Is the World YOUR Office? The Work From Anywhere Workforce Trend You Just May Want to Adopt

0:00 The topics and opinions express in the following show are solely those of the hosts and their guests and not those of W FOURCY Radio. It's employees are affiliates. We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services, or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability explicit or implies shall be extended to W FOURCY Radio or its employees are affiliates. Any questions or comments should be directed to those show hosts. Thank you for choosing W FOURCY Radio. What's working on Purpose? Anyway? Each week we ponder the answer to this question. People ache for meaning and purpose at work, to contribute their talents passionately and know their lives really matter. They crave being part of an organization that inspires them and helps them grow into realizing their highest potential. Business can be such a force for good in the world, elevating humanity. In our program, we provide guidance and inspiration to help usher in this world we all want working on Purpose. Now here's your host, doctor Elise Cortes.

1:04 Welcome back to the Working and Purpose Program, which has been brought to you with passion and pride since February of twenty fifteen. Thanks for tuning in this week. Great to have you. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes. If we've not met before and you don't know me, I'm a workforce advisor, organizational psychologist, management consultant, logo therapist, speaker and author. My team and I at Gustri and I help companies to enliven and fortify their operations by building a dynamic, high performance culture, inspirational leadership, and nurturing managers activated by meaning and purpose. Many organizations are not aware of just how critical it is to invest in developing their leaders and managers not just for their own effectiveness, but also to avoid burnout and keep them fulfilled. And you do know that inspired employees outperform their satisfied peers by factor of two point twenty five to one. In other words, inspiration is good for the bottom line. You can learn more about us and how we can work together at Gusto dashnow dot com or my personal website at Leiscortes dot com. Getting into today's program, we have with us doctor Prithburra Chowdhry, a globally recognized expert on the future of work, serving on the faculties at Wharton and Harvard Business School for over a decade. He studies how technology is shifting wherever we work and how we work.

2:12 He has pioneered research on the change in geography of work and how work from anywhere affects workers, organizations, communities, and smaller towns. He also studies the impact of AI and organizations and how AI and automation can help both desk workers and desk desk list workers work from anywhere. His book, The World Is Your Office, How Work from Anywhere Boosts talent, productivity, and innovation, which we're talking about today, was published by Harvard Business Press in April twenty twenty five and became a national bestseller in the United States. He joined us today from Boston, where he has been residing. He'll soon be relocating to London, where I have to come and see him. Raj, Welcome to Working on Purpose.

2:55 Thanks for having me. It's wonderful to have you. And when I first all your book and I reached out to you, I said, you've got to come on and talk to me about this, because you know, as somebody who is helping organizations steward their culture, their leadership, and being in the middle of all these conversations about this forced return to office, I was like, I've got to hear what this man has to say. So thank you very much for coming on. I devoured your book. We have a shorter episode and I want to get through as many topics as we possibly can. I just want to start with the promise of your book, Raj, and as somebody who would love I live in Dallas, I would love to work from Greece and Italy and other places and such, I want to just start with this idea of the war. You know, you're moving past the idea of work from anywhere, not just a workforce perk, but as a transformational shift. Can we start with that idea?

3:48 Sure? Absolutely so. I'd like I described in the book. Work from anywhere is the idea that I've been working on for over it, you know, many many years now close to a decade. And work from anywhere is not the same as work from home. So work from anywhere, as I say this twice and every session that I attend, work from anywhere is not the same as work from home. Work from anywhere is about having the freedom to choose where to live. So which city with state, which region, sometimes even which country, and then once you've chosen that location, you could be working from home, you could be working from a co working space, you could be working from a small satellite office of the company. All of that is worked from anywhere. And as I discussed in the book, this is a win win. It's good for the worker, it's good for the organization, and now we know enough about how to work from anywhere, we also have a solid repertoire of best practices.

4:51 You know, when the COVID nineteen pendem was going down, I was also getting very interested in how people were going inward, looking at what do they want from their lives and their work, And I wrote about that too in a couple of my books, and I became very fascinated with the connection of people's work to themselves in their lives. Where did you start to get fascinated with this idea of working from anywhere? Yeah, So I've been a scholar of geography, so I've studied this question about how do firms access talent that's living far away, distant talent. And the premise there was that, you know, we know that talent is everywhere, but opportunities are not and so the dominant way firms have managed to access distant talent is by forcing talent to relocate.

