The first annual Microsoft Work Trend Index should be a wake-up call for
bosses and software developers alike to improve employee experiences as offices
reopen.
The majority of people want flexible remote work to continue, but new
research from Microsoft warns leaders that they're out of touch with exhausted
employees and need to plan if hybrid work is to be successful. Otherwise, they
will lose staff -- especially Gen Z workers.
There have been plenty of smaller-scale studies showing how working
habits, attitudes to remote work and plans for the future have changed during
the pandemic, but the scale of Microsoft's
Work Trend Index -- interviews with over 30,000 people across
31 countries, plus analysis of trillions of mails, messages, Teams meetings and other activity across
Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn -- lends it more weight.
Indeed, with the data representing "a global and cross-industry
view on how work is changing", Microsoft will be using it to guide product
development and even reorganise some of its own offices, Kamal Janardhan, general manager of Microsoft 365
Insights told TechRepublic.
Remote trade-offs
Microsoft's Kamal Janardhan: "The flexibility and agility is
something that people appreciate, and it's here to stay."
Obviously, remote work is a major topic. "The theme of the pandemic
is that the entire world participated in this work-from-home experiment, and it
became a norm essentially," Janardhan said. "For a lot of people it
used to be 'can we even do that as an organisation?' and now it's the norm --
of course we can."
Although it varies by country, industry and what job you have, the
interest in remote work is strong, despite the drawbacks. Nearly three-quarters
(73%) of workers in the survey want the option of flexible remote work to
continue, and 46% plan to move because of that flexibility.
"The flexibility and agility is something that people appreciate,
and it's here to stay," Janardhan maintains. "This is going to be the
new way of working [that] is actually going to [bring] better culture, more
inclusion. The human need to accommodate each other is something that creates
connection, and all of us should think about how we accommodate each other in
this new way of working."
The good news is that 40% of workers feel they can finally bring their
full selves -- complete with pets, family members and the worries they might
share, along with a few tears -- to work without embarrassment, the way
employees have been promising they could all along. People who have those
closer interactions report higher productivity as well as better wellbeing and
stronger work relationships.
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That's much harder for Black and Latino workers in the US, Microsoft
notes in the report: these groups find it slightly harder to build
relationships with their team, feel less included and are less likely to feel
they can be themselves.
But with lines between work and home blurring, we've lost what Janardhan
calls "cognitive white space" -- travelling to work or dropping
children off at school might mean traffic jams, but it also provides a
transition that the 'virtual commute' in Teams might not fully
replicate.
Teams meetings last longer -- 45 minutes rather than 35 the year before
-- and people are in more meetings, (with almost two-thirds of those not being
scheduled in advance), adding up to 2.5x more time in meetings. They also send
45% more chat messages and do 42% more chats out of business hours. Despite all
the pressures of the past year and the fact that remote work should allow for
asynchronous work styles, people aren't stepping away from work: just like the
year before, 50% of people respond within five minutes in a Teams chat.
It's not just Teams: 66% more people are creating documents that would
presumably have been conversations before, and just among Exchange Online
commercial and education customers, 40.6 billion more email messages were sent
in February 2021 than in February 2020.
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Image: Microsoft
Trying to make up for not being in the same room as people by spending
so much of the time in Teams interactions may be why 54% of people feel
overworked and 39% are downright exhausted. Despite options like Together mode, the combination of the urgent
feeling of virtual meetings and the lack of social cues and body language
creates 'digital static' that makes it harder to communicate and understand
what other people mean. That leads to fatigue, anxiety and even less of a
feeling of connection.
We're spending more time with those we work closely with, but much less
time with the broader network of people. Messages in Teams channels that the
whole group can see are down 5%, while private and small group chats are up
87%. Some of that back channel is positive -- attempts to replicate those
physical interactions, Janardhan suggests. "Previously it was rude to chat
while you were in the meeting, and now it's the norm, because this is how
people exchange things that were previously available only through body
language. I would lean over to the person next to me and say 'really?' or I
would smile. Now we do that in the chat."
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Feeling included correlates with feeling productive and collaborating,
coming up with new ideas and thinking strategically -- the things that
contribute to creativity and innovation, which are under threat. "Innovation
is defined by the things that you create together as a community. This risk to
innovation is caused by the fact that when we look at how people are
interacting with each other, the level, the depth of their conversations, the
time they spend, the team bonds and networks are diminishing," Janardhan
warns.
