New Microsoft Study of 60k Employees: Remote Work Threatens Innovation(inc.com)
inc.com
New Microsoft Study of 60k Employees: Remote Work Threatens Innovation
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/remote-hybrid-work-paradox-microsoft-satya-nadella.html
68 comments
> Also, how are they measuring "innovation"?
This is really important. Not to diss Microsoft as they do put out innovative stuff nowadays (eg, vscode) but I want to know how they measure this as there’s a lot of trash features coming out (eg, Teams) so having more or fewer of those new things isn’t innovation.
Basically, I don’t trust Microsoft or Inc to define innovation in a way that matters to my curiosity.
This is really important. Not to diss Microsoft as they do put out innovative stuff nowadays (eg, vscode) but I want to know how they measure this as there’s a lot of trash features coming out (eg, Teams) so having more or fewer of those new things isn’t innovation.
Basically, I don’t trust Microsoft or Inc to define innovation in a way that matters to my curiosity.
How is VS Code innovative? It’s a text editor with packaged plugins. If there was innovation then it lies in making an above board Electron app.
Several ways, I think.
1) As an editor it’s novel for his high performance across so many platforms.
2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.
3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.
4) Within Microsoft’s culture it turns the decades old visual studio model (good performance but locked into Windows and costly) on its head. So this is really new for Microsoft. (Even though I think it would be innovative from any company, but there aren’t any other companies I know that make money from developers so don’t actually need to charge for dev tools).
1) As an editor it’s novel for his high performance across so many platforms.
2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.
3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.
4) Within Microsoft’s culture it turns the decades old visual studio model (good performance but locked into Windows and costly) on its head. So this is really new for Microsoft. (Even though I think it would be innovative from any company, but there aren’t any other companies I know that make money from developers so don’t actually need to charge for dev tools).
>1) As an editor it’s novel for his high performance across so many platforms.
Sublime Text is one of many cross-platform text editors with superior performance than that of VS Code.
>2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.
This existed before VS Code. Perhaps an argument can be made with respect to the UI of such a repository, but the existence of this concept has been around for a while.
>3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.
This isn't innovative. This is having a lot of money, thus resources, to have such a release cadence.
I can see the argument where VS Code is better suited for some people but innovative it is not (and that's OK).
Sublime Text is one of many cross-platform text editors with superior performance than that of VS Code.
>2) As a plug-in platform with a simple marketplace it’s the first time I’ve seen this work well across many types of dev groups. “Easy enough” for html designers, and data scientists as well as traditional programmers. Plug-ins exist for other tools, but not as easily put together as this.
This existed before VS Code. Perhaps an argument can be made with respect to the UI of such a repository, but the existence of this concept has been around for a while.
>3) The release schedule is so rapid. At least monthly releases with new features with lots of community ideas realized.
This isn't innovative. This is having a lot of money, thus resources, to have such a release cadence.
I can see the argument where VS Code is better suited for some people but innovative it is not (and that's OK).
The Language Server Protocol alone, which was invented for VS Code, was innovative enough that it's now being used by other major editors and IDEs.
Sure you might get slightly better performance with some other program but you won't get all the features or quality of VS Code with that (and for free).
Sure you might get slightly better performance with some other program but you won't get all the features or quality of VS Code with that (and for free).
I agree with the sibling poster, here. None of those things represent innovation. a) none are novel in the IDE space, and b) they're incremental.
If "innovation" just means "make things marginally better than before", we've got a very weak definition indeed...
If "innovation" just means "make things marginally better than before", we've got a very weak definition indeed...
That's not a bad question. I find I use it for basically all my code editing nowadays, but I don't know why. I think it's just "smooth enough" and feels consistent even as you use it for a variety of different languages. It's innovative in some subtle way.
I still like BBEdit on Mac and notepad++ for quick text editing, but have slowly migrated to using vscode for everything but jupyter.