5:42 You pack your bags and you move from the West coast to the East coast, or from China to the US, or from Australia to India or whatnot. And that's worked for firms for many, many, many years, but it has also created lots of problems for both companies and workers. Think about regulation, think about licensing, occupational licensing things, think about visas. Think about leaving your parents back home and moving seven thousand miles and you can't now take care of them. And so, as I was studying migration and documenting very meticulously both the benefits of migration, I also realized that migration and relocation has lots of challenges. And about twenty fifteen I then started thinking, why is there not an alternate model instead of having people move? Why can't companies let the work move to places that people want to live in? And I call that work from anywhere.

6:45 It's just yummy, Raj, It's just yummy. Okay. I know you talk about how this idea is really something that leaders need to embrace. So let's maybe situate next some of the benefits for companies. As I say, I'm just fascinating with these mandates of work, you know, return forced one hundred percent work from the office that I see large organizations trying to erect. And so you talk about, of course this notion that talent without borders, and so now organizations have the opportunity to it to access all kinds of talent they wouldn't otherwise have any access to. Yes, and you've already stated the main reason. So the main reason to embrace work from anywhere as a leader is work from anywhere allows companies to hire from anywhere, So you dramatically expand your labor market access. So now you can even though you're in the East Coast, you can hire from the West Coast. You can hire from the Heartland, you can hire from Canada, you can hire from Mexico. You can even go and hire from a different continent if you want to do that. There are other and that kind of hiring does two things. It expands the talent pool. It gives you access to more diverse talent, So diversity based on gender, based on ethnicity, based on geographic region. And we know that diverse talent leads to better innovation. I think that's been established in the research community for decades now. The second thing that Work from Anywhere does is it converts real estate cost

8:18 into a variable cost. So now you don't have to commit to a thirty year lease or building a huge building that's fifty percent occupied all the time. Now for Work from Anywhere, teams they need to meet. That's very, very important, and in the book I stress that a lot that intentional in person is very important. But you can now rent the real estate when you need it. You can hire a coworking space when the teams want to meet. So you're converting real estate into a utility, just like electricity or water, and that saves a lot of money for companies if it's done well. And they could also be some productivity benefits, which I document in both my research and the book. But again to summarize, the main reason is accessing talent beyond one single geographic location.

9:10 I'm convinced, of course. However, I do know that chief financial officers and chief human resource officers can be really skeptical in part because they worry about managing costs or especially losing connection to workers. Now I know, you go into detail about how to address that. But because people haven't read the book yet like I have, can you say a bit about how your research overcomes the turnover and organizational performance issues. So, first of all, work from anywhere, as I've shown in my research, leads to luring attrition because now that you are allowing people to live, they want to live. They are more happier employees, the work life balance is much better, and especially for women, this is the game changer.

9:54 So I'll just mentioned a couple of things. So we know for at least three decades now in the search community that in dual career couples, the woman disproportionately praise pays a price because of geography, and it doesn't have to be a new job. So imagine a woman working in a large company in Boston if the next promotion means that she has to move to San Francisco. But the research shows is that in many cases the person is not able to move because the partner or sometimes even the kids don't want to move. So geography becomes a spanner in the wheel in career progression. Work from Anywhere solves that problem. Now both men and women can take a promotion without moving, without relocating. That's the first part.

10:41 Think about military spouses they've had no career continuity whatsoever, or the spouses of diplomats, same problem. Work from Anywhere solves that problem. And what my research shows is that these groups of workers become incredibly low and stay longer and work harder and a're more productive under a work from Anywhere scenario. And then in the book and I can go deeper, alis like there are many ways to build connection, but the most important idea is to bring people together at some frequency that works best for the team. So for some teams, it could be weekly meetings. For some teams, it could be monthly meetings. For other teams could it could even mean a quarterly retreat. But when the team is together, the only thing that people are doing is socializing. So no one is sitting in the corridor wearing headphones getting on zoom, no one is sitting in the corner office working on Excel. For that week or those three four days, you are spending it with the team in a very deep, meaningful way. And that's the best way to build connection.

11:51 I believe, Oh yeah, quality experiences totally and I really appreciate this is why I get so excited about your research and your work, Raj, is that you're giving you your really extending the opportunity for more humans across the planet to participate in the world of work that in a way that works on their terms, and therefore you're actually helping people to realize more of their potential. And I could get behind that every day all day long. Okay, So speaking of that, we got to talk next about some of the ways that working from home helps human and social impact really really interesting things. You already talked a bit about how it helps empower people and families to stay together and to be able to have more of what they want from their respective lives, but then you also talk about rebalancing economic geography, and I was really interested. You do talk about the research that Suhani Jalada and also Lisa Hoe have been doing which has really speaking to elevating employment opportunities for women in countries and communities where the social and religious norms are stacked against them. So working from home opens that for them, and I think that's really compelling. So if we could talk a little bit about the human and social impact and working from home affords.

