<figure class="wp-block-audio"><figcaption>Subscribe to Distributed at Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RSS, or wherever you like to listen.</figcaption></figure>

“We have introduced so many frictions to people’s lives by forcing them to move.”

Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury, the Lumry Family Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, studies the future of work — specifically the changing geography of work. What happens to cities, to immigration policies, and to issues around gender equity when more companies let people work from anywhere?

Choudhury earned his doctorate from Harvard, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology, and an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management. Prior to academia, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and IBM.

For more on Choudhury, go to HBS.edu or follow him on Twitter (@prithwic).

The full episode transcript is below.

***

(Intro Music)

MATT MULLENWEG:  So here we are. It’s been more than three months into this global transition to remote work. And let’s be honest, a lot of this has been difficult and exhausting and even for folks at Automattic, who have been doing distributed work for 15 years, it’s quite different when there is a global pandemic and economic uncertainty everywhere.

But there have been a ton of positives too. I’ve heard from many friends who are working in knowledge-worker roles and they’re saying “I never want to go back into a full time office,” particularly with the restrictions that these physical offices are probably going to have. So they’re seeing benefits in their  productivity, their lifestyle, and their connection with their families and their life. So there is uncertainty but there is also opportunity.

Today I am excited to speak with Raj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School, who is focused on questions around the geography of work and the outcomes of mobility on productivity. He has studied this question very closely and I was excited to find out what he has learned. So welcome, Raj.

RAJ CHOUDURY:  Hi Matt, thanks for having me.

MATT:  Oh it’s a real pleasure. What brought you to study all this?

RAJ:  So I’ve been studying essentially the future of work, but the topic I have been studying for a long time is geographic mobility. So that includes studying both cross-border migration but also what happens to productivity when people move within the same country.

And as I was doing that research for the past eight, nine years, I discovered that there are lots of reasons why people do not move. So yes, there’s productivity benefits when they move but there are tons of reasons we have immobility. So the obvious reason would be immigration, but dual careers, even the cost of living, which might be super expensive in a place like Silicon Valley, might constrain geographic moves.

So as I was doing that research, I was thinking of solutions to that problem. And then I stumbled upon that U.S. Patent Office experiment with letting people work from anywhere, which would presumably solve this problem of trying to move people to Alexandria, Virginia. So that’s how I arrived at this topic.

MATT:  And people moving for work in the U.S., I have heard it’s gone down actually over the past 20 years or so.

RAJ:  That is correct. So we are in this era of not only people moving less within the country but also internationally. We just have all these constraints on immigration not only in the U.S. but it’s tightening in many parts of the world. So the other great example would be what’s happening with Brexit and what it means for the talent coming from continental Europe. Yes, so I think we are in this phase of immobility on the rise.

MATT:  So here’s where I say something random I’ve heard and you can tell me whether it’s correct or not. I’ve heard part of the, one of the hypotheses for why in the U.S. mobility was going down was double-income houses. So it was harder to find two new jobs in one city versus one new job.

RAJ:  That’s true. And there is also research done by other colleagues, not me, which has shown that in those dual-career situations, Matt, it’s typically the wife who is the trailing spouse. So women have made disproportionately greater sacrifices in dual-career situations. And that’s among many of the reasons why I am super excited about working from anywhere.

MATT:  Because even if one spouse can get that flexibility, they can maintain. If one spouse has it and one spouse doesn’t, they can still move, because one of the jobs is not geographically constrained.

RAJ:  That’s true. And one of the subpopulations that I’ve been working closely with for whom this is a huge deal is military spouses, because they just have to constantly be on the move. And now they don’t have to experience a break in their careers. So I think that group and many other groups have been tremendously benefited with work from anywhere.

MATT:  That’s awesome to hear. Because if we get this right it benefits so many people’s lives.

RAJ:  Correct, yes.

MATT:  These past three months I don’t think any of us would have predicted, but it must be a boon for your data collection and research. So what has happened that you found surprising or unusual or heterodox?

RAJ:  Actually I would argue that these three months are such an anomaly. This is not normal work in any way. Even under normal, remote work, you are not having to homeschool kids, you’re not prohibited from going to the gym, you’re not stressed out because of people being sick in your family. So I feel that this will be less relevant for research in terms of driving generalizable findings.

So what I’ve been doing is I’ve been studying work from anywhere years before the pandemic and I feel once we come back to a more, quote/unquote, “normal” situation it will be, again, fun to see what happens with which companies and which workers stick with remote work. I think that is something I’m super excited to study going ahead.

MATT:  Yes, there have been a ton of announcements already — Stripe, Shopify, Facebook, Square, Twitter. Is there anything coming out of that? Are we seeing more mobility from their employees or any early indications? I know it’s too early to see big data but…

RAJ:  Yes. I think there’s been tons of very exciting announcements. And I can tell you about one project which I am personally working on very closely and that relates to TCS, which as you would know is the largest IT service company headquartered in India. I hesitate to call them an Indian company because they are truly global. They have 500,000 employees, they have three campuses in China, they have campuses in the U.S., they have a campus in Hungary and of course tons of campuses in India.

And what they did in the past six weeks was the CEO made an announcement saying that 75 percent of their workforce would become remote in three years. So that is one situation I am working closely with because this… It’s probably four to five times of Facebook and they have built all these campuses and for them now to go 75 percent remote, I thought that was super interesting in terms of the challenges they have to overcome and the change in the processes and the culture and whatnot.

MATT:  One thing I heard from other companies when they worked with partners in India that had offices, it was harder for people to work from home because they might not have the home setup which is as productive as the office, meaning literally internet, power, etcetera. Have you come across anything like that?

RAJ:  So I feel that’s still true in parts of not only India but parts of emerging markets. But I feel with now better fiberoptic connectivity and all the transitions… In the case of India, just this one single Reliance Jio sort of proliferation has increased internet penetration and speeds tremendously. So I feel that is less of a concern now.

And just given the tradeoffs. So I was speaking to a group of TCS employees and many of them said they will now leave large cities, like Chennai, and move back to their native villages because that’s where their family lives, that’s where they really want to live, given a choice.

MATT:  We ran into this in South Africa. We bought a company based there and a lot of people would want to go into the office, it was just much harder to get fast internet at home, like it was maxed out at DSL. I even had a colleague outside of Austin that ended up having to put a tower on his property because he’s a little more in the country and there wasn’t a good wired service. So he had to move to some point to point wireless.

When you think of the hierarchy of distributed work, internet is pr