James' World 2

• A Harvard Business School professor who has studied remote work for years says companies risk making big mistakes in a rushed moved to new employment models after Covid.
• He referenced GitLab, a 1,300-employee company that has been fully remote since it was founded and built rigorous processes from Day One to make it work.
• GitLab’s CEO says hybrid work models, which many companies now say they will favor in the future, can turn out to be “horrible.”

If you work for a company that is planning to make work-from-home permanent after the Covid-19 crisis, a big mistake could be in the making. That’s because, according to Harvard Business School professor Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury — a remote work expert who has been studying the phenomenon since well before the coronavirus — work-from-home is not the right model, even if it was a pandemic-induced short-term requirement. The new employment normal needs to be work-from-anywhere, or it is more likely to be a failure.

“Remote work is more than work-from-home, and the form of remote work I am most excited about is work-from-anywhere, where the employee has the choice to live anywhere,” Choudhury said at a recent CNBC Workforce Executive Council virtual event.

The Harvard professor, who recently wrote a cover story for the Harvard Business Review on his research, points to several key ways companies that think they are doing the right thing in migration to remote work may get it wrong.