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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2020

  Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work

  Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeffrey T. Polzer and Raffaella Sadun

  We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employee's digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270 users, we find, compared to pre-pandemic levels, increases in the number of meetings per person (+12.9 percent) and the number of attendees per meeting (+13.5 percent), but decreases in the average length of meetings (-20.1 percent). Collectively, the net effect is that people spent less time in meetings per day (-11.5 percent) in the post-lockdown period. We also find significant and durable increases in length of the average workday (+8.2 percent, or +48.5 minutes), along with short-term increases in email activity. These findings provide insight from a novel dataset into how the nature of work has changed for a large sample of knowledge workers. We discuss these changes in light of the ongoing challenges faced by organizations and workers struggling to adapt and perform in the face of a global pandemic.

  Keywords: Organizations; Communication; North and Central America; Europe; Middle East;

  Citation:

  DeFilippis, Evan, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeffrey T. Polzer, and Raffaella Sadun. "Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 21-006, July 2020.  View Details

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• Teaching Plan | HBS Case Collection | June 2020

  Chief

  Katherine B. Coffman, Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Kathleen L. McGinn, Julia Kelley, Amy Klopfenstein and Katherine Chen

  Teaching Plan serves as a supplement to the case for “Chief: Role for Carolyn Childers” (920-019), “Chief: Role for Lindsay Kaplan” (920-020), and “Scaling at Chief” (920-021).

  Keywords: Negotiation; Negotiation Tactics; Negotiation Participants; Agreements and Arrangements; Business Ventures; Business Startups; Business Model; Business Growth and Maturation; Demographics; Gender; Ownership; Ownership Stake; Strategy; Business Strategy; Expansion; Competition; Finance; Capital; Venture Capital; Service Industry; Technology Industry; North and Central America; United States; New York (city, NY); New York (state, US);

  Citation:

  Coffman, Katherine B., Jeffrey J. Bussgang, Kathleen L. McGinn, Julia Kelley, Amy Klopfenstein, and Katherine Chen. "Chief." Harvard Business School Teaching Plan 920-033, June 2020.  View Details

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• Article | Quarterly Journal of Economics | May 2020

  Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment

  Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low and Kathleen McGinn

  Using a randomized control trial, we examine whether offering adolescent girls nonmaterial resources—specifically, negotiation skills—can improve educational outcomes in a low-income country. In so doing, we provide the first evidence on the effects of an intervention that increased noncognitive, interpersonal skills during adolescence. Long-run administrative data shows that negotiation training significantly improved educational outcomes over the next three years. The training had greater effects than two alternative treatments (offering girls a safe physical space with female mentors and offering girls information about the returns to education), suggesting that negotiation skills themselves drive the effect. Further evidence from a lab-in-the-field experiment, which simulates parents’ educational investment decisions, and a midline survey suggests that negotiation skills improved girls’ outcomes by moving households’ human capital investments closer to the efficient frontier. This is consistent with an incomplete contracting model, where negotiation allows daughters to strategically cooperate with parents.

  Keywords: Negotiation; Competency and Skills; Training; Age; Gender; Education; Investment; Outcome or Result; Developing Countries and Economies;

  Citation:

  Ashraf, Nava, Natalie Bau, Corinne Low, and Kathleen McGinn. "Negotiating a Better Future: How Interpersonal Skills Facilitate Inter-Generational Investment." Quarterly Journal of Economics 135, no. 2 (May 2020): 1095–1151.  View Details

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