told me that Raj, for the first time, I now make enough money because I'm living in a cheaper city, so that I can hire a babysitter and look after my kids. And that makes me more productive. So that's the patent office story where my journey into this research began. They also saved a lot of real estate, the carbon footprint went down and lots of other benefits to the US patent office. So if I had to summarize what's the business case for firms to adopt work from anywhere, I would say four things. I talked about productivity gains and real estate savings. The two biggest benefits in my opinion actually are neither of them. The biggest benefits is relates to the ability of the organization now to hire from anywhere. If you embrace work from anywhere as an organization, your labor market is the whole world. You have to now only restrict hiring from Dublin or wherever your company has an office. The second thing that also comes about and I've seen data from Twitter, among other companies, is that now since you are hiring from many more communities and colleges and countries, your diversity of the workforce goes up. So this is more inclusive, including on the dimension of gender. So there's at least 20 years of research, which has shown how women have lost out on opportunities because of geography. So imagine a woman living in Dublin, she gets a great opportunity in London or wherever else, but she cannot move because the spouse has a job in Dublin, or the kids are in high school in Dublin and they don't want to move. This has shown that dual careers have disproportionately negatively affected women. But if the organization allows the woman to work from anywhere, she can take the new opportunity without moving anywhere. So inclusion and the ability to hire talent are the two biggest reasons why organizations should embrace work from anywhere. So that's my business case. I'll come to my second message, which is about flexible hybrid, and that's a form of hybrid, which allows the company to embrace work from anywhere. And if you're interested, just last week, Airbnb literally took my slide deck and announced a policy, and I'm really really happy about that, which does all of this. So what is flexible hybrid, let me tell you a little bit about my current work on hybrid. I ran an experiment with a very large organization in Bangladesh, and these were the corporate HR workers at BRAC. And you can think of them as HR workers in Dublin or New York or anywhere else in the world. And the bottom line finding of that experiment, where for a period of nine weeks during the pandemic. We randomly decided every day which of the HR workers were to work from home versus work from the office. So we did a randomized control trial each day running a lottery for nine weeks. And the headline finding which actually appeared in Bloomberg a few weeks back was that what we find in this study is just a day or two in the office was related to positive work outcomes. Wherever we looked all kinds of outcomes, the novelty of work, communication patterns, self reported satisfaction with remote work, self reported, not being isolated from colleagues. So we've looked at many, many outcomes, and the intermediate hybrid group, the folks who work in the office 23 to 40% of their work days which roughly translates to a day or two is that group is doing better than the group which is mostly working in the office or mostly working from home. Because this research reconcile with the work from anywhere research it reconciles in the following way. If you put these two together. This is what I call flexible hybrid. If you believe that we can work from anywhere for most of our work days. And let's say we need to be co located with our peers with our teams for 25% of our work days. This is a flexible hybrid model, where each team decides when to schedule that 25% collocation. So some teams could say, we will do it once one, one day every week, that's our collocation time. And some of the teams could say no that's too frequent for us, because we live far away, and we need to travel to meet our team. So we will meet one entire week, every month that's our 25%. And some of the teams could say no but you know we have a team member who lives in Portugal, or who lives in I don't know Estonia, and she cannot travel every month. So why don't we meet for two and a half weeks in April, and then meet back in July, and then meet back in in October, and that is our 25% time. And this is a model that actually TCS, which is a global tech major is implementing and I've written about it. You can find this on my webpage. So the flexible hybrid model set as a rigid hybrid model, in contrast would say, every week, come to the office for two days, or one day flexible hybrid does not do that. It allows each team to decide what is the right amount of collocation, and what's the right frequency of collocation. And then at the start of the annual planning cycle, each team blocks its calendar for the entire year, so that there's no ambiguity about when are we meeting our peers for deep collaboration and for deep mentorship. So the golden rule of flexible hybrid is, it's the same policy for all members on the team, and the team decides when to be collocated. And when the team is showing up in an office or at an offsite, the entire team is there. So you're not missing anyone from the team, when you are going to the office. In the UNA, I can talk more about