Work's Not Working... Let's Fix It!

What If the Office Is the Problem? Prithwiraj Choudhury

Season 2 Episode 11

In this episode of Work’s Not Working… Let’s Fix It!, Siân Harrington sits down with Prithwiraj Choudhury, professor at the London School of Economics and bestselling author of The World is Your Office, to challenge our most stubborn assumption: that work must happen in the office.

Raj has spent the past decade studying ‘work from anywhere”’ and the myths that stop companies from unlocking its full potential. And his research is clear: innovation doesn’t require water coolers, culture isn’t confined to cubicles and productivity doesn’t improve with proximity.

From the myth of hybrid to the rise of digital twins and personal AI bots, Raj offers bold ideas and practical tools for designing work around people, not places.

Whether you’re an HR leader making the case for flexibility, a manager grappling with hybrid or a CEO still clinging to office mandates, this episode will challenge your assumptions and expand your thinking.

Key Takeaways

  • The return to office is often a disguised layoff strategy – with no proven productivity gains and high attrition costs.
  • Hybrid isn’t a strategy, it’s often a lazy compromise. Most models ignore the power of monthly or quarterly in-person time. 
  • Water cooler myths are wrong. Real innovation needs diverse collisions, not just random chats in the office.
  • Work from anywhere boosts inclusion. Smaller towns, caregivers and introverts all benefit – when systems are well designed.
  • Digital twins and AI bots are expanding the meaning of remote work. From hospitals to factories, even frontline roles can now be more flexible.
  • Managers must evolve from monitors to leaders. Surveillance kills trust. Outcomes, not hours, are the real measure of performance.
  • HR’s role is critical. From business case to experimentation, work from anywhere needs intentional design and not default settings.
  • Packed with research, real-world case studies and practical tips – this episode is essential listening for anyone rethinking how work works.

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Prithwiraj Choudhury (00:00)

There's research dating back to the 1970s, which has shown that we meet people in the office. That's true. But we meet people within 25 meters of where we are sitting. So if this is your cubicle, you want to meet people within 25 meters of where you're sitting, which means you are meeting the same seven or eight or 10 people every day. So that means your meetings are the ‘in-person water coolers’ are all very siloed. So sales is meeting sales, the chemistry team is meeting the chemistry team, there is no diversity in the interactions. And if you think about innovation, what triggers innovation is diverse people coming together. And that's not going to happen in the physical office.

Introduction (00:47)

Hey everyone, welcome to Work’s Not Working, a show about forward thinking people leaders, innovators and academics and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable. Brought to you by The People Space. 

Siân Harrington (01:02)

Hi, I'm Siân Harrington and today I'm joined by one of the most original thinkers on the future of work, Professor Prithwiraj Choudhury. We're tackling a simple but provocative question: Why are so many leaders still obsessed with the office? 

Because let's face it, we still confuse work with the office. As if proximity equals productivity. As if culture is created at the water cooler. As if mentoring only happens when you're watching someone over their shoulder. 

But Raj's research says otherwise. In fact, he spent the last decade busting the myths that keep us stuck in outdated ways of working and showing how work from anywhere isn't just a perk, but a strategic advantage.

In this episode, we'll explore why hybrid often isn't a strategy. It's just a compromise. How virtual water coolers might drive more innovation than your office ever did. Why remote work doesn't kill culture, but lazy design does. And how AI, digital twins and personal bots are reshaping not just where we work but who gets to do it. 

Raj also shares how top organisations, from the European Central Bank to Zapier, from NHS to Nvidia, are rethinking location, talent and inclusion in bold new ways. 

But first, a little bit more about Raj. Raj is professor at the London School of Economics and one of the world's leading experts on the future of work. A former Harvard and Wharton professor, he's pioneered the study of ‘work from anywhere’ and how it impacts people, organisations, and even towns. His new book, The World is Your Office, is already a bestseller, and it might just change how you think about flexibility, inclusion and the geography of work. 

So if you think work is something you do and not a place you'd go, this one's for you. 

Siân Harrington (03:12)

So thank you for joining me this afternoon, Raj. Very much looking forward to the conversation today. So let's start with the big question. Is the office still the best place to get work done or are we just being nostalgic? 

Prithwiraj Choudhury (03:27)

Thanks for having me, Siân. It's great to be on your show. So I guess I've just written a book. It's called The World is Your Office, and in summary, what I've said in the book is that the office used to be the single performative stage for work for decades and that's completely changed now. So the idea of work from anywhere is that people can live where they want to live and they can perform their work across multiple locations and we can get more into the details.

