Building Successful Hybrid Teams (Back to Work, Better) | HBR IdeaCast

[upbeat music] Welcome to the HBR Idea Cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Curt Nickisch. [upbeat music] The sudden shock to the workplace of the COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to transition to remote work. They had to quickly figure out how to function well amid a lot of uncertainty. And now many of them are transitioning back to more in-person work, and they're often trying to blend some old and new ways of working as they move forward. For employees who've been through this, it's a lot to deal with. Many people feel out of sync or even out of sight. They want to build trust with their coworkers, they want to maintain connections, but they also wanna keep a proper work-life balance. Meanwhile, managers wanna know how to lead teams effectively within this combination of in-person and remote work. They wanna help their employees with this too. Today's guest studies remote and global work, and she's here to help us navigate the hybrid work that seems to be here for the foreseeable future. Tsedal Neeley is a professor at Harvard Business School. She's also the author of the book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere. Tsedal, it's great to have you back on the show.

It's so great to be with you, Curt.

We spoke to you over a year ago, just as the pandemic was beginning to take hold and people were scrambling to figure out how to navigate working from home. How are things different today? What have we learned from this experience?

How vividly I remember that time when we were having conversations around will remote work work? And here we are today, where most companies have not only discovered that remote work works, productivity has in fact increased for most, uh, organizations. And now, because remote work has become a fundamental part of how they achieve their goals and how employees want to move forward, today people are asking, "We want some kind of flexibility in our, uh, work repertoire." So we've learned we can achieve a lot without being in the same physical space. We've learned that you can actually have a work-life flexibility approach where people segment their days i- in ways that's effective for them personally as well as professionally. We've also learned how to use digital tools in ways that we'd never fathomed before this time. And all of this is setting us up for this future. Some people call it hybrid, some people call it dynamic work environments, but it's a future that incorporates some remote, some in person, uh, for most, and, uh, for many, uh, others, full-time remote.

Are you definitely in the camp that this new s- system, new flexibility is here to stay?

I am. Uh, and the reason for that is because the historical arguments and concerns around can you have a productive workforce without having everyone in the same space, uh, and having fears and concerns that you can, have been eradicated. We have full evidence that you can have an organization with people, uh, not co-located, uh, be quite effective. And the second thing is that people have tasted what their lives can be without the commutes, without the challenges of figuring out their work and non-work responsibilities. People have tasted the ability