(soft music)
- [Batia Wissenfeld] Hi, this is Batia Wiesenfeld,
and I wanna welcome
everyone to another edition
of the faculty insights
on COVID-19 session.
Today we have an amazing and
incredibly packed session
for you with four presenters.
All of whom are gonna offer
different perspectives
on remote work and remote working
and the technology and policy
and organizational implications
associated with it.
We're gonna start with Rob Seamans
and then turn it over to Frances Milliken
and then Hila and then
I'm going to finish up.
So, Rob, I invite you to start us off.
- [Rob Seamans] Great, thank you, Batia.
So I'm gonna be speaking about
the effect of the pandemic
on innovation and some public policies
to address at least some of
what I think is going on.
So, for starters, there's
no question that the effect
of the pandemic on innovation
in the immediate term
has been largely negative.
There's plenty of
anecdotal evidence of labs
that have had to be shutdown, of R and D,
ongoing R and D, ongoing experiments.
Some experiments that have been going on
for really long periods of
time that have had to shutdown.
So in the short run, for sure,
a negative shock to innovation.
Longer term, what we would
expect to have happen is
that innovative effort
will shift into new areas.
Again, there's plenty of
anecdotal evidence of this,
but one example that I've
listed here is that following
the oil embargo in the 1970s it turns out
that as a result firms in
the U.S. started to invest
in new technologies including fracking.
There's also a lot more
systematic evidence
coming out of the innovation
literature showing that,
indeed, when you have
these large negative shocks
it leads, in the short
run, to a negative effect
on innovation, but longer term leads
to innovation in new areas.
So what might be some of these areas
when it comes to this shock that we're
currently experiencing
from the corona virus?
First, let me start by
just giving a little plug
to the NYU Stern Management
and Organizations Department.
We've been putting out a
series of research briefs
from around how firms are responding
to the ongoing pandemic.
And for those of you
that might be interested
there's a link that's
provided in the presentation
or you can get to it by
Googling the department.
At least a couple of these
research briefs have highlighted
some of the ways in
which firms are shifting
their innovative efforts.
And so three that I'm gonna touch on are
remote learning, e-commerce
and telemedicine.
Now remote learning, of course right now,
we are engaging in some remote learning
and technologies are slowly
getting better around it
and I would expect that
we would continue to see
some innovation in this area.
I'll talk more about
e-commerce in just a moment.
As to telemedicine, what I
have at the bottom of the slide
is a chart of Google trends, right.
So this is searches for telemedicine.
You see a large spike in early
March, perhaps no surprise.
But what's interesting
about telemedicine is
that it's been around for a long time.
There are many physicians
that've been trying
to push telemedicine.
Many public health organizations
that've been trying
to push it, but it
really hasn't taken off.
And part of the reason for that is
that you need adoption
on the physician side
and you also need adoption by patients.
As a result of the pandemic we've had
a really big shock to this
and we sort of have moved
to this equilibrium where
now most doctors offices
are sort of telemedicine enabled
and many patients are
starting to use telemedicine.
So I think we're gonna
see a lot more innovation
in this space in the coming years.
So let me talk a little
bit about e-commerce.
Some of what I have to say comes
from a recent NBER working paper.
Again, there's a link to the
paper here in the slides.
So what's interesting in e-commerce,
so we know there's been a big increase,
of course, in e-commerce.
A lot more people are
engaged in online purchases.
I think all of us, now that
we're at home a lot more
we've been doing a lot more
purchasing online of course.
What's interesting is how
this shifts employment
from retail to other sectors.
And so the sectors that
have done really well
are the warehousing and storage sectors.
That's what you see in that black line
in the figure that I have there.
And also, it turns out, in local delivery,
that there's been a very
big increase in employment
in local delivery.
Now, where's the innovation here?
Well, it turns out that
firms actually need
to invest in a lot of innovation in terms
of fitting out their warehouses
and fulfillment centers
with new technologies.
So we will continue to see
a lot of innovation there.
And we also need innovations
in terms of business models
because firms don't just have to ship
to its individuals, they
have to figure out ways
for how to get those goods back if
for some reason the customer
doesn't like the good
or is not satisfied with it.
And so, the sort of backend
logistics is actually
an area where I suspect we'll
see a whole lot of innovation.
Now there's been some
recent research showing
that as individuals shift
their purchasing to online
it frees up time for them.
And then the question is, well,
what is it that they do with that time?
That extra time that they have.
It turns out that one of the ways
in which people are
spending their extra time is
by going out more frequently
to local coffee shops
and spending more money
at local coffee shops.
I suspect that part of
the reason for this is
that we actually miss some
of the person-to-person
interactions that we typically
would have engaged in
if we had been going to a retail store.
I think that there are
probably gonna be a number
of other innovations in this space
or a number of ways at least in which
purchasing activity is gonna change
and this is certainly an area where
I'm gonna keep an eye on.
So just coming back a slide,
the three areas that I listed
were remote learning,
e-commerce and telemedicine.
Of course, all three of those require
that you have a good
internet connection at home.
And unfortunately, this is an area where,
as a country, we have fallen behind.
So there are many areas of the country
that do not have good broadband access.
What I'm showing in this heat map here,
so this is on a county by county basis,
the areas that are
darker in color are areas
where you have more internet
connections per household
and in lighter it's fewer
internet connections
per household.
You see that there's
a lot of heterogeneity
across the country.
