Harvard Business Review

As remote work continues to grow in the U.S., employers are increasingly adopting new technologies to monitor how their employees spend their time. The research on the utility of these monitoring tools has been mixed: Some studies show that they boost performance whereas others suggest they increase deviant behavior and erode trust. In a new study, researchers explored the impact that different kinds of monitoring have on employees’ willingness to share new ideas. They found that “interactional monitoring,” characterized by regular, discussion-based check-ins, can encourage innovation while passive “observational monitoring,” often powered by technological surveillance, makes employees less likely to speak up. This is particularly true of workers in complex jobs like software engineering, product design, or strategy consulting, who are three times less likely to share new ideas if they are experiencing observational monitoring. The researchers offer considerations for companies looking to encourage creativity without weakening employee trust.

Managers often grapple with whether to be lenient or punitive when addressing employee misconduct. While leniency may seem like the empathetic or pragmatic choice, research suggests it has complex and often unintended consequences. Managers who choose leniency experience mixed emotions — pride in showing grace but guilt for deviating from rules — which can impact their energy and engagement. Meanwhile, employees closely observe managerial responses, often perceiving leniency as unfair unless there is a compelling reason for compassion. The key to effective leniency lies in balancing consistency, fairness, and context. Before opting for leniency, managers should: 1) Anticipate the presence of big emotions, 2) assess the individual’s needs, and 3) take a look from others’ perspectives.

It’s well known that understanding your boss’s priorities is crucial for career success. Yet many professionals find themselves guessing what their manager really wants or needs. The result? Misaligned efforts, wasted time, and missed opportunities for both you and your leadership. The problem isn’t just busy bosses or poor communication — it’s that we often don’t ask the good questions to get inside our manager’s head. Here are seven questions designed to uncover your boss’s true priorities, pressures, and preferences.

Many hiring managers will begin a job interview by asking: “Can you walk me through your resume?” They’re not looking for a laundry list of accomplishments or responsibilities. Instead, they want a focused narrative that highlights why you’re the perfect fit for the new role. You need to bold in drawing clear connections between your unique skills and the role you’re interviewing for, showcasing how your experience enables you to deliver exceptional value beyond what other candidates can offer. Connecting your experience to the job you are pursuing and showing progressive skills acquisition throughout your career in a succinct story will leave the interviewer satisfied that you can succeed in the new role. Highlighting your unique skill is the icing on the cake that not only sets you apart from the competition but also makes you a more memorable and compelling choice for the job. This article offers three steps to answer this question – and shows how to do it in under two minutes.

The colossal wave of downsizing in the last few years is dividing the workplace in two, between the leavers and the survivors. Business has traditionally emphasized the consequences of downsizing on the leavers, sometimes putting in place severance pay, outplacement programs, and extended health benefits to ease their transition. However, the negative impacts of change are frequently felt just as strongly by those who remain following major layoffs. If you’re a layoff survivor, how can you regain a sense of control over your work life? Once you have a solid understanding of the challenges you’re facing, you can take steps to navigate your new work situation with clarity and confidence.

Public criticism, customer boycotts, political controversies, and investor skepticism have created a volatile environment for organizations navigating corporate purpose initiatives. For many, the question is no longer whether purpose is important — it’s when, how, and even if their organization should pursue it. Drawing on three years of research with senior leaders across industries, the authors create a framework for evaluating whether purpose initiatives are producing long-term value or when they’re leaving companies vulnerable to critique. The authors also point out common pitfalls on the way to purpose and offer suggestions for how to create and sustain initiatives that deeply align with an organization’s core values.

No one should be working for someone who doesn’t respect them, makes them feel undermined, or makes their work life hell. If you’re stuck working for a toxic boss, what can you do? While you cannot completely change a person or their behavior, there are things you can try within your sphere of control to manage a toxic boss and keep your mental well-being a priority. In this article, the author outlines the signs to watch out for to help you assess whether your boss is toxic, and offers strategies to try if you’re finding yourself in this impossibly difficult situation.

