Tsedal shares 5 key insights from her new book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere (available now from Amazon). Download the Next Big Idea Appto listen to the audio version—read by Tsedal herself—and enjoy Ideas of the Day, ad-free podcast episodes, and more.
As organizations consider what a return to the office looks like, some employees say they would be willing to forgo traditional perks like health care and pay for access to office space.
In this edition of Author Talks, McKinsey’s Eleni Kostopoulos chats with Tsedal Neeley, the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, about her book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere (Harper Business, 2021). The award-winning scholar and expert on virtual and global work offers teams and managers a road map for navigating the enduring challenges of a virtual workforce.
In this episode, host Gautam Mukunda is joined by President Biden's nominee for Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School and award-winning author, Tsedal Neeley to discuss how humans will thrive in the post-pandemic, new world of work. New digital tools can allow us to combat loneliness as the world transitions to a predominately remote workplace. But can technology create an experience where people feel a deeper source of connection with one another? Can it mimic the face-to-face environments of the past? One thing we do know: The only way we will be able to overcome this pandemic is if we do it together. But in a time of such intense isolation, how do we reclaim togetherness to solve the problems that plague us?
VIDEO: Ken Frazier, one of only four Black CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, speaks with Professor Tsedal Neeley about the search for a coronavirus vaccine, how racism at the workplace holds back America’s progress, and his own upbringing just one generation from slavery.
Tsedal Neeley, Harvard Business School professor, award-winning author, and global management and leadership expert, recently caught up with us to share her insights and advice as the workforce continues to go through rapid transformation brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. From digital transformation, team relaunch, to leading in times of radical change, she gives a picture of the future of work and essential advice for employees and leaders alike.
Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, says that there are simple ways leaders can help their employees stay productive, focused, and psychologically healthy as they work from home during the current global global pandemic. The right technology tools and clear and constant communication are more important than ever. She recommends that managers do an official remote-work launch, carefully plan and facilitate virtual meetings, and pay extra attention to workers’ behavior. For individual contributors, it’s critical to maintain a routine but also embrace flexibility, especially if you’re in the house with family.
Are you suddenly working from home? 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.
The coronavirus pandemic is expected to fundamentally change the way many organizations operate for the foreseeable future. As governments and businesses around the world tell those with symptoms to self-quarantine and everyone else to practice social distancing, remote work is our new reality. How do corporate leaders, managers, and individual workers make this sudden shift? Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, has spent two decades helping companies learn how to manage dispersed teams. In this edited Q&A, drawn from a recent HBR subscriber video call in which listeners were able to ask questions, she offers guidance on how to work productively at home, manage virtual meetings, and lead teams through this time of crisis.
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.
If you’re concerned about quickly transitioning to the virtual classroom, you are not alone. Educators and students around the globe are settling in—at home—to finish out the school year in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. For many, the digital classroom is a completely new environment. But there’s good news: studies show that learning online is just as effective as learning in the physical classroom, as long as you prepare yourself—and your students—to succeed.
You want to work abroad. But how do you start? Host Dylan Thuras explores how working abroad can be personally and professionally advantageous with guest experts including Tsedal Neeley. They’ll tackle everything from résumé boosting to the cognitive benefits of adapting to a new culture.
Tsedal Neeley, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Paul Leonardi, a management professor at UC Santa Barbara, talk about the potential that applications such as Slack, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams have for strengthening employee collaboration, productivity, and organizational culture. They discuss their research showing how effective these tools can be and warn about common traps companies face when they implement them. Neeley and Leonardi are co-authors of the article “What Managers Need to Know About Social Tools” in the November-December 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review.
by Neeley, T. (2017) Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press
For nearly three decades, English has been the lingua franca of cross-border organizations, yet studies on corporate language strategies and their importance for globalization have been scarce. In The Language of Global Success, Tsedal Neeley provides an in-depth look at a single organization—the high-tech giant Rakuten—in the five years following its English lingua franca mandate. Neeley's behind-the-scenes account explores how language shapes the ways in which employees who work in global organizations communicate and negotiate linguistic and cultural differences.
This online simulation teaches students about the difficulties in cross-cultural communication and managing global teams. Communicating via chat, teams of 4 or 5 students race against the clock to prepare a VC presentation. Students are assigned the role of a native English speaker or a nonnative English speaker at their organization. The simulation constrains the ways in which the native and nonnative speakers can interact, and the resulting experience replicates communication patterns in real globally diverse and distributed teams. As their team struggles to collaborate, students experience first-hand how communication challenges can interfere with work goals.
Increasingly, almost every team is a global team in some capacity. This presents a difficult challenge for managers everywhere, and especially for high-potential leaders who want to take their careers to the next level: how do you bring together a team whose members are geographically and culturally dispersed? Professor Tsedal Neeley discusses her case of a real-life executive charged with corralling a hugely diverse, underperforming group and leading it back to success on a global scale.
Japanese interview with Prof. Tsedal Neeley about Rakuten case and LEAD Class
Continuation of interview (in Japanese) with Prof. Tsedal Neeley about Language Strategy
From the October 2015 Issue of Harvard Business Review
To succeed in the global economy today, more and more companies are relying on a geographically dispersed workforce. They build teams that offer the best functional expertise from around the world, combined with deep, local knowledge of the most promising markets. They draw on the benefits of international diversity, bringing together people from many cultures with varied work experiences and different perspectives on strategic and organizational challenges. All this helps multinational companies compete in the current business environment.
But managers who actually lead global teams are up against stiff challenges. Creating successful work groups is hard enough when everyone is local and people share the same office space. But when team members come from different countries and functional backgrounds and are working in different locations, communication can rapidly deteriorate, misunderstanding can ensue, and cooperation can degenerate into distrust.
Language pervades every aspect of organizational life. It touches everything. Yet remarkably, leaders of global organizations, whose employees speak a multitude of languages, often pay too little attention to it in their approach to talent management. As we have observed in countless organizations, unrestricted multilingualism creates inefficiency in even the most dedicated and talented workforces. It can lead to friction in cross-border interactions, lost sales, and a host of other serious problems that may jeopardize competitiveness (see also
“Global Business Speaks English,” by Tsedal Neeley, HBR May 2012). Developing a comprehensive strategy for managing language can help transform that vulnerability into a source of competitive advantage
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