And it looks like, just
by eyeballing this,
that a lot of the
heterogeneity here is urban
and rural areas, but when
you zoom in to urban areas.
So here, if you can direct your attention
to what's as figure four
over on the right-hand side.
So now we're gonna zoom
in to some urban areas
and if you look at the
map of Washington D.C.
the green areas is where there
are more internet connections
red area where's there's
fewer internet connections.
And again, you see a lot of heterogeneity
even within an urban environment.
You see that in Washington
D.C., Philadelphia,
San Antonia, at least
in the pictures here.
And again, you would see this
across many different parts of the U.S.
Now it turns out that internet
access typically varies
by income and so that explains partially
the reason why you have
this heterogeneity.
So if you turn your
attention to figure two,
on the left-hand side of the slide,
this is using data from 2014.
If we were to look at the data from today
it would look still pretty similar.
What this is plotting out
is the percent of households
that use internet at home based on
the income quintile in which they fall in.
And what I find really dramatic is
when you look at the
bottom income quintile
only about half of those
households use internet at home.
So this is a huge area where
we need policy interventions
especially if we're hoping and expecting
that people are gonna take advantage
of these new innovations that
we've been talking about.
So in terms of internet
access policy options
this is an area that I've
spent a lot of time doing
research and writing
for academic audiences
as well as for popular press audiences.
And so what I've got listed here are
three different policies that potentially
could help to address this.
I'm not gonna go into detail
right now in any one of these.
Perhaps during the Q and
A I'd be happy to talk
at more length on any of these.
But if you're interested
please take a look
at recent article I wrote for Forbes
that lays out these three policies
and talks about some of the pros and cons
of these three different policies.
With that in mind, or
so I leave with that,
I guess that's my last slide.
What I'm gonna do is
I'm gonna stop sharing
and I'm gonna turn this over
to my colleague Frances.
- [Frances Milliken] Thank you, Rob, and thank
you, Batia, for inviting me
to participate in this panel discussion.
I'm gonna talk to you this
afternoon a little bit
about COVID-19 and the
switch to remote work
and some of the challenges
that are inherent
or that are becoming apparent as a result
of the shift to remote work.
If you'd asked people maybe a year ago
did they think that most Americans
would be working from home?
Most managers and most
companies would have been
highly skeptical of the idea
that remote work would be
so frequent and so
omnipresent as it is now.
In fact, in a recent survey almost 50%
of working Americans are now
working from home, in April.
Up from about 15% pre-COVID-19.
And that figures actually
probably a little bit higher
because if you look at this chart
about 10% of working Americans said
they'd been recently
furloughed or laid-off.
So at least 50% of
Americans, working Americans,
are now working from home.
Now, the question is, is
remote work here to stay?
And we can look at this
from two perspectives.
One being the perspective of companies
and if you look at some of
what corporate executives
have to say, such as
executives at Barclays,
JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley,
they say it's highly unlikely
that all their workers will
return to the office
towers in New York City.
And David Kenny, the chief
executive at Nielsen,
says that they probably plan to use
their New York City offices primarily
for team meeting spaces rather
than for in office work.
Turning to the tech sector,
not surprisingly perhaps,
workers at Facebook and
Google and elsewhere
can continue working
remotely through 2020.
And Twitter has said that
all of its employees can
actually work remotely forever
if their position allows them to.
Now, how do workers feel
about working remotely?
Actually, it turns out they like it.
75% of the workers surveyed
said that they would like
to work remotely at
least some of the time.
And 54% said that they would like it
to be their primary way of working.
So, if remote is here
to stay it's important
that we spend some time
understanding the challenges
of working remotely.
Understanding and
addressing these challenges
will be critical to
creating the opportunities
that remote work might
provide going forward
and to avoiding some of the pitfalls
that could characterize remote work.
To foreshadow Hila's
talk a bit, a commonality
between the two of us is the idea
that you cannot just do more
of the same when you're trying
to innovate and adapt to a major change
and expect to be successful.
It's important to understand
some of the challenges
that remote work has inherent in it.
The first of these you're
probably familiar with
and it's called Zoom Fatigue.
Anecdotally, people are
reporting that they experience
Zooming for long periods
of time to be exhausting.
The question is why is that?
Well, it turns out that we're not meant
to video chat, actually.
Video chat means that we
have to work a lot harder
to process people's facial expressions
and figure out how people are reacting
to what we are saying.
And also, Zoom chats
often lack body language
that conveys a lot of nonverbal ideas
about what a person is trying to say.
So, Zoom Fatigue means that we're working
a lot harder to process information
and especially to try to
process what we might call
nonverbal cues as we're
listening to someone speak,
so that's the first challenge.
The second challenge is distraction.
Now that we're working from home
and especially during
COVID-19 our children
are taking classes from
home or going to school
from home, or not, as the case may be.
We can be distracted by our kids.
We can be distracted by
our pets, by our partner,
by our roommates, and also we may engage
in multitasking while we are Zooming
such as answering emails or texting.
The bottom line is
distraction and multitasking
negatively affect your
ability to pay attention
and to concentrate,
especially on complex tasks.
So so far I think we have two challenges
in remote work that have to do
with the cognitive
processing of information.
The Zoom Fatigue showing
that it's more difficult
to process information
in Zoom chats possibly
and then there's the role of distractions.
A third challenge is what I
call a lack of common ground.
It's easier to communicate effectively
with people when you have common ground.
Common ground refers to
the idea that participants
in a conversation share some common
understandings and assumptions.