Professionals today are focused on doing mode — achieving goals and checking items off of to-do lists to satisfy their managers and companies. But better relationships, bigger-picture strategic and creative thinking, and personal well-being and satisfaction rely on pausing from doing mode and entering into spacious mode . To do this amidst daily pressures, people should recognize that they first need to give themselves permission to pause, adopt practices to train their minds to be more spacious, build a safe space for pausing around them, and keep the company of those who help them enter spacious mode.

Tensions are inevitable in the workplace. But there is a difference between healthy and unhealthy conflicts. Healthy team conflict moves a team towards its goals and builds productive, respectful, and trusting relationships. Unproductive conflict, on the other hand, holds a team back. Here are four ways to encourage healthy conflict on your team: 1) Tell your team that disagreements are expected and a normal — and productive — part of collaboration, teamwork, and innovation. 2) Name positive tensions. 3) Separate the people from the problem. 4) Stay calm.

While the corporate wellness industry expected to be worth $85 billion by 2030, there’s also evidence that the effectiveness of well-being programs is low, as individual interventions like wellness apps do not address the broader workplace culture. So, do these apps have any place within organizations? Maybe, if they’re part of a much larger strategy. To decide whether investing in an app can really make a difference for your employees, ask four key questions of your organization: Why do we want to invest in an app? How can we set the stage for introducing an app? How do we select the right vendor? And, how do we integrate the app we ultimately choose?

Although organizations and managers have a strong incentive to combat burnout, it is often difficult to detect — especially in remote workers. Fortunately, there are effective strategies managers can use to improve their ability to identify burnout signs in their teams, even when they lack frequent physical proximity to their team members. Indeed, by paying more attention to both behavioral and communication cues, managers can significantly improve their ability to assess employee burnout even in virtual or digital meetings. This article discusses five things managers should be doing to identify burnout in remote employees, as well as what to do if you spot the signs.

Many reports have shown that Americans are pessimistic about the economy — and their place in it — despite indicators that the labor market is robust and the economy is thriving. In order to explore why this pessimism persists, researchers at data and technnology firm Numerator analyzed the spending habits of 150,000 customers from 2019 to 2024 and then surveyed a representative sample (over 4,500 people) to examine what’s driving that sentiment. They found that people are spending more and doing better than they were before the pandemic, but they’re also having to put in more effort, which leaves them frustrated and tired. Additionally the gaps in spending habits between income brackets has widened greatly since 2021—those in the highest income bracket are spending relatively much more than those in the lowest bracket, making those who earn less feel left behind.

Many organizations are experimenting with “job deconstruction,” a new way of organizing work where employees’ skills are dynamically matched with specific tasks or projects rather than through fixed roles. While this is a potentially transformative organizing principle for enhancing talent deployment across organizations, its implementation is not without challenges. Research highlights three tensions in particular which, if left unchecked, risk alienating employees and failing to deliver the benefits of job deconstruction: Balancing autonomy and control, balancing detachment and belonging, and balancing growth and stability. Implementing guardrails that place the human experience front and center can buffer against the negative effects of these tensions.

In selecting the most creative people or ideas to hire or implement, many organizations use multi-step processes that winnow the initial pool to a group of finalists and then select “the best of the best” from the finalists. Research conducted in which the authors were involved found that such an approach may be a waste of time and resources and that the experts trying to pick the winners from the finalists agonize and can’t really determine the clearly superior choices. A better approach might be: keep the selection criteria for identifying talent or potential relatively broad, don’t try to select the best of the best and instead use other criteria such as diversity or cultural fit, involve experts early in the process, and create a community of winners that includes all finalists.

There is a powerful business case to be made for increasing the economic status of the lowest paid U.S. workers. Lower levels of inequality are correlated with higher overall economic growth that benefits every member of society, including shareholders. It has also been shown that companies with the best employee practices create sustained long-term value for their shareholders. But the private sector cannot act alone in creating a more inclusive form of capitalism. It needs strong incentives from the government. Among the potential policy ideas that could move the needle: expand employee ownership programs; raise the income level where federal tax is due; and make the minimum wage a living wage.