The pandemic has hastened a rise in remote working for knowledge-based organizations. This has notable benefits: Companies can save on real estate costs, hire and utilize talent globally, mitigate immigration issues, and experience productivity gains, while workers can enjoy geographic flexibility. At the same time, concerns include how to communicate across time zones, share knowledge that isn’t yet codified, socialize virtually and prevent professional isolation, protect client data, and avoid slacking. Research into work-from-anywhere (WFA) organizations and groups that include the United States Patent and Trademark Office, Tata Consultancy Services, and GitLab (the world’s largest all-remote company) highlights best practices and can help leaders decide whether remote work is right for their organizations.
An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work‐from‐anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work‐from‐home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work‐from‐anywhere (WFA) programs offer both temporal and geographic flexibility. WFA should be viewed as a nonpecuniary benefit likely to be preferred by workers who would derive greater utility by moving from their current geographic location to their preferred location. We study the effects of WFA on productivity at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and exploit a natural experiment in which the implementation of WFA was driven by negotiations between managers and the patent examiners' union, leading to exogeneity in the timing of individual examiners' transition from a work‐from‐home to a work‐from‐anywhere program. This transition resulted in a 4.4% increase in output without affecting the incidence of rework. We also report results related to a plausible mechanism: an increase in observable effort as the worker transitions from a WFH to a WFA program. We employ illustrative field interviews, micro‐data on locations, and machine learning analysis to shed further light on geographic flexibility, and summarize worker, firm, and economy‐wide implications of provisioning WFA.
The pandemic may be winding down, but that doesn’t mean we’ll return to full-time commuting and packed office buildings. The greatest accidental experiment in the history of labor has lessons to teach us about productivity, flexibility, and even reversing the brain drain. But don’t buy another dozen pairs of sweatpants just yet.
While working from home (WFH) has become relatively commonplace, a new form of remote work is emerging: working from anywhere (WFA), in which employees can live and work where they choose. Managers often worry about remote employees working less, or multitasking, mixing personal responsibilities with work. There are also concerns that allowing employees to work from anywhere could decrease communication and collaboration among coworkers. A new study looked at the effects of a work-from-anywhere program initiated in 2012 among patent examiners at the U.S. Patent & Trade Office (USPTO). Researchers analyzed productivity data for patent examiners who switched from work-from-home work conditions to the WFA program. Their results indicate that examiners’ work output increased by 4.4% after transition to WFA, with no significant increase in rework.
Firm-induced migration typically entails firms relocating workers to fill value-creating positions at destination locations. But such relocated workers are often exposed to external employment opportunities at their destinations, possibly triggering turnover. We conceptualize the firm-induced migration path, consisting of the relocated workers’ place of origin and destination, as relevant in determining worker performance and turnover post-relocation. Using a unique dataset from a large Indian technology firm that hires talent from both large cities and smaller towns, we document robust econometric patterns by exploiting the firm’s randomized assignment of workers to production centers across the country. These production centers are located in the largest technology cluster in India (Bangalore), smaller technology clusters, and non-cluster locations. We find that the firm-induced migration path shapes both worker performance and turnover. Compared to workers from large cities, workers from smaller towns achieve higher performance when relocated to Bangalore than to other production centers, but are also more likely to join competing firms. Fine-grained data on employment and human-capital-augmentation opportunities at workers’ destination locations, and on socioeconomic conditions in workers’ places of origin, help us rule in an abductive explanation: across firm-induced migration paths, differences in external labor-market opportunities between workers’ places of origin and their destinations, as well as intrafirm skill-development opportunities at the destination, are related to heterogeneous human-capital outcomes.
We study whether, when, and how better connectivity through nonstop flights leads to positive innovation outcomes for firms in the global context. Using unique data of all flights emanating from 5,015 airports around the globe from 2005 to 2015 and exploiting a regression discontinuity framework, we report that a 10% increase in nonstop flights between two locations leads to a 3.4% increase in citations and a 1.4% increase in the production of collaborative patents between those locations. This effect is driven primarily by firms, as opposed to by academic institutions. We further study the characteristics of firms and firm locations that are salient to the relation between nonstop flights and innovation outcomes across countries. Using a gravity model, we posit and find that the positive effect of nonstop flights on innovation is stronger for firms and subsidiaries with greater innovation mass (e.g., stocks of inventors and R&D spending), for firms and subsidiaries located in innovation hubs or in countries that are deemed technology leaders, and for firm and subsidiaries that are separated by large cultural or temporal distance.
Prior research has established a relation between intra-firm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations. The literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship: the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas that occurs because of intra-firm mobility. But a second mechanism may also be at work: intra-firm mobility might help distant employees secure access to resources for their innovative projects. Using unique data on travel, employment, and patenting for 1,315 inventors at the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 50 multinational, I find that intra-firm mobility in the form of short-duration business trips from a distant R&D location to headquarters is positively related to higher subsequent patenting at the individual level. I also find mobility immediately prior to meetings at which R&D funds are most likely to be disbursed to be related to higher subsequent patenting. This study sheds new light on how intra-firm mobility and possible face-to-face interactions with those who allocate resources might affect innovation outcomes and the matching of resources to individuals within a distributed organization.