This is harder to do
in remote communication
because people are less
certain about how people feel
about issues or about what
other people know about issues.
And so, there may be
this hesitancy to talk
in Zoom communications.
In part because you're not sure
that you share common assumptions
with the people in the conversation.
Related to that is a
challenge that has to do
with the possibility
that it will be harder
for upper level managers
to get information
from employees about
problems that are emerging
or issues that are emerging
in the organization.
We already know from past research
that speaking up about problems or issues
to one's boss is perceived as risky.
And my hypothesis would be
that it would be perceived
as even more risky in remote work
because of the challenges
of lack of common ground
and the challenges of being
unable to see how people
are reacting to the points
that you're trying to make.
So this may, in part,
handicap upper level managers
in terms of getting access
to complete information
about what's going on in the organization.
A final challenge I'll
call inclusion challenges
and the challenge is how do you make sure
that people feel included
when you're unable
to see them fact-to-face?
For example, in the elevator
or at an office lunch.
So Satya Nadella, the
CEO of Microsoft, says
that what he misses the most
about working in person is
when he walks into a physical meeting
you're talking to a
person that's next to you.
You're able to connect with them
for about two minutes before and after.
This is very tough to replicate virtually,
as are some of the other
soft skills crucial
to managing and mentoring.
In fact, a recent research
study suggests that
people are actually spending
more time communicating
with people they know very very well now
during this period of remote work
and less time communicating with people
that they do not know well.
So the challenges of this
abrupt change to remote work
are captured on this
slide, the five challenges.
And I think a key to being
able to take advantage
of the opportunities that remote
work provides going forward
will be trying to figure
out creative solutions
for dealing with some of these challenges.
So thank you for allowing
me to participate
in this panel discussion and
I'm now gonna stop sharing
my screen and turn it over to Hila.
- [Hila Lifshitz-Assaf] Thank you, Frances.
So I will kind of combine some things
from Rob and Frances around
innovation in COVID time
and the challenges working
also remotely for innovation.
So my name is Hila Lifshitz-Assaf
and this is brand new research.
I'm showing preliminary insights
and some stuff that are clear results.
And I would welcome any
comments and feedback
or questions that you have so I put
my contact details here, H@nyu.edu.
So, what is different about
innovate in COVID time
and why am I focusing on that?
One clear difference is that we need
to accelerate innovation.
Saving time means saving life.
So how can we innovate in those areas
that we do need innovation and
that are increasing faster?
So I will focus on two
levels of analysis today.
One is a team level of analysis,
this is based on field studies
that I've been conducting
on accelerating teams
and their work process
for innovation with Sarah
Lebovitz and Lior Zalmanson
and it's now in press
and the link for the
paper will be in the chat.
And a new study that I'm now doing
with the European
Commission in a big effort
I'll share with you soon
called EU verus Virus.
There we're focusing also
on remote collaboration
on the team level.
And the second study that I
will share towards the end
is the organizational level of analysis.
What organizations are
doing, how they're using
new ways of open innovation to accelerate
their innovation process.
And this is a mixed method study
with Karim Lakhani and
research affiliates in his lab.
So, why is it so hard to
accelerate innovation?
To begin with, time
pressure impedes creativity.
It is very hard to innovate
from a cognitive perspective
as Frances was emphasizing.
This is a new condition, there is stress.
Time pressure does not go so well
with opening your mind and
thinking outside of the box.
So how do we do that?
And the additional layer of challenge is
the team level of coordination.
So usually it's hard to coordinate
with people that you've just met.
So what happens when
you have ad-hoc teams,
as many companies and
organizations are doing.
People that have just met
either from different places
in their organizations
or across organizations that
are trying to solve together
COVID related problems very fast.
So ad-hoc plus acceleration,
that's very hard.
So most of the research
that we have so far
will tell us that this will fail.
So time pressure impedes creativity
and coordination with
a lack of common ground
and with a lack of a
pre-organized structure
leads to failure, but this is happening
and needs to happen.
So I've been studying that
in the last couple of years
in health tech hackathons
where you bring people
that have just met for
three or two or three days
to solve such emergent problems.
That in the end, a very ambitious goal.
In 72 hours you need to hand
over a working prototype
to a needed user.
So this is the paper that
I said is now in press
and you can find it also
in the COVID related parts
since we updated it to COVID.
And there's the new study that
I will share with you soon
on the COVID related hackathons as well.
But what have I learned from studying
this work in two or three years?
So I've learned that teams
fall into two common mistakes.
The first one is how to
deal with the time pressure.
Most team try to deal
with it by compressing
the regular organizational
processes of innovation.
The best practices that
we teach and that we know
to do there are just
trying to make them faster.
So if they're doing Agile or Scrum
and they have once a
day stand up meeting
they're trying to do it once an hour.
This does not work.
So as Frances also said,
we cannot just take,
import our regular processes
and expect them to work
if we just compress them.
The second problem is the coordination.
So this is counterintuitive.
So actually the way the
teams try to work was
to fully and clearly coordinate
since they don't have a lot of time.
They just met each other.
They wanted to make sure
everything is clear.
That every person what they have to do.
This does not work as well, unfortunately.
This is counterintuitive,
so I'm stressing it as well.
If you try to really do everything
to coordinate fully and clearly
this will lead to failure
and lots of frustration.
So what does work?
What are the good news?
How can we make this work?
So the first thing is
not to try to compress
what you know.
