Welcome to episode four of series 11 of The Digital HR Leaders podcast. The nature of work and workplaces was already changing, but the pandemic has fast-forwarded many aspects of the future of work. Today's guest is Ethan Bernstein, who is an Associate Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Unit at The Harvard Business School.

He teaches the second year MBA course in managing human capital, the Harvard Business School online course on developing yourself as a leader and various executive education programs. Ethan studies the impact of workplace transparency, the observability of employee activities, routines, behaviours, output and performance on productivity. With implications for leadership, collaboration, organisation design and new forms of organising.

Together with others, Ethan has conducted research during the pandemic to understand the implications of working without an office, which sought to answer a number of questions. Paramount amongst them was what impact has working from home had on productivity and creativity?

The discussion that follows is rich, wide ranging and consistently fascinating. Ethan is one of the most interesting, knowledgeable and witty guests we have had on the show yet. Sit back and enjoy.

You can listen to this week’s episode below or by visiting the podcast website here.

In our conversation, Ethan and I discuss:

• The key findings of his research on the impact of remote working and the impact it is having on productivity and innovation

• The implications, post pandemic for work, collaboration and workplace design

• How well-equipped HR functions have thrived during the crisis of 2020

• What the future leaders he teaches in his Harvard MBA course are saying about the role of HR

• The role of HR in workplace design and in helping prepare their organisations for hybrid ways of working

This episode is a must listen for anyone interested or involved in workplace transparency, technology, people analytics and future ways of working. So that's business leaders, CHROs and anyone in a people analytics, strategic workforce planning, HR tech or HR business partner role.

Support for this podcast is brought to you by orgvue . To learn more, visit https://www.orgvue.com/.

Interview Transcript

David Green: Today, I am delighted to welcome Ethan Bernstein, Associate Professor in the Organisational Behaviour Unit at The Harvard Business School to The Digital HR Leaders podcast. Ethan it is fantastic to have you on the show. Can you provide listeners with a brief introduction to what you teach at HBS and also the specific areas of your research as well?

Ethan Bernstein: Thank you, David, it is a pleasure to be here. I have to say I'm a little bit intimidated to be here with the leader of myHRfuture. I feel as though I am going to be asking you more questions than you should be asking me, but I am delighted to be here with you. At HBS I am the Edward W. Conard Associate Professor of Business Administration where I am in the Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Unit. In that unit I teach the Managing Human Capital course and our virtual Developing Yourself as a Leader course. And I do research on the increasingly transparent workplace, its impact on employee behaviours and the impact of those changing behaviours on the performance of organisations.

David Green: Perfect. Well, I can assure you Ethan, people are tuning in to listen to you and not me.

So I will definitely hope that the balance will be mainly you talking, but I think you might challenge me on that a little bit as we go.

So let's begin with the focus areas of your research around workplace transparency. Firstly, what does that involve?

Ethan Bernstein: Well transparency means a lot of things to a lot of different people.

I try to come to it with the most simple definition. We tend to think of something as transparent, like a glass of water, if we can see through it and so partly that is in physical form we can see more of the effort that is going around our organisations today. Of course, that was true before the pandemic, when we were in open offices and so I was very interested in the ways in which open offices changed behaviours. It was true in factories, which have for a couple of decades focused on the visual factory, the ability to see work getting done, see where there might be problems and find ways of solving them more quickly. And of course, many of those changes have been very productive for workplaces across industries.

I tend to have a particular proclivity for those places where it turns out to be less productive or perhaps better said, counter-intuitive, implications of the fact that we see human beings and therefore human beings, because they are human beings, change the way they do their work and they change them in ways that are unintended and sometimes counter productive.

David Green: I mean, again, we could probably talk about this in great depth but what are some of the examples of the key findings of your research? Something that you think will really pique the interest of people listening.

Ethan Bernstein: So one of my first pieces of research that made its way into HBR was called The Transparency Trap, was in part based on a study I did in China where we it was about as transparent a workplace as you can imagine. It was a large factory making mobile devices, one of the largest in the world, you could see across football fields length of factory floors and the thought was, this must actually be not just very productive but a good way of working. And I embedded, in a very non-transparent way ironically, a few Harvard College students in the line and as they had all been born in and had lived in China for extended periods of time, so they fit right in. No one knew that they were anything other than ordinary workers. And we immediately discovered, David, that there were two ways that they were trained to work, this was on the very first day. One way when people were watching and one way when people weren't and they knew, because it turns out if you have a transparent factory floor, it is not just that everyone can see you, you can also see everybody else. So as managers who had been trained in management by walking around, walked around, everyone changed the way they did things and they changed things to meet the expectations of the managers. This turned out to be a less productive way of working because they had done this 2000 times a day, times X number of days, if you do things enough times you find little tricks and ways of doing things better. And the cost of explaining to the engineer or the manager that I found a better way of doing things, is not as great as the benefit you get from that conversation. So instead you just make everyone happy, in their own words, you do it one way when they are watching and you do it another way when they are not. So we wanted to solve that and to make a long story short, after all the HR interventions I considered and I'm sure the listeners of the podcast would think of cultural innovation, power based innovation changes etc depending on who you are, you think of all sorts of ways that you would try to change the way this place was working.

