Operational Excellence

Organizations have become flexible about where and when employees work. But there are trade-offs.

Pennies drop in all sizes. Miniature ones, like tears in a lake. Enormous ones, like meteors on an unsuspecting desert. Of all those that…

Companies are figuring out how to balance what appears to be a lasting shift toward remote work with the value of the physical workplace.

Figuring out how much office space to lease may be more complicated than it’s ever been for occupiers. In addition to typical considerations like how many

Anthropology offers us models for how we can adapt.

What does it mean to be productive? At the beginning of the pandemic, when many workers went remote, some managers were tempted to start counting things — whether hours, objects, or other things. But they’re about 100 years and two industrial revolutions too late: In the mechanical and electrical revolutions, productivity was indeed a measure... Read More

Our study, measuring heart rate, skin conductivity and emotion in controlled conditions, shows the effects of office noise are very real.

Technology now allows us to combine digital tools with physical space to create a modern digital workplace—one that uses the best capabilities of both.

The long read: For decades, anthropologists have been telling us that it’s often the informal, unplanned interactions and rituals that matter most in any work environment. So how much are we missing by giving them up?

The rise of remote work during the pandemic is just one part of a generational shift that is redefining how and why we do our jobs.

People are starting to expect their AI to feel human, and that expectation is moving into the workplace.

Today, millions more than predicted are facing a newly distributed way of working—one where the majority, if not all, of a company’s employees are working from home. Though work from home culture has been building for a while, with some companies adopting it wholeheartedly as others viewed it with caution, suddenly, due to wide and rapid spread of the novel coronavirus, it has become a necessity for large swaths of the world.

The main obstacle for workplace and people analytics has been employees’ discomfort with perceived surveillance and privacy.