Siân Harrington  (03:58)

Yes, lots of companies claim to be flexible, but as you just said, there is a difference between that work from home that we all talk about and then work from anywhere. So can you explain to me what that difference is and why does that really matter for talent and productivity? 

Prithwiraj Choudhury (04:14)

Yeah, so thanks for asking this question. This is like one of the most important questions to ask – why work from anywhere is not the same as work from home. So I've been studying work from anywhere for over a decade now. And personally, I don't like working from home. So I work from either the Starbucks or I go to a co-working space. Work from anywhere is the idea that you give workers the freedom to choose where to live. So which city, which town, which part of the country, which state, and sometimes even which country they want to live. And once they've chosen that location, they could work from home, they could work from a co-working space, they can all come together in a small satellite office if enough people are around. All of that is work from anywhere. 

So work from anywhere again is the freedom to choose geography. And what I say in the first part of my book is this is extremely important because it's a win-win. For the worker, it creates lots of benefits that I can go into detail. But also for the companies, it is amazing because it expands your hiring. So companies that practice work from anywhere can now hire from anywhere.

Siân Harrington (05:34)

It sounds ideal, but is it just a privilege for global companies or elite tech firms? How realistic is this for smaller organisations or maybe those dealing with very complex compliance and legacy infrastructure?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (05:47)

Yeah, again, a great question. I think first of all, work from anywhere is not only a tech phenomena. So there are many large tech companies and I'll mention a few: Spotify, Shopify, Atlassian, Airbnb, NVIDIA, which is one of the world's most highly valued companies, they are all practicing work from anywhere. But outside of tech, there are many large organisations practicing work from anywhere. 

So I'll give you one example. The European Central Bank, ECB. The ECB has 110 day work from anywhere policy. So if you are an ECB banker you can work for 90 days anywhere in Europe and then 20 days anywhere in the world. And the memorandum, which everyone should read on this policy which was adopted earlier this year, mentions why the ECB is doing this because it's helping the ECB compete for talent. So now against the large private banks such as Deutsche Bank they have something to offer. 

But on your second part the question, Siân, work from anywhere has actually become the dominant model for start-ups. So if you are starting a company today you are invariably going to start with the work from anywhere model. Why is that? I'll give you one example of a company I’ve studied quite a bit. 

So this is a company called Zapier. They have about a thousand employees now, a little more. And if you think about Zapier 10 years back, they would probably be based in Silicon Valley. They would be competing for talent against Google and Facebook. But now, because they are all remote, they have no offices, their 1,000 people come from over 30 countries and over 170 cities. So the global access to talent has dramatically shifted. And this is especially helping start-ups.

Siân Harrington  (07:43)

It's really interesting, isn't it because there's quite a lot of varying data out there about the different flexible, if you want to call it that, working patterns of today. A lot of people have talked about hybrid. I've seen some research actually that said that's the ideal approach, but this two to three days in the office policy, you argue that might be –  I'm not putting words, well, I am putting words here into your mouth, but I'll call it like a bit of a lazy compromise. It's not a strategy as such. It's really just fairly poor design potentially. But why is it so common? And is there a better model, do you think, for hybrid or we shouldn't even be looking at hybrid?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (08:22)

No, absolutely. I think your question is spot on. So I think what is hybrid is a question I tackle in the book. And first of all, let me mention two things. So lots of people have opinions about this thing – how many days should be in person versus working from wherever. But there's very little scientific research. 

So we actually did one of the experiments on this subject with a group of HR workers. And our experiment in summary shows that about 25 to 40% days should be in person – about 25 to 40% days – and we can talk about what in person means how to design in person.

But here is the thing, so in the book what I try to do, Siân, is I try to open our minds to what hybrid means.

So what most people call hybrid and I think just what you refer to as hybrid is what I call weekly hybrid. And in the book I say there are at least two other hybrid models, one which I call monthly hybrid where the team is living, say, all over England but getting together one week every month so then you take the train you come to London you spend three or four days with the team in the first week of the month or the last week of the month – I call that monthly hybrid. 

And then there's a third form of hybrid which I've called quarterly hybrid where you're now living all over Europe but once a quarter you're coming together with the entire team and that quarterly meeting can move from location to location. So one quarter it's in Portugal, the next quarter it's in Germany, based on where people live or where the conferences are, so on and so forth. 

So in summary, we need to be in person about 25 to 40% days and that can be arranged in three forms of hybrid. The weekly model, the monthly model and the quarterly model and each team should do what's right by them.

