I i hope you’ve enjoyed today’s content in the new future of work track at the Microsoft research summit. I know i certainly have um. Thank you very much for joining us and thanks in particular, for engaging in the conversation in the chat now it’s time for us to foreground some of that conversation and answer some of the questions that you’ve raised in the live video feed as well. So i’m going to be back again with shamsi iqbal and longchim yang, who pulled together all of the presentations that you saw today, and we’ve also invited two leaders from microsoft’s new future of work initiative, brent hecht and sonya javi to join us in answering your questions.
Brent is the director of applied science here at microsoft and a tenured professor at northwestern he’s well known for the research that he’s done in human-centered ai, but of particular relevance to today’s conversation. Is that he’s one of the few people in the world who has an advanced degree in both computer science and geography? Sonia is an economist at microsoft’s office of the chief economist, and she has a phd in economics from harvard university and did a postdoc at the university of chicago and she’s. Bringing expertise in industrial organizations and labor economics for the conversation. She’S also used causal analysis to help us tease out some of the impact of the move to remote work from the impact of working in the middle of a pandemic, and so the set of us are going to be available.
Now to talk about some of the topics that have come today and we’re going to start by pulling some of the questions that have come up throughout the presentations, but we’re also going to address any of the questions that you put in the chat now. So please participate i’m going to be moderating and directing those questions, then, to the experts who are in this virtual room. But i thought we would get started by uh just doing a quick round robin answer of a question just to get us all, uh, all speaking and so uh brent, longchie, sonya and shaumsi. I want to know what kind of meeting do you think is best now that you’ve got experience with remote meetings and in-person meetings and hybrid meetings, which, which meeting type, would you most want to attend long cheat?
Why don’t we start with you? Well thanks jamie um! Well, this is a very hard question actually and i’m not actually reflecting this question while you’re asking so, i think my favorite meeting so far uh are the meetings about the meetings that we host remotely that actually pulling people across different organizations that were otherwise not possible Before the pandemic, so i think uh you know during the remote we’ve seen uh we’re able to actually bring in people from many different fields. Many different organizations to work together to meet together and really address that uh geographic and then also uh time zone boundaries. Awesome. What about you brent?
What’s your favorite kind of meeting to be annoying and say it depends? One thing: we’ve learned is that um you know now that we have a lot more meeting types uh. The problem is not so much choosing one meeting type for all purposes. It’s uh choosing the right the meeting type for the specific purpose that you have so, for instance, um. One thing that brings me a great deal of joy and happiness is being able to meet in person with my team um, occasionally uh, but that’s not go on an, be you know something uh in person. Excuse me um, but we don’t need to do that. All the time in person right, we can have uh more regular check-ins. You know remotely these types of things. What about you Sonia?
What’s your what’s your favorite kind of meeting well seconding, lingchi and Brandon on the caveats, but i really miss in person, particularly in person, walking meetings with my teammates yeah walking meetings when you’re doing it on your own. Aren’T the same right like if i’m like just carrying my phone, it doesn’t have the same all right. What about you? Oh you’re, not not! Now i have to provide a different answer. You know, honestly, i i really like remote meetings for just one reason. I find it often difficult to kind of participate in a conversation, and so the chat features that we have that’s amazing. That makes my voice heard, but i would also say that after watching the hybrid meetings uh discussion today, i can see what the promise could be and i’m really really excited yeah.
That was amazing, um good, so brent you gave you gave a fairly um broad answer, but you’ve got a real uh deep knowledge of the geography of work. Is there anything that you can take from the geography of work and use to inform your answer? Meetings? Oh boy, yes, of course, um, and one thing i love about geography is: it is a field that encourages you to think about all relationships between people and places, not just the relationships of a specific type of um.
So, i think, let’s see what’s something that would be particularly interesting for folks to chew on here’s one. So one thing that having occasional meetings in the office affords is the ability to have the same amount of commute time but live further away. So one hypothesis people have is that we might see more folks when they uh engage in acts of residential preference like renting a an apartment or buying a house.
