Day 27: Remote Work

Today you will learn from expert guest Ravi S. Gajendran about remote work, why it may or may not help solve climate change, how it works and what needs to still be done for it to be an effective solution to climate change.

Summary

Guest: Ravi S. Gajendran

Dr. Ravi Gajendran is Professor and Alvah Chapman Eminent Scholar Endowment Chair in the Global Leadership and Management Department (GLAM) at Florida International University.

He is also the Department Chair of the Global Leadership and Management Department. He received his PhD in Organizational Behavior from Pennsylvania State University. Before entering the doctoral program at Penn State, he had a career in sales and marketing for over seven years working for multinationals such as Cadbury’s and Procter & Gamble. Prior to joining FIU, Ravi was on the faculty of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he featured on the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent for every year he taught there. At FIU, he has taught courses on organizational behavior, leadership, and human resource management at PhD, MBA, and undergraduate levels. He has won multiple teaching awards at FIU including Faculty Excellence and Course Excellence Awards.

His areas of research expertise include remote work, virtual teams, impacts of communication technology, leadership, and human capital development. He is a member of the editorial board of three top-tier journals: Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, and Journal of Management. Dr. Gajendran is the recipient of research awards from the Academy of Management including the Best Student Paper Award (2006) and the DeSanctis Award for Best Paper based on a Dissertation (2012).

He is a well-recognized expert in the area of remote work and his research has been featured in several public policy documents and prominent media outlets including New York Times, USA Today, Fox Business News, Entrepreneur.com, Inc.com, and Forbes. His research has been cited by the Report to Congress on the Status of Federal Telecommuting Arrangements. In addition to publishing his research in top-tier journals, he has also written articles for managers that have been published in Harvard Business Review and Business Today.

Follow Ravi:

• LinkedIn
• Website

Explain succinctly what remote work is from first principles.

So a traditional offices, you show up t a 9 to 5 at some location to do your work. Remote work really is taking some element of that and saying, okay, I can do the same task at a different location rather than sort of the central office location.

Since the covid pandemic many offices have shifted to hybrid work, which is you spend some time in the office and you spend some time at home and it may not be substitution. Things you do in the office may not necessarily substitute for what you do at home or vice versa. Maybe you do different things in the office and you do different things at home.

Why does remote work help to solve climate change?

Remote work can be a contributor to alleviate some of the issues that contribute to climate change by:

• less commuting to work and carbon emissions from vehicles
• less in person meeting needing to take place and cutting travel emissions

Steel man the other side. Why would remote work NOT work to solve climate change?

Remote work increases reliance on information and communication technologies such as the cloud. Cloud infrastructure requires a very carbon heavy presence of servers and computing architecture that is energy intensive. So while remote work may reduce carbon footprint through reduced commuting, it might have an impact somewhere else.

Who benefits most by implementing remote work as a solution?

Employees: gain flexibility. They gain more control over their time. They gain more economy or where and how they do their work.  

The organization:  If employees are not coming in as much, they don't need to maintain these big offices and central downtown.

Society: people are distributed in different places, it's easier to keep operations going if you have the infrastructure to work remotely.

Who is harmed most by implementing remote work  as a solution?

Employees: are meeting people less often. They have less contact with supervisors and others which in general may lead to decaying of social skills is generally decaying.

Organization: may fire people in local communities for cheaper talent in overseas communities.

How does remote work work as a solution to climate change?

The organization must determine:

• What is it that you are doing, given the context of your own industry, given the context of your own business and your business model what is it that you are doing as an organization in terms of your norms, your culture, your technology in terms of, you know, training to both employees and to their managers?

You have to provide employees the autonomy and create systems where trust is the basis for dealing with employees. You trust employees are there to do a good job. You create systems to verify that they are indeed doing a good job, but then let them figure out how to do it.

You must create the right infrastructure: social, technological, and trust based infrastructure so that employees can do their jobs better and providing them training and the scaffolding needed so that they can be effective.

For remote work as a solution to work, what innovation or policy needs to be created?

Tools like Zoom, Slack, Teams for effective organizations.

‍

Additional Resources

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Virtual Work: Bridging Research Clusters by Sumita Raghuram
• Our Work-from-Anywhere Future by Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury

Top Skills To Learn

Our guest recommends learning the following skills:

• Meta learning skills: how to learn more effectively. Knowledge by itself is not a very valuable commodity. It's the ability to access that knowledge that is valuable and use it in the appropriate context.
• A chosen discipline: you need to know a lot about other disciplines, but you need to have a depth in a certain discipline but also the willingness to learn across different areas.

‍

Activity

Activity: Commute Carbon Savings Calculation

Description: Calculate the carbon emissions saved by telecommuting instead of commuting to campus. Use online carbon calculators and reflect on potential reductions.

‍

Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.