Most people try to keep work and friendship in separate boxes, but that division is counterproductive. Professionals now spend more time with colleagues than with anyone else, and strong personal ties at work are directly linked to trust, learning, creativity, and performance. The real obstacle to productive business friendships is the widespread belief that mixing the personal and professional inevitably cheapens relationships, a mindset that prevents people from forming connections that would make them more effective and happier.

Ensuring your team members receive proper acknowledgement for their work extends beyond shallow praise.

Melissa Swift

Many employees are dealing with more uncertainty than they can handle, which takes a toll on teams. Here’s how to help.

Arthur C. Brooks

The ultimate advice for managers could be just to be human.

Stefanie Fernández

2025 was a year of big change—in general, and in the workplace. HBR asked its global social media community to weigh in on the question: How did your work change this year? Overall, three major themes stood out: AI adoption, the importance of people and purpose and major disruptions like layoffs, funding cuts, or career pivots. Alongside their responses are articles HBR published in 2025 on these trends, changes, and challenges.

Diego Quiroga

Alignment with your peers is the best way to secure cross-team success.

Rob Bowley

Coding has never been the governing bottleneck in software delivery. Not recently. Not in the last decade. And not across the entire history of the discipline.

Jackie Colburn

A roadmap brings direction, helps align the team, and keeps everyone moving toward shared goals. But here's the thing: The strength of your roadmap is only as good as the foundation it's built on. Here are three foundational pillars you should address before building a roadmap, along with practical

Christina Wodtke

Last quarter I watched a Stanford student conduct her first user interview. She had a beautiful script—twelve questions, carefully worded, organized by theme. She was prepared. But when she did the…

A lot happened in 2025. Luckily, charts can help make sense of it all. Here are some of HBR’s most popular, topical, and important charts of the year. They cover a wobbly economy, an explosion of AI-generated slop at work, the challenge of finding joy in a busy life, and more.