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  • August 12, 2021
  • Article
  • Harvard Business Review Digital Articles

The Endless Digital Workday

By: Arjun Narayan, Rohan Narayana Murty, Rajath B. Das and Scott Duke Kominers
  • Format:Electronic
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Abstract

The shift to remote work ended the traditional 9–5 workday: employees work in bursts, at night, between caregiving tasks, and whenever they can find time between the endless distractions of messages, calls, and emails. New research, however, shows that for many teams, this means people are quite literally working at all hours of the day, which also means that they’re almost never all working at the same time. Is this bad though? Researchers found that it depends on the task. For some tasks, being on at the same time improved productivity; for others, the distractions created by coworkers made it harder to finish the tasks, and productivity went up in what used to be considered off hours. Importantly, employees proved to be good judges of how to manage their time to be most productive. There are still lessons for managers. As a first step, write a team charter to establish norms and expectations, which should include specific times when the majority of the team is on together. That said, don’t force overlap or micromanage people. Finally, make it okay for people to be offline.

Keywords

Remote Work; Workday; Team Overlap; Groups and Teams; Employees; Performance Productivity; Management

Citation

Narayan, Arjun, Rohan Narayana Murty, Rajath B. Das, and Scott Duke Kominers. "The Endless Digital Workday." Harvard Business Review Digital Articles (August 12, 2021).
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About The Author

Scott Duke Kominers

Entrepreneurial Management
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • Collusion in Brokered Markets By: John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers and Richard Lowery
  • Harvard Students Should Ignore Calls to Boycott Israel Trek By: Jesse M. Fried, Paul A. Gompers, Scott Kominers and Mark C. Poznansky
  • O2X: Optimizing to the X By: Scott Duke Kominers, Thomas Jennings and Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon
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