Ethnic migrant inventors may differ from locals in terms of the knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions. Using a unique dataset of Chinese and Indian herbal patents filed in the United States, we find that an increase in the supply of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors increases the rate of codification of herbal knowledge at U.S. assignees by 4.5 percent. Our identification comes from an exogenous shock to the quota of H1B visas and from a list of entities exempted from the shock. We also find that ethnic migrant inventors are more likely to engage in reuse of their prior knowledge, whereas knowledge recombination is more likely to be pursued by teams comprising inventors from other ethnic backgrounds.
The Role of Workplace Context in Shaping Career Advancement and Human-Capital Development
We develop and test predictions on how early-career challenges arising from the workplace context affect short- and long-term career advancement of individuals. Typically an organization’s decision to deploy a manager to one of several possible contexts is endogenous to unobservable factors, and selection makes it challenging to disentangle the effect of workplace context on individual career advancement. We work around this problem by studying an organization, the Indian Administrative Services, which deploys entry-level managers quasi-randomly across India. We find that managers deployed to more challenging contexts early in their careers experience faster career advancement in the short term. We present suggestive evidence that this is because challenging contexts provide managers more opportunities to develop skills (‘crucible experiences’), and a greater motivation to relocate out of the challenging context. We also find that managers deployed to a challenging context early in their careers continue to experience faster advancement in the long term, suggesting that initial deployment to a challenging context is associated with human capital development. Managers initially deployed to more challenging contexts were not, however, more likely to break into the upper echelons of the organization
We investigate the relationship between the presence of migrant inventors and the dynamics of innovation in the migrants’ receiving countries. We find that countries are 25 to 60% more likely to gain advantage in patenting in certain technologies given a twofold increase in the number of foreign inventors from other nations that specialize in those same technologies. For the average country in our sample, this number corresponds to only 25 inventors and a standard deviation of 135. We deal with endogeneity concerns by using historical migration networks to instrument for stocks of migrant inventors. Our results generalize the evidence of previous studies that show how migrant inventors “import” knowledge from their home countries, which translates into higher patenting in the receiving countries. We interpret these results as tangible evidence of migrants facilitating the technology-specific diffusion of knowledge across nations.
A natural experiment of knowledge production by local workers reporting to return
migrants
I study whether return migrants facilitate knowledge production by local employees working for them at geographically distant research and development (R&D) locations. Using unique personnel and patenting data for 1315 employees at the Indian R&D center of a Fortune 500 technology firm, I exploit a natural experiment where the assignment of managers for newly hired college graduates is mandated by rigid HR rules and is uncorrelated to observable characteristics of the graduates. Given this assignment protocol, I find that local employees with returnee managers file disproportionately more US patents. I also find some evidence that return migrants act as a ‘bridge’ to transfer knowledge from the MNE headquarters to the local employees working for them.
Many workers now have the ability to work remotely. And cities across the country are trying to lure these workers with cash and other perks.
Hybrid work refers to a spectrum of flexible work arrangements in which an employee’s work location and/or hours are not strictly standardised.
Conventional wisdom suggests that hybrid work pertains only to location—if an individual is working in-person at the office, factory or some other place. This emphasis on location is evident in recent reports published by the International Labor Organisation and the World Economic Forum.
Dr Choudhury’s research focuses on the future of work, especially its changing geography. In particular, he studies the impacts of geographic mobility for workers, with an emphasis on remote work practices such as “work from anywhere” and “all-remote”.Episode 22: Raj Choudhury Sees a Future Where You Don’t Have to Move Your Family for
a Job
The Distributed Podcast is an in-depth conversation about the future of work — with the companies and leaders driving it. Hosted by Co-Founder of WordPress and CEO of Automattic Matt Mullenweg. Episode 22 features Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School. He studies the future of work — specifically the changing geography of work.
Although the Covid-19 crisis has halted travel in recent months, geographic mobility has become critical for managers and knowledge workers hoping to advance in today’s globalized economy, and that trend is unlikely to reverse. Assignments far from headquarters can pay off financially and can boost your career by improving your problem-solving and leadership skills and building your networks. Yet they also have constraints and costs. Anyone contemplating such a move should think through its full implications first.
Research on people in a variety of organizations around the world—from Indian bureaucrats to American consultants—suggests some common principles for getting the most out of relocations: (1) Make moves early in your career, when hurdles are usually lower and you can apply the learning over many more years of work. (2) Step out of your comfort zone to stretch your abilities. (3) Find creative workarounds for constraints. (4) To minimize the psychological costs, find ways to stay connected to home. (5) Time your trips to HQ strategically, and plan the next step right from the start.
As organizations across the United States wrestle with post-COVID office policies, researchers at Harvard Business School (HBS) present evidence for an optimally productive blended office-and-home schedule. Their findings may help managers cope with the shift to remote work that is transforming the professional landscape.