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I got the impression that vscode (monaco) was green lit in order to retain certain people threatening to leave. MS is having retention and talent acquisition problems. Luckily there are enough people with enough clout to do these projects. But they are definitely not normal.
That sounds unlikely, but if true, is... impressive? That's a non trivial product launch that has been a pretty big deal.
I think people would be surprised how much of the innovation in dev div is directly attributable to retention projects. Basically, let me do this here or I will go to Facebook and do it. I think much of the open sourcing is due to people threatening to leave if it wasn’t. They get sick of building things that get shelved.
The Steve Sinofsky era did so much damage to morale at Dev Div that they’re now going to great lengths to placate certain devs.
The Steve Sinofsky era did so much damage to morale at Dev Div that they’re now going to great lengths to placate certain devs.
Not to mention June 2020 was only a few months into a pandemic unlike the US has seen in most of our lifetimes. I don’t see how you could differentiate between the effects of the pandemic/isolation and working from home.
If this is the same study I've heard of before, they defined innovation as "number of interactions", and assumed collaboration is directly proportional to the number of interactions.
The study should have been named "Remote Work Reduces Interaction".
The study should have been named "Remote Work Reduces Interaction".
I have a feeling there was an agenda behind this.
Deislabs, a part of MS that's been functioning as a distributed org for years, has produced a lot of innovation... https://deislabs.io/
Deislabs, a part of MS that's been functioning as a distributed org for years, has produced a lot of innovation... https://deislabs.io/
If you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But ten years later somehow, you don't quite know what problems are worth working on.
Richard Hamming
Richard Hamming
Open it every five years or so then?
This was in an era pre-Internet.
Agreed! It took years for me to get a door, so now that I have one I close it every chance I get. Silence is really wonderful, only WFH has been better.
I think you're disagreeing if your takeaway is to keep the door closed.
The irony of this is next level, after all Microsoft has been threatening innovation for decades.
This sounds more like their typical corporate propaganda to get workers back onto their campuses and under the whip of their middle-management class.
This sounds more like their typical corporate propaganda to get workers back onto their campuses and under the whip of their middle-management class.
I agree with a lot of the criticism commented so far, that it could be biased (even unintentionally), how do you really measure innovation and so on. But... just based on my own experiences and gut, I kind of agree. It seems harder to innovate now. I get it this is anecdotal or whatever, but when we were all together, there were so many times when; maybe in the hallway yaking, or break room, and just casually talking, then next thing you know we are in a huddle room white boarding something. That's just not happening now. We have tried different things, Slack threads, scheduled Bluejeans calls etc. but I don't feel like we have replicated it. And a lot of my colleagues agree, we talk about it openly. We all love WFH, but miss the synergy.
I sometimes wonder if there is a technical solution we are all missing? I dunno, AR/VR, something to bring back that certain je ne sais quoi of all being in one place?
I sometimes wonder if there is a technical solution we are all missing? I dunno, AR/VR, something to bring back that certain je ne sais quoi of all being in one place?
I seriously could not agree more. For some folks, WFH doesn't impact their collaboration, but it definitely does for me.
I've had so many instances where we've been trying to crack a problem, going back and forth over emails and WebEx calls for months. We finally get back into the office and have a person-to-person meeting, and it just...gets resolved. Like magic. You could say that those previous discussions just laid the groundwork for us to crack it, but it's more than that...having one more WebEx meeting wouldn't have fixed it, or two, or three.
There's something about the personal interaction - physically pointing at the screen, having multiple laptops open, pacing back and forth, whiteboarding - that can be magic for brainstorming.
I've had so many instances where we've been trying to crack a problem, going back and forth over emails and WebEx calls for months. We finally get back into the office and have a person-to-person meeting, and it just...gets resolved. Like magic. You could say that those previous discussions just laid the groundwork for us to crack it, but it's more than that...having one more WebEx meeting wouldn't have fixed it, or two, or three.