We decided, at their own suggestion, to put up curtains. We just put curtains up around the line, not around individuals, these were not telephone booths or other kinds of booth like environments, these were literally just curtains, think of a hospital bed curtain around an entire line. The lines that had those curtains and we did this very carefully to correct for Hawthorne effects and all the other things that a rigorous academic would want to correct for. The curtained lines did really honestly, somewhere between 10% and 13% better. Over a long period of time they got a jump in performance and stayed there and that increase in performance really came from the fact that they simply were not subject to as much transparency as they otherwise had felt before.

We can go into more detail, but you asked for a short answer, that is the short answer. That is what got me started in this and that is how I made my way to open offices because everyone wanted to know is the same true about open offices. That is a little bit different, so in another article that I have since written about open offices, we used more of the technologies that you are familiar with, the people analytics based technology, sociometric badges and such, to measure how people change their interactions as they transitioned from more traditional cubicle like offices to really open spaces, think of the newest form of an office before the pandemic. And we found that despite at least this organisation's desire to bring people “together” in open spaces, to have them interact more face to face. When you took down those boundaries, you got substantially less face to face interaction and people move their interaction online into email and IM, we tracked all the digital traces.

Again, not necessarily a bad or a good result but it is an unintended consequence and not at all what this organisation was expecting to see.

David Green: Yes and probably quite counter intuitive to the whole reason for doing it in the first place, they thought they were bringing people together. They may have been doing it digitally, but that as you said was an unintended consequence, actually they were doing the opposite of bringing people together. Interesting.

Ethan Bernstein: And you know, it is counter-intuitive for us as managers, leaders and HR professionals but as people it is probably not counter-intuitive at all. We like privacy, we have a natural human need for privacy. It's either individual or group level of privacy. We do things differently when we have an audience, you and I expect to have one right now, so we are speaking a little bit differently, we have got a little bit more adrenaline running through our bodies as well. That effect, it's a very human effect, so as you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. It just not how we tend to act as Managers because we have never had the levels of transparency and the tools for transparency that we have today. We have always been fighting for more because we haven't had enough. Now we are suddenly in a world in which we might actually have too much and privacy has become more expensive than transparency and we are not exactly sure how to make sure that we use the tools for privacy well, while keeping the benefits that the tools for transparency have bought us over the last 30 or 40 years.

David Green: Well we are definitely going to get to the privacy angle a little bit later and we are also going to start talking about some of the research that you have been doing since the pandemic started as well. But before we do, I know you have also done some work around rhythm and collaboration as well. I thought that would be quite an interesting thing to share with listeners before we plow into the pandemic.

Ethan Bernstein: This comes from some of the work I have already talked about, but also you can imagine David, I think you have done some work over time on the sociometric badges on the work that came out of the media lab on this idea of tracking people's interactions digitally and face-to-face. If you combine those two themes and maybe I'm stretching a little bit here, David you will correct me, if you are at least in my mind you start to see an interesting movement towards always on. Not just in, always on, because my smartphone is on and I have it with me, but always on like always communicating with one another and actually the move towards open offices was an attempt to increase that. If that is a) an open office is not necessarily what they do and b) if you go to that factory study, not quite what we want, if productivity is the goal, then I owe everybody a better answer than it depends and we don't have the answer. I mean, that is not what they pay me for at HBS and that is not why you brought me on the show.

And so we set out to try to understand more broadly, what is the rhythm of collaboration that we are seeking? And that is how we framed the question. We did some studies that showed that actually it is not always on and it is not always off if we are problem-solving, which is what we focused on. It is actually something in between it's an on and off that, interestingly enough, if you look at the real world 30 years ago, we had it naturally because we would have meetings and then we would have isolation and then we have meetings, then we have isolation. Technology has given us the option of not having that kind of alternation, the silence and sound of a rhythm, but instead constant on. What that has done is defaulted us towards acting that way and what we suggest is that actually managers, whether they are HR managers or general managers, today have a harder challenge than they did 20 years ago because now they have to set the offs as well as the on.

In order to actually get that rhythm, but that's what we find will yield the most fruit in good human behaviour and ultimately productive behavioural workplaces.