13:01 Yeah, sure, But first of all, you know that study is a work from home study, which I respect my book in my research mostly is about work from anywhere. It's about choosing the geography. The same principles apply. So what they find in their research is in certain communities. So, first of all, their main motivation is that in India, it is really surprising that a pretty progressive country with a very vibrant democracy has a really a bimissile female labor rate participation, So it's really really low. And one of the reasons they argue it's low is that in many communities in India, women are not expected to socially because of the family norms, step out and be working.

13:48 And so now what this remote work option does is it alleviates this problem. And what they find fascinatingly is that in many cases, the family doesn't even know the woman is working. I think they're playing some sort of you know, working on some app on their phone, right, But the fact that they are now participating in some economic activity for which they're getting paid, it's something that you know, it's opening up a new whole world for these women. Yeah, and so I think and I've seen replications of this study in Africa. Now the same issue there. But you know, just on that theme, the one thing we didn't talk about is people with neurodiverse conditions or disabilities, right, And you know, the research has shown that these people don't want to live in a bustling city and commute every day. They would much prefer live in a smaller town where they have access to their amenities. Work from Anywhere opens up the door of employment to them. So I can keep going on and on and on about how this is inclusive and how it allows multiple people to participate in the labor force.

14:55 Love your passion. Let's grab a quick break on that note. I'm your host doctor really scored. Has we've been on the air where doctor Perthraraj Childry. He goes by Raj, who, while serving on the faculties of Wharton and Harvard Business Schools for over a decade, has been studying how technology is shifting where we work and how we work, as well as the impact of AI on organizations and how a on automation can help both desk workers and desk list workers work from anywhere. We've been talking so far about the idea behind work from how working from anywhere and also its benefits to companies as well as its impact on families and socially as well. After the break, we're going to talk about really how leaders can embrace implementation in the future of work. We'll be right back.

15:53 Doctor Release Courts has as a management consultant specializing in meaning and purpose. An inspirational speaker and author, she helps companies visioneer for greater purpose among stakeholders and develop purpose inspired leadership and meaning infuse cultures that elevate fulfillment, performance, and commitment within the workforce. To learn more or to invite Elise to speak to your organization, please visit her at elisecortes dot com. Let's talk about how to get your employees working on purpose. This is working on Purpose with doctor Elise Cortes. To reach our program today or to open a conversation with Elise, send an email to Alise A Lisee at eliscortes dot com. Now back to working on Purpose.

16:45 Thanks for stating with us, and welcome back to working on Purpose. I'm your host, doctor Elise Cortes, as I also am dedicated to help them create a world where organizations thrive because they're people thrive. They're led by inspirational leaders that help them and find them, contribute their greatness, and we do business a better the world. I keep researching and writing my own books, so one of my latest came out. It's called The Great Revitalization. How activating meaning and purpose can radically in life in your business. I wrote to help leaders better understand the lay of today's discerning and diverse workforce and what they can do to provide something that will make them want to come to work for them, and then provide twenty two best projects to equip you to be able to inculcate that. You can find my books on Amazon or my personal site at least Cortes dot com if you are now just joining us. My guest is Prith Barrage Chowdri He's the author of the World is Your Office How work from anywhere boost talent, productivity and innovation. So I want to talk next here if we can raj about how we can implement this and how leaders can embrace it, because I do know there are fears out there, and we certainly know right out of the gate we do need some leaders to be able to embrace trust and allow for and unleash the autonomy. And I know that that is a major issue for many organizations. And so can we talk a little bit about what you recommend for leaders to either develop in terms of their competencies their behaviors to be able to embrace this idea, especially around trust and autonomy.

