Study of 61,000 Microsoft Employees Finds Remote Work Threatened Productivity and Innovation (geekwire.com) 140
"A new study finds that Microsoft's companywide shift to remote work has hurt communication and collaboration among different business groups inside the company, threatening employee productivity and long-term innovation," reports GeekWire:
That's one of the key findings in a peer-reviewed study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees, published Thursday morning by Microsoft researchers in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.... The researchers call it a warning sign for other companies, as well. "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 in an accompanying blog post. "In light of these findings, companies should be thoughtful about if and how they choose to adopt long-term work-from-home policies."
The Microsoft study says remote work has also changed the way employees communicate, causing them to rely more frequently than before on asynchronous communication, such as email and instant messages, and less frequently than before on synchronous communication, such as audio and video calls. "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," the Microsoft researchers write. The study is based on an analysis of anonymized data about emails, calls, meetings, and other work activities by Microsoft employees.
At about the same time, Microsoft published a blog post summarizing the results of its own surveys of Microsoft employees — an opt-in survey of a random sample of 2,500. Some highlights: - In a year when we sent 160,000 people home to work and remotely onboarded 25,000 new employees, the share of people who report feeling included at Microsoft is at an all-time high of 90%. According to surveys, employee confidence and support from our managers is also at an all-time high...
- Our ongoing research shows employees crave more in-person time with their team but wish to keep the flexibility of remote work...
And Microsoft's LinkedIn also surveyed more than 500 C-level executives in the U.S. and U.K., "to better understand how employers are thinking about navigating this new world of work." Top of mind for executives is the same thing on the minds of employees — flexibility. With 87% of people saying they would prefer to stay remote at least half the time, a majority of employers are adapting: 81% of leaders are changing their workplace policies to offer greater flexibility. Despite all the change, leaders feel like there are opportunities ahead — more than half (58%) are optimistic that flexibility will be good for both people and the business.
The Microsoft study says remote work has also changed the way employees communicate, causing them to rely more frequently than before on asynchronous communication, such as email and instant messages, and less frequently than before on synchronous communication, such as audio and video calls. "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," the Microsoft researchers write. The study is based on an analysis of anonymized data about emails, calls, meetings, and other work activities by Microsoft employees.
At about the same time, Microsoft published a blog post summarizing the results of its own surveys of Microsoft employees — an opt-in survey of a random sample of 2,500. Some highlights: - In a year when we sent 160,000 people home to work and remotely onboarded 25,000 new employees, the share of people who report feeling included at Microsoft is at an all-time high of 90%. According to surveys, employee confidence and support from our managers is also at an all-time high...
- Our ongoing research shows employees crave more in-person time with their team but wish to keep the flexibility of remote work...
And Microsoft's LinkedIn also surveyed more than 500 C-level executives in the U.S. and U.K., "to better understand how employers are thinking about navigating this new world of work." Top of mind for executives is the same thing on the minds of employees — flexibility. With 87% of people saying they would prefer to stay remote at least half the time, a majority of employers are adapting: 81% of leaders are changing their workplace policies to offer greater flexibility. Despite all the change, leaders feel like there are opportunities ahead — more than half (58%) are optimistic that flexibility will be good for both people and the business.
Balance (Score:4, Informative)
In my situation, it wasn't reasonable to collaborate with all the required people and maintain a 'normal' schedule.
Yeah balance, and different techniques for differe (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed - no one thing is the best fit for all people, all projects, or all purposes. For most of the last 25 years I've had the option to work from home or the office, with whatever split/balance between the two is best at given time and for a given task. I've found that a screwdriver and a hammer are BOTH useful tools.
There are some on Slashdot who insist that working from home is always the best in every way, for every situation, and there is never any advantage to having a face-to-face conversation with anyone. That hasn't been my experience. I'm not even *good* at face-to-face conversation. I'm naturally a bit combative, with a natural tendency to play devil's advocate. (As anyone on Slashdot who pays attention has surely noticed). Yet even for me, I've found it very good to make time for being in a room with co-workers.
I've ALSO found advantages to being at home most of the time - but I have the luxury of having three extra rooms in my house, so I not only have a dedicated office, but a full SOC with a rack of gear. I have five computers on my desk at the moment, and a dozen virtual machines, piped through three monitors. I also have the benefit of a family who has understand since day one that during work time I'm *working*; I can play when I get off work. Many people don't have such a nice setup at home.
This study points out that as we enjoy the benefits of working from home, it's smart for us to ALSO to mindful of rich communication. I've even found that long-standing disagreements over email and PR comments can sometimes dissolve in a few minutes with a phone call.
