Microsoft Viva: A bet on the future of remote work
theverge.com
theverge.com
I've felt stuck professionally, the seperation between engineering and marketing and sales has always been physical. However I often made friends with the guys, and would hang out at their desks during coffee breaks. A few minutes chatting there, and other people start joining in. After a bit of this, I was pretty good friends with the whole department. This bridge I built over coffee, was the origional accelerant to my career. I had direct insight into the customers and their problems because of these conversations.
But I don't have that any more. I'm back in my silo, and I can't get out.
Why does this video feel like watching someone live in a really fancy prison?
(That said not all offices are closed. Depends where you are.)
Maybe you can suggest a similar program for your own company to implement?
Demand real offices. Demand real human interactions. Demand to not be profiled excessively by your employer, and refuse to excessively profile your coworkers and subordinates. Reject China-style social credit scores.
Interestingly, when I worked at Microsoft, I felt like they had a pretty good feedback tool. You could not leave feedback anonymously and it went well beyond a 1-5 star rating system. It asked specific questions about projects you worked on with other employees. I remember individuals taking the better part of a week to put together feedback for one another and I always felt like I got valuable feedback.
That being said, Microsoft is like a conglomeration of many companies: some good; some bad. Perhaps other orgs within Microsoft did not see the same success with the feedback tool.
I guess social networks with "likes" were the first step and now actually rating your colleagues seems acceptable.
Rating anyone anywhere at anytime like in Black Mirror is the next step after that.
I've heard rumors some teams where I work are already doing this. If this ever happen to my team, I'll quit for sure.
It seems that as long as your are going little step at a time, people will accept any dystopian practice (or won't even notice it)
That's not protecting, you can't de-identify work that's done by a single person, even if MS magically could do this is completely meaningless metric made so that managers can look busy doing "evaluation".
Seriously? They expect us to believe that because the manager will have to actually press a button to activate it, that's protecting privacy?
This is very worrying.
I wonder though, has anyone actually got any value out of such as "intranet"? Big companies spend lots of resources on them, and software suppliers are happy to capitalize on it (Yammer, Hive, MS Sharepoint & Delve, etc) but ultimately does anyone actually enjoy using those things?
I share your pain there, Teams is painfully slow especially the browser version. The native version for Windows is an improvement but it still suffers and the version for linux is just an electron app which is as slow as the webapp.
I wonder if an unofficial client is possible, because a third part client which is faster would be appreciated. Currently I'm using some custom CSS to for some personal touch.
Every one I've ever encountered ends up full of stale info that no one touched in years and half the time it's "Bob's job to keep that up", even though Bob retired 5 years ago.
And after the pandemic, I feel like down town areas will become even hotter than before if WFH is permanent. Without socializing at work, it will need to be made up after work.