Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host Bill Kerr. This episode is one of a series of special dispatches on the sweeping effect that Covid-19 is having on society, the economy, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we’ll be bringing you interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus.

The consequences of Covid-19 are sweeping. Many organizations needed to pivot quickly to remote work and partially reinvent themselves, both of which are tall orders. At a macro level, the virus’s impact has been very uneven, disproportionately impacting African-Americans and other minority groups. I’m joined today by Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neeley. Tsedal studies leadership and organizational behavior, focusing on the intersection of work, technology, and organizations and the particular dynamics of distributed organizations. She was at the forefront of remote work well before most of us had ever even heard of Zoom. Tsedal has also been working on the deep inequalities in our workplace that are being exacerbated by the coronavirus. Welcome, Tsedal.

Tsedal Neeley: Thank you so much for having me, Bill.

Kerr: Tsedal, you were onto remote work well before it was ever cool to do so. So let’s use your expertise to say what lessons can we take from the various business and government responses to Covid-19 so far.

Neeley: It’s interesting, because I was convinced almost 20 years ago that we needed to sit at the intersection of work, technology, and organizations, and, voila! Here we are. And the lessons we take from the various businesses, government responses to Covid-19 so far have been extraordinary. What’s happened here is that we’ve seen full migration of workforces to home or working from home. It’s nothing like we’d ever seen. And as you know, Bill, I’m working on a book called Remote Work Revolution that had been underway for the last couple of years, but like everything else, Covid-19 has accelerated the completion of this book, inasmuch as it’s accelerated the virtualization of work. And so what we’ve seen is organizations that have had to very quickly expand their technological capacity for their workforce to be able to communicate with one another, their cybersecurity, their ability to have their employees tap into their technology at the workplace in safe ways—here, I’m talking about VPN systems and otherwise. So from a technology standpoint, they’ve had to do that. On top of that, many organizations have had to very quickly figure out how to engage their employees and their external stakeholders. We’re talking about suppliers and customers, and all of the other parts of making work function when everyone is also remote. So it’s been an extraordinary time, Bill. It’s been an extraordinary time.

Kerr: Give us a sneak peek. Tell us one of those pieces of advice that you would give to managers, especially as the summer progresses and we have more remote work ahead.

Neeley: It’s interesting, because what’s happened is, at the beginning there were lots of challenges around “How do I even begin my work day? And how do I make things function?” What’s happening now is that people are finally dealing with the many challenges that are inherent with virtual arrangements. And so the sneak peek into the book is how to combat some of the things that people are feeling very, very deeply now—isolation, feeling out of sync, feeling out of sight. And the more time passes and there’s no regular in-person contact with coworkers and otherwise, the more persistent and urgent becomes questions around bonding, trusting, and alignment. So for managers, one thing to absolutely do is group launches—and if they’ve done launches, relaunches. And what’s a launch or a relaunch? This is when you bring together your team or the group that you work with, and you talk about three or four things. And you get alignment around those. One is, what are our shared goals, and what are some of the things that we need to make sure we achieve this summer? Number two, what are the constraints that individuals are facing today? Things have been so dynamic, Bill, that for many, over time, you have families who have been dealing with homeschooling, perhaps even trying to help a relative who was sick, to trying to manage dual careers in an environment that’s now very different than they’re used to. So it’s really important to talk about those types of constraints among groups and team members. The third thing you want to do is that you need to choose the right medium for the right communication. And that includes internal social media—I’m talking about Slack and Microsoft Teams—where you can do one-to-many communication. Email is still awesome. Not every interaction requires videoconferencing, and not every interaction needs to be as long as it has been, because people are getting exhausted. And then you have agile teams. The big thing about agile teams that go remote? They actually love it! And agile teams are built around the premise that you have to be in close physical proximity. And this remote work revolution has shown many agile teams that, actually, working remotely, having time on your own—provided you use additional tools more than the average employees—you can thrive in agile teams.

Kerr: I’m curious. You’ve been thinking about remote work for 20 years or so. This was probably the most accentuated remote work experience you’ve ever had. So is there anything in your own personal transition as you went from a day that would typically have probably been in Harvard Business School and in your office and not as remote into one that has all of this Zoom and Slack and everything else?

Neeley: For me and for my family has been the addition of homeschooling. And it turns out, I don’t know if you have found this to be true, or some of our friends, our mutual colleagues, but being a professor does not give you a leg up into homeschooling children. But I had to be reminded of a number of things, like being very disciplined around boundaries. Ensuring that ending my work day at a particular time, I had to be so, so strict about that, because it was very easy for me to keep going on and on and on and on and on. So there are a few things that I had to really push myself to be disciplined around, because I know in the end they would ... the return on the work investment would not be there. So the transition, itself, was particularly difficult because of the fact that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. And we’ve had to deal with the complexities that the global pandemic had brought. You can lose track of time quite easily, so getting disciplined during my transition was really important.