I wanted to take the guy out for a beer and figure it out, but because he was 6,000 miles away I had to settle for electronically buying him a beer at his neighborhood pub, then getting on the phone. We came to a solution much better than what either of us was advocating via email.
Re: Balance (Score:4, Interesting)
Dementia FTW.
Going to bed at 2am, ans being un the office at 10am, means you got an average of 5-6 hours of sleep per night.
I suggest you watch the Joe Rogan interview with Matthew Walker [youtube.com], the sleep pope of the planet.
Maybe you, like Napoleon, are one of the 1:1mio people or so with the genetical modification to get by on 5 sleep hours per night, but for the rest of us, this is essentially what slow suicide looks like.
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Napoleon, great example.
Totally no dementia.
Some people naturally sleep less, do not experience subjective dysphoria, and cannot sleep more. It doesn't mean they wouldn't perform better if they could sleep normally, though.
Re: Balance (Score:2)
You should really, really watch that interview.
Yo spoil a little: there is, indeed, a genetic modification that enables the body to get by on 4-5 hours of sleep. BUT, to put in in Matthew Walker's words as to how many people actually have that modification: "the number of people expressed in percent of the population, and rounded to the next integer, is zero".
So there's less than 0.5%, or a factor of 0.005. If you think you have it, you most likely don't. Hint: if in your adult life you've had phases where
Re: Balance (Score:2)
But these people don't have a choice, after 5 hours they stand in bed like you and me after 8 or 9.
Ahm, that's how I imagine it. I actually realized that I have no idea if this part is true (i.e. that they couldn't sleep more even if they wanted), because I know of no one personally.
Re: Balance (Score:2)
...but the key part I know to be true (from 3rd party relations and descriptions) is that these people definitely feel fully refreshed after 4-5 hours. Every night.
So anyone who doesn't, doesn't have it.
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I set myself a schedule of 10am - 4pm in the office, ... Around 10pm I would work from home till about 2am, from 12am to 2am....
I am not sure if I consider routinely working 10 hour days "balance".
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Triggered (Score:2, Insightful)
A well known company that isn't friendly with remote work publishes a study about how remote work doesn't work. I'm surprised I tell you...
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It works (Score:5, Insightful)
The Linux kernel proves that complex projects can be completed successfully without meetings, phone calls, or any other communication medium other than email.
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Successful projects like the Linux kernel have good managers though and good managers in a large corp are hard to come by because often they get their position based on anything but merit.
Re:It works (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: It works (Score:4, Insightful)
Without an OS kernel being developed...
FTFY.
But we do have OS kernels developed in-office! In fact, even Microsoft has several. We can compare very well, and guess what: against all initial odds, FUD and scary predictions, the world is running Linux everywhere where lock-in is not an issue.
So please stop the nonsense.
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There was never a deadline for a linux kernel that meets any specs. Full stop.
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And how do you know? How do you know what deadlines the Linux kernel devs have? You don't. Maybe go look at their release schedule and the rest ... Torvalds does a lot at a regular cadence.
You assume too much.
Re: It works (Score:4, Informative)
You inadvertedly hit the nail on the head.
The problem - no, the problems, there are at least two of them - with management are these.
First, remote-vs-office.
Most managers try to apply the same tools to remote as they do to in-office presence. The strong part of office presence is immediate feedback and nonverbal queues. Walking into someone's office and discussing a problem is a good way to solve it. The strong part of remote is time to think, so writing down a problem and giving a differentiate feedback, instead of the chat-style "mhm", "maybe", "let me show you the whiteboard" is a lot easier. The downside with office is that communication scales squarely in N (everybody needs to communicate with everyone else). Remote, it doesn't have to - on a mailing list, for example, it scales differently (I'd claim linearly, but that's probably too simplistic - there are many factors to consider). All this means that, roughly starting at a team size that you can count on one hand, more time is wasted to communicating in-person than remotely, if the latter is done correctly.
Now everybody and their dog bring new "telepresence" tech to the table - Teams, Zoom, Jitsi etc, and then they complain it doesn't work. Well, duh. You're bringing the disadvantages of both worlds together: N^2 communication scaling of in-person meetings, with non-real-time response of remote collaboration. And you're doing that while managing to kill any advantage that remote collaboration would have, namely better thought-of, differentiated, solution proposals to a problem. After all, there's a reason why the Linux kernel development (and pretty much any other Free Software project of relevance) takes place on mailing lists even in 2021, and not on Zoom.
Next, deadlines.