To understand that these
new extreme conditions
require new different processes,
way more experimental.
And the second thing about coordination is
do not try to fully coordinate,
but instead what we found
the teams that were able
to produce working products,
brand new working products
in three days, that they did something
that we call minimal and
adaptive coordination.
What do we mean?
Minimal means you do not fully agree
on the specific measurements
and methods and materials
of the product or the solution
that you're going to build.
You only agree on the rough outline
and a straight jump into experimentation.
So time-wise, this was up
to an hour of a discussion
and then quickly splitting
into individuals and teams
that start to iteratively experiment.
And the adaptive part
comes when you adjust
to the results of this
experimentation from each other.
So that's what helps,
but what's happening now
we're adding remote to it, right?
So this happened in
hackathons when had in person.
What happens when you do remote?
So this is the big EU versus Virus effort
that I was telling you.
This is the largest online
collaborative effort
so far to fight COVID.
More than 20,000
participant, 2400 projects
that participated out of
which 120 working projects
that are becoming now start-ups.
And I warmly recommend
for you to study them.
It's open to academics.
It's a very interesting project.
But I'll tell you what have we learned.
So what have we learned?
The winning teams, the 120 out of the 2400
were those that either were teams before,
meaning some of their coordination issues
were solved before, they
had a common ground.
Or what they did when they just met was
that they made sure that they
have a visible work flow.
Because as I said, you need
to adjust to each other.
So how can you adjust when
you're hardly seeing each other?
So what we warmly recommend
based on this quick study,
that we're still kind
of analyzing the data,
is to open cameras, to share
ongoing work documents.
Do not wait until something is perfect
to share with your team members.
If you wait until it's
perfect it's too late.
So that's kind of what we've learned
on the team level of analysis.
And if you wanna hear more
about how to manage such teams
for creativity I created
this short animated movie
and we will share it,
the link, via the chat.
Now moving to the organizational
level of analysis.
So what, organizations,
what are they doing
to accelerate the process?
One thing that we have
seen is definitely
that they are responding fast
by using open innovation initiatives.
So what I mean by open innovations is
a wide variety of collaboration online.
Crowd sourcing, hackathons, citizen sites,
so kind of across boundaries not only
with the organization or a few others,
something that is open for the population
and other professionals to join.
And you can see time-wise
and this is kind of showing
the graph with the cases in the U.S.
how the responses have
grown and are still growing.
We're collecting kind of quantitative data
of about more than 100 kind
of since February right now
of these initiatives
sponsored by government,
universities and companies.
What else have we seen?
Since the problem space is
so dynamic the time, that's kind of why
I'm talking about time and acceleration,
is shortened for this effort.
Initially we thought we
understood the problem
and people and organizations
gave kind of a month
or two months to solve a problem.
Now it's becoming shorter
and shorter over time
because people understand
that the problem is
constantly changing and
we need to be more agile
around our understanding of the problem.
And one interesting case that
I'm doing kind of a deep dive
into is the ventilator shortage problem
and the different ways the different
organizations attack it.
The big lesson that we
have learned so far,
that I can share, is that
they're designing the process
with a full path to
implementation already in place.
And what I mean by that is most times
these organizations are
using crowd sourcing
or open innovation that really focused
on finding the solution,
but they forget often,
unfortunately, what happens
once they found the solution.
How will it get implemented or adopted?
That's where the failure usually happens.
And now, because there was a real need,
they made sure that the path is clear
for implementation in
different ways and in new ways.
So this is fascinating and if anyone wants
to share more of what they know about it
I'm really curious to hear.
So, this is it for today
and I'll stop sharing screen
and I'll move to Batia.
- [Batia] Thank you.
We are definitely in the middle
of a remote work revolution
that I think my colleagues
have highlighted
that is changing our
work, our organizations
and our cities.
And here are some, one of
the things that I think is
a big change is the way that
remote work has become strategic.
For a period of several weeks it was
the most common new topic highlighted
by CEOs in their earnings calls.
And what we've seen is actually a change
in the way that CEOs are
talking about remote work.
You can see that early on
there was a lot of attention
to employee health and
business continuity,
the orange and gray lines here,
but those have fallen
off and what is rising is
a focus on real estate and
the ways that remote work
can save money and a big
focus, the blue line,
is that big focus on figuring
out how we can take advantage
of remote work to
restructure our organizations
and offer up new opportunities.
Remote workers, in the past,
have been overrepresented
by either the highest sort
of top earners like many
of the professionals that
we come into contact with
and also those at the lower
end of the wage scale.
That's changing under COVID
where it's much more universal.
In fact, there's a lot of
things that have changed
about remote work under COVID.
Before it was low intensity virtual work.
People were working virtually,
just a day a week or a
couple of days a week.
It was actually two days modally.
Now high intensity,
everyone's doing it 100%
of the time, not everyone.
Before it was exceptional
only 3.4% of workers
worked remotely at
least 80% of their time.
Now much more universal, over
60% as Frances highlighted.
Before it was predominantly voluntary
and now it's predominantly required.
Before it was disproportionately female
and now it's much more diverse.
Before the alternative
to working remotely was
working in the office and
now the alternative is
pretty much not working, which we heard.
Before the childcare and
eldercare, we had a system,
and infrastructure that
was offering up support.
Now that support is either
gone or it generates demands
like the demands on working
parents to home school.
So as we reopen what can learn
from the remote work pre-COVID
that we can use to figure out
how to manage it post-COVID?
