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Welcome to the HBR idea cast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Alison Beard.

If you're like many knowledge workers out there, struggling to do your job from home,

juggling family responsibilities, exhausted by never-ending zooms, you might be

dreaming of returning to the office when the pandemic ends. Or maybe you've really

thrived without the daily commute and distracting the workers and you want to keep working

from home. Our guest today says that the reality for most of us will probably be somewhere

in the middle. Her research shows that the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated to trend toward

more flexible schedules and virtual work. But it's also pushing organizations to rethink

the purpose of the office and reinvent its structure and schedules as we start to carve out

our new normal. M. Law Freyard is an associate professor at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering

and she's co-author of the HBR article, Designing the Hybrid Office. And welcome to the show.

Thank you very much for having me.

So, you and your co-authors did a lot of research on what workers want and how companies expect

to operate as we move on from the pandemic. What did you find?

So we found that there was of course, you know, there was the constraints of the lockdown

last March, but what was really interesting was that on the one hand, there was like,

oh, you know, we can do the work no matter what. But there was also at the individual level

variations and people realizing that they were missing some of the social part of the

office. Collaboration was harder and then for more senior people or also for junior

...