I predict that the idea of hybrid work will expand from the rigid definition of “being in-person at a company office two days a week”. My research suggests that teams are innovating on both where to meet and when to meet. The downtown office building will be only one of the spaces where teams can meet for in-person work. My research suggests that work-from-anywhere (WFA) teams are meeting at a multiplicity of places including at company offsites, suburban locations and around trade conferences. In addition to being flexible on where to meet, teams are also experimenting on how frequently they should meet for optimum outcomes. Many of the teams I study have developed a ritual of being in-person together for a few days once a month or even once a quarter. My longstanding research, has documented how even brief periods of being in-person together help individuals innovate, especially when they meet team members from different time-zones or different cultures. Long before the pandemic, I had documented that the timing of travel and being in-person is also important: it really helps to be in-person with senior leaders who allocate budget immediately prior to budget allocation meetings. In sum, moving from a rigid version of hybrid (two or three days every week in a downtown office) to more flexible forms of hybrid (meet at offsite/suburbs/client conferences, monthly or quarterly) will help individuals work-from-anywhere, companies hire-from-anywhere and will further the proliferation of all-remote firms.
Lumry Family Associate Professor
About
Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury is the Lumry Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. He was an Assistant Professor at Wharton prior to joining Harvard. He studies the Future of Work, especially the changing Geography of Work. He made the business case for ‘Work-from-anywhere’ in a 2019 article and is the author of the article, ‘Our work-from-anywhere future’, a Finalist for the 2020 Harvard Business Review McKinsey Award. In 2023, Forbes included him in the Future of Work-50 list.
His research has been cited by BBC, Bloomberg Businessweek, CNBC, NPR All Things Considered, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Economist, Harvard Business Review, The Independent, The World Economic Forum, Forbes, Yahoo! Finance, Freakonomics, WIRED, Axios, Nikkei Asian Review, Inc. India Today Television, NDTV among several other outlets. He earned his Doctorate from Harvard. Prior to academia, he worked at McKinsey & Company. He has advised organizations as diverse as Google, Atlassian, ITC, Young Presidents Organization, Deloitte, Cactus, the Council on Foreign Relations, the British Parliament and the United Nations, on the Future of Work.