David Green: We are going to move on to the pandemic now, but certainly some of the people analytics practitioners I have been talking to recently, some of the research they have been doing in their own organisations during the pandemic is this importance around focus time, which I guess is what you are saying about getting that rhythm right. So yes, we know that we are going to be doing lots of calls via Zoom and Teams and other platforms, but we also need to have that focus time to get our work done effectively because we know that if we get interrupted continually, we are not going to be able to do that or we are going to stress and work long hours. So it is quite interesting, which I think leads quite nicely onto some of the research that you have done in the pandemic. I am certainly not going to try and predict the future after the events of this year, I think it is fraught with challenges. I think it's fairly safe to assume though that the crises of 2020 have fast-forwarded many aspects of “the future of work” if we can use the inverted commas around that title and I know that you have been involved in some research associated with the largest remote working experiment in history. I think you have framed that initially around what the impact working from home had had on productivity and creativity. I know that research was published in the summer, it would be great to share some of those key findings with listeners, those that haven't read it, and maybe if you have been doing more research since, how those findings have developed?

Ethan Bernstein: Absolutely. So to take a step back here, this is with all the work I have described actually is with many different, fantastic collaborators. In this case, I joined up with Hayley Blunden at HBS, Andrew Brodsky and Wonbin Sohn at UT Austin McCombs School of Business school and Ben Waber who is an old time friend and the CEO of Humanyze. We have mentioned sociometric badges, he was one of the people with boots on the ground when Sandy and the group were first creating those in the Media Lab at MIT. We got together and looked at some survey results, that was the starting point. The survey that we have been running is unique in the following way, we have been asking people, not really a representative sampling but a diverse sampling of people in the United States who have been working from home, every two weeks, the same set of questions since they began working at home because of the pandemic. We started with 600, it has come down a bit since then, but at least the original work was with 600 people. Roughly half women, half men, half of them married, a third of them have children, about 40% managers, 60% individual contributors all working virtually. We asked them, this was nothing like new or novel, all the normal stuff, job satisfaction, work engagement, perceptions of own performance, how they rated their conflicts with colleagues, stress negative. What made this interesting was not the questions we asked, what made this interesting was the context in which we asked them and the longitudinal nature of them. And then we paired that data and continued to pair that data with data that Ben is collecting from various organisations that are sociometric in nature. So not just what people perceive, but actually how they are working, what their interactions are like digitally over the course of the same amount of time and then we interviewed some leaders too. That combination of data led to some interesting findings that I summarise, there are three curves. There is the, we sort of optimistically named this The “we can do this” curve. I realise now in December it feels a little bit less optimistic, although work-wise it has been, employee stress, negative emotions, task conflict, all steadily falling since virtual work began.

People have figured out how to do this and they framed it, we also ask an open ended question so we get a lot of interesting qualitative responses. People are saying “I’ve been taking my Zoom skills to the next level” you know “we're figuring out how to do this” “it is starting to feel like business as usual, it is weird how normal everything has become, the virtual meetings, emails, "everyone looking grungy” whatever it is and these are their own quotes. They have gotten into the groove of working from home and actually many of them say they love it and that is this “we can do this” curve. So that's one.

The second curve to pick up on is what we are all still hoping to see in the economy is the V curve, this idea that we dive down and bounce back up and job satisfaction and engagement, both followed that path. So people felt less engaged and less satisfied sharply after two weeks of working virtually, but it recovered almost as sharply after that and we have seen it basically plateau and not go back down. We know little blips here and there that I think at this point might need more due to the news cycles on the pandemic than it is due perhaps to the workplace affects themselves, but they have recovered. It took some time to get used to it and for things to go right, it was a learning process, but they actually said “we got into a rhythm.” I was so happy when I saw that word after my own work, but this is the finding the rhythm.

Then the third curve, which looks really boring, but to me it is just as interesting if not more so, is the flat line. So people have consistently rated their perceptions of own performance roughly unchanged, now in part that is because, as Ben finds, work days are 10 to 20% longer and we are just doing everything we possibly need to do to keep that performance the same under stress of the world and all that it means for our job. Stress is harder for people with kids and not as hard for people with spouses, all these things are highly predictable, but if you think of the combination of those things, it is actually a pretty good story for us at least on average. I get very excited by this because I do think it offers us both a spirit and a path forward for how work might change and has been accelerated by the last nine months is that there may be lots of silver linings here. Interestingly we thought, well, the introverts will love this and the extroverts won't and by and large, that was insignificant. We did not find a distinction there because remember we asked for all sorts of personality traits, but people who were more agreeable on the traditional measure of agreeableness, did much better at adapting to the pandemic work. People who are more narcissistic did much worse and so that tells us a little bit about how this new future of work might evolve, given who we are favouring and who we are not, in this particular way.