Siân Harrington (10:22)

That is very interesting because I've seen a fair amount about that needing that in-person interaction that your research says is 25 to 40%. I think there's other research, which is similar in saying that type of amount of time, but I don't think many people have thought about that outside the weekly design that we're used to. And then you read about people going into the office and just sitting there on Zoom meetings or Teams meetings all day. Thinking a bit more about how that is designed is obviously key.

We know that there are different reasons people are doing this. A lot of it is about control. People are worried about productivity and they just think this is going to make a difference. But there's also a lot of myths out there, I think. So I'll be very interested with your perspective on busting some of these myths. 

We hear all the time about mentoring only happens face to face. Innovation needs these amazing water cooler moments. Culture can only be built in the office. What does your research and the work you did for the book tell us about this? Is this true or are these myths?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (11:28)

Yeah. So they're all three myths and let me just bust them one by one. So on productivity, you know, the study I did about 10 years back on work from anywhere. So this is the study we did for the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We found that when workers were given the flexibility to live anywhere they want, to work from anywhere, productivity went up 4%. 

And the reason that happened was that many workers moved to cheaper towns and they had lower cost of living and the women for once could now afford childcare and that would make you more productive. Or they moved to places where there was family around them and having family around you just makes your life much better and then you can be more productive. 

So that's the productivity myth at least in our really well done scientific study we found work from anywhere increased productivity by 4.4%. 

The second myth is about these water coolers. So I'll mention two facts around water coolers. So the physical water coolers that we have in the office, there's research dating back to the 1970s, which has shown that we meet people in the office. That's true. But we meet people within 25 meters of where we are sitting. 

So if this is your cubicle, you want to meet people within 25 meters of where you're sitting, which means you are meeting the same seven or eight or 10 people every day. So that means your meetings are the in-person water coolers are all very siloed. So sales is meeting sales. The chemistry team is meeting the chemistry team. There is no diversity in the interactions. 

And if you think about innovation, what triggers innovation is diverse people coming together. And that's not going to happen in the physical office. And if you think my research has shown that innovation is now the global production – your co-authors or collaborators on patents or on scientific ideas tend to be spread out all over the world. They're not sitting within 25 meters away of sitting. So that's the myth on innovation. 

And my research shows that on water coolers, one of the ideas I have in the book is what I call ‘virtual water coolers’ where you bring together diverse people for a quick chat. This is not a Zoom happy hour. This is an algorithm predicting who can Raj benefit from talking to who's doing complimentary research in psychology or sociology and bringing those two people together for a quick chat that leads to a creative collision.

And we did a study on virtual water coolers in a large bank and found that virtual water coolers have a very strong positive effect on people's performance. 

I forget the third thing you mentioned.

Siân Harrington (14:28)

The  third one is culture, but I'll just come back to that because what you're really saying in that last bit, because this is something we hear all the time, we need this spontaneous collaboration. We need this serendipity, but you are saying we can engineer that in this virtual way, as long as we're intentional in doing that.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (14:47)

Yes, and also in person what happens is our serendipitous interactions in person are also not free of bias. So there's one study that I write about in the book where I studied an offsite where these Zapier employees were going to. So they are all spread out all over the world. Like I said, they're coming together for this offsite. And when they came to this retreat, what happened was one of the subconscious biases that we have, something that's been called homophily ,kicked in. So if you see any group of people in a room, what you might observe, Siân, is people are sitting in silos. So you'll see ethnic silos, you will see gender silos, you will see the Indians in one table, you will see the white women clustering together, and that's exactly what happened in the Zapier retreat. People just look for other people who look like them.

Siân Harrington  (15:45)

And I expect you also get like leaders together or sales teams together so there's all these different silos when you do something like that. 

Prithwiraj Choudhury (15:54)

To your point about engineering serendipity, think we can't under-emphasise the importance of that. So what happened in the Zapier study is that the only way people made diverse connections, and we studied the connections by looking at Slack data before and after the retreat. So we were observing who's speaking to whom on Slack. And we found that the diverse connection got made if two people were traveling in the same taxi from the airport to the retreat because once you're in a taxi, doesn't matter who's sitting next to you. You start a conversation. That's exactly what we've called engineering serendipity.