I hate to break it to you, but top-down deadlines in a tech project of any significant complexity don't work. This is because essentially any (IT) tech project can easily reach 2x, 3x complexity, scope or otherwise delaying properties. This is different from most "classical", non-IT, non-tech projects, like building a house or a bridge. We can argue about the reason. (To me it's simple: mostly when you build a house, you know exactly what you're up against. Not many substantial surprises there. When building IT, almost every problem you solve is a new one - because if it was already solved, you'd just reuse that code.) But in the end, regardless of the reason, that's a fact - from AAA games, to OS releases, to Office packages: all are late; all require "crunch time", sometimes substantially so; all are significantly above; all under-deliver on features, and over-deliver on bugs. There are rarely any exceptions, and the management rhetoric is always the same: "we need dedicated people", always meaning "we want you to swallow the factor 2x, 3x, 4x uncertainty that we have in our project because we couldn't do better planing".
Now it doesn't have to be like this. There are project management methods that do it differently - e.g. Scrum. I'm not a big fan of Scrum (for reasons I won't go into right now), but at least they got one thing right: you don't set top-down deadlines anymore, you make bottom-up projections based on feature requirements and actually measured development speed. Those projections are not very stable in the beginning, but stabilize pretty well in the 2nd half you your project, once scope is well-defined, user stories are realistic and worked out, solutions to major tech stumbles begin to shape out etc. They do allow for a good product planning and marketing, but that requires a different take from upper management and business development. They absolutely don't cater to the "I guess we'd be releasing a new OS, written from scratch, in 2 years for Christmas" philosophy.
So, the take-away from all this?
Well, same pattern: management has one job. Making sure the planning is right. (Source: After being a dev for 20+ years, I was a manager for the past 5 years.) Th
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nonverbal queues.
I don't know about you, but in the UK we don't talk much when in a queue, so they are all non-verbal.
Re: It works (Score:2)
in the UK we don't talk much when in a queue
It's because of the weather, right? Always foggy, unless it's raining...
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As someone who designs buildings more complex than a typical house, I would say that you are wrong. There are plenty of substantial "surprises" in design and construction of buildings. Even simple houses run into different site conditions, different cod
Re: It works (Score:2)
As someone who designs buildings more complex than a typical house, I would say that you are wrong.
Given that I'm not in that business I'm hardly in a position to contradict you. While I do have some experience with building, it's just a handful of private homes (my family) and two business locations (also family business).
However, keep in mind that all houses solve exactly the same problem. All skyscrapers may solve a different, but in themselves again the same problem. All shopping centers. Office buildings, etc.
Software is different. Well, unless you're rolling out your X-th webshop for a new custome
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There was never a deadline for a linux kernel that meets any specs. Full stop.
There never was an NT kernel that was worth a fuck compared to Linux since it about version 1.1, full stop.
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FTFY.
Not really. Using a car analogy as OS kernel is an engine. So examples of marine diesels to lawnmower engines would fit the criterion, but be poor comparisons. The Windows is potentially a comparator, but trying to compare versions between Windows and Linux would still make comparison difficult.
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Yes, and no.
The Linux kernel has one key difference. At its core, it is a reimplementation of the Unix/POSIX system design, based upon several decades of prior art in both design and implementation. This has meant that while the developers are certainly talented and hard-working, for the most part they have not been undertaking complex original design. They are reimplementing a system which is well understood and which has already been implemented several times over.
When it comes to greenfield developmen
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epoll doesn't work with btrfs? Are you sure?
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That is not the point I was making.
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Maybe you should think of examples that support your point.
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The Linux kernel proves that complex projects can be completed successfully without meetings, phone calls, or any other communication medium other than email.
1) The majority of linux kernel programming hours are done by engineers, at work for various companies that use linux. Many of them are working from an office.
2) There is no reliable public data about the relative productivity of linux kernel developers.
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1) The majority of linux kernel programming hours are done by engineers, at work for various companies that use linux. Many of them are working from an office.
It doesn't really matter if they are working in an office, that is not the point. They could be working on the beach, that doesn't matter either. The point is they are coordinating their work entirely remote from each other.
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Re:It works (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that why Boeing has been having a terrible time of it even pre-Covid? It's just too complicated?
Nah. 80% of the problem ... is bad management.
Re:It works (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are making an airplane, then you better have more written down and documented, and fewer decisions made only in meetings. There should be a place written down that anyone on the team can look at, and you shouldn't have meetings with 80 people where important decisions are made, because not everyone will be able to give their input.
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Airliners can be developed over a wide geographical
Teams (Score:5, Funny)
I get it, they are using Teams.
