How Do We Manage Remote Work?
Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell doesn’t care for research that isn’t practical. If it can’t provide insight or help solve some of the most difficult problems in business, then there’s not much point.
“We want it to be right, and we want to really understand what companies are doing if we are going to be useful to them,” he said.
As faculty director of Wharton People Analytics, Bidwell has introduced a convening series for professors, students, and industry leaders to collaborate on data-driven, evidence-based solutions for businesses and their employees. The program launched in December with a convening to tackle the first tough topic: remote and hybrid work. Seventeen company executives joined Bidwell, Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli, postdoctoral researcher Jasmine Wu, and students who make up the WPA Applied Insights Team to discuss the challenges of remote work – from onboarding to productivity to organizational culture.
The students are a key part of the program because they conduct the research and facilitate the discussion. They also use the information shared by the executives to sharpen future research. That’s especially important to companies that are still experimenting with remote and hybrid work policies.
“Remote work has been a big shock. It’s the biggest change to employment in my working lifetime, and it’s completely shaking up our expectations of what it means to have a job and have relationships with other people.”
– Matthew Bidwell, Faculty Director of Wharton People Analytics
“Remote work has been a big shock. It’s the biggest change to employment in my working lifetime, and it’s completely shaking up our expectations of what it means to have a job and have relationships with other people,” Bidwell said. “Employers are not sold on it, but they understand that it’s important to employees. It’s a source of real tension.”
Wu kicked off the daylong event with an overview of remote and hybrid work practices in the represented companies. Next, the Applied Insights Team led participants in discussions based on research they curated from academic journals and industry reports. The participants then broke into sub-groups to brainstorm over assigned questions before regrouping to share their final thoughts.
Wu said she was surprised to find that the participating companies struggle with similar challenges despite differences in size and function. The firms range from very large to very small, yet they share the same concerns about hiring and retention, diversity and inclusion, siloed information, peer interaction, parity, mentorship, operational costs, and other aspects of work that shift when employees are remote.
“Senior leadership is quite lost and doesn’t know what to do, so they are also learning from each other to see what the most successful practices are,” Wu said. She earned her doctorate during the pandemic, which sparked her interest in remote work. Her dissertation focused on what happens to employee relationships and peer networks in remote settings.
MBA student Kirstie Irmana, who led the Applied Insights Team that also included Aarati Cohly, Melissa Liu, and Shirali Nigam, said three common themes surfaced from the discussion: What is the manager’s role in remote and hybrid teams? How can technology help make remote work seamless? And how should office space be repurposed in a hybrid workplace?
“It was helpful to hear what matters most to the industry leaders because that helps us refine our research questions. I learned a lot about the very tangible issues they are facing.”
– Kirstie Irmana, Applied Insights Team Lead
“It was helpful to hear what matters most to the industry leaders because that helps us refine our research questions,” Irmana said. “I learned a lot about the very tangible issues they are facing.”
The Applied Insights Team is writing a white paper on remote work that will incorporate findings from the discussion.
“I think everyone wants to embrace remote work, but there is still a bit of a journey to figure out how,” Irmana said. “Discussions like this are useful platforms to exchange ideas.”
The next convening will be held in April. The topic will be frontline workers, who Bidwell described as a significant yet understudied portion of the labor market.
“When we talk about the great resignation, it’s largely been about these roles,” Bidwell said. “The group that has unambiguously done well in the last five years in the market is frontline workers, which is great because they’ve historically not done well.”
More convenings are planned, all with the goal of maximum mutual benefit. They help faculty develop more practical research, help companies formulate better policies, and help students understand real-world problems so they graduate prepared to make a difference.
“I was blown away by the quality of the student presentation,” Bidwell said about the Applied Insights Team. “I cannot overemphasize how impressed I was with the job they did in digging up the right information and presenting it super clearly and succinctly. We hope it’s a valuable experience for the students and well as the companies.”
– Angie Basiouny