Siân Harrington  (16:33)

Picking up then on inclusion, because what we're saying is that this, the work from anywhere can support inclusion, which is again something that a lot of people challenge. But is there a flip side where we're creating a new divide between those who might have good setups, for example, at home or good laptops to take when they're working from another office or a beach or wherever? Are we saying there's a new type of exclusion potentially?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (17:05)

No, I would say there are ways to get around this. So one of the things, one of the pieces, that I'm most excited about is the fact that work from anywhere leads to people now moving to smaller towns and communities that have lost talent. 

So in the UK, I was reading that the Midlands is now starting to get new people, these remote workers who had left the Midlands and gone to the larger cities. And this is something that's happening worldwide. Now in the UK it's not a problem, but if you are in an emerging market the smaller towns may not have great internet, right? So the solution that is emerging is to create co-working spaces in those smaller towns. 

So one community that I've studied for years, this is the community in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They have been extremely successful in reversing the brain drain and they have got about 4,000 remote workers and their families. These remote workers in Tulsa do not work from home. They all work from this world-class co-working space that's been built for them. 

Siân Harrington  (18:10)

And then again, you're now going to get innovation and creativity because you're meeting people outside your business. It brings together people that will just create new friendships and all manner of things. So it's a very positive move from that perspective as well, isn't it?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (18:26)

Absolutely. And last month I was in the island of Madeira and Madeira has had a very successful programme where they told me 20,000 remote workers have passed through the community and they're all sitting next to each other. So now you have a person who is a creative artist sitting next to an engineer and the conversations are truly diverse and could lead to new ideas and new inventions.

Siân Harrington  (18:50)

So let's pick up on the culture thing because that's another of those set in stone. We need to be together to create culture. So talk to me a bit about why that is again, a myth. And also I'm particularly interested in new people because we talk a lot about how you onboard junior people. How do you bring them in if they're not in that face-to-face regular, watching managers, for example. So there's the culture piece and then that piece about bringing new people into the culture as well.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (19:21)

Let me address the new employee, young employee question first. These are things I have personally learnt over the years studying these start-ups. I've studied GitLab, Zapier, and many other start-ups which are practicing the old remote model. They don't have any offices, they all do off-sites and they are hiring talent worldwide. 

On the onboarding piece, let me mention two or three best practices. The ones I have written about all of these the book.

One is to have a buddy system. So every new employee gets a buddy who's someone just like them, maybe joined earlier this year or last year, but in a different team. Because then that buddy who's committed to your wellbeing and development, you have the psychological safety to ask any question. What's the reputation of my manager? That's the question you can ask this person because that person is from a different team. So I think the buddy system has really spread like wildfire, it's an idea that's becoming pretty universal. 

The second idea we've already talked about, which is the virtual water cooler idea, that now the super senior people who never ever in person met these young people one-to-one. No young new employee has ever told me that I went to the office, I pressed the elevator button for the C-suite and I knocked the door of the CEO and said, can I have a water cooler conversation? That doesn't happen. 

But HR can organise virtual water coolers for the C-suite and these new interns or new employees. And that is our study, which is mentioned in the book. 

And the third thing, Siân, is that in these settings, the work from anywhere companies, it's extremely important to codify knowledge. So you need to write about how to get things done here. How do we hire? How do we promote? How do we get an expense sheet file? How do I get an email? How do I go to if my computer is broken? And then also what's happening on the project on the team every day. 

And now with GenAI, it's very easy to do. It's almost costless to do. All the old remote companies have taken knowledge codification extremely seriously and successfully.

Siân Harrington (21:34)

And that's something any company needs to do anyway with so many changes in the workplace, I think. You talk about, you've mentioned the European Central Bank, obviously a lot of what we talk about is start-ups, but are there other organisations that you can point to that you think are doing work from anywhere or at least including it in their offer in a positive way? And what can we learn from them?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (21:58)

Yes. So like I mentioned in the tech space, there are many examples, Atlassian, Airbnb, Shopify, NVIDIA. These are just a few names that I know of. 

And then I guess outside of tech, can go through many. One of the world's most reputed law firms, Emmanuel Quinn, they have been rated as the most feared legal rival by their competitors for five years in a row. They practice work and they're saying that our attorneys can now live anywhere, have their desks anywhere. 

Smuckers, which is a manufacturing company making snacks in the US, they practice work from anywhere. So I think there are many examples, and I've written about these examples in the book.

Siân Harrington (22:45)

What are the main challenges that you've found that people when they're starting this are facing?