Kerr: Yeah, well put. And I’ll have to come back at some point later and talk about the Kerr Family Elementary School and its ups and downs over the last little bit. I do want to, though, continue just to what you were describing there, because you are in a recent piece that was in the Boston Globe that emphasized the importance of just routine as a way to avoid burnout. And I guess, I think, the juxtaposition is fascinating, because on one level, we think of remote work as bringing all this flexibility. Like that there’s ... you can set schedules differently. You can do things maybe more asynchronously, but you’re also highlighting the importance of routines. So talk about that balance. And if people are finding it hard to get a schedule or to get a routine, what should they be doing?

Neeley: That is the exact challenge about remote work, because the boundaries between home life and work life can easily get blurred, which means that you are working and living in the exact same space. And the other thing is, others are working with you. Their boundaries … if their boundaries are completely off, they’re seeking you, and the work patterns that they’re used to begin to bleed into your own. And the other thing is, people are working, in absolute terms, longer hours with their remote arrangements at the moment. They’re working much more. So it’s easy to get burned out, because you’re working more, people are experiencing a lot more stress. And you’ve talked about this in so many ways, Bill—the economy’s not doing great. So people have all these concerns about the economy. There’s job insecurity and all of these other socioemotional and geopolitical things that are weighing people down. So when you put all of those things together, burnout is constantly the problem that we have to battle if we are to sustain this type of remote work for the long term. And I suspect it’s going to last quite some time in one form or another. So the routine, therefore, becomes a critical way to keep the work hours not only bounded, but the ability for people to care for themselves, the self-care. You have to wake up at the same time on a regular basis. You have to go physically to that space where you work. I talk about going to work at home. So you go to that physical space on a regular basis. So don’t move around the house just to spice things up. Go to that same place, in the same way that you would had you been able to go into the office, and start your workday. Then you have to build in your self-care throughout the day, whether it’s the walking, the exercising, all the moving, the movement that you need in order to take care of yourself. And you have to stop working at the same time every day so that you can, as you mentioned, maintain the boundaries and avoid the burnout. The routines are critically, critically important, because otherwise, the days will blend into each other, and then the hours the same way, and you can easily not take care of yourself, and stress will only increase. And once burnout hits, it’s really hard to recover.

Kerr: Relating back to some of your earlier comments, I think that an important job of managers is to help their employees set those routines and also set the boundaries around when communication should be allowed or when do you need to be responding to email and so forth.

Neeley: I completely agree. One thing that I always advise managers is, if you have the tendency to send emails during off hours—meaning late in the evenings because you’re still working, or on weekends as I do—I always add “When we’re back in action on Monday, might you be able to help me with X?” Or “Can you please give me your thoughts about this when you’re back in action on tomorrow morning or whenever it is?” Setting the clear expectation that I’m not expecting you to respond now, or the fact that you’re getting this note from me at this time could be that I’m using flextime as opposed to me trying to model this nonstop 24/7 work system to you. That’s not what I’m doing. So you have to explicitly say it, but you also have to make sure that when you solicit information or get into any communication with folks that you explicitly say, “Can you get back to me when we’re back in action,” so that they know you’re not signaling things.

Kerr: So one of your areas of expertise is around organizational culture, and I’d love for you to reflect for a minute on what do you see shifting about organizational culture right now? And are there some that you circle and say, “Those are probably rather ephemeral, transient. They’re here for a little bit, but maybe once the world gets a little bit closer back to normal, we would expect that one to fade away,” versus some that you’re seeing that this is more of a permanent shift or is going to get locked in to how we approach our workplace?