They might choose to live further out. So, for instance, here in the Seattle area, they might even go beyond the mountains in a place like Yakima, or you know further up the Hudson river valley in new york um because they can come in for those in person meetings one or two days a week. Thanks, um and Sonia, i was wondering if we could tap into a little bit of your insight into what sort of changes we’re seeing as a function of the pandemic versus as a function of remote work and how that might apply to the kinds of meetings or The kinds of collaborate collaborative engagements that people have more generally yeah – i mean, i think, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic.
There was a lot of feelings of disconnect from people and also a lot of feelings that we were spending way too much time on screens, and i think that both of those things are somewhat affected or somewhat driven by remote work. But that is really important to remember that, like during lockdowns right people were feeling disconnected, but they also like weren’t going out in the evenings to see their friends and or seeing their neighbors. They were much more isolated outside of work, and so the those feelings of disconnect were only partially due to the working remotely and so going forward and, as things have started, to open up in many places, it’s not just remote work that affects kind of how people Are feeling connected, and also, i think, the zoom fatigue right.
I was doing most of my social interactions with friends on zoom and so that it all accumulates in terms of how uh, how much screen time, how tired people are of staring at boxes of other people. Yeah, no, and actually following up on that, i know you’ve got a lot of kind of in-depth knowledge into well-being and multitasking, and a lot of these sorts of things that are making all of this online engagement uh, particularly challenging. I wonder if you can speak to some of the things that are causing fatigue with online meetings or are kind of remote engagements more generally, yeah, i’m just having this discussion with someone else the other day, and i think that one of the reasons why online meetings Can be so exhausting is that it is so cognitively loading we are processing. So much more, i mean when you’re in person you’re.
Looking i mean there are all these subtle cues in the environment that you automatically pick up on. So it’s like habitually processed, but when you are looking at a screen online, you have to put in that extra effort and that’s just about processing the meeting itself. There’S a meeting chat going on there’s so much information, that’s being shared. I think that’s just putting a load on how we process and integrate information and it’s kind of like we feel that we are on all the time, and that’s particularly why it’s so important that we insert breaks and these like physical activities into our days, so that We are able to take care of ourselves, yeah um, you know something that you mentioned trump say sort of in your in your initial answer. Um.
So you know folks have some questions about how uh the shift to remote work has affected different people differently, specifically across different demographic groups, whether it be gender or ability these types of things. I was wondering if you could reflect more on that. So is this a question for me: okay, yeah. I think that there is, i mean there was also so much that came up in the discussions today, for example in i think it was the equitable futures and the thriving organizations discussion where, where the panelists talked about how the pandemic has affected different people differently. So there’s people, especially women and women with children they are leaving the workforce.
There are people with different abilities who are finding it difficult need to be really really observant and careful when we are going back to hybrid so that we don’t let leave these people behind. So it’s kind of like thinking about i mean these things were always there, but i think that in the last 18 months all of these issues came to the forefront and as ed doran he mentioned in the traveling organizations panel, is that we don’t want to go Back to the old normal, we want to go to a better future now that we have all this knowledge with us yeah, and i think another thing to think about. There is kind of the the effect and then also so so what um? We see, for example, that uh women have been more affected by layoffs during the pandemic, but we also have uh they’ve, seen in some linkedin data that women are more likely to apply for remote jobs.
So, on the one hand, maybe they’re more negatively affected, but they’re also presented with more opportunities and if we think about it from like an organizational perspective, you don’t want to have hybrid work policies that create uh differential effects within your current population. But you also have to think how it’s going to affect, who you hire and who your population of employees is so there’s there’s both this like what economists would call the external margin of like who’s coming in and out and then the internal margin of like within The people who are uh the intensive margin within the people who are there and then launching. I was wondering if you might want to think of uh. You know share a bit about uh.
