Safe Workplaces

Dear HBR:

Harvard Business Review

Careers, Business/management, Work, Advice, Harvard, Help, Mentor, Workplace, Business, Management, Challenges, Entrepreneurship, Hbr, Office, Business/careers, Business/entrepreneurship

4.6 • 782 Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2020

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What will it take for you to feel safe at work again? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Ethan Bernstein, a professor at Harvard Business School. They talk through what to do when your essential employees are staying home despite increased safety measures, you want to redesign your open office to make it work for the new normal, or you’re seeing a growing divide between workers who have to come in and those who can work from home.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.
0:03.9	I'm Dan McGinn.
0:04.9	And I'm Alison Beard.
0:12.3	Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.
0:15.3	We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.
0:17.8	That's where Dear HBR comes in.
0:19.9	We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.
0:32.1	Today, we're answering questions about safe workplaces during the pandemic with Ethan Bernstein.
0:37.0	He's a professor at Harvard
0:38.1	Business School. Ethan, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Alison. It's a pleasure to be here.
0:43.4	Now, you're known for your research on work spaces and workplace culture, and now COVID-19 is with us.
0:50.4	So how have things changed? Organizations have thought deeply, my experience about how to try to keep people safe and productive. And they've done that for those who are essential workers in the workplaces, in the manufacturing plants, in the hospitals, as they have done for people who they don't have to bring into the office. But many things have actually not changed so much.
1:13.4	In fact, we're actually quite capable of working without an office,
1:16.0	at least those of us in white-collar jobs.
1:18.1	Ethan, the open office concept was hotly debated even before COVID.
1:23.2	Are people who went to open offices now regretting it?
1:26.4	In some respects, if we want to go back to them and use them the way we did before,
1:32.1	then the openness is going to be a challenge.
1:34.6	On the other hand, if we reconceive the office as an add-on to the remote work,
1:40.8	which many of us are finding quite productive,
1:43.0	then it might be those open spaces turn out to be the best thing we ever planned for,
1:46.9	because we're not trying to stuff a lot of people and their desks into them.
	...

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