Article | Harvard Business Review | November–December 2020

Our Work-from-Anywhere Future

Abstract

The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can enjoy geographic flexibility. At the same time, concerns include how to communicate across time zones, share knowledge that isn’t yet codified, socialize virtually and prevent professional isolation, protect client data, and avoid slacking. Research into work-from-anywhere (WFA) organizations and groups that include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Tata Consultancy Services, and GitLab (the world’s largest all-remote company) highlights best practices and can help leaders decide whether remote work is right for their organizations.

Keywords: remote work; best practices; Employment; Health Pandemics; Geographic Location; Opportunities; Problems and Challenges;

Format: Print

Find at Harvard Register to Read

Citation:

Choudhury, Prithwiraj. "Our Work-from-Anywhere Future." Harvard Business Review 98, no. 6 (November–December 2020).

Goldman Sachs ran an annual internship for over 3,000 participants, spread across dozens of the firm’s global offices. As the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, the firm decided that an in-person internship would not be a safe option for its staff or interns. The team brought all its resources to bear to transform the internship program into a fully virtual format in just a few short weeks. The new all-virtual internship faced challenges, but also benefited from unexpected opportunities. As the program ended, the team reflected on what worked, what they would change, and what the future of the internship program at Goldman Sachs could look like in 2021 and beyond.

GitLab is a software company that works “all remote” at the scale of more than 1000 employees located in more than 60 countries. GitLab has no physical office and its employees can work from anywhere they choose. Any step of the organizational life of a GitLab employee (e.g., hiring, onboarding and firing) is performed remotely, except for a yearly companywide gathering. GitLab strongly relies on asynchronous coordination, allowing employees to work anytime they want. After highlighting some of the main practices implemented by GitLab to effectively work all remotely and asynchronously, I asked renowned organizational scientists their thoughts on this interesting case and to question the generalizability of the all remote asynchronous model. Understanding whether and under what conditions this model can succeed can be of guidance for organizational designers that are now considering different remote models in response of the COVID-19 shock and its aftermath.

We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60 percent more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors "import" knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.

Faculty & Research

Our Work-from-Anywhere Future

Abstract

Citation:

About the Author

More from the Author