Prithwiraj Choudhury(22:52)

Yeah, so it's a great question again. How do we implement work from anywhere? What are the challenges? So in the book, I talk about three challenges. There's the challenge of social isolation, that if you're not really engineering serendipity, creating that buddy system, doing the off-sites really well, if you're trying to save costs by saying, now we don't have offices, we don't even need off-sites, that's extremely, that's a wrong move. You cannot save costs. You have to bring people together, either monthly or quarterly. 

So work from anywhere is not a cost saving strategy. It's a talent strategy. It's about accessing more talent, diverse talent across multiple cities, towns, states and countries. And you have to do the in-person well. So the social isolation problem is one of the problems. And I mentioned lots of solutions to that. 

The knowledge sharing problem that we've talked about and how codifying knowledge is another challenge. 

And then the final challenge is communication across time zones. And for that's what I say in the book is there are two forms of work from anywhere. So one is what I call the North-South form, where your team is spread out, but on the same time zone or the same time zone plus minus two. So if you're in Vancouver, Canada, and your team member is in San Francisco, you can have you have the same overlapping work hours. That's the North-South form of work from anywhere. 

The East-West form is where your colleague is in Mumbai. Now, it's a choice. It's a design choice of what work from anywhere form you are adopting. If you go for the East West, then you have to communicate asynchronous. Then you have to put more emphasis on writing and reading versus speaking.

And listen, both forms have their challenges and benefits. The East-West asynchronous form really helps introverts because introverts hate meetings, they hate Zoom calls, they just want to read and write. So in the book I mention these two forms: the North-South and the East-West and what each form entails.

Siân Harrington  (25:58)

That's a good way of seeing it, I think. And often we can assume, as soon as we're talking about work from anywhere, we're thinking of people working off beaches in Australia when we're in Britain. We're not thinking about just within a geographical spread as well, which I think is a good point. 

What about these mandated return to offices that we're reading about every day at the moment? People are saying it's about productivity and performance, but we know it isn't. They're really quite a subtle way to push people out. It seems to me. What do you think is going on there? And what does this mean for both talking about talent, about trust and retention?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (25:38)

Yeah, so now we actually have data on this. So there's a couple of very good studies and what the studies find. So first of all, I mentioned one fact – that despite what we read in the papers, or I guess on the internet, the percentage of days that the Western world's economies are working remotely has been extremely stable since October 2023. So the needle hasn't moved. 

So what that tells me, first of all, is that we the Ford and the Amazon and the Dells of the world and Jamie Dimon at JP Morgan are getting disproportionate media coverage. And the Citibank, you asked an example,  Citibank and their CEO, who's a woman, has been extremely stable and mature about hybrid work. And they get less press, but the needle hasn’t moved. 

The second thing is on the RTO researchers have looked at it, Mark Ma at The University of Pittsburgh and his team has looked at it. What they find is the RTOs and they've looked at every single RTO over the past several years. The RTOs have had no financial gain, have brought no financial gain to the companies. They've looked at stock market prices and event study analysis and all of that. The only effect is on attrition. RTOs are followed by about 11% of the company leaving. I'm sorry, 9% of the company leaving and about 13% of women leaving. 

So you're right. Your intuition is correct. RTOs are being used as a tool for voluntary layoffs, not for productivity. Because if 10% of your company leaves, you don't have to pay them full benefits. 

But here's the last thing I'll say, Siân, the labour market has a long memory. You cannot do this forever. Because what's happening is if you're disproportionately letting go of women and minorities and people with disabilities, you're going to make your workforce more, for lack of a better phrase in the Western world, it's going to become older white men and no board will give you the rope forever to do that.  

Siân Harrington (27: 55)

Yeah, I think the boards won't like it. There's a big move with stakeholders generally to get more diversity. Obviously talent itself, employees won't think much of those businesses, your brand reputation is going down. And ultimately it comes through to the consumer because we've seen some good examples over the years of consumers voting with their feet when people at the top of businesses do things. So it does seem a strange move to do. 

Now I get accused a lot when I'm writing about working from home or flexibility or generally remote work of disregarding the very large amount of people who don't work in an office. Everyone thinks this is a privilege, you know, for those people who are knowledge workers, people working in the office. We assume it's only about that, but you've got a really interesting part of the book that I'd love to delve into in quite some detail because it's probably something people haven't thought about a lot in our readership. And that is how technologies like digital twins can change that. 

So for people who don't know what a digital twin is, can you give us a very brief description of that and then how does that helping expand who could be working from anywhere?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (29:09)

It's great and it's one of the topics again. I'm very passionate about – digital twin So a digital twin is a combination of sensors, AI and automation where you create a virtual copy of a hospital a hospital ward or a factory or a piece of farmland or an oil rig on your computer in real time. And once you have that copy on your computer in real time then you don't need to be in many cases on site. So I have three examples that I talk about in the book. 

