In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth

“A crucial book for this moment.”—Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs

“Essential reading for anyone who leads a company or team today.”—Amy Edmondson, Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of Right Kind of Wrong

It’s not about being in office. It’s about being in person with other people.

Finally, the science-backed guide to making the most of in-person work, drawing on the authors’ original research as featured in Science, NPR, HBR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more.

For the first time in history, millions of workers can do their jobs from anywhere—and the result is the most contentious workplace debate in generations. Employees fight to protect their freedom. CEOs issue return-to-office mandates by gut instinct. Everyone argues, but no one has the data. Until now.

Harvard-trained economists Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington are leading researchers on remote and in-person work. They've spent years tracking millions of work hours across industries, analyzing Fortune 500 firms, startups, tech companies, and call centers. Their findings? Remote work is good for crossing tasks off a to-do list, but can erode the quality of our work, stifle creativity, and hurt mental health. When we're together, our brain-to-brain synchrony increases 10x, accelerating creativity, mentorship, and innovation. That’s why Pixar animators, Nobel Prize winners, and Silicon Valley founders have come up with their best ideas face-to-face with one another.

Working side-by-side can be a powerful force to supercharge company performance. But many office policies miss this mark, focusing on butts in seats, instead of brains in sync. Emanuel and Harrington offer solutions on how to craft the right policy. Backed with the latest research on the science of work, In Person offers tactical steps to make the most of in-office time, covering:

• How to calculate the right number of on-site days for your specific organization
• The playbook for preserving employee flexibility without losing the power of being together
• Why some RTO mandates fail spectacularly–and how to succeed

After years of confusion, animosity, and conflicting mandates, In Person finally delivers the answers in a clear, evidence-based roadmap for making smarter decisions with your most valuable resource: your people.