The 10 Most Popular Articles in 2023 (So Far)

Three-plus years after COVID-19 interrupted office-based operations with a sudden transition to remote work, managing hybrid teams remains a pressing issue for leaders. Hybrid culture has its own pitfalls to manage, with risks like feelings of disconnection among employees and “productivity paranoia.” Based on the most-read articles in the first half of 2023, readers of MIT Sloan Management Review seem keen to address these issues. Tools for improvement can be found in articles on skills-based culture change, effective one-on-one meetings, and intellectual honesty. Readers have also been focused on the bigger-picture issues of ESG, sustainability, and the growing role of AI in performance management and strategy.

The following are the 10 most popular articles of the year so far. We hope they will continue to help leaders in managing and supporting employees and in building thriving, innovative organizations.

#1
Work-From-Home Regulations Are Coming. Companies Aren’t Ready.

Jimena Murillo Chávarro

A growing web of regulatory minutiae governing flexible working arrangements around the world poses an acute challenge for multinationals. These companies must now contend with different compliance requirements in different jurisdictions, depending on how governments define and interpret terms like remote work, teleworking, and work from home.

#2
Five Ways to Make Your One-on-One Meetings More Effective

Jessica Wisdom

Weekly check-in meetings between managers and their teams or direct reports are key opportunities to build trusting manager-employee relationships. By taking five science-backed steps and asking five key questions, managers can better structure their one-on-ones to make these check-ins more productive.

#3
Why Innovation Depends on Intellectual Honesty

Jeff Dyer, Nathan Furr, Curtis Lefrandt, and Taeya Howell

Fostering psychological safety alone isn’t enough to successfully drive innovation; leaders must also create conditions that enable healthy debate. The authors describe the factors most important to establishing the balance between psychological safety and open, honest debate and outline what leaders can do to create a high-performance learning and innovation culture.

#4
Three Lessons From Chatting About Strategy With ChatGPT

Christian Stadler and Martin Reeves

Amid great excitement about the potential use cases of large language models like ChatGPT, a pair of business strategists decided to test whether the tools can support ideation, experimentation, evaluation, and storytelling as part of the strategy creation process. In this article, they share three lessons that emerged when they conducted a series of experiments in which they posed a question of strategy to ChatGPT and followed up with iterative queries.

#5
AI Is Helping Companies Redefine, Not Just Improve, Performance

Michael Schrage, David Kiron, François Candelon, Shervin Khodabandeh, and Michael Chu

Research on organizations’ use of artificial intelligence offers new perspectives on what drives performance and how best to measure it. Three practical and valuable ways KPIs can redefine strategic measurement include using smart KPIs that learn, measuring the performance of KPIs themselves, and enhancing organizational alignment with KPIs.

#6
ESG Is Going to Have a Rocky 2023. Sustainability Will Be Just Fine.

Andrew Winston

Companies’ environmental, social, and governance activities are facing two kinds of backlash: “anti-woke” political theater and noise from the investment community about whether ESG funds will outperform “regular” funds. But while ESG gets buffeted by these winds, the real work of sustainability continues.

#7
The Toxic Culture Gap Shows Companies Are Failing Women

Donald Sull and Charles Sull

Which elements of corporate culture are most critical to women? And which cultural shortcomings are causing women to head for the exits? In analyzing the language that 3 million U.S. employees used in Glassdoor reviews to describe their employers, the authors found that toxic culture disproportionately affects women, with the widest gender gaps in perceptions of inclusivity and respect.

#8
Managing the Cultural Pitfalls of Hybrid Work

Christine Moorman and Katie Hinkfuss

Although the hybrid work model has been widely adopted among many businesses, the complications involving peer relationships and connections that it has introduced linger on. A set of strategies presented here can help leaders navigate organizational culture and the socialization of new employees during this era of digital transformation.

#9
Take a Skills-Based Approach to Culture Change

Per Hugander

Taking a skills-based approach, rather than implementing typical culture-change initiatives, can lead to positive changes in behavior that endure, particularly when it comes to cultivating soft skills like perspective taking and creating psychological safety. The author explains key attributes of the skills-based approach to culture change and how organizations can leverage it to speed the process and improve performance in the long term.

#10
Four Ways to Build a Culture of Honesty and Avoid ‘Productivity Paranoia’

Pamela Meyer

Remote and hybrid work environments can breed distrust, or productivity paranoia, between managers and employees or between remote and in-person colleagues. The author describes four steps managers can take to foster a culture of trust and honesty when people aren’t able to interact and develop relationships with one another in person.