There's a Unilever factory in Brazil making detergents. So once they had the digital twin, once they could see the factory through the sensors and cameras in real time on the computer, then that factory was run from miles away from the home of the technician. 

And then the second example I mentioned is this power generation company in Turkey, which is running 24 power plants all over the country from one single location in Istanbul. And the reason, Siân, did that was their top line engineers did not want to live in the mountains of Turkey. No one wants to go and live in a place where there are no schools or no shopping malls or no theatres to watch movies. They all want to live in Istanbul. So they created digital twin headquarters in Istanbul. 

And the other example I talk about in the book are these New York hospitals, which have implemented now an electronic emergency room, EICUs. And I know the NHS is doing this with the virtual ward programme. So what the NHS is now doing is for patients, especially older patients, who do not want to go and stay in a hospital for weeks together, they're putting sensors on the patients and the doctors and nurses are monitoring these older patients from far away. So today the idea that the doctor and the nurse has to be in the same building with the patient, already that myth has been broken. 

So I expect digital twins to spread like wildfire over the next few years. And that's the next wave of work from anywhere.

Siân Harrington  (31:18)

To me, this is one of the most exciting areas of it because so many countries are struggling to get the workforces that they need. And also the specialisms, if you take something like the healthcare sector, to be able to be treated by someone who's a real expert in a completely different country, opens up so much positivity, I think, and we tend not to think about it in this way but digital twins actually help us with a number of big issues that a lot of countries are dealing with in terms of their workforces at the moment. So it's absolutely fantastic to see that. 

Have you seen any examples in areas like retail or other businesses that are frontline –  logistics? I'm just trying to think of where else we've got big employment sectors.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (32:15)

Yeah. So Gap has done a digital twin implementation where everything starting from merchandising to raw material sourcing. Now the merchandisers are not sitting with the suppliers. I know there was a very large retailer and I don't know if I can, because it was a private conversation with one of their retail heads, but she mentioned that they were thinking they're piloting kiosks in all the shopping malls or a few shopping malls where if you are buying a pair of jeans, you wear that piece of jeans and you press the button on the kiosk and there's a designer sitting far away giving you live advice on whether the jeans is fitting you well or you should move to a different style. So I think the only constraint in digital twins is imagination. I think this is real, this technology works and now it's for companies in all sectors to adopt.

Siân Harrington  (33:07)

Yeah, fantastic. So let's keep with technology and you mentioned AI earlier. I remember reading about you mentioning that we could have AI bots attending meetings for us, for example. Is that actually happening? How close are we to that? And what are the ethical challenges or leadership challenges that people leaders in a particular HR might have to think about around that use?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (33:24)

Yes. So this is what I'm currently working on. So the part of AI that I'm most excited about as a work from anywhere scholar is how AI can be used to create personal bot. So this is not a generic bot. It's a bot for Siân or it's a bot for Raj. 

So the study we did again, so a couple of years back, I called up the CEO of Zapier, Wade Foster, and I said, Wade, will you let me create a bot for you and he was excited and then we created a bot. 

And the challenge there, Siân, is the bot has to not only answer correctly, it has to also write the English in a way that Wade Foster writes it. Each one of us has a style of writing. So, you may sign off your emails with warm regards and I might say best regards. It needs to know how Siân writes her emails. 

So we had to train the bot on how Wade writes English. But once we did that, the experiment we ran was to ask Zapier employees to pose questions for the CEO. And the answer came from either the human CEO or the bot CEO. And they had to guess which source was giving the answer. And turns out that the bot passed the Turing test with flying colours. They could not distinguish. So with today's technology, it's possible to create a bot for each one of us. And my prediction is in five years, just like we have email, we'll have bots attached to our email answering part of our email, not all of it. 

And so what this means for work from anywhere is, this is a historic moment because for the first time we are separating human capital, our communication skills, our reasoning skills away from the human body. It's now part of an algorithm. And so we can scale up human capital like never before. 

So after I showed this research to a company called Otter in Silicon Valley, the CEO of Otter got inspired and he's created a Sam Bot. And the idea is Sam Bot will now go and listen in meetings on Sam's behalf. But what it means is Sam Bot can go to five meetings at the same time. Sam Bot has no work-life balance issues. It has no constraints of time zones. Sam Bot can attend a meeting and listen when Sam is flying on a plane. So the constraints of time zone and space on work from anywhere are potentially substantially mitigated by these personal bots.