18:06 Yes, I'll just summarize, you know, and then the book gives a chapter by chapter detail on all of us. So the first thing that you know I write about in the book is that this cannot be a one size fits all for the whole company. The unit of analysis should not be the company and shouldn't be the person either. The right unit of analysis is the team. So the team should have freedom to choose what I call among three forms of hybrid. So what I try to do in the book is expand our imagination about what hybrid is. What most people call hybrid, I call it weekly hybrid, where the team is meeting every week, so the frequency of meeting is weekly. In the book, I write about two other forms of hybrid, which I call monthly hybrid and quarterly hybrid. So in a monthly hybrid model, the team working from anywhere for three weeks every month, and for one week they're coming together for three or four days. So imagine living in Connecticut for the whole month, and then you are taking the train or driving down to New York City to meet the team in the fourth week every month for three days, and then you get back to your home in Connecticut.

19:19 So that's monthly hybrid. And the European Central Bank, one of the largest federal banks in the world, is now practicing monthly hybrid. They let their bankers live anywhere in the EU for about one hundred ten days a year, and the condition is that you have to meet your team once every month for a few days. The other form is the quarterly hybrid model, where now you're living anywhere in the country or sometimes even anywhere in the world, and you are coming together once a quarter for a retreat. And what I do in the book is I say, once the team has chosen whether to practice weekly, month or quarterly hybrid, there are a set of management practices that you need to master, so I can go through all of them. But if you think about a weekly team, the most important practice is scheduling. Because when a company says come to the office three days or two days, if part of the team is coming Monday Tuesday and part of the team is coming Thursday Friday. Then the whole team is never together. You need to get your schedules aligned. And similarly for monthly and quarterly hybrid you need to do some other management practices Differently. You have to codify knowledge, you have to participate in virtual water coolers, you have to get the off site planned really really well.

20:43 So in the book, I say the first choice is choose among the three hybrid models, and based on that recipe book I layout. Then you have to you know what management practices you need to master as a team. How would you be able to start to address I've seen this all the time, Raj, this idea of managing my present smith. If I see you, I think you might be working instead of really looking at the output of productivity or what is it that actually want you to do? And I do know that under that very much is a mistrust. I do not believe my people are working. How can leaders start to move away from that anchored What do I want to say, chain around at the ankle?

21:23 Yeah, So the two things to be done. The mechanical thing to do, which I write about in the book, is to start measuring performance based on quality of work and not how many hours you worked, how many days you worked, how many times the manager sees your face. That's the mechanical thing to do, and it's a tough thing to do, but it's very doable. And with one company. What I'm doing right now is I'm going by role, task by task and revisiting all the KPIs for how people are getting their performance rating. But the more fundamental, deeper issue, I think what you're hinting at, Alice is something I completely agree that there is a fundamental lack of trust among some managers, I wouldn't say everyone, and a certain graphic of managers in my opinion, where they think that if people are working remotely, they are shirking.

22:14 My response to that is you are confounding your lack of trust with remote work. If a person is a shirker, trust me, that person will also shirk in the office. They will appear to be busy and they'll have other things open on the computer. So it's a hiring problem or a trust issue that you're confounding as remote work. So if you have hired the right person who has the right amount of intrinsic motivation, where the fit between the person and the job is really good and the person is being measured on quality of work, then there's no reason for the person to shirk when you can see them. And I think there's a certain generation of manager that still doesn't get it, but they will be forced to adapt because the labor market is cruel. In today's labor market, if you're not offering flexible positions, you will not attract a diverse workforce and your board will slam you at one point. Seeing what's going.

23:11 On, I had Miles Everson on earlier on and he was talking about he gave a quote from the pricewaterhouse chairman that said, the war for talent is over talent one. Okay, so let's talk. Let's finish up our conversation here by talking about really the future of work. One of the things that's so exciting for me to get to talk with and connect with guests like you, Raj, is getting into tap to your expertise and just really getting to extend what I know and what I practice today. So I want to ask you a couple of things about where all of this is going. So I first want to ask because people are wondering, well, could work from anywhere work for us? What about our industry? So are there certain kinds of industries is just limited to knowledge work that works for work from anywhere?

23:56 No, so that used to be the case, but it's changing. So in the book I talk about this idea of digital twins, and digital twins is very much a reality today, unlike the metaverse. So digital twin is a combination of sensors, AI and automation where you can create a real time model of a hospital ward or a piece of farmland, or a factory making detergents, or a power generation utility or an offshore oil rig on your computer. And in the book I have examples about a Unilever factory in Brazil making detergents and a Turkish power generation company that runs twenty four power plants in Turkey about how implementing a digital twin allowed blue collar workers to work from anywhere.