Close-knit groups can be supportive, but they can also be silos of
groupthink with no new ideas, Microsoft researcher Nancy Baym (who studies
social connections) cautions in the report. "Bumping into people in the
office and grabbing lunch together may seem unrelated to the success of the
organization, but they're actually important moments where people get to know
one another and build social capital. They build trust, they discover common
interests they didn't know they had, and they spark ideas and
conversations."
It's worst for Gen Z: 60% of 18-25s (who may be living alone or lack the
space and money to create a good home workspace) say they're surviving rather
than thriving, or flat-out struggling. They find it harder to balance work and
life, they're more likely to feel exhausted after work, they don't feel engaged
because they can't suggest new ideas or even get a chance to talk in meetings
and they have fewer opportunities to make up for that and grow their career by
networking because they can't connect with people casually at work. "They
feel like the outlook is worse than ever on feeling engaged and excited about
work, career advancement, being included in conversations and meetings, wellbeing
and productivity," Janardhan notes.
Those downsides are why 67% of people want more in-person time with
their colleagues as well as working remotely.
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There's a disconnect between how business leaders and various groups of
employees are coping with remote working.
Image: Microsoft
Overoptimistic leaders
Even though two-thirds of employers talk about converting offices into
hybrid work locations, they seem to be out of touch with how much this matters.
Business leaders are mostly male, information workers and either Gen X or
millennials and they're thriving (61%, up over 20% from pre-pandemic),
reporting better relationships with colleagues and their own bosses and taking
all of their vacation days or even a few extras. "However, their employees
are actually saying that they're tired -- the time spent in meetings has almost
tripled, and it's still increasing."
Women, frontline workers, those with less career progress and especially
Gen Z are struggling -- and 37% of all staff say their company is asking too
much of them. A fifth say their employer doesn't care about their work-life
balance.
"This dissonance between how leaders are seeing what's happening
and how individuals and teams are feeling is really key," Janardhan warns.
One problem is that leaders are more isolated than before the pandemic.
"What we see with leaders is that they're often focused on talking to that
core group a lot. Previously they had all-hands meetings or company parties:
the large gathering is exactly what the pandemic took away from us, it's
something they no longer have access to so they become more siloed,"
Janardhan explains.
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Image: Microsoft
Companies advertising more roles as remote work (a 5x increase in remote
job postings on LinkedIn) aren't always investing in what staff need to make
that work: 42% of employees say they're missing some 'office essentials' and
one in ten say their internet connection at home isn't good enough for their
work. Worldwide, only 46% of staff get even a portion of remote work expenses
paid.
Oblivious leaders may get a rude awakening. Remote flexibility and a
lack of support may explain why 41% of employees are now planning to leave
their current job within a year. "This is a pretty significant trend
increase," Janardhan notes. "When you look at Gen Z, the younger
population that has been in the workforce for less time, that jumps to 54%. How
leaders approach this next phase of work will impact who stays, who goes, and
who joins the company, and it will significantly impact the bottom line. How do
you manage your overall workforce with this churn and transition
happening?"
Although Microsoft has some suggestions about using technology to
improve the situation, most of the strategies the report suggests are about
improving employee experience by being flexible and supportive -- and setting
the right example.
"This is a pivotal moment in history: we're on the cusp of the next
workforce disruption. Across the board companies are thinking about how they
can reinvent themselves," says Janardhan. "We should resist the urge
to see this new way of working, hybrid work, as business-as-usual. It is an
opportunity to rethink long-held assumptions, and I'm convinced that if we take
the good that's emerging from this time with us, then we're going to reinvent
for much better workforce [conditions]."
The cultural norms inside companies about hybrid work need to be matched
with new thinking about workspaces, Janardhan says. "If entering a certain
physical space or exiting it was how you defined working, that's gone out the
window. Organisations have all these cultures about 'when did you badge and
when did you badge out, how long did you work?' That will have to evolve for
this new type of working that is more individual, more empowered, more
trusting, but also needs to have guardrails in place to be
effective."