You know the ways that software might be replacing space as a technology um, and you know, ideas that have been mentioned in the literature on that front. Yeah um absolutely so i think this is uh one of the things that i think on top of people’s mind, a lot these days because, like in the remote environment, we lose all the in-person connections and in person interactions which we use to kind of build relationships Between people so like as we are moving to remote or hybrid environment, then i think the question really is: how can we use software to complement some of the connections or interactions that we missed?
So that includes you know the collaboration software that we use and the content that we see that are recommended by these uh different products and different platforms um in a way that not just make people engage more but really help them achieve their goals and Also uh, you know at the organization level, how can we help organizations to achieve their goals through these new kind of virtual environment, where software is sort of mediate, all the interactions and communications between people? So i think another question that we we get a whole bunch. Um is about uh, you know how we can make sure that um folks who are remote and maybe not come into the office as often you know, don’t feel like they’re uh. You know second-class citizens, and these types of things do you have any uh uh reflections on that yeah. I think that that’s definitely uh a concern and a challenge um a lot of remote workers faced prior to the pandemic um.
I think for people who are already more remote, the universal or widespread remote work has been a boon in terms of them not being the only remote person in the room, and so i think that um we’re definitely trying to do some research around what practices Feel most inclusive to remote attendees. I think that a big piece of it is just for the in-person people to be really intentional about uh inclusion and uh when they’re solicited when they ask a question, make sure they’re soliciting input and opinions from remote attendees, because it’s very easy for the people. In the room to kind of just get into a discussion, and it can be hard harder for remote attendees to jump in um, there’s also a recommendation to have kind of a moderator uh, particularly if you’re, in a medium that has a parallel chat.
Making sure that someone in the room is tasked with rather than just saying. Oh, everyone should be intentional about pulling those people in have a specific person whose job it is and they can make sure they’re. Following the chat and uh directing attention to remote people as necessary, i think that’s great, you know one thing we’re thinking a lot about right is is not trying to make the remote and in person experience the exact same right, but instead to lean into the strengths and the weaknesses of each of those modalities right. So, what are some of the advantages that you have when you’re remote?
How can we lean into that or some advantages that you have in person and how can we lead into that and actually, speaking of advantages when remote um, i see we have a question here about um people extending their days right. So we see in our log data, you know, people who used to log in around 8 30 maybe are logging in now around 7 and logging off around. You know 7 pm instead of 5
Um, you know a lot about the uh, the contours that are happening. You know behind the scenes of with that log, behind the scenes of those log observations, so i was wondering if you might be willing to share there. Yeah, there’s this discussion around the third peak. Now emerging, and so in fact, Mary Sherfinski and her Hugh team uh found some data recently, this uh this summer, where there’s a little peak that is emerging uh after hours, so i mean many years ago. We looked at how they were like two main productivity peaks during the day, and this third peak is corresponding to people working after hours, and these are less about collaboration.
These are mostly people working on their own uh, so this basically suggests two things. One is that, as people’s lives are now interleaved, they have like their personal life interleaved with their work life. Their days are now extending the other thing that touches upon flexibility uh as well. A little bit is that now that we are learning more to be more inclusive and collaborating more with our remote participants, now we are working across time zones, which means that well now previously, when uh, my colleague from china had to kind of like adapt to The pacific time zone to get in a meeting now we are much more open to actually logging in at eight o’clock at night so that they are able to participate in a meeting at a suitable time for them.
So, i think that we’ll see these patterns, and now how can we make sure that these are not becoming another replacement for a longer workday? I think that we need to work actively towards those champs.
You and i both have uh young kids so that that third peak definitely is beneficial after they go to bed. You know it’s been a secret to my success over the last little bit you have much a much younger kid than i do, but yes, absolutely just learning how to do remote, work and be uh working here at the same time – and i get To jump in there, i think it’s, it’s really important, that teams discuss that and set expectations, and so that it’s not uh one person’s, like flexibility becoming another person’s, unwanted after-hours messaging right. It’s one thing to say: okay, I’m goon an have dinner with my kids and then go back for a meeting or I’m goon an take a walk in the afternoon and do some work either.
