Gain a strategic perspective on workplace design and develop tactics informed by behavioral science principles and your company’s goals.

Employee expectations about the workplace have fundamentally changed post-pandemic and employers are trying to figure out how to respond. Some are in limbo. Others are acting out of intuition or even fear. The highly relevant curriculum for Remote, Office, or Hybrid Workplaces? Navigating the Tradeoffs is designed to help you think and act more holistically and strategically, enabling you to make hard workplace decisions based on data.

The curriculum integrates research, real-world experiences, and a workshop-style process for constructing/developing your own workplace plan. Stanford GSB faculty from diverse social science disciplines share their cutting-edge research on the tradeoffs inherent in different workplace modalities along the major dimensions that impact workplace design: communication, coordination, culture, and productivity. The program also includes dedicated time for nuanced, intellectual discussions and sharing of best practices to inform your own thinking and strategy. At the end of each day, you’ll work in small groups to put learning into action as you think about developing a workplace plan for your organization.

Below is a sampling of the sessions you’ll attend in this program.

The Future of Working from Home

In these sessions, Professor Bloom will present research findings that address questions related to HR, office space, and planning including: how many days should we work from home post-pandemic, should I let employees choose their days, should I reduce/change office space, should I change compensation patterns, and should I offshore/outsource more employees?

Creating (New) Collaboration Routines

Most organizations require collaboration among their employees. However, new expectations of flexible work arrangements have made collaborative work more challenging. In this session, Professor Flynn discusses how you get employees to collaborate with one another when they’re not occupying the same space. We’ll identify the most critical principles of collaboration and use these principles to design new routines that are suited for a hybrid work environment.

The Blindspots of the 13” Office

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a nascent trend for remote work. More importantly, it reset the expectations borne by a whole generation of workers about workplace policies, forcing a reassessment by employers about how work should be done, in particular regarding the viability of remote work. In this session Professor Levav discusses some of the psychological blindspots that can arise in a shift to remote or hybrid work modalities. He describes how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and technological factors influence psychological variables that are relevant in the workplace.