Jobs and Homes

A couple of years ago, reading "WFH" might have made many of say WTF?  A year into the pandemic, we are all well aware of WFH.  There is so much work happening at home that it seems more like we are living at work :(

Technology has stepped up with tools that we didn't know even existed.  We are now emailing, chatting, Zooming, and chatting while Zooming while checking emails while checking personal messages on the smartphone, ... All these make one wonder, well, is this a win-win-win all around?  Or, is something important lost in this WFH?

Microsoft teams "conducted over 50 studies to understand how the nature of work itself has changed since early 2020." What did they do?

Microsoft’s annual Work Trend Index is part of this initiative and includes an analysis of trillions of productivity signals — think emails, meetings, chats, and posts — across Microsoft and LinkedIn’s user base. It also includes a survey of more than 30,000 people in 31 countries around the world.

That's a pretty good survey.  What did they find?

The effort revealed a significant impact on "organizational connections — the fundamental basis of social capital."

People consistently report feeling disconnected, and in studying anonymized collaboration trends between billions of Outlook emails and Microsoft Teams meetings, we saw a clear trend: the shift to remote work shrunk people’s networks.

It doesn't surprise me one bit. But, before I add my editorial comments, let me present more from that report:

[Interactions] within close networks increased, while interactions with distant networks diminished. As people shifted into lockdown, they focused on connecting with the people they were used to seeing regularly, letting weaker relationships fall to the wayside. Simply put, companies became more siloed than they were pre-pandemic. And while interactions with close networks are still frequent, we’re seeing that now — one year in — even these close team interactions have started to diminish.

Now, this is also the time when big organizations are beginning to think about office structure post-pandemic.  Microsoft announced that from March 29th, it will open its headquarters to a limited number of employees.  As more and more organizations think about these issues, will everything be remote?  WFH forever?  Or, fully back to how things were pre-pandemic? Or, a hybrid of sorts?

Most of us hypothesize that it will be a hybrid.  Employers realize that productivity does not mean everybody has to be in the same place at the same time. Employees have experienced the advantage of doing laundry in the background while working on reports.  So, will a hybrid mode restore people's networks and the social capital in the organization?

When we studied trends in countries where more people had returned to hybrid work environments, we saw improvements in team isolation. For example, in New Zealand, we saw spikes in team isolation — measured by the amount of communication with distant networks — when lockdowns were issued. When lockdowns were eased, team isolation improved. We saw this trend in other countries as well, like Korea.

This data supports our hypothesis: remote work makes teams more siloed, but adding some in-person time back to the workplace will help.

The pandemic has changed the world in many ways.  There's no going back.