Well, first of all, there is some evidence
and I think some of the
enthusiasm for remote work
is coming from the fact
that remote does seem
to improve performance.
There is some evidence about
how remote work improves
financial performance, but
it's really very difficult
to tease apart that confounds
of the selection bias.
Are there certain kinds of firms
that are more likely to have remote work?
But then we can turn
to the individual level
and see what are the impacts
at the individual employee level
and you can see there that
there is lower attrition
among remote workers and
that working remotely
really does seem to increase
employee performance
as rated by their supervisors
and on objective ratings
of performance, but a
lot of that is coming
from the fact that people
increase their work hours
when they work from home.
These performance
benefits are not uniform.
It's much more likely that you
will see performance benefits
from telecommuting more,
from working remotely more,
for people who are doing
more independent tasks.
And it also is true that
people who are doing
more complex tasks who are
going to be more disturb
by distractions in the
workplace, those folks do better
and show more performance
increases when they work remotely.
Employees, it's interesting,
'cause like basically
employees with low social
support, these folks,
are the ones who show a greater benefit
from telecommuting more in
terms of their job performance.
But this actually seems
to be, it's not a function
of don't support your workers
and they'll work better.
In fact, it's the fact that when you have
a toxic work environment
the same pattern shows
in other people's research
on things like having
a toxic relationship with your supervisor
that a bad work environment
is much more bearable
and much less likely
to diminish performance
when you spend less time in it.
So basically, working
remotely helps people
who are in bad work environments
kind of manage their work.
Some other of the benefits are
that there's greater autonomy,
greater job satisfaction,
lower work family conflict.
And that's two different
kinds of work family conflict.
Work interfering with family
and family interfering with work
and it ends up people
report better relationships
with their supervisors
when they're remote.
Several of these effects
are stronger for women
than they are for men, but we're seeing,
consistent with what Frances highlighted,
we're seeing some evidence
of women suffering
from these effects under COVID.
So many of these benefits may not apply
to the current crisis.
There are a number of
downsides of working remotely.
Probably one of the big
ones that has been reported
extensively is that sense of isolation.
And that has been true
even before COVID times.
Some other costs are the
socialization of new employees.
People who are hired remotely
tend to be less committed,
more likely to leave and
perceived that they have
less knowledge of what's
going on in the organization.
Professional development
definitely takes a hit
when people work remotely.
And for female professionals
working remotely,
and females are a disproportionate share,
working remotely does seem to lower wages.
Some of the benefits of remote
work are actually dependent
on being the exception, the fact that
other people aren't doing this.
So this is really
problematic in COVID times.
So things like improved job
satisfaction and autonomy,
those benefits are eliminated
when others are also remote.
And it seems like what happens is
when some people are
remote and other people are
in the office the coordination
and collaboration work
gets delegated to the folks in the office
so the remote workers suffer
when everyone is remote.
What happens when your manager is remote?
Well, then in office workers
tend to be less satisfied,
feel like they get less
professional development,
are more likely to wanna leave
than those whose managers
are in the office.
But, the remote workers benefit
from having a remote supervisor.
Sorry, so basically, what many
organizations have created
to respond to COVID is something like
a minimally viable product.
The equivalent of just a skateboard
to get us from here to there,
to kind of triage in this crisis.
But what we need now is to
actually start iterating
on that model and iterating with a number
of different models that
are going to kind of work
for the broad set of organizations
and industries that we have now and jobs.
So as we reopen there are
a few things to highlight.
Number one, we have to recognize that
there's an easier way to manage.
The easiest way to manage is actually
through direct monitoring.
It requires a lot less managerial skill
and a lot less planning for managers,
but it doesn't work as
well in remote work.
What we need to do to
manage remote workers better
is we need to create that
sense task independence,
a sense of control and independence.
And that means managing by objectives
and not by watching their processes.
So contact with your
employees is really good,
but for information sharing
and not for monitoring,
not looking over their shoulder,
A way to manage them is to
create clear quantifiable
and objective performance criteria
and use performance as
a basis for promotion,
But that requires a fair
amount of managerial skill
and planning in advanced.
We also have to not ignore
the non-remote employees.
So distribute the work of collaboration
to avoid burdening them and recognize
that certain kinds of employees,
especially as we reopen,
are more likely to wish
to return to work sooner.
What the prior evidence
suggests is that we're gonna see
that happening more with
single than married employees,
with male than female employees,
with younger than older employees
and a host of other distribution concerns.
Now that raises a bunch of
diversity and inclusion issues
that Frances has highlighted.
And possibly one of the
things we need to do is
reduce some of the incentive
or reward to returning
by encouraging managers to stay home
so you have less visibility
benefit from that return.
And there are opportunities, opportunities
of reducing barriers to
growth, for sort of having
finite office spaces, wider
labor force participation
possibly and maybe some
of these lower costs.
So now I'm gonna stop sharing
and I'm going to highlight,
sort of bring everyone
together to highlight
some of the questions
that we have gotten in.
I'm gonna start with the
questions that we've gotten
from our colleagues and then I'll move on
to some of, sort of fill in
with some of the questions
that I have for you folks.
So, first of all, the first
question actually comes
from Anenja and it's a question for Rob.
And the medium terms and long
term impacts on innovation
may also be confounded by immigration
and the current
administration's perspective
on immigration and I wonder
if you would be willing
to speak to that?
It feels a little bit
different from remote work,
though related, because
obviously if you can collaborate
remotely then perhaps
some of this collaboration
can happen from abroad.