this. So that is how you allow a flexible hybrid model to take care of work from anywhere because for 75% of your days, you can be living anywhere for 25% of your days. You are being collocated with your team. And then the team decides when that collocation is. That was my second message. My third message is, having decided the policy, a lot of work now needs to happen to make sure the processes of the organization support this model. And honestly, I can talk the whole day on this, but let me give you a little preview. The first thing you would encounter when you let folks work from anywhere is time zones, and I've done significant amount of research showing how time zones constrain our communication patterns. So what's the solution. There are many solutions but I will refer you to my work with GitLab, which is published. And GitLab has two interesting specific solutions. So first of all, you have to think about distributed remote work as digital work. You need a lot of digital tools, but also digital processes. So the first thing that Git Labs of the world embrace as a synchronous communication. You do not need to have a meeting for everything. We have packed our calendars with unnecessary meetings, both before the pandemic, during the pandemic and even now. And these meetings are often counterproductive, because in the meetings, what happens is the extroverts get to talk a lot, and the introverts are sitting quietly nodding their heads, not speaking a word. So part of our communication, we do need meetings, but part of our communication has to be on a synchronous channels. It could be a shared Google document. It could be a Slack channel. It could be a DoS channel. I'm not evangelizing any technology. Choose your favorite technology, and then brainstorm partly asynchronously. And there are two benefits of this. The first benefit is what I found in the research, people often contribute to more thoughtful ideas. So if Joyce asked me a question in the meeting, and I answer at the spur of the moment, then I'm just giving her my top of mind thoughts. But if she asked me a question on Slack, and I go for a walk in the woods, I think deeply about what she asked, and then half an hour later or two hours later, I come back and give her a much more thoughtful response. The second benefit is introverts can now contribute. And that's what I found in my study of DOIST, which has embraced an asynchronous first communication strategy. The second thing that these old remote companies do very well is they write down all the best practices. They have an up to date live knowledge handbook where you can find out everything about how this company works. And that's key because for a newcomer, a person who just joined the company yesterday, that person doesn't know how the company works, and that person now doesn't have a shoulder to tap and ask the question. So instead of asking and answering, we now got, we got to read and write. So both the knowledge has to be updated, and people have to have incentives to do that. And then we have to also develop a deep habit of reading instead of shooting 50 emails, asking our questions. And finally, there's the whole concern about social interactions. So in my model, you've, of course, you're spending 25% of your time with the team, doing deep collaboration and deep mentorship. So when we go to the office, we don't lock ourselves up in our offices or cubicles that 25% time is meant to be all about social interactions. So break down the cubicles, change the office layout, create collaboration spaces, create social interaction spaces. So Dropbox, for instance, is doing a wonderful job building public community halls, community kitchens where the whole team can cook and meal together and make some memories. But for the remaining 75% of the year, when we are virtual, when we are working from anywhere, what I've proposed is that we conduct virtual water coolers. So virtual water coolers, first of all, are not zoom happy hours. I don't like zoom happy hours, because in zoom happy hours, the same five extrovert friends meet every week, and no introvert ever shows up. So virtual water coolers are randomly put together groups, those groups are constructed by HR, or by the head of remote, who come together once a fortnight for 30 minutes. And what it does is you get to know through virtual water coolers a little bit about lots of people in the organization. So think about this, when we went to a physical office every day, we met the same 10 people every day. This research by Tom Allen, which shows that if there's a wall between two people, you're much less likely to meet that person for a serendipitous conversation. If you're on different floors of the same building, much less likely so. And if you're in different buildings of the same Google campus, you will never meet that person. In virtual water coolers, you're breaking down all those silos and Amy from sales gets to meet Mark from R&D, and at least has a name and a face of someone in R&D she can contact if there's a problem. So our 25% time is all about deep social interactions and virtual water coolers are all about broad social interactions. So a lot of time I'll skip. I did an experiment on this with interns at a global bank, and we found virtual water coolers really work. So these were interns meeting really senior managers at the bank, and getting to know these people they would have never met. No intern ever goes to