New Microsoft Study of 60k Employees: Remote Work Threatens Innovation

Note that this "study" only went till June of 2020.

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"?

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

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.

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?

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 tobacco companies funded countless studies that showed that cigarettes were safe. This seems like the same thing.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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).

> 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.

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?

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 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.