Neeley: What I am seeing—and I started seeing this early on when the virtualization of work began to accelerate—is you suddenly have a distributed workforce. And when you have a distributed workforce, necessarily, the patterns of interactions, the patterns of communication, the network patterns all change. And that, then, becomes reflected in the cultures of organizations. So when we talk about organization culture, by the way—and our definition, particularly at the Harvard Business School, is what we value, meaning what’s important to us, and the norms, attitudes, and the behaviors that we espouse and enact in our organizations—so with the distributed workforce, therefore, our patterns of behavior, our patterns of interactions and engagement have shifted. So what are some of the changes that we’re seeing? Well, one of the things that we started to see early on is that there are some parts of the organization where people are actually going into the office. This could be because their roles might require it. Sometimes these are leaders in the organization who are involved in task forces, or planning, or crisis management, or because you might have the type of organization where a portion ... or it could be those who are custodians of the technology and the servers who might have to go in in the service industry, in the health care industries. And so those who are safe and staying at home and working from home and those who are physically going out getting exposed to the potential dangers of Covid-19. What that does to an organization is that it creates an “us versus them” culture where you are safe, you are not. You’re essential. You know, that term essential workers? You are not. And those types of bifurcation, those are the things that we really need to be careful about and attuned to. And this is where leadership matters. I worked with one such organization where, in fact, they were working on—and still are working feverishly—trying to come up with a vaccine. It’s a local company. And you had a portion of their workforce going in in shifts, in labs, doing the work that they do. Whereas you had another portion of their organization staying at home safely. And it completely tore them apart. And it took leadership, it actually took a leadership relaunch and a lot of messaging and a lot of work to make sure that people understood, “No, we’re all one organization, one heartbeat. But things are just a bit different, and we need to understand how to operate in this distributed fashion.” There’s also something else that is, of course, happening. And your question asked—and is trying to get at—what is going to be permanent and what is not? Particularly when it comes to not only our culture, but this remote-work revolution that we’re seeing. Many companies have already declared that they intend to make remote work a permanent fixture of their organization, whether it’s 20 percent, 30 percent, 50 percent, even up to 75 percent. Here, we’re talking about Dell computers, where they have 162,000 employees, and they’re saying that they want most of them to work from home post-Covid, and this represents a jump from about 24 percent of their employees. Twitter, saying that “We’re going to make remote work a permanent option for our employees,” or they use the word “forever”—“Our employees can choose to do this forever.” Nielsen Research in New York City will have its 3,000 workers stay at home post-Covid. Insurance company, Nationwide Insurance, saw no loss in performance when they were working from home, and they intend to have 16 out of their 20 locations convert to remote work. And I can go on and on and on and on. And so what I described earlier is actually going to be a permanent type of cultural shift for many organizations where you’re going to have people who will be either in and out of the office because they’re working from home one or two days per week, or 50 percent, 60 percent of employees will be working from home permanently. And that changes the culture of the organization.

Kerr: You’re right. That changes so much. And I want to maybe dwell a little bit on this kind of “us versus them,” “in versus out” that you worry about and maybe shine a light a little bit more toward the efforts that organizations have had that have been rightfully ramped up in recent weeks to think a lot about diversity, equity, and inclusion. So how has remote work and Covid-19 affected these sort of important cultural goals?

Neeley: Oh, Covid-19 affecting diversity, equity, and inclusion. I think that the “us versus them,” “who’s in, who’s out” for organizations to understand that there are these differences is, first and foremost, very important. And one of the things that we’re learning is that many organizations, or leaders in organizations, don’t even quite realize that this is part of what they’re dealing with—this thing where you have some feel like they’re working from home or excluded, versus those who are deemed essential and who are coming in and are active or part of the core organization. So the first thing is leaders and organizations need to understand and identify the fact that this is happening. The second thing is through messaging, through structural shifts—meaning ensuring that you have managers who are caring for members of groups that have individuals who are both working from home and both not working from home—and ensuring that you have someone in charge of those groups within units, or it could be teams, bringing people together, making sure that they’re communicating with one another. Part of what I advise people is that, if you’re working from home and feeling away, and your team member is working in the office or health care or wherever they may be, and they’re feeling away, make sure you communicate with one another. You’re not separated. You’re actually part of the same team, working toward the same goals. Your superordinate goals are very much shared. Speak to one another. And that breaks the ice very quickly. And in the end, people realize, “Wow, we’re in this together.” But it takes leaders and knowledge that this is happening to be able to do this. And then there’s the part that many organizations actually don’t recognize when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion, affected by Covid and remote work, that they are actually going through radical change. This remote work migration that we’ve been talking about, Bill, is a radical change for organizations. Even think about our own experiences. Working from home and the shifts in what we do, how we do what we do, the changes in the ecosystem externally, the changes in industries around this—every single thing that’s going on now is part of a radical change. And it’s been surprising to me the extent to which people aren’t recognizing that they’re leading not only in times of crisis, but they’re leading radical change. And when you do, it’s crucial to make sure that no one feels left behind through your words and your deeds. And this is one of the important things to highlight with remote work and Covid when it comes to inclusion and a sense of belonging for every member of the organization, because the experiences have been very disparate and different for many.

Kerr: Yeah. Maybe I can put another plug in for your book here. You titled it Remote Work Revolution. So I think you had a lot of that radical nature in the title. So now I’d like to take a moment and have you share with us some of your recent work on Covid-19 in the African-American community in particular, which has been very heavily hit by the implications of the virus.

