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Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(687)
- News (95)
- Research (511)
- Events (4)
- Multimedia (3)
- Faculty Publications (148)
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- 22 Sep 2010
- Working Paper Summaries
The Task and Temporal Microstructure of Productivity: Evidence from Japanese Financial Services
- 29 Jul 2019
- Research & Ideas
How Companies Benefit When Employees Work Remotely
needed to fully understand the implications of remote work in more collaborative settings. Looking ahead As some companies move to adopt broader telecommute policies, others such as Yahoo! have publicly retreated from allowing workers to... View Details
Keywords: by Kristen Senz
- 2010
- Working Paper
Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank
By: Bradley R. Staats and Francesca Gino
Sustaining operational productivity in the completion of repetitive tasks is critical to many organizations' success. Yet research points to two different work-design related strategies for accomplishing this goal: specialization to capture the benefits of repetition... View Details
Keywords: Employees; Working Conditions; Service Delivery; Performance Productivity; Financial Services Industry; Japan
Staats, Bradley R., and Francesca Gino. "Specialization and Variety in Repetitive Tasks: Evidence from a Japanese Bank." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 11-015, August 2010. (Revised May 2011.)
- Forthcoming
- Article
Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis and Kyle Schirmann
This paper reports causal evidence on how the extent of hybrid work—the number of days worked from home relative to days worked from office—affects employee attitudes and performance. Workers who spent around two days in the office each week on average self-reported... View Details
Choudhury, Prithwiraj, Tarun Khanna, Christos A. Makridis, and Kyle Schirmann. "Is Hybrid Work the Best of Both Worlds? Evidence from a Field Experiment." Review of Economics and Statistics (forthcoming). (Pre-published online February 9, 2024.)
- 28 Aug 2023
- Research & Ideas
How Workplace Wellness Programs Can Give Employees the Energy Boost They Need
While companies may tout their wellness programs as a way of investing in their employees’ well-being, many are overly focused on reducing healthcare costs, so they tend to offer step challenges and gym discounts that workers don’t have... View Details
Keywords: by Hise Gibson
- 16 Nov 2021
- HBS Case
How a Company Made Employees So Miserable, They Killed Themselves
attendance and behavior, asked some workers to reapply for their jobs, and gave what seemed like unmanageable workloads to others. Some employees returned from vacation to find that a company car, badge, or desk had been stripped from... View Details
Keywords: by Michael Blanding
- 17 Sep 2012
- Research & Ideas
Blue Skies, Distractions Arise: How Weather Affects Productivity
Autumn has sprung, and the cold, dreary days of winter are around the corner. But take heart, wistful sun lovers. It turns out that lousy weather is actually good for business operations. A new research paper reports that a decrease in sunny weather is directly related... View Details
Keywords: by Carmen Nobel
- December 2015
- Background Note
Incentive Systems
By: Brian J. Hall
This note serves as a supplement to any course on incentive design within organizations. The note focuses on the principal difficulties in designing incentive systems, including the tradeoff between objective and subjective performance metrics, how to design incentive... View Details
Keywords: Organizational Strategy; Compensation and Benefits; Motivation and Incentives; Performance Evaluation; Strategy
Hall, Brian J. "Incentive Systems." Harvard Business School Background Note 916-029, December 2015.
- 22 Oct 2021
- Research & Ideas
Want Hybrid Work to Succeed? Trust, Don’t Track, Employees
workers over the past several months, Neeley says managers should keep three things in mind as they develop long-term plans for hybrid work. 1. Trust in employee autonomy While working from home, employees have enjoyed an unprecedented... View Details
Keywords: by Michael Blanding
- 16 May 2023
- HBS Case
How KKR Got More by Giving Ownership to the Factory Floor: ‘My Kids Are Going to College!’
