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Yet for many others, the move to remote work has been somewhere in the middle. Kathleen Hogan, of Microsoft, shared that “working remotely has ushered in the best of times and the worst of times.” There have been some real positives, such as productivity. At a personal level, Kathleen has not had to commute to the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters and has had much more time to work – and to be around her college-aged son, who has been attending classes remotely. She added that for many of the company's leaders, such as those who work with enterprise customers and governments around the world, the velocity of business has accelerated dramatically, enabled by the fact that the norm of traveling to visit customers has been replaced by video meetings. One of the top officers of Microsoft said, “I've met with five governments today,” doing in days what typically took weeks. Similarly, Kathleen conducts best-practices sessions with peer CHROs, which she used to do in person. Those meetings would normally have taken so much time to schedule and now it's much faster to get them set and executed. “Last week I spoke with a half a dozen CHROs about what they're experiencing,” she said. At an organizational level, remote work at Microsoft has led to a level of flexibility she and other company leaders never thought was possible. “It's allowed us to tap into diverse talent, access and hire more people from different geographies, and be incredibly productive along the way,” she said.

At the same time, Kathleen shares the sentiment expressed by almost all the other leaders we spoke with: There is no substitute for being in person. “A big aspect of being with other people is the serendipity that often presents itself in life.” She worries about that loss both individually and organizationally. Employees seem to agree that there is something to be said for the hybrid approach. “While we continue to learn, our current research shows roughly 80% of our employees want to go back to the office, but with greater flexibility, while roughly 20% say they want to work from home all the time. Some thought the 80/20 rule would be in favor of people wanting to work from home given COVID and we are seeing the opposite.”

We interviewed Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, who agrees. There have been some massive advantages to remote work, but some serious disadvantages as well. One surprising benefit for Jamie was the way it accelerated his onboarding process when he joined the company in April 2020, after having been the successful candidate in a CEO search that was conducted predominantly virtually. “It's remarkable how efficient and effective we can be,” he said. “When I started, I wanted to visit all of our offices around the world. In normal times that would have been a multi-week process. Now it was achieved in a matter of days. And it was easy to customize my communications to the audience. I just changed my virtual background to that of our German office, UK office, Amsterdam office, and everywhere else I visited.”

Yet despite articulating many of the benefits, Jamie concluded that working remotely has been a slight net negative. He knows that connecting with people is a huge part of leadership and he misses managing by walking around, having the three-minute conversations in the halls, elevators, or cafeteria. For him, working remotely while coming into the company from outside – Jamie had been COO of Walmart's gigantic e-commerce business – has created challenges building new relationships. “It's relatively easy and efficient to translate a 3D relationship into 2D, but it's hard just to start and build a meaningful relationship in 2D.”