Last thing, David and then I really will let you in. For those who aren’t watching the video, you can see David's sitting here nodding and smiling, so he is encouraging me to keep going. Communication because we talked about this rhythm before, strong tie communication, people that we knew well we're communicating roughly 40% more with not less. We are actually communicating more with those people who we need to communicate with to get the basic functions of our job done or with whom we already had strong ties. Weak ties are down, communications are down at least 10%, probably much more than that at this point. And Ben's concern and I echo it on that is, much of the work that has been done using people analytics shows that organisational health in the long term drives from the weak tie networks that provide unique and novel information to us in the short term. So it very well may be that we have a challenge for creativity, a challenge for innovation, a challenge for information and knowledge generation and learning in the next 18 months, because we have under-invested in the weak ties in these last nine months that would lead us to do well then.

That is a cautionary tale from all of it.

David Green: Interesting. Well, I suppose anything that is bad for narcissists, isn't necessarily a bad thing.

What is interesting though is that finding that people that you collaborate with regularly, people in your own team, maybe your best friends at work, that collaboration is up, but collaboration with our weaker ties is going down.

I think when you actually look at that on a network map, typically those are the connections that connect different teams together and as you say, drive innovation and creativity within organisations. I guess it is too early to come to any firm conclusions yet, but I share your concerns about the next 18 months.

Interestingly we had Michael Arena on the podcast a couple of months ago and he said exactly the same, some of the research that he is doing with Rob Cross and others, is finding the same things around those kinds of bridge connections, if we can call them that. So that is quite interesting.

Obviously you have got a view based on your research prior to the pandemic and some of the stuff you have been doing since, so if we are brave enough to look post pandemic with the hope that comes as soon as possible, we can imagine a more hybrid way of working perhaps. Also the type of work that we do together in the office may be more collaborative, may be driven towards the creative and the innovative tasks that we have got.

What does this mean for workplace design? And I am thinking about the research that you have done around transparency previously.

Ethan Bernstein: David, you know I like to say that as an academic, I prefer to predict the past rather than the future, but that said we actually do have some research to suggest at least some of what I think will happen and I haven't heard a lot of people say this.

Here is prediction number one and then I am going to ask you if you think that that is indeed, what is going to happen. Prediction number one, as human beings, because we are very good at remembering the better things in the past and forgetting the worse. I have two kids there, that is evidence of that just in itself. I think we are all longing for a return to the office right now and we don't long for it with masks on and we don't long for it with social distancing. We long for a vaccinated world in which we can go back to what we were doing before because we have forgotten how much we disliked our commute to work, how much we disliked the smell of tuna at lunchtime in the open offices we used to inhabit. We have forgotten about what it means to not get work done during the day and having to do it at night because that is our only focus time, we have actually forgotten about all the logistical frustrations, all of the workplace frustrations of what it was like before. I think that will last for a grand total of maybe a week or two after we all move back to the quote unquote “real world.” And that is going to be the really interesting moment because then we are going to end up nostalgic for the things that you remember, that actually were really good, about this time.

Not just the things that are absent, the wasted time waiting for a delayed flight in the airport, or whatever else might be the case with our travels and they come back. But also, in my case saying goodnight to my kids every night since March because I'm not travelling, feeling like I actually get maybe twice as much work done these days, at least certain days because I have that opportunity. We are going to naturally want to put the two together and that yields a couple of key questions because that is the kind of thing we haven't necessarily been successful at doing before and that is not the fault of all the HR professionals listening to the podcast. That is actually all of our faults because, if you work from home, you are always sort of a second class citizen if the default is working from the office, because it is difficult to make people remember both muscles virtual and non-virtual in person. It is difficult for people, for human beings, especially collectively to make decisions that are good for the collective and not just good for the individual.

We haven't been good at this and so the question is, what do we do? And I do think it starts with three things. It starts with 1) continuing to experiment. We are not going to figure this out just with a bunch of brain power. This is not the, I listened to the Harvard Professor and he'll tell you the answer. This is, we are actually going to have to keep trying. Put the same spirit into the hybrid world that we have put into the pandemic world for the last nine months.

I think 2) that as I have suggested, these are both muscles. So Gale King, who is the CAO and EVP at Nationwide, as they have started moving people back to the office she has intentionally ensured that everyone gets to flex both muscles, virtual and in-person, because a) you get empathy for the other and b) you just remember how to do it so that you're not forgetting that, Oh, I could put something in the chat here instead of taking the extra five minutes of airtime with everybody listening. There is this joining of power. Let's keep that in Slack, let's put this here, that only comes from us collectively having those bosses.