workers like his father a share of the profits and get them to think like owners. The case studies, written by HBS Professor Dennis Campbell and assistant professor Ethan Rouen, describe the sea change in motivation that happens when... View Details
Keywords: by Avery Forman
- 27 Feb 2023
- Research & Ideas
How One Late Employee Can Hurt Your Business: Data from 25 Million Timecards
deviations on the performance of individual stores in a new study. “One employee being late or absent can negatively affect not only store operations, but also their coworkers by making them stay to make up for the lost labor.” Ananth... View Details
- May 2012
- Article
Incentive Schemes, Sorting and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence
By: Ian Larkin and Stephen Leider
We investigate how the convexity of a firm's incentives interacts with worker overconfidence to affect sorting decisions and performance. We demonstrate experimentally that overconfident employees are more likely to sort into a non-linear incentive scheme over a linear... View Details
Keywords: Motivation and Incentives; Performance; Behavior; Prejudice and Bias; Decisions; Employees; Wages
Larkin, Ian, and Stephen Leider. "Incentive Schemes, Sorting and Behavioral Biases of Employees: Experimental Evidence." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics 4, no. 2 (May 2012).
- 29 Nov 2021
- Research & Ideas
How Bonuses Get Employees to Choose Work Over Family
pay—and that has the potential to lay the groundwork for an overworked, unhappy existence, according to research by Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor in Harvard Business School’s Negotiation, Organizations, and Markets Unit. The research shows that View Details
Keywords: by Rachel Kim Raczka
- 24 Aug 2020
- Research & Ideas
How Much Will Remote Work Continue After the Pandemic?
Are remote workers less productive? While past research suggests that many American workers could successfully perform their jobs from outside the office, companies have been... View Details
Keywords: by Kristen Senz
- 03 Nov 2015
- First Look
November 3, 2015
Workers By: Housman, Michael, and Dylan Minor Abstract—While there has been a lot of research on finding and developing top performers in the workplace, less attention has been paid to the question of how to... View Details
Keywords: Sean Silverthorne
- 01 Nov 2022
- Research & Ideas
A Penny for Your Thoughts? For Big-Picture Ideas, the Right Pay Structure Matters
to focus employees on a particular task and base their pay on the workers’ performance need to be aware of the potential tradeoff when it comes to the willingness of workers to develop innovative ideas, she... View Details
Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis
- 2025
- Working Paper
Training Within Firms
By: Brayan Diaz, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun and Jorge Tamayo
Training investments are essential for improving worker and firm productivity, yet their
implementation is often hindered by low participation rates and insufficient worker engagement.
This study uses data from three firms–a car manufacturer, a quick-service... View Details
Keywords: Productivity; Absenteeism; Middle Managers; Training; Management Practices and Processes; Performance Productivity; Employees
Diaz, Brayan, Andrea Neyra-Nazarrett, Julian Ramirez, Raffaella Sadun, and Jorge Tamayo. "Training Within Firms." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 25-045, April 2025.
- 06 Jun 2018
- Research & Ideas
Cut Salaries or Cut People? The Best Way to Survive a Downturn
eugeniek Companies looking to shed costs in an economic downturn rarely cut compensation—typically, they slash jobs instead. New research confirms the wisdom of that decision. The study concludes that when a company cuts employee pay the best View Details
Keywords: by Rachel Layne
- October 2013 (Revised November 2021)
- Case
Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American (A)
By: Gautam Mukunda, Lisa Mazzanti and Aldo Sesia
In 2007, Cynthia Carroll, the newly-appointed chief executive of mining giant Anglo American, was considering shutting down mines in South Africa for safety reasons, namely worker fatalities. No company had ever done so before. Carroll felt that operating a company... View Details
Keywords: Culture; Leadership; Gender; Safety; Working Conditions; Business Exit or Shutdown; Organizational Culture; Change Management; Mining; Mining Industry; South Africa
Mukunda, Gautam, Lisa Mazzanti, and Aldo Sesia. "Cynthia Carroll at Anglo American (A)." Harvard Business School Case 414-019, October 2013. (Revised November 2021.)
- May 2022
- Article
The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns
By: Evan DeFilippis, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer and Raffaella Sadun
We explore the impact of COVID-19 on employees’ digital communication patterns through an event study of lockdowns in 16 large metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Using de-identified, aggregated meeting and email meta-data from 3,143,270... View Details
Keywords: Meetings; Email; COVID-19 Pandemic; Communication Technology; Health Pandemics; Time Management
DeFilippis, Evan, Stephen Michael Impink, Madison Singell, Jeff Polzer, and Raffaella Sadun. "The Impact of COVID-19 on Digital Communication Patterns." Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 9, no. 180 (May 2022).