Siân Harrington (36:02)

It's fascinating because I think, although we see, I can see that's so fantastic in so many ways, it feels coming back to our culture at the beginning when we were talking about the culture issue and we know we can create cultures in a work from anywhere, in a remote work environment, but it feels that we're moving more and more away from that human connection at work. What happens to empathy, presence, just general leadership in when we can get digital twins and AI bots and all of this there. Have you looked into the deeper sort of side of that? We talk all the time, yeah, the human thing is going to be the empathy, the human thing, but you're actually talking here about how you can almost mimic that person, that CEO have their language, have their approach, their style, et cetera. So where's that line?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (36:50)

Great question, Siân. So what happens to our humanness when the personal bots take over? I think it can go both ways. So let me paint the optimistic picture. 

So prior research has shown that CEOs spend about, I want to say 60% of their time on communication. And much of the communication is something that can be codified and performed by a bot. And I would say this is the rather impersonal communication that the CEO really has to do, but doesn't enjoy doing. 

So if the bot can take over those mundane, impersonal pieces of communication, then what it does optimistically is the CEO has two options – the CEO can go and play golf – but the other view is that the CEO now gets a few hours every day to really have those more personal human conversations. Because now you can sit down with your direct reports or the subsidiary manager in a faraway country and say, what's going on with your dad? What's going on with your family? You can, you get that time back to become a human. So that's the optimistic view. I'm sure there will be CEOs playing golf and there'll be CEOs engaging on those human conversations.

Siân Harrington  (38:08)

Yeah. And I suspect we know who's going to do better, I hope so. So if work isn't a place anymore, what does this mean for people leaders, in particular HR, in how they help to create and lead culture, productivity, inclusion, some of these things that we're talking about? Where is the role of HR in that? And how do we move that mindset? Because that's what it seems to me to be very much about – moving mindset to this intentional designing of work as something you do, not a place you go.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (38:40)

I see two important roles for HR. First is, HR needs to, if you are an HR leader listening to this podcast, hopefully you'll read my book. And then the first task is standing up to the C-suite and the board and making the case for why work from anywhere is a talent strategy. It's not a cost saving strategy. It's not a productivity strategy. It's about accessing talent from more places, which makes talent more diverse along every dimension: gender, ethnicity, religion, ideas, you can think of any dimension if you're hiring more broadly you will get more diverse hires in every dimension. So it's making that business case to the C-suite and the board – that's the first task.

And hopefully once the C-suite and the board is convinced – because one thing I'll quickly mention, Siân, is my fear is that most companies will get comfortable with this weekly two-day hybrid and get stuck there. And they will not really unleash the force of work from anywhere. So the real power of remote work doesn't come to work from home or two days in the office. It comes when you are hiring diverse talent from all over the country, all over Europe, all over the world. So that's the business case that the CHRO and HR leaders need to make. 

And once the board has that buy-in to start the pilot, you go step by step, then the role of the CHRO becomes one of managing the organisational transformation. Then you are a leader who has to look after the whole transformation of practices. How we, and we didn't talk about culture, I'm happy to, but how do you codify knowledge? How do you do the body system? How do you do the virtual water coolers? How you manage the offsides? How do you do the engineering serendipity? It becomes a five year project to really transform the organisation inside out.

Siân Harrington  (40:34)

I suggest people read your book to get the answers to some of those questions. But I wonder, are we putting too much expectation on managers here? Because suddenly they are coaches or culture architects or have a slightly different role to play here. So what's your take on where managers sit? 

And alongside that, some of those tips, the things HR needs to do, I wonder, I suspect that a lot of HR departments aren't really sure how well their remote or flexible working policies are going. I'm not sure they know how to monitor, for want of a word, this without going into those areas of surveillance and things like that. So I think that sits with managers as well. So I'm interested in this manager role and how you can actually really look at the success of a policy like this without going down the route of every keyboard clicking and all these types of things we hear about.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (41:35)

Yes, a couple of thoughts. think a very specific response to the monitoring doesn't work. One fun anecdote was when in the pandemic people were trying to monitor employees working remotely. There was a start-up which came up with a device where you could put your external mouse and the device would randomly move the mouse every few seconds.

My response to leaders is, if you think your worker will shirk from home, trust me, they're also shirking from office. This is a hiring problem and a performance measurement problem. They might look busy in the office, but there'll be other screens open on the computer. 