- [Rob] First of all thank you, Batia.
And I always learn so much when
I see my colleagues present
so thanks also Hila and Frances.
And Anenja thanks for the question.
Yeah, I agree that there are
sort of three things going on.
So there's the pandemic
which has forced us all
to work from home.
There's the recession now which
is a result of the pandemic.
Then there's sort of a
bunch of policy responses
and there are many different
types of policy responses.
And one of which,
unfortunately, has been changes
to the immigration laws that
we have in this country.
And so, sort of disentangling all of those
is gonna be tricky.
There's plenty of research,
including research
by colleagues that we
have here at NYU Stern,
such as Petra Moser and
Mike Waugh, who have spent
a lot of time sort of looking at the link
between immigration and innovation
and there's a positive link there, right.
As you increase immigration, particularly
of high skilled immigrants,
you see positive effects
to innovation, positive
effects to productivity.
And so, we're gonna missing out on that.
Of course, as I was
saying, disentangling that
from some of the other
things that are going on
is going to be difficult.
- [Batia] I think this question, which was posed
by Maria Patterson, is very relevant
for both Frances and definitely for Hila.
And so, Maria's question is about
what is the impact of
group size on innovation
and collaboration remotely?
We certainly have seen
it when you're Zooming
that is there an impact
of being able to kind of
in this Zoom world collaborate
when you can't see
everyone on your screen?
And, Hila, you certainly were working
with sort of large scale.
Frances brought in the expertise
of speaking up in these groups.
So I wonder if the two of
you might have a perspective
on that question?
Maybe we could start with
Hila and then move to Frances.
- [Hila] Sure.
So, indeed, I worked now with
EU versus Virus hackathon.
We've had a crazy amount of people,
but still even in this large scale
of more than 20,000 individuals
they made sure that when
there was work sessions
of the teams they did
not exceed the usual,
let's say, recommended size of a team,
which is usually between
four to six individuals.
So the way they did it was dividing,
I would say, the technology tools.
So Zooming was through
this kind of good size
of four to six people.
Slack was constantly the place
where the action happened.
So basically, everything lived on Slack.
So for those three days, which
happened every two weeks,
we all lived on Slack.
Which was an interesting experience
'cause I'm used to regular
physical hackathons
and events where you go and do it.
So the first thing I felt was
where is the event happening?
How do you get 20,000
people feeling connected
that they're in the same environment?
So Slack was the home.
So I would say it's
important to try to think
as a company or a manager
how do you create,
what is the home?
'Cause Zoom is not enough.
And then when you do the
teamwork then it went to Zoom
and there was collaborative
tools that we kind of all know
from Google Presentations
to Doc, et cetera.
But Slack was leveraged to
its maximum I would say.
- [Batia] Frances?
- [Frances] So, what we know from research on teams
prior to working remotely
is that the optimal size is
somewhere between four and
seven for communication.
So it sounds like, Hila,
that in your hackathon
they sort of got that idea
and they broke out people
into smaller groups and
I think that that's going
to be similar on Zoom.
I suspect that the coordination problems
in larger groups on Zoom
will be even greater
than the coordination problems
in large groups face-to-face.
And the reason I would say that is because
of the problem with the nonverbal cues.
Trying to figure out like who
wants to speak, for example,
in a very large Zoom
group can create problems,
can create coordination challenges.
And then, sometimes when people experience
those challenges they might decide
that it's just too difficult to speak up
or to make their contribution
and they may not speak.
So I think, bottom line I
think team size will matter
a lot in remote groups.
- [Batia] Now I'd like to turn it
to Mor Armony's question
and I feel like it's actually
relevant to across the board.
So each one of us touched
on an issue of inequality
in various different
ways and Mor is asking
what impact will these changes,
a variety of these changes,
I think, what impact will it
have on inequality in the U.S.?
Maybe we can start with
Rob because you shared
with us some of the demographic data.
- [Rob] Yeah, thank you for the question.
And Batia, I completely agree.
I think we can all speak to sort of
different dimensions of this.
Mor, I think your intuition is correct
the fact that it's really
important to be connected
to the internet right now
and coupled with the fact
that there are many people
that actually don't have
great access to the internet
or no connection at all
means this will likely lead to an increase
in income inequality absent
any type of policy response.
So that's sort of the
initial thing we have to add.
But policy makers are aware
that there is a bid digital divide.
Policy makers have been
considering policies
to address this and so
it wouldn't surprise me
if there's at least some attempt to try
to address this a little
bit in terms of taking care
of some of these spacial inequalities
that I was talking about
in my presentation.
- [Batia] Maybe Frances or Hila.
- [Frances] So the inequalities that
I think about are maybe
within the set of people
that are working remotely.
Whereas Rob is thinking
about the inequalities
in access to technology and the capability
to work remotely.
But within organizations where
people are working remotely
I suspect that inequality will increase.
And the reason why is
the lack of this kind of
casual contact between
people that might occur,
for example, in hallway conversations
or in the elevator or in the kitchen.
So these things are not
occurring and those are times
when people have the
opportunity to interact
with people who are very
different from themselves.
Perhaps different hierarchical levels
or more interaction,
possibly, across racial lines
and across gender lines.
So this piece of research
I was describing earlier
suggests that what's
happening in the Zoom world is
that people are talking a lot
to people they already know.
What are called strong ties
in the research on networks
and what has been reduced
is the communication
to people that you don't know as well
and that's the weak ties.