The third is I still think the office space has to be thought of as an add on. We just can't go back to the costs, if you're a real estate professional and in-flexibilities, if you are an HR professional, of thinking that everything has to default to the office. If instead we assume, well, people can get work done in the future of work virtually, which we kind of have a lot of evidence we can now. We should re-envision the office for the things like on-boarding new people, for the things like building weak ties by fostering relationships that otherwise wouldn't get fostered.

For the things like that so-called water cooler conversation, that doesn't have to be a water cooler conversation, but is frankly easier in a physical space than it is in a virtual space. As one of our respondents put it in their survey “one can only have so many zoom happy hours” I mean, there is a limitation to break out rooms and how much we can adore them or despise them.

We can design spaces and approaches that take the best of both but we are going to have to do that intentionally. We are going to have to structure organisations to do it, so organisations getting rid of physical spaces should think about investing in people who are responsible for this like heads of remote work, we say in the article. Let's just say maybe stipends for people to invest in work from home devices that will help them do this well. And if we do all of this, half of it will work and half of it won't, but 50% is actually a better rate than we have had in the past. So let's just keep our relative expectations appropriate and use all the people analytics and data tools we have to figure out if it is working.

That is my recipe, David, but you are more the futurist than I, what do you think?

David Green:  Well, I definitely liked your comment about we are going to have to be intentional because I think maybe we haven't, we have just said, oh, people can work from home one or two days a week.

We don't think about the work that could be done more productively at home. Let's be honest, there are a group of leaders and managers in different companies, some in bigger numbers than others, that feel if they can't see people doing the work, then they must not be working. And as you said, now we have got the data to show that actually people are working just as hard, if not harder remotely and in some cases actually being more productive. What will be interesting is if we start to look at, what is the cost of people being more productive at home and working longer hours? And what is the impact on wellness and health and other things related to that? I guess we don't really know yet because it is probably too early. So I love your idea that we are going to need to experiment, we are going to need to look at a number of different factors and we will also need to accept that some people actually prefer working predominantly from an office and other people prefer predominantly working from home. It doesn't mean that either is right, because I guess, it is all right for me, someone in my forties, living in a reasonably large house with my wife and kids. My wife doesn't work so she looks after the children so that they don't really impinge on me working longer hours. I have an office set up to do that but if I was 15/20 years younger I would probably be living in shared accommodation in London. I would have a bedroom and I wouldn't really want to work from home because I would want to go in the office, build community, build connections with the right people in the organisation and help progress my career. So I guess that is the kind of employee preference piece that companies are going to have to think about.

I am going to turn it back to you now, in the organisations that you have studied, is there anyone that has already, obviously it will be prior to the pandemic, that have got these hybrid workplace things working quite well?

Ethan Bernstein: It's hard because they are still confined by the pandemic safety concerns, so I think actually most of the organisations that are interesting to study are ones that are foreseeing the future rather than actually already in it. I think they would split into two different groups and actually I find the same is true of my students, my MBA students who I just finished teaching a semester. They have a similar division in the way they see things. There are those who actually think that now that we have the collective experience of having done this virtually that actually, as long as we continue to have that memory, David we will actually do better and that we can let people who want to be in the office, be in the office. We can let people who want to be at home, be at home. By the way, that is not a switch that goes on once and stays on, our circumstances change, we are human beings with lots of other human beings. The interdependence amongst human beings means that sometimes we want to be one place and sometimes we will want to be in another, it might very well be that that becomes very flexible.

For example, I sit on the Board of Directors for Protocol Labs, which has never had a headquarters, never intends to, they do virtual work quite well, they are going to continue to do that. They have never had an interruption but when they need to come together to really force through an important project, they have done that in the past and I think they will continue to do that. It is typically a time delimited and often location and specific thing. So that I think is one answer.

The other answer honestly, there are a lot of people out there who believe that by the time, and I am not going to predict when we will be able to go back into offices, but by the time we are able to, let's just say, we are halfway through, maybe we are three quarters of the way through as a guess. We have got a number of months ahead of us. There are people who think technology is going to solve this before we make it back into the office and they might be right. In which case virtual might end up being more relevant. I am affiliated with, as a Board Member and having known the founder since he was in grad school many years ago, with a company called ModuleQ. ModuleQ partners with Microsoft Teams, Refinitiv and others to provide people in teams with real time information, that they wouldn't otherwise get, about what is going on in the news and ultimately it might be even what is going on in other teams within the organisation. The Q things are relevant based on the conversations you are having in teams. So just think about that, we have struggled for decades to figure out how to get knowledge from one place in the organisation to another, because the conduit is always people. People don't silo bus particularly well and they are time limited.