So the structural solution is to do two things. One is to fix hiring and then performance should be measured based on the quality of work. It should not be measured based on how long you work, how many days, how many hours, how many meetings, how many weekends. That's immaterial if your work quality is not great.

So what I'm doing with some teams now is I'm going task by task saying what are the key performance indicators and are they output based? They need to be all output based. 

So the managers need to do that. They need to expand their minds to hiring from more geographies. And then what I tell managers is you have to become leaders. This is a transformation of the manager itself. You cannot be the monitor. You have to become a leader. You have to help people succeed. You have to see where are the cracks, who's falling through the isolation crack, who's not getting the communication. You have to become a problem solver for people rather than trying to monitor them through mouse clicks or what.

Siân Harrington   (43:20)

And this is actually where the manager, the human comes in against the AI in a way, because we are talking there about that problem solving, that spotting the issues. We can use data obviously to surface some of this stuff, but that conversation that needs to be handled so carefully and so empathetically there, this is what management, people management should be all about rather than the person just constantly like keeping an eye on and filtering reports. 

So let's end with some really practical actions. So you've talked about how we need to do the business case. And I think that's definitely something HR needs to do. But let's say somebody in HR is sitting here now listening to this and thinking, okay, so I know I've got to do a business case, but what other three practical actions can they literally start, aside from buying and reading the book, could they start with today to help them to get into more of a mindset and some practical actions around working from anywhere?

Prithwiraj Choudhury (44:14)

Yeah, so the first thing to do is, just to summarise, work from anywhere is a great idea, but it has to be done team by team. There's not a one size fits all. So like we said, there are three forms of hybrid: the weekly form, the monthly form and the quarterly form. So what every team needs to do is to decide which form of hybrid will they follow. 

So what I suggest is the HR folks could have a broad overall mandates saying 25 to 40% days need to be in person, but teams are flexible and have the freedom to structure that 25 to 40% in-person days, weekly, monthly or quarterly. 

And then in the book again, what I do, Siân, is for each of these forms of hybrid, I have a menu of management practices that need to be mastered for that. I'll give you one or two quick examples. If you're following the weekly form of hybrid, the most important management practice is scheduling. Because if you say two days in the office every week and part of the team is going Monday, Tuesday and part of the team is going Thursday, Friday, then there's no day of the week where the whole team is together. And that's happening across many companies I've looked at. So scheduling is the most important management practice for the weekly hybrid model. 

For the monthly and the quarterly hybrid model, there's a menu of management practices. And so the HR person needs to say, if you are a monthly hybrid team, these are your priorities of management practices you need to master. 

And the final thing I would say the HR person needs to do is give the flexibility to teams to experiment. Run your own little experiments on culture, run your own little experiments on virtual water coolers, run your own little experiments on asynchronous communication. And then once the experiment is successful, come back and teach everyone else. So this has to be a thousand ideas emerged from the bottom of the organisation.

Siân Harrington (46:20)

Great advice there. And let me end by asking you, how are you working at the moment? Maybe you work from anywhere, maybe you work remotely. Tell us what you do and how you think that's impacted you personally in terms of your own wellbeing, your own resilience, your own productivity.

Prithwiraj Choudhury (46:32)

Yeah, I work from anywhere and I'm very thankful I can do that. I have my colleagues and co-authors across around 20 countries around the world. So personally for me, this has allowed me to pursue other interests I have. So I'm also a singer songwriter. So I've done academic Zoom calls in the studio in different parts of the world. And more recently, my father is 86 and he was not well. And I was able to spend a lot of quality time with my dad. So I'm moving to London. I'm very excited about being closer to my parents. But work from anywhere has made a huge personal impact on my life already.

Siân Harrington (47:01) 

That was Raj Chowdhury reminding us that return to office mandates aren't just about productivity. In many cases they're quiet layoffs in disguise. What stayed with me is this. Innovation doesn't need an office. It needs diversity and design. And culture isn't about sitting together. It's about intention, connection and the systems we build to support belonging, wherever we are. If you're an HR leader,

Now is the moment to make the business case for work from anywhere, because proximity is not a proxy for trust and where someone lives shouldn't define what they can contribute. Raj's book, The World Is Your Office, is packed with practical insights and global case studies, and I highly recommend that you check it out. So thanks for listening to Work’s Not Working… Let's Fix It! And for more bold ideas and practical tools on the future of work, head to www.thepeoplespace.com. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard. Until next time, stay bold, stay curious, and let's redesign work for everyone. Goodbye.

 

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