But weak ties are really really important
to creativity and innovation,
past research has suggested.
And weak ties would be
more probably connections
to people who are different from yourself
whether that's on gender or on race
or on hierarchal level in an organization.
So I would have concerns
about increase inequality
in organizations as a
result of remote work.
- [Hila] If I could end on inequality
I do not know enough
about within the U.S.
inequality and its impact,
but have experienced in
this last couple of months
the global inequality since
this was a global effort
that we did and it was very
clear to see the difference
specifically with Africa.
And think the result, some of it is
from what Rob suggested
around the technology
and the broadband and the infrastructure.
So the digital divide is very clear.
So we had to, first of all,
from a creative perspective
we had to think of very
different solutions.
How do you educate and
get medical education
and training to physicians
when they do not have wifi,
when they do not have actually broadband.
So all the telemedicine
we have talked about
in the U.S. is very
different and less relevant
in some places because they lack
the technological infrastructure.
So I would say in that case
we were actually feeling
on the side that can help.
So NYU was one of the most,
and Sterns specifically,
was one of the most
contributors actually to
those countries that needed more.
So in those hard days I think we feel
a lot of problems within
the U.S. maybe it helps
to broaden the scope and
see that in some cases
on the global scale we are better off
with those technologies and
we're able actually to help
other countries that are
still struggling with COVID
and with the lack of technologies
and the infrastructure.
- [Batia] These are great insights.
I wanna add just one point that
I think that there could be,
contingent on what Rob
highlighted and other technologies
like 5G actually, I think there could be
a real opportunity going
forward for diminishing
some forms of inequality.
So one of the thing
about remote work is that
it does make it possible for moms
to come back to work earlier.
It makes it possible for, it's very good
for Americans with disabilities.
It turns out that there
are a host of people,
for example, the LGBTQ
community is more likely
to be represented among remote workers
and it creates much more
opportunity for them.
And I think that one of the
things that we realized is
that there is so much
inequality as a function
of, honestly, housing
and the concentration
of opportunities in certain regions.
Particularly around major
metropolitan regions
and if remote work enables
that broader participation
then it could actually be a tool
for reducing inequality in the U.S.
But again, and I just
feel like I'm reflecting
exactly what Rob, Hila and Frances said.
It's all contingent on sort
of creating an infrastructure.
So this is something that policy makers
and corporations have to work together
to make sure that we've
got the infrastructure
to make this something that
increases participation
and diminishes inequality
instead of exacerbating it.
Maybe I'll turn now to
Dick Berner's question,
which actually relates to
something that Hila brought up
as we were preparing for this.
So Dick Berner raises that
several of our observations
seem to apply to remote teaching
and collaborative research.
And I really feel like
this is the question
of like what's the role
of researchers in this?
And what can we learn
about this for academic,
for sort of furthering academic goals,
both research and teaching?
And wonder if any of you, I
think I wanna start with Hila
because she did think about this earlier
and then have the rest of you weigh in.
- [Hila] Sure, so Batia knows that
I've become very enthusiastic,
I would say, in this over the last period
about our role as academics and
what can we change about it.
And what are the academic policy
implications, I would say?
So if we talked about
accelerating innovation
in the sciences, in technologies,
what about the social sciences?
What about business schools?
So a few things that I think are kind of,
let's say my academic
policy recommendations
and things that I'm still
thinking of how to do it.
And if anyone has examples that they see
I would love to hear and learn from them.
So one thing is open access.
So one way to get our research out,
put faster out there and
with a broader impact
and it also solves a lot
of the inequality issues
that we are talking about
since many people do not have
the ability to read a lot of our research.
So open access to anything
related to COVID to me is a must.
This is a public good.
This is something that has to change.
So many journals have changed it
and many publishers have changed it,
but I warmly recommend to all researchers
and myself included, I had
to negotiate in this spirit
for instance when I'm
doing this special issue
with that it has to be open access
because it's COVID related.
So it's not so obvious in the
social sciences we are behind.
So in the medical sciences,
in the physical sciences,
chemistry, genomics, name
it, they understood it
and they're even temporary opening it
and we are still behind on that.
So that's one way, it's kind
of in the end of the funnel
of our work, is kind
of to push it out there
so other people can build upon it
and really use what we're doing.
And in the start, I
would say, of our work,
in the data collection
and what we're doing,
the way we're doing research itself,
that's, I think, still an open issue
of how can we do it in
more open collaborative way
and there are different
ways to go about it,
but I would say we haven't
found a good answer yet.
Mostly due to kind of
the incentive structure
of academia, I believe.
But I would love to hear
more from my colleagues
and what they think about it.
- [Batia] Rob or Frances?
- [Rob] I'll offer a very quick thought
that I think applies to both the teaching
and research part of the
question, Dick, that you asked.
The technology that we're using right now,
this Zoom, it's pretty good.
I like Batia's description of this
as a minimum viable product.
What I feel like I really
miss out on are the
sort of happenstance interactions
with either colleagues around research
or with students around what it is
that they're learning in the classroom.
So in the case of students,
if we were teaching at Stern,
I would be bumping into
students in the hallway,
in the elevator.
There'd be the chance to
sort of deepen relationship
via just some chit-chat,
but also they could ask me
about something that they
don't understand in class
and that's useful feedback.
So there's all of that
on the teaching side
that we're totally missing out on.