the C suite knocks the door and says hey I want to have an informal chat with you. That never happens in the physical world. And the final thing I'll say on the organizational transformation piece is that this entire transformation has to be driven from the top. So the first thing I do when I work with organizations is I say, let's make the remote C suite work, because if the top has embraced the model that will percolate down below. The others are not acting the way everyone else should. The signal is, we are not serious about hybrid or remote or work from anywhere here. So the most important part of the puzzle is to make the leadership, the remote C suite work really well. And in my final couple of minutes, I'm just going to show a little bit of data on what's happening on policy because I believe you have an active debate going on in your parliament, which is wonderful. And I would love to help in any way possible so please, please do reach out. So first of all, I think there's a race going on around the world to attract talent that can work remotely. So I've worked with a startup in Canada, called Mob Squad. And what they're doing in a nutshell is they have worked with the government of Canada to form an accelerated work permit stream. They're finding talented foreign workers in the United States, who are being denied visas or green cards, and they're moving these folks to Canada. And the worker is working for the same American company, but now living in Canada, working from Canada, and paying taxes in Canada. This is a anywhere model is being used to arbitrage foreign workers who are facing immigration challenges. So you can think of Brexit and what's happening in London, and whether you guys can move some of those folks to Ireland, and make them live and and contribute taxes in Ireland. There's a whole phenomenon of digital nomads. And my last count was 40 countries in the world, who have explicitly laid out a digital nomad visa policy. So I studied the Chilean policy which is almost 10 years old, but this is a partial list of the country so Germany, Iceland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, many, many countries in Europe. And the idea is to get talented remote workers for six months or a year, and it does two things for your country. These guys come with ideas and knowledge, and then they build connections with the local knowledge ecosystem. So even after they go back, go to the next country or to their home, they are still building a community, which can leverage their knowledge and their ideas. So Portugal has actually gone a step forward, and they have come up with legislation to protect the rights of domestic remote workers. Now I studied this policy it's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction. And other things for instance, they've made it now automatic for people with kids eight years and below to work remotely, and the organization has to agree. They have a switch off policy which says your boss cannot contact you after a certain hour of the day to set up a meeting. So lots of protection for remote workers. And I think it's a good model that maybe your policymakers can study. The other thing the final thing I'll say and I'll stop is that it's not about only the policy at the cross country level. There's a lot of policy being enacted in the United States to move talent from the over congested coastal cities to the heartland. And I've been working on this reverse brain drain program for a while now. I've written about it in the New York Times, and my work has been focused on a city called Tulsa, which you may or may not know where it is. It's in the state of Oklahoma, right in the middle of the country. And what Tulsa did was in 2018 before the pandemic, they said remote workers, if you move from San Francisco or New York to Tulsa will pay you $10,000. And that was just an initial carrot. And then they helped these guys buy houses, integrate with the community. And so far they've moved 1500 families. And my research has shown that this has been a win-win for the worker and the community. The worker is making more money because it's cheaper to live in Tulsa compared to living in San Francisco. Housing prices are one fifth. And then the community has been benefiting from the volunteering that these people are doing in the local community, and also from the local businesses that the partners of these people are starting. So they're opening new food trucks and all kinds of businesses. And now the government of Oklahoma has stepped in and said, we will compensate this organization $10,000 if the remote worker stays back for at least a year. And so you might think about this policy and this similar policies are being enacted in lots of other American states. There are regions within Ireland, which have lost talent for decades. It's a great new beginning to get some talent back to these regions. And this is diverse talent moving to Tulsa. This is just a photograph of their first cohort. So I'll stop there. As Joyce said, I've written about this. And my final thing is, it's not about whether work from anywhere is possible. The short answer is it is possible. And what is needed is good management. Good management is all that you need to make flexible hybrid work from anywhere possible. Thank you again for the opportunity. Would love to stay in touch. This is my Twitter handle. So I'll stop sharing my screen and look forward to your comments.