Video conferencing and other communications technologies have been a lifeline for many during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they can exacerbate existing inequalities and create new ones. How can organizations help employees thrive in the post-COVID hybrid workforce of in-person and remote teams? 

COVID-19 has accelerated many organizational trends, from remote work and digitalization to automation and a growing recognition of inequalities. Consulting firms are key actors in responding to this dynamic, since their judgement has influence well beyond their own affairs. What can we learn from their latest thinking on the new normal and the future of work? Michael Fenlon, PwC’s Chief People Officer shares insights on managing remote work, addressing disparities, maintaining wellness (including mental health), developing workforce skills, and the importance of purpose and trust.

Is the pandemic making you rethink your commute? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Ashley Whillans, a professor at Harvard Business School and the author of the new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. They talk through what to do when you want to work remotely but your company is against it, you’re considering a new job closer to home, or you’ve been offered a job that’s a great fit but comes with a longer commute.

Before 2020 a movement was brewing within knowledge-work organizations. Personal technology and digital connectivity had advanced so far and so fast that people had begun to ask, “Do we really need to be together, in an office, to do our work?” We got our answer during the pandemic lockdowns. We learned that a great many of us don’t in fact need to be colocated with colleagues on-site to do our jobs. Individuals, teams, entire workforces, can perform well while being entirely distributed—and they have. So now we face new questions: Are all-remote or majority-remote organizations the future of knowledge work? Is work from anywhere (WFA) here to stay?

What will it take for you to feel safe at work again? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School. They talk through what to do when your essential employees are staying home despite increased safety measures, you want to redesign your open office to make it work for the new normal, or you’re seeing a growing divide between workers who have to come in and those who can work from home.

A conversation with Harvard Business School’s Raj Choudhury about why more companies are building all- or mostly remote workforces.

Humans are motivated by four drives: acquire, bond, comprehend, and defend. Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams discuss how managers can use all four to keep employees engaged.

What's in store for the gig economy and how will COVID-19 change the nature of work? Managing the Future of Work project co-chair and podcast co-host Joe Fuller was the inaugural guest on The Way Work Should Work, the new podcast produced by Braintrust. We present the "away" half of the home-and-away pair of episodes that saw Joe interview the freelance platform's co-founders, Adam Jackson and Gabriel Luna-Ostaseski, in Episode 18.

A study of 3 million people confirms what many work-from-home employees already feel, according to research by Raffaella Sadun, Jeffrey Polzer, and colleagues.

A new survey suggests that at least 16 percent of employees will remain at-home workers long after COVID-19 recedes, report researchers Christopher Stanton, Zoe Cullen, and Michael Luca.

While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! But despite the potential for staggering time savings, many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece.

At least 16 percent of American workers will switch from office-based settings to working at home at least two days per week after COVID-19 subsides. This has significant implications for companies, employees, and policymakers alike.

In early 2020, the world began what is undoubtedly the largest work-from-home experiment in history. Now, as countries reopen but COVID-19 remains a major threat, organizations are wrestling with whether and how to have workers return to their offices. Business leaders need to be able to answer a number of questions to make these decisions. Primary among them is “What impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?”

Assembling a large, diverse team of researchers to make sense of COVID-19’s impact on issues of work and organizational psychology, this project explores changes that are unfolding for practitioners and human resources professionals.

“I don’t know how you do it.” Whether it comes at the start of a video conference or a call, this is one of the most frequent comments I hear from clients, colleagues, and even friends these days as we’re doing our usual pre-meeting check ins. Like me, many working adults across the globe have been juggling a lot since the COVID-19 crisis started.  Let’s lower our standards. Better yet: Let’s use this moment to shift them to something more reasonable. Here is how I’ve done it, by focusing on four simple principles.

We study the disproportionate impact of the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak on female and male academics' research productivity in social science. We collect data from the largest open-access preprint repository for social science on 41,858 research preprints in 18 disciplines produced by 76,832 authors across 25 countries in a span of two years. We find that during the 10 weeks after the lockdown in the United States, although the total research productivity increased by 35%, female academics' productivity dropped by 13.9% relative to that of male academics. We also show that several disciplines drive such gender inequality. Finally, we find that this intensified productivity gap is more pronounced for academics in top-ranked universities, and the effect exists in six other countries.

Hayden Brown has been Upwork’s CEO since January 2020, just before the coronavirus pandemic shifted much of the workforce to working from home. Upwork is a leading platform connecting freelance workers to businesses who need help. Hayden shares with what changes she has seen since COVID-19 hit, what skills are in demand and how this new normal might change the nature of remote work. Often the capabilities that are not readily available in the local market are accessible on platforms like Upwork.

We all have had conversations over the last few weeks with people working from home for the first time while sheltering from COVID-19. I've tried to use the opportunity to conduct an informal survey: How is it going? Do you think you'd like to change your work habits to continue working from home?

A growing body of research suggests that there are surprisingly powerful benefits to connecting with casual acquaintances — relationships that sociologists call “weak ties.”

Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard Kennedy School professor and HBS Senior Fellow, provides three key equations for happiness during a pandemic.

Patricia Thompson, PhD provides insight on how to be productive while working from home.  Among the information cited is research from Prithwiraj Choudhury and a study from the Stanford School of Business.

Listeners around the world write in to ask questions and share their experiences of COVID-19 with Youngme Moon, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and Mihir Desai.

This study shows that people working from home (WFH) make more online contributions to socially helpful topics, yet face higher psychic costs and anxiety about time constraints. Managers might consider giving WFH workers more temporal flexibility to deal with time constraints during this crisis.

In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School. They talk through how to be productive at home whether you’re alone or distracted by children, how to care for your newly remote team and make sure they still get work done, or how to adapt when your job requires going outside and seeing people face-to-face.

Working at home brings with it confusing new rules of conduct. Remote work expert Prithwiraj Choudhury answers questions from our readers.

Welcome to the new world of remote work, where employees struggle to learn the rules, managers are unsure how to help them, and organizations get a glimpse into the future.