On the research side, I
was remarking to Batia
and Hila about this on Sunday, so many
of my research ideas have
come from academic conferences
not from seeing other people present,
but just from bumping
into people in the hallway
and starting up a conversation
and it sparks an idea that
then leads to research.
And the technology interface
that we're using now
doesn't allow for those sort
of happenstance interactions.
Everything is planned.
You got a Google invite
to attend a Zoom webinar.
Or you set up your class
and that's when you see your students.
All of those sort of little
happenstance things are missing
and maybe there's a
technological solution to it
or maybe there's sort of
a behavioral solution.
I'm not sure, but I do really miss that.
- [Batia] Anything you wanted to add, Frances?
- [Frances] Just, this is on a
slightly different note.
In some of my Zoom conversations
over the last few months
I have been struck by the
diversity of our experiences
and how, I guess this relates
to the common ground point
I was making earlier, how we have
such a minimal understanding
of the circumstances
in which other people are operating now.
And I think that definitely applies
when thinking of our role as teachers
and trying to understand our students
and trying to understand
how difficult is it
for them to log in.
What's going on in there house?
How many people are living in their house?
Has anyone in their family
gotten sick from COVID?
There's so much information
about the diversity
of people's experiences that we're lacking
and I think that's a real
challenge in teaching.
To try to figure out like
how can we somehow use
this technology in some
way to connect individually
with students to try to
understand a bit more
about their personal experiences
so that we can help
them optimize learning.
- [Batia] So a question that we got from Mor is
a question about what's the
impact of the home schooling
on kind of parent's ability to innovate
and be creative and
engage with their work?
And I do think that in
prior research, I mean,
I'm gonna just try to
respond to that a little
and then welcome your comments.
But in prior research, so not
so much focused on innovation,
but in prior research what
has been demonstrated is
that generally working remotely diminishes
the interference of work on family
and that is especially true for women.
But it's kind of across the
board for men and women,
there aren't any differences
in how much interference
of non-work impacts work,
but I think that that's
one of the things that we
are starting to realize.
Is how those interferences
are much greater
and I think that we're
gonna see that continue
because it looks like
public schools are likely
to not, with social
distancing and all of that,
for the foreseeable future
until we really have a vaccine
that everyone is going
to get we may not go back
to having all the
infrastructure that we have had.
And the question is what can organizations
and what can policy makers do to address
what definitely does seem to be a drag
on the attentional
resources of our workforce
and the sense of conflict and stress
that we know stress generally
undermines creativity.
I wonder if Frances or Hila or Rob,
we're all kind of living with this.
I know I've got four kids and a husband
and all of us competing
for bandwidth here.
So I guess we're all
sort of living with this.
I wonder if any of you
have any reflections?
- [Hila] I can say about accelerating innovation.
So, unfortunately, I usually
like to be optimistic
and I love kids, but they do,
they or any other distraction,
I think as Frances talked
about distractions,
have a negative effect on
accelerating innovation.
So we haven't checked it, at least not me
or none of my colleagues, in this period,
but what we know from
before part of the magic
or the ability to do
accelerated innovation has to do
with putting everything else
aside, the lack of distraction.
We are constantly, even when back then
when we used to work in a
regular work environment,
all those distractions and
the phone and the meeting
that was bad for innovation
when it needs to happen fast.
So I actually think
that's a negative effect
for accelerating innovation.
For some longer term
creativity I do not know.
Open questioning, maybe, but when we need
to do something fast and
to find creative solutions
for things that are related to COVID,
technological scientists
that are working from home,
and I think that relates
to Rob from slides,
that kind of negative
productivity of scientist
of engineers, yeah, that's not going well
with having kids in the house.
And we do need to think about employers,
co-parenting as solutions.
I know different countries, by the way,
have started when they started opening up,
they did not only went from
home schooling to school.
Some of them went to grouping.
Kind of grouping of families
and then parenting could happen.
You could work for three
days and three families
with the parents and
all kind of interesting.
Europe is really interesting in that case
'cause you can see the
variation across the policies
of the different countries and
how they opened differently.
So in that sense it's interesting to watch
and maybe they can provide data.
I do not know it yet.
- [Rob] I'll just, I know we're
sort of running out of time,
but I'll just very very quickly add.
I mean, I completely agree with everything
that you both have said
about the likely effects
on creativity and innovation.
The only thing I would add
is just echoing something
that Frances said
earlier about not knowing
what's going on with our students
and it's the same thing
with our colleagues.
I would expect that these
effects very greatly
across families with children
depending on, of course,
number of children, ages of the children,
the specific sort of
behavioral and emotional needs
of different children and maybe a number
of working adults in the house.
There's just so many sort of dimensions
along which this varies
and the experience is
probably very different
for many different folks.
It'll be an interesting thing to study
looking forward several
years in the future
what the effect of kids in the household
during this time period is
on creativity and innovation.
- [Batia] Okay, I guess we've
kind of run out of time,
but just to reinforce
it, it does seem like one
of the things that's
happened with COVID is that
we've seen how large organizations,
rather than the smaller
ones, seem to be more agile.
This is definitely a
crisis that has played
to the strengths of those, the strengths
and innovation capability of
those large organizations.
And a big part of it is being
able to provide some of this,
to have infrastructure at scale.
And I feel like that is what's needed,
highlight some of the things
that Rob and Hila were
both just talking about.
So I wanna thank everybody for joining us
and we will have the video
up ready in a couple of days.
Thanks all and see ya next week.
(light music)