There's something about the personal interaction - physically pointing at the screen, having multiple laptops open, pacing back and forth, whiteboarding - that can be magic for brainstorming.
since last April, I often find myself reminded of the talk by John cleese on creativity. Specifically his thesis that its not a talent. https://youtu.be/Pb5oIIPO62g
When having a call after another, and trying to be efficient during the day, there is just less time to be creative…
When having a call after another, and trying to be efficient during the day, there is just less time to be creative…
Most of these results are quite weak, especially those around the number of connections ("ties") a given worker has with those in other parts of the organization.
The only significant result I see is a decrease in time spent collaborating with others. There are two major confounds I see, neither of which is adequately addressed:
1. The study relies entirely on numbers of electronic communications (IM, email, voice and video calls), taking February as a baseline and measuring differences from that in following months. No apparent effort is made to account for in-person collaboration, or for the reduction to ~zero of messages relating specifically to the needs of in-person work. When everyone is remote, no one needs to ask who wants lunch or where everyone wants to go.
2. As the authors themselves acknowledge, they have no way to account for any impact, beyond the switch to WFH, of the COVID-19 pandemic. They attempt to fudge this by applying some multipliers whose derivation seems uncertain, and excuse it by saying that other studies using similar econometric methods do likewise.
For management interested in pushing against all sense to force workers back to the office status quo ante, this might make a useful argument assuming that no one they're attempting to persuade looks too closely at the paper. For anyone trying to understand accurately the impacts on work culture and output of a broad switch to WFH, I think there's little of value here.
The only significant result I see is a decrease in time spent collaborating with others. There are two major confounds I see, neither of which is adequately addressed:
1. The study relies entirely on numbers of electronic communications (IM, email, voice and video calls), taking February as a baseline and measuring differences from that in following months. No apparent effort is made to account for in-person collaboration, or for the reduction to ~zero of messages relating specifically to the needs of in-person work. When everyone is remote, no one needs to ask who wants lunch or where everyone wants to go.
2. As the authors themselves acknowledge, they have no way to account for any impact, beyond the switch to WFH, of the COVID-19 pandemic. They attempt to fudge this by applying some multipliers whose derivation seems uncertain, and excuse it by saying that other studies using similar econometric methods do likewise.
For management interested in pushing against all sense to force workers back to the office status quo ante, this might make a useful argument assuming that no one they're attempting to persuade looks too closely at the paper. For anyone trying to understand accurately the impacts on work culture and output of a broad switch to WFH, I think there's little of value here.
The tobacco companies funded countless studies that showed that cigarettes were safe. This seems like the same thing.
Yeah what we don't talk about is the impact of commuting and offices on the environment. To these CEOs we will never be in an environmental crisis they have the wealth to shelter themselves from the bad effects of global warming so they're eager to return to "business as usual."
If it actually was beneficial for productivity and innovation if everyone worked from home, why would they want to cripple themselves? Especially considering they could get rid of the office cost. At least tobacco companies had a clear incentive to lie.
If everyone else has the benefits of remote work, who is going to buy your office space?
Jobs that must be on-site (medical, manufacturing, etc.).
Going fully remote results in:
- Profit on real estate - No/less expenses on utilities - No expenses on relocation packages - No expenses on custodial staff - No/reduced expenses on office furniture
I mean, from a cost perspective, fully remote is clearly a big boon for a company. Either Microsoft is truly seeing reduced worker productivity from WFH, or there is another incentive, but it's not strictly economic.
Going fully remote results in:
- Profit on real estate - No/less expenses on utilities - No expenses on relocation packages - No expenses on custodial staff - No/reduced expenses on office furniture
I mean, from a cost perspective, fully remote is clearly a big boon for a company. Either Microsoft is truly seeing reduced worker productivity from WFH, or there is another incentive, but it's not strictly economic.
It can be repurposed as housing, there seems to always be a need for that.
Big offices tend to be in urban areas that without the offices for people to work, have less demand for that expensive housing. It’s also expensive to convert and not ideal for manufacturing or other uses.