Maybe one a 7 a.m. meeting or something things like that, but it’s another to have this feeling that you’re always on, because someone from another time zone might message you and you’re expected to respond. So having those conversations as a team and with various collaborators about when you’re available, what expected response times are, or what yeah just getting everyone on the same page, about uh expectations and finding collaboration patterns that works for the individual and then also for the Team, oh, Jamie, we’re not hearing you, anyone know lip reading. What sonny was saying is um.
You know one thing: we talk about a lot when we’re talking about the policy people in the company and um in our you know, uh when we have customer conversations as well is uh thinking about when we do spend time in in the office, we can think About those as shared hours, uh versus a shared days, so, for instance, launching i are on the same team and we decided that we’re goon an all make sure when we’re goon an on days, we’re goon an be in the office. We’re goon and be in the office from ten to three. Instead of you know, from the nine to five and what that really. That does something very important and that allows us to commute um during off-peak hours.
Uh, which can dramatically reduce commute times, which we see in the data is the number one uh far and away number one thing: people most spend at most value from work from home. So that’s another way we can take advantage of flexibility. Yeah um. Can you hear me now? Yes, okay, good all the joys of working from home right, i was actually really struck with the um the conversation around how the kind of pattern temporal patterns of the work day have changed at home. I’M curious if you found temporal patterns changing in the office as well. Are you still working the same hours in the office or is that changing?
I i think the large-scale data is still waiting to be seen about like what patterns really emerge, but personally, just as freed mentioned, i think the my commute to office is definitely dramatically changed and, for example, you know our team has agreed to just Stay in office from 10 to 3, instead of the full day and also we choose which days to go, go to the office. So i think there’s a lot to be learned and a lot to be looked at uh from the data yeah. Is there a sweet spot in how often people should go in to um into the office? I know there was a question earlier in the chat today about how often orgs should have meeting free days. Is that a weekly thing or a monthly thing so um? I can quickly, you know, jump and jump in there.
You know one thing we have just as an initial best practice right, because this is uh. He was just commenting earlier in meeting states. So, in terms of our everyday lives, probably the most uncertainty we’ve seen um for most of us uh in our in our lifetimes right. So we don’t know for sure how things are goon an unfold, but as an initial research-backed starting point uh three days a week. Five hours a day seems pretty good.
There might be other pretty good options too, but the data does suggest that if you’re in three days a week, you sort of uh get most of the benefits of in-person work, and you also get those two days of flexibility and then five hours should be Good enough to get those benefits and also miss out on the commute times uh for the rough commute in terms of the meetings i know, some works of Microsoft have been trying to do a once a week um meeting day, but there’s, i think, a bit Of a feeling that that just kind of makes the adjacent days all the more hectic – and i have heard from the groups that have tried um that have tried doing, i think, once a month that that feels more like a real break, because, rather than Just moving your regular once a week, meaning that, like maybe it gets canceled instead of just moved to a different day if the no meeting day happens once a month.
So, i wanted to interject with one point here so, and this is somewhat related, but not exactly. Research, that was in the space and so uh about 12 years ago or more gloria mark showed in her work where, when people tend to get interrupted or they self-interrupt themselves and they when they come back, they’re more efficient with the time that they are, they actually Have available to do their primary task, so my intuition here is that people will learn how to adapt uh once if they have a meeting free day, they will tend to focus more on those days, though, i agree with Sonia that the other days will now Be clamped with meetings, but i think that there is a definitely an a growing need to be able to focus more and having that date that can be dedicated to focus.
I think that’s super important yeah and then i see there’s a question that i think brent is going to be really relevant to you and your expertise in terms of space. How does remote work impact the corporate thinking associated with the capital costs of owning and managing low occupied facilities, really good question it uh? The first point to remember when thinking about this question is that the uh geography has a long memory.