AI is not either of those things and so increasingly, if we can create the weak ties without going through the motions of, which by the way I have never particularly loved, of standing in a bar, yelling at somebody because it is loud around me. Having a drink and not sure that I will ever actually have a normal, useful conversation, but hoping that one weak tie will be formed. We might actually be able to craft these in ways that solve the problem better than we have ever thought of solving them before. And there are people at legitimate companies who are planning on that future rather than the other form of hybrid future. I can't predict which is which, I just think those two paths are probably equally valid to investigate, especially if you are an HR professional.

And by the way, my students who aren't all going to become HR people, most of them are going to be general managers. That is what they want from HR, they want people like you, people like those who are listening to this podcast. They want those people to be entertaining that set of choices, so that they get the benefit of both and ultimately if one wins fabulous, but we have learned along the way.

David Green: And actually that turns it quite nicely to the role of HR now and the next couple of questions.

As we said, most of our listeners work in HR, what do you believe the role of HR should be in workplace design?

It is not something that most HR functions traditionally got involved with, but you could see an input from HR and people analytics teams in particular around this?

Ethan Bernstein: I think many of us have already seen this change. People analytics has done a lot to help us think about real estate and HR being two people oriented functions.

There are Chief Administrative Officers, like Gale actually, but other Chief People Officers who have real estate within their portfolio and that has given them a leg up in this particular environment, for obvious reasons. And it was even there a little bit before the pandemic. As you know David, because you were kind enough to mention it in your LinkedIn posts, I wrote a piece on smart buildings. Not because I have a lot of background in real estate, although an increasing number of fans and haters in that space for obvious reasons after I wrote my open office article. I have never gotten hate mail before, I was kind of excited to get my first piece.

Smart has had this technological meaning when it was attached to the word building and yet we also believe people are smart. A real definition of smart has to incorporate both. It has to not just be about the data, but the way we use it. Having data is not useful if we are not using it. It can't just be about the definition of smart by some kind of fixed certification. It has to actually evolve as we figure things out, as we become more collaborative.

In fact, it should be all about collaboration. I think the expectations of HR going forward is that it is going to be more and more, we have talked about for years the move from traditional HR to strategic HR and in part that has been echoed by a move from the basic functions to the talent orientation.

If you consider that and you just sort of draw the trend lines of traditional to strategic and basic to talent. If what HR is going to be about is talent strategically, then it has to be more than just about hiring and socialisation or onboarding and performance management and structure and compensation. It has to actually be a holistic view of all those things that is honestly, probably the biggest customer of people analytics data within the organisation and that, by the way, has not been the case necessarily. We haven't had data scientists in the traditional HR. They started in HR, they moved to sort of a central hub or shared service, they have moved up into the sort of C-level focus these days. But I think HR should be trying to grab that back and they should do so with this excuse. People thought that if we all move virtual and we have all this technology, we really wouldn't have nearly as much need for HR. I think HR professionals are some of the busiest people out there these days. They have become communication specialists, they have become pulse survey experts. The way that the field has moved to respond to the pandemic by and large, I am just so heartened and impressed by.

So this is your moment. This is the moment to make it clear that actually we have something to offer because we are going to represent the human side of things. As technology continues to help us think about that in different ways and people analytics, data analytics, real estate, all of these pieces start coming together and just give us a seat at the table, I think in a way that perhaps we haven't claimed before.

Obviously, I am not exactly impartial, David, this would be a great counterpoint moment where somebody who really thinks that HR shouldn't exist in 10 years would be here and tell me that all the evidence I just offered is true and all the conclusions I offered are fake, but that is up to us honestly.

David Green: As we spoke last week, that in many organisations HR has played a central role during the pandemic and has been likened, by some commentators, to the role the CFO played in the global financial crisis. I think we agreed that those HR leaders and those HR functions that are doing that, are the ones that are well-equipped. They do have a) talented people, but b) they have thriving people analytics teams, they have executives who want answers to questions and they are pulling those various pieces of the jigsaw together.

But because the focus has been primarily, it seems in many organisations, around employee wellbeing, employee experience during the crisis, HR has got such a key role to play in that. Whether people are virtual, whether they are hybrid, whether they are in the office, it makes the employee experience even more complex because you have got to think about the employee experience and all those different modalities.

If you are thinking about a CHRO now, what are some of the key attributes of a CHRO who is successfully managing to do this? I think we talked about the key resources. So what are some of the key attributes of CHROs that are really leading during the crisis and maybe prior to that as well?

Ethan Bernstein: I mean, to some extent you are asking an architectural question. I am using the word intentionally because we have been talking about physical architecture. So we have physical architecture, we have digital architecture, we have HR architecture. That is how we have thought about it and there are also the CFO, Ops, the other parts of the organisation. I think the new CHRO, as much as we might not want to admit it, has to have familiarity with the other forms of architecture too. So if we want a CHRO who can speak the language of a CTO, that person has to have background in there. And if we want a CHRO who can speak the language of data analytics, that person has to have some background in there. It doesn't mean that they have to be an expert in it but that means that when we throw words like Tableau or we throw words around, like I don't know, a more people analytics term David, give me one or two?