Both expectations and technology will need to change to make hybrid work
successful, Janardhan suggests. "If you do back-to-back meetings because
you have no need to commute from one place to another, you're going to be
exhausted. It was typical, when you walk to a meeting room, to visit the
restroom or get a drink of water and have a conversation. If you eliminate
that, that's going to be the opposite of productive for every human being for
every team. You can't write the best document or the best code if you aren't
creating the right cognitive, critical space for deep work and collaboration
work."
The new Viva Insights tool
can be helpful, Janardhan notes. "We're finding people are eager to set
things like 'this is my focus time, this is my deep work time, this is my
after-hours time'. That creates the courtesy culture you previously got from
in-person interactions. I could see someone was heads-down, working at their
desk, and I wouldn't interrupt. Bringing that sort of human sense into Teams
standards is a huge part of this."
But combating the exhaustion of remote work doesn't mean lecturing
people about taking a break -- it has to come from the top down. "You
can't have individuals saying 'we should have protected after-hours time' if
you don't have leaders creating the structure by saying 'I will have certain
times where I will engage and interact with the team and those will meet the
guardrails and the norms of effective work/life scheduling'."
If companies introduce extra wellness days (Microsoft has added five
extra days of time off for employees), leaders need to show that it's OK to use
them by taking time off and encouraging staff to do the same. They should also
encourage people to take time to network and connect, for fun as well as for
work, because that's not an unproductive distraction. "Embrace the asynchronous
collaboration, create a culture of breaks and interaction space for human
interaction versus just transactional," says Janardhan.
"We're human, we will always have to meet -- we will just do it
more intentionally on our own terms, with more flexibility," she adds.
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Image: Microsoft
Rebuilding the office
The culture change includes rethinking the spaces people work in,
because while many employees want both face-to-face time and the opportunity to
work remotely at least some of the time, they're not positive about hybrid
meetings. "Meetings where everyone's online: everyone rated those as the
most inclusive. Meetings where everyone's in person are next, and the meetings
with some online and some in person were the least inclusive," Janardhan
tells TechRepublic.
"Physical spaces have often been just a holding ground for people
to get transactional work done. If you create rich collaboration -- for example
extending the whiteboarding capabilities in Teams to a physical space -- you
get a very different kind of physical space."
Microsoft already has about 20% of its global employees back in offices
and other locations in 21 countries, and plans to slowly reopen its Redmond
headquarters to staff from March 29. Last year the company said that in
the long run it will be
standard for employees whose job doesn't need them to be in a specific location
like a data centre or a hardware lab to work remotely up to 50% of the time if
they want. That's already common for some groups like Azure DevOps, which has
team members in several different countries, but a much bigger shift for teams
like Windows, which has traditionally required employees to move to Seattle.
For now, though, employees working in and near Redmond will be able to choose
if they want to return to the office, carry on working remotely, or combine the
two.
Previously, the campus has been at stage three of Microsoft's hybrid
workplace classing, with working from home strongly encouraged. On March 29 it
shifts to stage four, a soft opening. "Employees are encouraged to work
remotely" a letter from
executive vice president Kurt DelBene says. They "should not feel they
need to return" but can "work where they feel most productive and
comfortable". Precautions on campus will include "social distancing
of workspaces, face coverings, extensive cleaning procedures, daily health
attestations, attendance strategies and more".
In other Microsoft locations at stage four, less than a third of
employees are in the office for half of their working week and more than half
are only there 25% of the time. If conditions worsen, the dial could shift back
to a more restrictive level and Microsoft won't remove those measures until
COVID-19 is more like a seasonal flu than a pandemic.
The company is also building prototype hybrid meeting spaces in Redmond
and its UK offices, experimenting with multiple screens, cameras and mixed
reality scenarios to try and make meetings equally inclusive for remote workers
and people in the room. That might look like the spacious offices Microsoft has
shown in the Viva launch video,
with a curved row of tables and wall-sized screens with a filmstrip view of
remote attendees that puts everyone face to face, or something more like Microsoft Mesh mixed reality. Either way,
offices and meeting rooms will need to be appealing spaces that are more
attractive than staying home.
Software will be an important part of this, because it can help create
habits and culture as well as simply enabling report work, and Janardhan is
keen to see technology that better supports people. "My hope is that we
and absolutely every single software company start thinking about the
reinvention of employee experience. This is the rising tide that should raise
all ships: we should change the way we think about software and service of that
human endeavour."
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