Issue #5: A bridge too far?
How does remote work impact a company's operations?
It's a question most organizations are asking themselves. Microsoft, given its vast resources (and the potential impact of long-term remote work on its competitive edge) is working to analyze the impact of remote work on their company's innovation and collaboration.
One of the main take-aways was this:
Overall, we found that the shift to remote work caused the formal business groups and informal communities within Microsoft to become less interconnected and more siloed. Remote work caused the share of collaboration time employees spent with cross-group connections to drop by about 25% of the pre-pandemic level. Furthermore, firm-wide remote work caused separate groups to become more intraconnected by adding more connections within themselves. The shift to remote work also caused the organizational structure at Microsoft to become less dynamic; Microsoft employees added fewer new collaborators and shed fewer existing ones.
In other words, people are developing stronger bonds within the groups they belong to, but are collaborating less with other groups across the company.
On one hand these findings jibe with my own experience:
there are your core team(s) you interact with to get your work done, and you're still very much engaged with those people. Standing meetings, project check-ins, as well as less formal interactions, keep those bonds tight. But anyone outside of that group? There were people who, when we were in the office, I would chat with every few days. But during the pandemic I could go months without a conversation. It wasn't that I didn't care, or wasn't interested in seeing how they were doing. It's just easy to not go out of your way. You're busy, time passes, and then you realize you haven't seen a few faces in far too long!
But - I'm skeptical about any grand conclusions on the actual impact on "innovation and collaboration." First of all, this is just one study over one period of time - a period of time that is completely unlike what long-term remote will be due to the pandemic. Microsoft attempted to separate out the impact of the pandemic, but statistical analyses require a ton of assumptions, and it can be easy to over-read into one such analysis. In my own experience, while I acknowledge one may interact less with teams across the company, whenever I had questions for a team member outside of my immediate circle, tools like Slack, Teams and Zoom make it easy to connect and collaborate, as necessary. The silos may happen naturally, but with the technology we have today, it's very easy to break them down.
I think where the impact can be most felt is in the 'soft' interactions people generally talk about: the casual chatter at the lunch table, or the conversations overheard from a few desks over that may impact your work. 90% of the conversations I had with those other co-workers were not about work, but they created bonds that are good for morale and company culture. Yes - hearing people constantly chatter around you can be very distracting, but sometimes you'd hear something that would spark a conversation and change how you thought about a project, a customer or a product.
Now, are constant distractions worth it for that 1/100 comment to spark an innovative idea? Do we really need to commute 2 hours a day to create social bonds with our co-workers? The answer to both is probably 'no' - but that doesn't mean that these things don't have value. It's in recognizing that they do that will allow organizations to focus on creating a truly great remote culture that generates the best of both worlds.
Microsoft notes that the "effects of these policies on company culture and innovation could take years to measure" - but the time is now for companies to create bridges between groups across their organization.
In the News
Want to know what CEOs across industries think about remote, hybrid and the future of work? CNN published a great piece, getting thoughts from the horses' mouth:
The pandemic changed the way we work. 15 CEOs weigh in on what’s next
Tips & Recommendations
For People Officers & HR
First Round Review published a great article, which as a Product guy I particularly appreciated: The Chief People Officer as PM: Rethinking The Systems & Tools That Run the Company
The piece centers on the learnings of Colleen McCreary - the current CPO at Credit Karma, with past experience at Zynga, Vevo, Twilio and more.
“As Chief People Officer, I'm not the CEO of culture. I’m really not the CEO of happiness. I think that I am like the product manager of the systems and tools that run the company. My job is to build the systems and tools that support the work that our leadership team has decided needs to get done. And so like any great PM, I do think it is my job to consistently be looking at all of these tools and seeing if they’re working.”
It's a unique perspective worth checking out.
...and one more thing
To celebrate the Digital Nomad lifestyle, we feature a couple photos each week of someone enjoying their freedom and flexibility.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing some photos of my own journey as my wife & I make our way across the country in our converted van. Below: Arizona, New Mexico & Utah
