 Now, let's hear from one of the world's leading experts in remote work, Professor Raj Choudhury from Harvard Business School. Raj was studying remote work practices before the worldwide shift to remote in 2020. His research has formed the basis for many policies and practices since, and now he turns his attention to an area that we all need to understand better, internal networks in the distributed space. How can we help new team members make connections and advance in their careers? Raj is going to share with us the results of a study on virtual water cooler chats and how they affect individual performance outcomes. Can an informal conversation with a senior manager make a measurable difference in a newcomer's career? Let's find out. Hello, my name is Raj Choudhury and I'm an associate professor at the Harvard Business School. I study the future of work and most importantly, for many years now, before the pandemic even, I've been studying what I call work from anywhere, which is a form of remote work that allows employees, individuals to live where they want to live and not be where the company has an office. And so I've been studying all remote companies such as GitLab, but others do such as Zapier and Doist and Seek for several years as well. And today I'll be sharing some of my research on one of the problems that comes up all the time when I discuss with CEOs and CHROs about remote work. So let me share my slides and then I'll go through my material, but feel free to please ask your questions on chat at any point during this talk. Thank you. So what I'm going to talk about today is what I call virtual water coolers. And you might have heard this term before, even if you have not, that's okay. I'll tell you what these are. And then I'll discuss the results from an experiment that me and my colleagues were able to run last summer. So now you know what I did last summer. So first, I would like to spend a little bit of time talking about work from anywhere. Work from anywhere is a form of remote work, but it's not the same as just working from home. So when you think about working from home, that is something probably a majority of knowledge workers have now experienced. So I shared this picture from the study done by a team from Stanford, which shows this employee working from home. And the general format for working from home is you work from home three or four days a week, then you go to the office. So you essentially are stuck to the location where the company has an office. In work from anywhere, you can now relocate to a location of your choice. So this is a map showing where the US patent office allowed its employees to spread out in 2015. That's correct. They sort of started this work from anywhere program in 2012. And so by 2015, folks had spread out to Florida, to California, to every part of the country. So each dot is a US patent exam. And so I call this live and work anywhere. And what this form of remote work does is it allows employees to enjoy what I call geographic flexibility. So you can choose where to live. So if cost of living is a big concern, you can go to a cheaper town. If you want to be closer to your family, so be it. And this really ships the ball game in terms of where talent lives. So just to summarize what I found in my research related to work from anywhere, the benefits to individuals is pretty obvious. But I've made the business case to many, many companies through my research that this is also a win win for companies. And so there are four main things that I found in my research for why work from anywhere is a great policy for companies. So the first and foremost reason is work from anywhere allows companies to hire from anywhere. So you're not stuck to just hiring from the labor market where you have an office, you can now hire from anywhere in the world. So if the talent lives in Kenya, in Ireland, in Bangladesh, you don't even need to give them a visa to immigrate to the US. So that's the biggest reason you become a talent magnet. The company becomes a talent magnet when it embraces work from anywhere. And I have plenty of research that documents that. The second thing that I found in my research is work from anywhere leads to productivity gains, at least in some settings that I have carefully looked at. I'm not claiming this is going to be always true, but it's definitely true under some conditions. And I'll show you one graphic in a minute. The third reason is when you embrace work from anywhere as a company, you create a more inclusive workforce. And let me just explain that with one example. So if you think about gender and workplace, for many years, women have borne the brunt of dual career families. So even if the woman had a great promotion opportunity or a job opportunity, that might mean that she had to relocate from Kansas to New York, from New York to Silicon Valley. And often the spouse couldn't move or wouldn't want to move. And the woman had to let go of the opportunity. But if the company embraces work from anywhere, the employee can get promoted or can get additional responsibility without relocating. So you solve the problem of dual careers. And so this, in my opinion, creates a more inclusive workforce. And finally, last but not the least, when you embrace work from anywhere, as the example of GitLab and several other all remote companies have shown, you don't need real estate or at least don't need as much real estate. And that can be a significant source of savings, especially for startups. So that's, I can speak all day on why work from anywhere is great for companies. But let me focus on, and this is just the graphic showing how the productivity of patent examiners went up and stayed up when the patent office embraced work from anywhere in 2012. If you're interested in this research, the paper is available on my webpage. You're free to take a look. So today, I'm going to, for the rest of my talk, I'm going to focus on this question that comes up again and again. So I've heard CEOs and CHRO say, Raj, we get it. All the benefits you described seem meaningful. But how do we facilitate informal interactions in a remote workplace? And this is especially salient for organizational newcomers, interns, new employees who do not know anyone in the company. How do we make sure these folks have informal interactions in a remote workplace? And relatedly, what I've heard many