David Green: You have put me on the spot there now. Well, understanding the difference between correlation and causation quite basic, but you know, it is quite important.

People analytics terms will be actually just translating some of those findings, that data, into a story that actually compels people to take action. So it's that comfort with data that comfort with analytics, but understanding of the business problem and how you frame the insights to get action.

That is what we see. That doesn't necessarily need to be the CHRO of course. But as you said, I think CHROs are not just sponsoring analytics, but are actually involved in analytics and passionate about it. I think those are the ones that are developing those thriving people analytics functions underneath them.

Ethan Bernstein: I would agree and so, as I think about training the next generation my course is entirely structured around the traditional ways of doing things that we know have had some success and certain failures. The leading edge or bleeding edge ways of doing things, which we know have had some successes and some failures.

And having, I hope, a set of individuals who will grow up into the role that understand how they might try to blend those into a hybrid form, to you use the word we have thrown around in this conversation. They need to grow up under CHROs who are familiar with all those assets too. So that is a very different specification than the traditional, which is you grow up through compensation or you grow up through talent and after you have grown up in those, you hire through the rest, you fill out the team and you end up running things like a succession process. I am oversimplifying and my apologies, in some respects I am channelling our haters, not our lovers.

But that track, I don't think is going to get us the Chief People Officers or the CHROs that we see who are doing the kind of work that we want to do. It's more of the kind of track of people, I hate calling out one person because there are so many to choose from, but there are a lot of people actually out there who are doing this well, but that is how I would position it.

David Green: Actually what I am seeing now is a lot of CHROs have actually spent a considerable amount of time in the business, working directly with customers in marketing or sales or in business operations. If we want HR to be a function that delivers more business value, then by definition if you spent time in the business, surely that should increase your chances of doing that because you understand what business leaders need from HR.

Actually that leads on quite nicely. You mentioned that you teach the second year MBA course or Managing Human Capital at Harvard Business School and some of those people will have careers in HR but many won’t. What to be are the future leaders saying about the role of HR and how it is changing?

Ethan Bernstein: Well, I will say a couple of things. First, there is more interest in the course than there almost has ever been in the past and I don't think that has anything to do with me, I think that has to do with the topic. I do think that this topic has become interesting to our MBAs in ways that it might not have been interesting before for two different reasons, some people are seeing this as a career in a way they wouldn't have seen it before because they think the questions are interesting and the transformations that are coming ahead of us are going to be fascinating to live through and manage. Some of them actually probably don't subscribe to the fact that HR is necessary in the future, but believe that they need all the skills and tools of it. So they want to be the CTO or they want to be the CFO or they want to be whatever it is they want to be, or the founder who actually gets this stuff. And so they are in the cohorts to try and understand what it is that the other half understand. So answer one is, there is increased interest. Answer two, they are highly skeptical of the fact that an industry that has brought about, not the pandemic obviously but some of the other challenges of 2020, is equipped to handle the solutions.

So questions of bias, questions of a lack of meritocratic answers and decisions, of a lack of processes that truly yield anything more than what somebody wanted them to yield. There is a healthy amount of skepticism I see in the classroom. I think in part that ebbs and flows with the context around us.

David Green: And is that HR failing, I suppose it is HR failing, or is it more a case of HR not being brave enough to tackle some of those biases that they see in some of the bad leadership that pervades in organisations?

Ethan Bernstein: In my view one of the most valuable things they get in the course, and this was an exceptional part of being virtual this semester because I didn't teach in the hybrid classroom. I actually, honestly didn't want to teach in the hybrid classroom, I preferred all virtual but that is a whole other conversation if you want to go there.

I have guests come, wonderful alums and others who devote their time to coming in to visit.

So I had, Nadia Rawlinson, who is the CPO sorry Chief People Officer it can be confusing to those who think of that as the Product Officer, of Slack before that Live Nation and before that Rakuten. I have people like Helena Folks who was the CEO of the Hudson Bay Company and before that she was President at CBS, come and talk to them about the ways that they are thinking about this relationship between development, development paths, CEOs and CHROs and how they interact. I think most of them actually are giving the students a view that the spirit is there, whether that spirit and bravery is the question or whether they are just seeing the best of the best, I think they are split on. Students don't know and they are waiting to see that out because they have seen bad and good in the world and the question is, is HR not brave enough or is HR not skilled enough? That, I don't think they have enough data points yet to establish. But I do think that this problem is partially solved by role modelling and so that is what I do and that is what I actually hope is being done out there too. I will say, in terms of role modelling sometimes I have accidentally... we do a session on talent development where we pick somebody who got a talent development plan, like a ten-year plan for becoming CEO, and we see how they actually became a powerhouse executive. We can actually go back and they are willing to share these documents that make these successful people look like they were totally unsuccessful, 10 years ago. That was Helena this year. Last year was Jane Fraser. As we see more and more role models and Jane is a person who deeply believes in the value of HR and people, but not in the old version of it in the new version of it.