24:50 And this is happening in the New York hospitals now with their electronic ICO the eICU. Not every doctorate nurses in the hospital anymore. Many doctors and nurses are far away working just on a computer, sitting on a cafe or sitting at home, monitoring patients remotely. So I think this is already happening, and my guess is this will unleash the next wave of work from anywhere among doctors and nurses and turbine engineers and people who traditionally worked on site. That is so exciting, Raj, so so exciting. Okay, now just for grins and giggles, that's what's happening today already and in the near future. Can you bring us forward, say, three to five years in the future. What are we doing in three to five years in terms of work?

25:38 Yeah, So I think the thing that I'm studying right now is how gen Ai is creating a special kind of bot, which is personal bot. So this is something that I'm studying right now. So personal bot is a bot for one person. It's a bot for Elise or a bot for Raj that can answer questions the way Elise or Raj would answer. So if you had my bod instead of me on the podcast, and if the bot was well trained, it could do the same job that I'm doing right now, which I think it could because I've done a bunch of these podcasts, So you could take the text of every time I've spoken and train a bot to answer questions just like I would.

26:18 And so in a study we actually did a bot for a CEO, the CEO of Zapier Weight Foster and employees at Zapier asked questions and they didn't know whether the answer came from the human weight or the bot weight, and they couldn't tell. One of the main findings of the study is the bot passed the Turing test. So my prediction is in five years, almost all of us, just like we have email, we'll have personal bots and they will be answering part of our communication, not all of it. But that will unleash a third wave of work from anywhere because for the first time in history, we are separating human capital from the humane and the bots don't need work life balance. The bot can be scaled in parallel. The bots can be answering Q and A when I'm flying on a plane or when I'm sleeping, so time zones become less of an issue. So I think all of this comes with a lot of cautions.

27:19 Read my latest study on my website for all the cautions on when the bot doesn't work and in what ways. But I think in five years that'll be a distinct possibility. Now that is very alluring. Okay, so I just have two more questions. One is the last real question, and then I'll let you finish. Since you know this show is really about activating and unleashing human potential, It's about working for purpose with meaning, etc. I want to give our listeners of viewers who haven't yet read your book the opportunity to glance into just really how leaders can embrace the work from anywhere mentality not to be more efficient, but also to build more purposeful, humane, and future ready organizations.

27:59 Let's leave them with that possibility. What could that look like for leaders? Yes, I'll end by saying the same thing I said at the start that what's driven all of my research over the past fifteen years actually is that I believe that talent is everywhere, opportunities are not, and geography has been one of the constraints for many people. So if you grew up in Silicon Valley, you have a different set of opportunities than if you grew up in a small rural city in the middle of the country. And that should not be the case. You should not have to leave your community and your parents and your church and whatever is close to you just for work. So I think we should be allowed to exercise our purpose and our talents wherever we live, without moving our life somewhere else if we don't want to. And that is what worked from anywhere is.

28:53 I am so grateful to know you, Raj, that you said yes. Want to reach out to you saying I want you to come on my podcast and talk about this. I'm great for the work that you're doing, the research that you're doing. You're helping us all extend our potential and our possibility. Grateful to know you. Thank you for coming on working on purpose. Thank you Elise, and I'll just share one last update. As of yesterday, I have a new job. I joined the London School of Economics as a full professor. Oh that's exciting. Thank you for telling me. But I do want to give you the chance. Sorry, I got so excited about having you on. Would you like to leave our listeners and viewers with any other thoughts today? No? So I think you know you can find me on LinkedIn. Would love to hear what you think and what are you working on. Definitely I'm going to share your that detail and your website as well here as I close. Thank you again, Raj, Thank you You're welcome listeners and viewers. I do believe you're going to want to connect with Prith Barrage Chowdhry as I have. You can find him very handily on LinkedIn.

29:45 He's extremely responsive. You can also go to his own personal website, which is his name. Let me spell it for you. So first it's said Prith Barrage Chowdery, So the way you spell that is pr you I R A J and then Chowdrey is c h o U d h u r y Prithraraz Chowdhury dot com. See you next week for another nourishing and inspiring episode on Working on Purpose, and remember, work is one of the best adventures and means of realizing our potential and making the impact we crave and can give us the opportunity to do business in a way that betters the world. So let's work on Purpose. We hope you've enjoyed this week's program. Be sure to tune into Working on Purpose featuring your host, doctor Elise Cortes, each week on W four CY. Together we'll create a world where business operates conscientiously. Leadership inspires and passion performance and employees are fulfilled in work that provides the meaning and purpose they crave. See you there. Let's work on purpose.