Remote Work Revolution for Everyone
Learn to excel in the virtual-work landscape
In this Harvard online course, you will learn how to build trust, increase productivity, use digital tools effectively, and remain aligned with a remote team.
2-3 hours a week
What You'll Learn
How are you thriving or surviving in your remote work environment?
Remote working has long been an option for many organizations and employees. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, many more organizations were forced to rapidly shift to remote work. While there are many benefits of remote working, including reduced commute, greater employee flexibility, increased productivity, lower operational costs, and a larger pool of global job applicants, virtual work can introduce new challenges. Employees and companies alike have learned to temporarily survive in a remote work environment, but remote work is here to stay and will likely be a permanent fixture that transforms many organizations in one form or another. Everyone will need to develop the skills, competencies, tools, and mindsets to thrive in the remote environment.
Remote work affects an entire organization. For individual contributors, it means having to learn to collaborate effectively with colleagues you rarely see in person. For managers, it means knowing how to lead fully remote teams, developing ways to keep your teams motivated, connected, and productive. For leaders, shifting to remote-work solutions means rapidly advancing your digital footprint, using cloud storage, considering cybersecurity risks, and deploying new tools to increase productivity among your workforce.
In Remote Work Revolution for Everyone, you will learn to excel in the virtual-work landscape. Using the Harvard Business School case method of real-world examples, Professor Tsedal Neeley will not only provide actionable recommendations, but also explain the theories and concepts behind them. You will learn how to build trust, increase productivity, use digital tools intelligently, and remain fully aligned with your remote team. By the end of the course, you will create actionable steps to “relaunch” your team—focusing on new ways to stay connected, be collaborative, and remain productive—while meeting your own personal and organizational goals.
Remote Work Revolution for Everyone will teach you best practices for working remotely. This course is based on Professor Neeley’s book— Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding From Anywhere. Praise for the book includes:
“Neeley draws on her nearly 2 decades of research to answer the critical questions regarding how we best build productive and enjoyable virtual routines into our post-COVID-19 professional lives. Few of us are going back to the way we worked. Read her book and begin to prepare for the other side of this pandemic now.” - Larry Culp, CEO of GE
“I often talk about the importance of trust when it comes to work: the trust of your employees, and building trust with your customers. This book provides a blueprint for how to build and maintain that trust and connection in a digital environment.” - Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO, Zoom
The course will be delivered via edX and connect learners around the world. By the end of the course, participants will be able to:
- Understand the key elements of remote work and use your knowledge to successfully navigate the remote work environment
- Develop strategies for yourself and your team, improving productivity, communication, and collaboration
- Understand the types of trust required to be successful in remote working environments—and how to build it
- Learn how to select the right digital tools to increase productivity and access to team membersImplement practices that will allow you to be an effective leader and successfully manage a remote team
- Create a plan to relaunch your team into successful remotely working contributors
Your Instructor
Tsedal Neeley (@tsedal) is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Development and Research Strategy at the Harvard Business School. Recognized as one of the 100 people transforming business who are innovating, sparking trends, and tackling global challenges by Business Insider, her work focuses on how leaders can scale their organizations by developing and implementing global and digital strategies. She regularly advises top leaders who are embarking on virtual work and large scale-change that involves global expansion, digital transformation, and becoming more agile.
Her book, Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere (2021, Harper Collins Business), provides remote workers and leaders with the best practices necessary to perform at the highest levels in their organizations. Her award-winning book, The Language of Global Success: How a Common Tongue Transforms Multinational Organizations chronicles the behind-the-scenes globalization process of a company over the course of five years. She has also published extensively in leading scholarly and practitioner-oriented outlets such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Management Science, Journal of International Business, Strategic Management Journal and Harvard Business Review, and her work has been widely covered in media outlets such as BBC, CNN, Financial Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist. Her HBS case, Managing a Global Team: Greg James at Sun Microsystems, is one of the most used cases worldwide on the subject of virtual work.
Tsedal co-chairs the executive offering, Leading Global Businesses, which helps top leaders develop emerging and mature market strategies in a global and increasingly digital economy. She also teaches extensively in executive programs such as the Harvard Business Analytics Program. She has previously been the course head for the first-year required Leadership and Organizational Behavior course in the MBA program that focuses on how to lead effectively; the curriculum addresses group behavior and performance, organization design, change and how to align people behind a common vision.
Prior to her academic career, Tsedal spent ten years working for companies like Lucent Technologies and The Forum Corporation in various roles, including strategies for global customer experience, 360-degree performance software management systems, sales force/sales management development, and business flow analysis for telecommunication infrastructures. A sought-after speaker with extensive international experience, she is fluent in four languages. She holds a patent for her software simulation on global collaboration and is a member of Rakuten People & Culture Lab Advisory Board.
Tsedal is a recipient of the prestigious Charles M. Williams Award for Outstanding Teaching in Executive Education and the Greenhill Award for outstanding contributions to Harvard Business School (two-time recipient). She serves on the Board of Directors of Brightcove, Brown Capital Management, Harvard Business Publishing and the Partnership Inc.
Tsedal received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in Management Science and Engineering, specializing in Work, Technology and Organizations. Tsedal was named to Thinkers50 2018 On the Radar list for making lasting contributions to management, honored as a Stanford Distinguished Alumnus Scholar and was a Stanford University School of Engineering Lieberman award recipient for excellence in teaching and research.
Ways to take this course
When you enroll in this course, you will have the option of pursuing a Verified Certificate or Auditing the Course.
A Verified Certificate costs $149 and provides unlimited access to full course materials, activities, tests, and forums. At the end of the course, learners who earn a passing grade can receive a certificate.
Alternatively, learners can Audit the course for free and have access to select course material, activities, tests, and forums. Please note that this track does not offer a certificate for learners who earn a passing grade.