Welcome to Dear HBR from Harvard Business Review.

I'm Dan McGinn.

And I'm Alison Beard.

Work can be frustrating, but it doesn't have to be.

We don't need to let the conflicts get us down.

That's where Dear HBR comes in.

We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts, and help you move forward.

Today we're answering questions from listeners who are suddenly working from home due to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Our guest is Harvard Business School professor, Sadal Neely. Sadal, thanks for coming in the show.

Thanks for having me. It's always terrific to be with you. Like most of our listeners, we're each

working from home and we're recording ourselves there rather than doing it in the studio. So we're

kind of learning this as we go. It's a big experiment.

Siddal, how are you holding up through all this?

I've been okay, you know. I'm adjusting like everyone else. I do feel like I'm much more tired than I typically am.

Yeah, I hear that a lot from people that a one-hour Zoom meeting is a lot more intense than a

one-hour face-to-face meeting and that the fatigue factor when you do two or three of those in a row,

it just really does get draining.

Yeah, and never mind having to find a quiet space where you won't have kids running around

in the background, asking what's for lunch,

what they should do next. I think that's one been one of the biggest challenges for me is just figuring out this new routine. You know, it's a boy, when I first took on this subject several

years ago, I never imagined that in my lifetime I would see the day that the entire world would shift to remote work all at once based on some global pandemic that we would encounter.

Never in my life did I imagine that we would see a day like this.

...