Neeley: Yes. You know, I have been alarmed. I have been heartsick by the way in which Covid has affected millions and millions of people around the world. And I have been heartsick by the way in which it has disproportionately been affecting brown and Black communities and worried about it. And it’s one of those things where you see the numbers in every city, every state. Where families, even multiple members of the same family, losing relatives—a father, an aunt, a mother, an uncle, a grandparent to Covid-19 all within the same family. You look at places like Chicago, where the majority of the deaths are African-Americans. St. Louis. You look at places all around the country, and that has been alarming to me. And so I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to talk about it. I wanted to raise awareness. And I’ve started to team up with various people who care about the issue a lot to just publicly talk about it and to raise awareness—not only to my community, but also all communities—so that people can not only be safer and practice all of the measures that make us safer, but also to try to come up with some solutions and some ideas that can reduce some of these rates. And so I teamed up with one of the extraordinary Celtics players, Jaylen Brown, to try to bring some attention to this. And so we did an interview that did quite well and to speak about, why is it happening? Where’s it happening? How to learn more about it? How to be safe? And I’m continuing that work. I just interviewed Deval Patrick. It was an extraordinary conversation, where we talked about the same things, but he brings additional insight into how should we think about the truth about what we face today, because part of it is Covid-19 exposed the inequities in this country, when it comes to particularly African-Americans. It exposed the health care disparities, the economic disparities, and also the racial disparities, where many people who have died from Covid-19 had been turned away at the footsteps of hospitals. And two days later they died. And so individual medical personnel are not to blame, but there are systems that had been really affecting individuals who were losing their lives. And so the work of using our platform, no matter who we are and where we are in our lives, in my mind, was critical. And so this is part of what I’ve been trying to do to make sure that we all understand that it’s happening, and that the only way that this can shift and change is if those of us are talking about it. And policy makers and business leaders can make a difference around this. And for African-Americans to make sure that we are taking all of the measures to be safe and not get confused by anything that’s happening in the political space or the mixed information that one hears. How to make sure that you’re discerning and you’re keeping yourself safe, as well as your family. That’s the kind of thing that has compelled me to do this. And I’m going to try to continue to do this as much as possible. At the same time, doing a lot of charity work as much as possible as well, because at the end of the day, as Larry Bacow recently wrote in a letter that he shared with the world—I think he called it “I Believe”—he ended the letter by saying, “To whom much is given, much is expected.” And I feel that, when it comes to what Covid is doing, the devastation of Covid, we all have to step up and do something about it, particularly those of us who can.

Kerr: Tsedal, that was very powerful, and I’m guessing most of our listeners would know that Larry Bacow is the president of Harvard, but let me add that in for those that might not. In this work, is there one or two key steps that you want to come back to over and over again as the ways to help improve racial justice here and now?

Neeley: I think, first and foremost, is we have to make sure that we’re honest about our racial makeup in our environments. And one of the things that—in fact, Deval Patrick and I talk about and you’ll hear about—is the hiring and retention of top-level professionals in organizations. That’s really important—to have people at the table who can contribute to and help make decisions that impact African-Americans. At the same time, one of our colleagues, Frances Frei, who also has this magnificent book called Unleashed, always talks about that if you make life better for any group, women and people of color, you actually make life better for every group. And I truly believe that. So the hiring and retention of top-level executives, African-American executives. And so the big thing with that, Bill, is people say, “Well, we have a pipeline problem. That’s really hard to do.” And I’ve been talking about the fact that the pipeline problem is a fallacy. If you want to find outstanding Black and brown executives, you ask the Black and brown executives or others where to find them. We know where they are. So the pipeline problem is not a real problem. You just have to know where to look. In today’s day and age, that’s not a reason not to have an environment that reflects the diversity that you want to reflect. That’s a big, big way to make a difference toward racial justice. And then the second thing is to make sure that you’ve created an environment where there’s the psychological safety and the culture where everyone can thrive and is informed, and is also working toward the type of diversity that you seek. If there are many pockets inside of your organization that are working against a diverse environment, then you won’t be successful in the long term to sustain the type of racial justice that you want, and even the kind of diversity that you want in your organization. And finally, I’ll say this, the work of racial justice—or even the work for all of us in business and government—is eternal. It’s never going to end. It’s not one of those things where one day we’re going to achieve it and be done. This is the kind of thing that we’re going to have to work on over and over and over again. And we’re going to have to work on it eternally. Why? Because the foundations that have led to the inequities that we’re dealing with today will not go away. And all of the prejudices and all of the racial challenges that we face will never go away. So we need to be prepared to work on these issues for always. And as long as we don’t, we’ll never be able to make inroads into them. There’s no such thing as “We’re done now.”

Kerr: Tsedal, thank you so much for joining us today. Tsedal Neeley is the Professor at Harvard Business School for organizational behavior and leadership. She knows quite a bit about remote work and also as we’ve just been discussing about the move toward improving racial justice. Tsedal, thanks so much for joining us today.

Neeley: Thank you so much for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.

Kerr: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.