It will cause a cascade of economic damage.
It will cause a cascade of economic damage.
Managers have the most fun at the office, as they are having meetings in separated rooms, while programmers need to be able to write and debug code in a room stuffed with 50 other people talking around them (because ,,walls are taking too much expensive real estate away''). At least that's how it was the situation at Google when I decided to leave.
Says totally un-biased study not geared towards the interests of one of the largest corporations in the US that does not want power to shift to labor.
How does remote work shift power to labor? It seems to me that the opening of the labor pool and the employer pool up geographically washes out.
If anything remote work entrenches the power of the providers of remote work tools eg microsoft.
If anything remote work entrenches the power of the providers of remote work tools eg microsoft.
This. It's not entirely clear that remote working is at all more "worker-friendly." Flexibility has increased, mostly, but so has overwork and mental health issues.
Could you explain why it would be in Microsoft's interests to bias the outcome of this study? Presumably the organization as a whole is mostly interested in output. Individual managers might have ego invested in their workers being local, but the organization probably doesn't, unless it impacts productivity. So MS' interests here seem aligned with determining the truth of the situation.
Most business owners probably don't want experienced staff to have opportunities to work remotely for another organisation.
Microsoft would tend to be a beneficiary of remote work opportunities, though, since they pay better than most places, and since the COL at their head office is high. If their workers can work anywhere, they might be able to pay them less. I have a friend who went fully remote there lately and took a 15% paycut to do it. Now he lives in a city with few local dev jobs, so he's even more married to Microsoft than before, when he lived SFBA and had many local opportunities.
All that to say this doesn't seem like a strong reason for them to put their finger on the scale.
All that to say this doesn't seem like a strong reason for them to put their finger on the scale.
Up until June 2020. This was just the beginning of the paradigm shift and during those uniquely stressful pandemic early days. We've had over a year of new data.
I wonder to what extent it's not the remote work, but rather the accumulation of stress and burnout.
Anecdotally, a good portion of my team is teetering on the edge of burnout. We're not less productive because of remoteness, we're less productive because we're all getting less sleep and fewer productive hours. And it's well known that stress reduces creativity.
Anecdotally, a good portion of my team is teetering on the edge of burnout. We're not less productive because of remoteness, we're less productive because we're all getting less sleep and fewer productive hours. And it's well known that stress reduces creativity.
> we're less productive because we're all getting less sleep and fewer productive hours.
Maybe all that is caused by remoteness?
Maybe all that is caused by remoteness?
Possibly, but I would more readily attribute it to COVID-specific causes. All of my friends and coworkers who have kids have been dealing with remote schooling, and they've all been noticeably more stressed because of it. My partner who is an extrovert suddenly had far less access to human interaction, and they've been visibly happier day to day in the more recent months despite work not being any less stressful in large part due to seeing more people in person. Zoom just didn't do it for them.
Myself too. It wasn't the remoteness that bugged me. I live less than 10 minutes from my office, so it's not like the lack of a commute even factored in. And I've worked with geographically distributed teams my whole career. It was the simultaneous social isolation outside of work and having just moved to a new location where I didn't have an established support network, taking away my normal channels for dealing with stress.
Myself too. It wasn't the remoteness that bugged me. I live less than 10 minutes from my office, so it's not like the lack of a commute even factored in. And I've worked with geographically distributed teams my whole career. It was the simultaneous social isolation outside of work and having just moved to a new location where I didn't have an established support network, taking away my normal channels for dealing with stress.
IME this Pandemic-from-home season isn't like the usual WFH where one has non-work social outlets. So it could be remoteness, more COVID-related, other factors, or a combination.
Remoteness makes this assumption 5hat you're always there.
And it doesn't have to be that way.
Clearly defined work hours needs to be a thing.
And it doesn't have to be that way.
Clearly defined work hours needs to be a thing.
> we're less productive because we're all getting less sleep and fewer productive hours. And it's well known that stress reduces creativity.