It’s one of my favorite quotes about geography, so decisions about space generally unfold over much longer time periods and decisions uh, you know about other topics um. So this is definitely something that’s top of mind for folks who maybe signed a lease in 2018 for 20 years. On some corporate real estate are kind of wondering what they might want to do with it um. So, okay, let’s get to the actual data. So, we see most the survey data associated with coming from decision makers.
You know folks who make real estate decisions at companies. Does suggest that they’re interested in reducing their footprint, not by 80, but you know, one survey was around 15 um one put out by McKinsey was about 30 ums. One really interesting problem with that, though, is that the best way to do hybrid is to make sure that collaborators are in the office together on the same days and that’s kind of a paradox with the or at least that tension with the desire to reduce a Real estate footprint so um in sort of a default case, you could imagine like a big building being super occupied Tuesday, Wednesday Thursday and then being basically ghost towns uh Monday and Friday, like they are right now, Saturday and Sunday, so sort of shift into um Uh, you know a majority ghost town um one solution to that, though, is um intelligence, so ai and machine learning uh, combined with sensor data, can do a wonderful job sort of uh, squeezing uh a lot more value out of the space we have um. Out of a smaller amount of space, so you can recommend that teams meet in specific places on specific days.
You can make sure that those teams have uh reservations as they need. You know these types of things, so it becomes, quite frankly, it’s a um, whereas space was less of an optimization problem.
Now it’s really like a classic computer science, optimization problem, and that means that uh computer science can play a role in solving it. Thanks uh, we have another question in the chat this one, i think sonya you’ll have a you’ll, have good thoughts on uh. The question is about the traditional five day work week, and actually it wrapped up not in the way i was expecting. It was started as saying: why are we still talking about the traditional five-day work week and i was thinking of all the conversation around four-day work weeks, but it actually asks uh.
Why would work not now extend over seven days yeah, and i absolutely think that the two are related. I think that uh part of the flexibility that we think is an important piece of the benefits of hybrid work will involve people being able to work on any of the seven days that works well for them, but similar to the coordination and the conversations that I mentioned earlier, a lot of work is best done at the same time that your colleagues are working, and so in some ways our five-day work week is a coordination device. I want to be working on the same days that my teammates are working so that when i come acro have a question i can ping them and kind of the default monday through friday is is an easy coordination device. If you want to move away from that, one you can, but you’ve got to replace it with other good coordination systems.
Um and the fact that, like people tend to have parties on the weekend and there’s societal level coordination as well. In terms of my wanting to have free time when my friends also have free time, so i do think we will see a little bit more of work bleeding and people going to a doctor’s appointment on Friday and working catching up on work on Saturday. But i don’t think we’re goon a completely move away from having weak designated days as weekends. I think so that that was a great answer and unfortunately that’s all that we have time for so thank you, Shamsi, lingchi, Sonya and brent for joining us in this q.
and thanks to all of you, uh for attending the sessions of the as part of the new future work track at the Microsoft research summit. Uh, as we’ve been talking about we’ve, pretty much all by necessity become experts in remote work this past year, but hopefully today, you’ve learned a little bit about how work has changed and where work is going as well as some tricks that might help you be more Productive in the future, of course, despite the decades of research into remote and hybrid work, uh by the academic community and by folks here, at Microsoft, research and despite a year and a half of research that we’ve been doing into what it was like to work during The pandemic in particular, it’s still almost impossible to predict what work is going to look like a month from now, even if you let alone a few years from now, but it’s important to remember that our job isn’t actually to predict the future of work.
It’s to help shape it we’re creating that future and we’re in the middle of one of the greatest disruptions to work in generations, and we collectively have an opportunity to reimagine work for the better. So research into the future of work is evolving quickly. We’Re figuring this out as we go along stay current on the latest progress at the microsoft research, new future of works site, which is located at aka dot. Ms slash new future of work, and we hope to see you at another Microsoft research event soon. Thank you.
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