Each yeah, HBR produces dozens of videos that cover a wide array of business and work topics, ranging from research-based business theory, to wisdom from top performers in their fields, to nitty-gritty tactics for surviving another day in an imperfect world of work. We took a look at our 10 most popular videos made in 2024, and noticed a couple themes emerging. Number one was that viewers were seeking ways to be happy, or at least happier, at work. The other was around how to be a better communicator. Here’s a wrap-up of our best and most popular videos that covered these two themes.

Rebecca Knight

Do you know how your employees truly feel about their roles, work, and relationships? Asking the right questions in focused one-on-one settings is key to making sure you’re in tune with your people. This article outlines six questions to try to move beyond surface-level interactions. The more you recognize your team members as people with ambitions and dreams — not just cogs in the machine — the better you’ll understand how they feel about their jobs and futures.

Samina Karim, Chi-Hyon Lee, and Manuela N. Hoehn-Weiss

Learn how to design work systems and resource portfolios to address bottlenecks that affect company performance.

Katherine Wastell

I’ve just finished reading Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Joseph Nguyen. One of the main concepts in the book is the difference between thoughts and thinking. It explains how overthinking can destroy our motivation and hopes. Too much thinking takes the raw, joyful thoughts we have and turn

Jason Yip

The SPACE paper, referencing an earlier Microsoft paper, argues for the importance of considering perceived productivity. This is…

... and how to escape it!

James Hawkins

Jessica Kerr

In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they communicating in that case? And if the OKRs say anything else, they’re in conflict the roadmap!

Jesal Gadhia

Exercise better foresight by identifying pattens, pinpointing what makes them persist, and understanding what could prevent it in the future.

Jackie Colburn

How do you confidently improve and refine a mature product while mitigating risks and maintaining user trust? A Design Sprint may be just…

While they can’t tell the whole story of 2024, seven charts stood out as stark visualizations of key themes and trends that shaped business and management — and the state of the world. They’re reminders of what’s important, and what’s at stake, and include: what everyone is really doing with gen AI, how economies respond to populist leaders, the long tail of layoffs, a new way to measure loneliness at work, the challenges of getting to net zero, what we can learn from beer and boycotts, and what the future of work might look like.

Johanna Rothman

I have the same problems as many of you do: I start something and then I realize it's much larger than I expected. That occurred with this month's newsletter. The problem I tried to […]