I'd say it is the opposite at my company. Less commuting means more time to sleep in and more time for eating healthy.
My QoL has markedly improved since WfH.
I do agree that a certain subset of technical problems are easier to solve with in person collaboration. I think as a team we are slowly getting better at brainstorming on video calls, but it has taken awhile. The latency is honestly what kills it. Give me a 30ms end to end latency (including headset to computer, which is often more than 100ms right now for common BT headsets!) and I think a lot of friction would be removed.
What is really missing is the random hallway conversations that lead to sudden bursts of creativity.
I'd say it is the opposite at my company. Less commuting means more time to sleep in and more time for eating healthy.
My QoL has markedly improved since WfH.
I do agree that a certain subset of technical problems are easier to solve with in person collaboration. I think as a team we are slowly getting better at brainstorming on video calls, but it has taken awhile. The latency is honestly what kills it. Give me a 30ms end to end latency (including headset to computer, which is often more than 100ms right now for common BT headsets!) and I think a lot of friction would be removed.
What is really missing is the random hallway conversations that lead to sudden bursts of creativity.
> The study, which was just published in Nature Human Behavior, analyzed data on the communications of approximately 61,000 Microsoft employees in the U.S. gathered between December 2019 and June 2020. Crunching the numbers revealed that while hours worked went up slightly when employees shifted to working from home, communication, particularly real-time conversations, fell significantly.
> Switching from a corridor chat to an exchange of emails isn't a one-to-one substitution, and the researchers worry about the knock-on effects of changes to the way office workers collaborate.
> "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, the study itself does not show any link between remote work and innovation. It merely shows that communication has become more asynchronous, and then applies the assumption that asynchronous communication is worse.
What a joke.
> Switching from a corridor chat to an exchange of emails isn't a one-to-one substitution, and the researchers worry about the knock-on effects of changes to the way office workers collaborate.
> "Without intervention, the effects we discovered have the potential to impact workers' ability to acquire and share new information across groups, and as a result, affect productivity and innovation," they write. "Based on previous research, we believe that the shift to less 'rich' communication media may have made it more difficult for workers to convey and process complex information."
So, if I'm reading this correctly, the study itself does not show any link between remote work and innovation. It merely shows that communication has become more asynchronous, and then applies the assumption that asynchronous communication is worse.
What a joke.
If Microsoft really did want to increase the ability for their workers to innovate, why not do the obvious and formally create an "innovation day" each week where workers are free to:
1) Watch recorded presentations or demos to expand knowledge and be inspired
2) Read whitepapers
3) Review and play with other software for inspiration
4) Have group discussions involving a lot of "what if..." and "I just learnt..."
5) Work on whatever project they want to that the worker has decided would be interesting for end users to trial or colleagues to learn from
There's nothing preventing any of the above from being conducted remotely.
Workers are arguably more likely to do mundane work in an office setting without inspiration, creativity or any desire to innovate. As has been found through various implementations of "20% projects"[1] it's not the physical location of workers exist that matters, it's whether the company is forward looking enough to invest a significant portion of wages into increasing skills and knowledge of workers, and allowing workers to freely conduct R&D. Google was once considered innovative in its early days. However, Google's "20% projects"[1] approach was famously killed off in 2013, or arguably long before this by effect of workers doing 100+20% work rather than 80+20% work, and I would argue that Google in the last decade has been very poor at innovating for its size.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project
1) Watch recorded presentations or demos to expand knowledge and be inspired
2) Read whitepapers
3) Review and play with other software for inspiration
4) Have group discussions involving a lot of "what if..." and "I just learnt..."
5) Work on whatever project they want to that the worker has decided would be interesting for end users to trial or colleagues to learn from
There's nothing preventing any of the above from being conducted remotely.
