The World is Your Office

Brian Elliott

CEO, Work Forward & Publisher, Flex Index

In a landscape cluttered with hot takes on the future of work, HBS Professor Raj Choudhury stands apart as one of the world's foremost authorities on workplace flexibility. While many jumped on the remote work bandwagon during the pandemic, Choudhury has been meticulously researching distributed work arrangements for years, gathering hard evidence that cuts through the noise of opinion and anecdote.

His new book "The World Is Your Office" (out April 22) arrives at a critical moment when leaders everywhere are wrestling with workplace decisions that impact talent strategy, organizational performance, and even economic development.

I spoke with Raj about his research, which offers much-needed clarity on how flexible work can benefit people, organizations, and communities when implemented with intention and insight.

At a time of rising global tensions, his research has implications for national policies as well as CEOs – insights into what will drive global competition in years to come.

It's Not Just "Work From Home"

While most executives are still stuck in the binary battle of "office vs. home," Choudhury's research reveals a much more nuanced and powerful framework. For starters, he wants us to understand what "Work From Anywhere" actually means:

"Work from Anywhere is not work from home. Work from anywhere is a work arrangement that allows individuals to choose where to live. I've called that geographic flexibility. The person can choose which city, which town, which state, and in some cases even which country they want to live in. Once they choose that location, they could be working from home, they could be working from a coworking space, they could go to a cafeteria, a satellite office of the company."

This distinction calls into question the artificial constraints most organizations have placed on their talent strategy. When we talk about hybrid work, Raj's perspective expands possibilities beyond the generic "three days in the office" default:

"Hybrid doesn't need in-person every week. They could be a monthly form of hybrid where you get together once a month. They could be a quarterly hybrid where the team is wherever they want to be for the whole quarter and come together for a week or a few days every quarter."

Federal Case: Remote Work and High Productivity

As policymakers push federal workers back to desks without evidence, Choudhury's research exposes the false assumptions behind these mandates. His work on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) provides a devastating counterpoint. When the USPTO implemented a Work From Anywhere policy back in 2012, productivity didn't crater—it soared:

"We found that the transition to work from anywhere led to a 4.4% increase in productivity. We also found significant reduction of real estate costs, carbon footprint savings. The most important thing they were excited about was for the first time the USPTO was now able to hire from campuses in the west and the south of the country. People didn't want to move to DC from places like California. So they really expanded their footprint of talent acquisition."

The USPTO case belies the myth that government work requires five days a week time in aging buildings, delivering the triple win of better performance, lower costs, and broader talent access.

The Togetherness Paradox

Choudhury isn’t a remote work zealot. Far from it, Choudhury recognizes that meaningful connections require physical presence—just not in the quantities or formats leaders often demand. Choudhury isn't advocating for permanent digital isolation. Just the opposite:

"I'm a huge believer in work from anywhere, but I'm also a huge believer in in-person interactions. For all these remote first companies—Zapier, GitLab, Doist, many of them that I've looked at—they all do retreats."

But before you start booking weekly team happy hours, his research reveals that most in-person gatherings fail to deliver their promised benefits due to basic human psychology:

"When people interact in person... there is this unconscious bias or homophily that they need to be aware of. The interactions usually tend to happen between people who are the same gender and same ethnicity. When you are meeting, you need to engineer serendipity because, left to their own devices, people will only hang out with similar people."

His insight comes from research on what actually works.His research at Zapier revealed a fascinating pattern:

"When people went to this retreat, they tended to make connections with people of the same ethnicity except for when they traveled in the same taxi ride from the airport to the retreat. Because when you're sitting in the back of a taxi, it doesn't matter who the person is, you start a conversation and make a connection.”

Small, intentional design choices around in-person time can achieve more connection than months of unfocused office presence.

Expanding Flexibility to Frontline Workers

He also is questioning the notion that flexibility is limited to laptop-based workers with Zoom accounts. One of the most exciting frontiers in Choudhury's research challenges the assumption that flexibility is only for knowledge workers. His work on "digital twins" reveals how technology can extend location flexibility to traditionally on-site roles:

"Digital twins are a combination of sensors, automation, AI, and the cloud where you can create a virtual replica of any physical operation in real time. It could be a factory, a warehouse, a hospital, an airport... What I found in my research with Unilever and a Turkish power plant company is that not every engineer, not every technician needs to be on site. And so now folks who are traditionally blue collar, they can also work from anywhere."

At a time when healthcare systems are buckling under staffing shortages, this innovation holds particular promise:

"I'm starting a new project with doctors and nurses, creating virtual wards in the UK, to see patients in a virtual room. This is a new, exciting frontier because it gives flexibility and work from anywhere options to blue collar workers, deskless workers, semi-desked workers. And this is going to kick like a new wave of work from anywhere."

This isn't just about convenience—it's about solving critical societal challenges through flexibility rather than rigid traditionalism. This opens up opportunity for groups who've traditionally not had access to it, while addressing critical shortages in fields like healthcare workers: a true win-win for society.

Economic Development and Global Competition for Talent

While some major metropolitan central business districts are still recovering, the most overlooked in the remote work debate is how it's reshaping economic opportunity. Choudhury sees this as nothing short of transformative:

"Migration scholars have known for decades that there has been brain drain from the heartland to the coastal cities, from emerging markets to the west. Work from anywhere is a promise to equalize that. This is now reversing the patterns of brain drain."

This isn't just academic theory – it's already reshaping global competition for talent:

"All over the world there are about 55 to 60 countries which have special visas for remote workers. Now countries are competing for remote workers, just the way companies are. Within countries, there are cities and municipalities that have special incentive programs for remote workers—just in the US about 45 cities in the Heartland have policies."

The political implications should be grabbing attention across the spectrum. His message to policymakers is direct:

"When this remote work debate is played out in policy chambers, policymakers need to realize that remote work is good for the heartland. It's good for red states. It's really a game changer where talent from the LAs and the New York's of the world now can flow into some of these communities...When this remote work debate is played out, in policy chambers policymakers need to realize that remote work is good for the heartland.”

The economic development potential of attracting talent back to the heartland also plays out globally. Countries are going to compete on the basis of talent to some degree, and it's going to be interesting to see how that shakes out in the next few years.

Professor Choudhury's “The World Is Your Office" comes out April 22nd. It's not another remote work manifesto—it's a blueprint for how flexibility might just save our communities, our companies, and our sanity. Highly recommended!

Full interview: You can watch my in-depth conversation with Professor Choudhury, or download the full conversation.