David Green: Well, Ethan, I think we could probably carry on talking for a lot longer but I think Ian, the show's producer would probably kill me.

So I am going to get to the last question now and this may be a case of summarising some of the stuff that you have already said. So this is one of the ones that we will put out as a video clip. It is a question we are asking all of our guests on the show in this series. What should HR leaders do to help prepare their organisations for this future where there is likely to be more remote and hybrid working, post pandemic?

Ethan Bernstein: If I were to put together the recipe step one, capture the learning from this last year that none of us have had the time to capture. We don't want to go back to normal, we want to go forward to something that looks different. And HR in particular has just learned so much, it would be a shame to lose it. Step two, on the basis of that learning, keep experimenting. Experiment with spaces, open, closed, digital, non-digital, hybrid whatever that means, hopefully in a way that doesn't create a second class citizen, no matter how we do it, but experiment with it and make those experiments agile. We are not talking about year long experience experiments. We are talking about week long or at most months long. As we have discovered, we have the ability to flex more muscles than we thought, things that we thought were ten-year investments don't have to be and so we have license to make those experiments happen.

And then maybe more specifically than that, be there as you have been there for your organisations as we continue to shift. It is going to be a mess in 2021 as some people are vaccinated and some are not, as some geographies have surges and some do not. As some want to go back to work and some cannot, whatever going back to work means because people keep using that phrase as if people aren't working at home. But nonetheless, we do have to define that, together. Being there for people the way you have been with an openness to having conversations, not just about our traditional tools but about the technological tools that people actually see as the fundamentals and foundations of HR today. Whether they are data analytics and people analytics, whether they are just simply communication tools like Zoom and WebEx and Chime and Meets, I think I've gotten almost everyone represented there, I am sure there is someone I missed. And Slack, just the wealth of tools offers us the opportunity to advise people on which ones to use where, just like we can advise our CEOs on when to be in person and when to be virtual, that advice on the basis of experimentation and learning is going to be valuable beyond 2021. Someone in the organisation is going to claim ownership of it let it be us. It has to do with people, we understand human behaviour better than most. So if there was one really strong piece of advice, it is just keep being there. Just keep being present. If it means writing the email for your organisation every week about how things are changing, then do that.

If it means running another pulse survey, do that, but all along make sure you are drawing a line. We started with three curves, right? We don't want to be the V and we don't want to be the flat line, we want to be the steadily increasing curve. We have all the ingredients for this as long as we keep putting the recipe together and recreating the recipe and recreating the recipe, a little less sugar, a little more good stuf,f as we go.

David Green: What a brilliant summary, Ethan. It has been fantastic having you as a guest on the show as I said, we could have probably pushed this to a two hour episode but Ian would have definitely had something to say about that. Can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about your work?

Ethan Bernstein: David, I have to say, I am still waiting for your kids and your dog to show up. I am a little disappointed we haven't seen them yet or heard them yet.

David Green: The dog has come in, he is on the bed, but he came in quietly.

Ethan Bernstein: Oh, well behaved, he deserves a promotion. I am always happy to continue conversations I start on podcasts like these, my email address is just simply the letter e@hbs.edu.

You can find me also on Twitter @Ethanbernstein and of course if you go to the HBS website hbs.edu/ebernstein, you will find me as well. And someday, perhaps, you will actually find me back on campus but for the moment, David, I am more than happy being virtually at home.

David Green:  In your rather amazing studio and we will put all those links on the publicity around this podcast because I know on the HBS site, it has got a collection of all your work. So you don't have to go around searching on MIT or you don't have to go searching on Harvard Business Review, they are all there in one place. So we will put the link to that.

Ethan, thank you very much. I hope to meet you in person one day, when things get back to the new normal, whatever the new normal is. I am actually missing New York so hopefully I get over there at some point.

Ethan Bernstein: As long as you are coming to me as now I teach in a studio with six big screens, more cameras than that, microphones and such and actually I am having a great time with my students. I don't know David, if I ever want to go onto a plane ever again. So if you are coming to me, that is great. But I don't know, perhaps I will change my mind in 2021, in the meantime I am just grateful for the opportunity to speak to all of you virtually.