Workers are arguably more likely to do mundane work in an office setting without inspiration, creativity or any desire to innovate. As has been found through various implementations of "20% projects"[1] it's not the physical location of workers exist that matters, it's whether the company is forward looking enough to invest a significant portion of wages into increasing skills and knowledge of workers, and allowing workers to freely conduct R&D. Google was once considered innovative in its early days. However, Google's "20% projects"[1] approach was famously killed off in 2013, or arguably long before this by effect of workers doing 100+20% work rather than 80+20% work, and I would argue that Google in the last decade has been very poor at innovating for its size.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20%25_Project
MS Employee here, and, on a personal level, I'm absolutely feeling a lack of creativity.
Although, I'm not sure it's due to the lack of hallway/water-cooler conversations. I personally feel that I have less time to unconsciously process my problem space (specifically during my transit commute).
Although, I'm not sure it's due to the lack of hallway/water-cooler conversations. I personally feel that I have less time to unconsciously process my problem space (specifically during my transit commute).
Go for a long walk every morning?
> Not so fast, suggests a massive new peer-reviewed study from Microsoft…
This feels (is?) biased toward the potential goals of Microsoft to push their hybrid/in-person plans.
This feels (is?) biased toward the potential goals of Microsoft to push their hybrid/in-person plans.
Whatever pressure there is to push towards getting back into the office, I'm certainly not feeling it on the ground. With teams distributed around the world, to some degree a large amount of my work was already remote. Of course, I can't speak for any of the other tens of thousands of employees.
I've read that Microsoft is very permanent-remote-friendly. Would you say that's untrue?
In other words, people can more easily transition to personal matters after completing their work for the day. Long-term creativity (inside of the workplace) goes down. Not surprised. Of course Microsoft would paint employees realizing there is more to life than living, breathing and sleeping your career as a bad thing.
Timeline of this study is the very beginning of mysterious pandemic. I guess, people had other sorrows than being very innovative at work. It was absolutely not clear how lethal the new virus is and how it will affect the world.
Didn't they just build new buildings in Redmond? How do you measure this? How do you explain companies that were fully remote before the pandemic building a new innovative product? Sounds like fluff.
Someone please correct me if I’m wrong. Wasn’t the Linux kernel built remotely using a mailing list and occasional IRC as the collaboration tools?
How do we explain the “innovation” that happened there?
How do we explain the “innovation” that happened there?
Here's how you maximize innovation: people who want to work from an office should work from an office and people who want to work from home should work from home.
Some would point out that we have a REAL Good Example of counter argument that still in fact functions as innovation...
What may you ask? The Linux Kernel Team
What may you ask? The Linux Kernel Team
What innovation? MS is a boring profit maximizing corporation. Unless stuffing Windows with ads is their definition of innovation.
Heavens no. No innovation for news ways to exploit? Whatever will the ruling oligarchy do?
Maybe they should have studied how open source ate their lunch without an office...
I think that's a Microsoft problem rather than a remote work problem
Guess they're gonna be heading back to the office soon.
Great. Let's have Microsoft require in-person employment and let's let other companies have as much remote employment as they'd like. We'll check back in 10 years and see how the innovation stacks up.
i think it's fair to say, for microsoft, lack of innovation predates remote work and covid moment
I guess we’ll see, right Microsoft? We’ll see in the long run if remote only companies innovate better than you. It’s been 2 years, there’s no way you can measure ‘long term’ yet. We’ll see just how creative you are in your office Mr. Microsoft. Keep making your laptops look like MacBooks, make the new windows taskbar look like OSX dock, keep having your productivity space eaten by Slack and Zoom. How how are those mobile phones going, did you make a dent against Apple or Google? You guys literally had to buy a todo list app (Wunderlist) and subsequently shut it down, because it’s so hard to innovate on a todo list app that’s literally built for you. I guess you guys worked on it remotely. Keep integrating with Linux, the poster child of remote work.
Settle down there Mr. Creativity.
Settle down there Mr. Creativity.
So all these workers went to remote work in a company without a remote work culture, then were measured for a short period of time before a remote work culture and the policies and tools to support it could be ironed out.
Also, how are they measuring "innovation"?