CEOs say is, don't we miss those serendipitous water cooler conversations that we used to have in the physical office? And isn't that something that we should preserve? And shouldn't that be a reason we should all go back to the office? So I've thought about that question for a long time, very deeply. And let me share some insights first relate to what I think about interactions in the office. It is true that we have these cafeteria conversations, hallway conversations, and water cooler conversations in the office. But if you think deeply about with who do you have these interactions? It's typically people who are physically setting close to us in adjacent cubicles, maybe the same floor of the office. So the top graphic on the left actually shows research by Tom Allen, which was done in the 1970s, where he showed that these in office communication patterns decayed exponentially after 25 meters. And if there was a wall between the two employees, the conversation happened much more rarely. And if there was a ceiling between the two employees, if the employees were sitting on different floors, you almost never had a water cooler conversation. And think about the implication of that. So what's going to happen and what used to happen is folks had water cooler conversations with people just like them. So interns spoke to interns, new employees spoke to new employees, sales spoke to sales, R&D spoke to R&D. And that's a big source of why we get these organizational silos. So the thinking that I've put forward is that we can break these silos, these hierarchical silos, these organizational silos, these functional silos by organizing virtual water coolers. So what is a virtual water cooler? A virtual water cooler is not, first of all, a zoom happy hour. Because in a zoom happy hour, only the same set of people tend to show up again and again. And they tend to be all extroverts and friends of each other. So virtual water cooler is a session, a zoom session, Microsoft team session or a Google Hangout session, which is organized by someone in the company, maybe HR, maybe the head of remote, someone in the company curates this randomly constructed group every week. And folks come together for 20 minutes, 30 minutes to talk about work, to talk about what's happening in the company, to talk about what's happening in their personal lives. But the main design principle is it's a randomly constructed group. So someone in the company sits down with the list of employees, and then mixes them up. So you get the CEO speaking to interns, you get R&D speaking to sales, you get Houston talking to Jakarta. And you never know who you're going to meet this week. So if you do this over time, what happens is for every employee, you are broadening the organizational network that you know, inside the company. Now, this was the idea that I had early last year. And then the question was, what does these virtual water coolers do for productivity? We didn't know the answer. So we teamed up with a large global organization, which was conducting a summer internship remotely. And so what we did is we took the group of couple of thousand interns and run an experiment. So in this experiment, they were there were two treatment conditions and three control conditions, which the graphic on the left shows. So the two treatment conditions where where the interns randomly met some really, really senior managers at this company. That was the first treatment condition. The second treatment condition was when these interns met other interns, but randomly again. And then we had three control conditions, one related to informal, asynchronous text based communication. Then we had a team project where you met the same interns, but every week and worked on a formal project. And then finally, the passive control group received none of these. So they just had free time. And then we ran this week on week. So every week, there would be a random lottery assigning people to one of these conditions. So you got assigned to one of these five conditions. And then every week, there was a second lottery, which said, do you get your condition this week or not? So that's what we call a dose effect. So you could meet a senior manager two times, three times, four times, one time, or none at all. So this is the focus of the experiment, thinking about how do these randomly constructed interactions with senior managers affect your productivity outcomes? And what we find in a nutshell, and once again, the paper is on my web page, on my web page, we find that these randomly constructed water coolers with the senior managers affected performance in a positive way week on week. So that's what and the two bars that I'm showing you here. The green bar is where the senior manager did not share the same demographic characteristics as the intern. And the yellow bar is showing the effect if the intern and the senior manager shared demographic similarity. So what we find here is that the senior manager of water cooler has an effect on average. And the effect is really, really strong if the intern was just like the senior manager in terms of gender and race. And that is the performance maximizing condition. That condition is better than all the other four conditions in the experiment. And we find a similar effect on the probability of, so I showed you the probability of receiving a job offer on this slide and the weekly performance on this slide. Same effects. So in short, randomly meeting a senior manager just like you has a strong positive effect on weekly performance and the probability of getting a job offer. And then the question becomes why? So to understand that why question we conducted a deep qualitative survey. And what came out was that lots of information and advice that normally would not be shared was shared in these water coolers, especially the senior manager of water coolers. So it's just like meeting someone in the hallway. The only difference is the intern normally would not meet the super senior manager in the hallway. But in the remote workplace, you can make that happen. And that has an effect. So that's the experiment. You can read more about my research in my Harvard Business Review article, which was the cover story from November, December 2020, entitled the work from Anywhere Future. And I would love to stay connected with all of you. And this is my Twitter handle. Thank you so much.