Such a nice piece of communication software can only help increase productivity, right? /s
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It's a joke, but it's 100% true. I've worked remotely for around 10 years now on Ceph (open source distributed storage). I have to use teams sometimes to interact with folks at various other companies and it's garbage. The only way I can use it is through chromium (the standalone app requires an account and refuses to allow my corporate email address). Audio output has progressively gotten more broken over the past year to the point where it simply doesn't work anymore. About 3/4 of the time there is n
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Evolution (Score:2)
Working with internet communication to achieve the same level of productivity requires evolution. A manager or lead designer now needs to rely on software where before a whiteboard existed. This of course requires multiple areas of evolution either in the flexibility of the tools or to better convey the structure. All the flow chart models exist but are rarely used on anything but a quick whiteboard sketch in a meeting which people took pictures of anyways. You cannot neglect this part of the process and ye
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I have been waiting for that evolution for nearly 20 years. I might not use my Blackberry at my bedside table like 15-20 years ago when borderline synchronous communication was expected, but the same issues faced back then are still hurdles today.
Maybe increased prevalence of remote workflow will lead to a step-change, but so far almost all the change is in the people or expectations (aka productivity). History tells us that we do better in teams compared to individuals, even if individual performance of so
Their definition of innovation.... (Score:2)
What improvements has Microsoft made to their software since say 2015, when Windows 10 was released? Forced updates that commonly "brick" your computer overnighht? A start menu in the middle and the inability to run on 2-3 year old computers?
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What improvements has Microsoft made to their software
That I do not know, but they make a nice keyboard.
Nonsense subjectively biased study (Score:4, Interesting)
Its nonsense. Instant messages are synchronous and allow for instant reply and exchanges. Plus there is the audio video option. Electronic communications can be a time saver since it allows for task management and queueing in reviewing them. Linux is a prime example of how this works and can be substantially more efficient than in person conversations which can wander off focus and become an unproductive time waster.
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Video doesn't let you see traditional social cues, like "Who is taller?" or "Who is flirting with who?" These are things they care about.
Disconnect between empirical and survey data (Score:2)
There is an interesting disconnect that seems to present itself consistently, and I am still having trouble reconciling it. From personal experience as a manager, the best-case remote scenario is going to be Friday + one other day in the week for most people. (We do half-day Fridays, so they are easy to have remote, and many of our employees were already remote on Friday.)
I would love to see a deep-dive into new-hire empirical data looking at effectiveness, retention, and team integration; everything I have
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Anecdotally, new-hire effectiveness has been an problem working remotely. And that was for a new hire with 2 decades of experience. I don't know how we could have done it with someone straight out of school. However, after 6 months with the new hire, they are finally starting to be more productive, wh
During a pandemic (Score:2)
Threatened, or caused? (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what else threatens productivity and innovation? COVID.
Doesn't mean a thing for husslers (Score:2)
I skimmed through the study (Score:5, Insightful)
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Working remotely makes millions of middle managers very, very nervous.
Because they are remote, their ability to micro-manage everyone is reduced dramatically. That means... companies need fewer bad middle managers.
MS, like many mega-corps, is probably top-heavy with these numpties hence, the report.
Disclaimer. I worked remotely for the last 12 years of my career. I became more productive the less interference I had from my managers. The last two that I had, knew that if I needed help then they'd be my firs
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Culture issue? (Score:5, Interesting)
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,"
This, from a company whose business should be very much aligned with sharing of information.
Sounds to me, that it could be a classic case of "silos" and a management failure to address this.
I get it. At the company I worked for, we noticed a slow drop off in comms between squads in the wider team.
We use slack and the most interesting thing that happened, is that squads would create their own private channels which then served as a kind of "general" / "chit chat" channel. The former team wide channels ended up with less and less interaction.
This also impacted channels related to development, where instead of using these team wide channels to discuss work and code, squads started using their own "squad channel".
This has been addressed simply by noticing the upswing in siloed behaviour and just communicating it has been noticed.
It's not perfect.
The reality is, we do need some time at the office, but management can play a role too.
We're about to embark on more cross-squad collaboration projects, with mini-teams being formed from various squad members, to try and bring back that collaboration within a team - and indeed, a "team to team" collaboration.
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Oh god. Is this a trend, because folks are trying it in my organisation too.
There are teams (silos) that work really well, and then there are teams that don't, people who aren't so experienced or competent, and projects without "resource".
So the solution was to break down the silos, which in practice means taking busy people from the teams that work well to do the work that the other teams and projects aren't able to do. The result of course, is that now everyone's fucked and there's even more work piled o
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The company I work for is HUGE - we have plenty of good people, good rates - and the cross-squad collaboration was very much in place pre-pandemic, it has just slipped, due to a natural loss of people focus - we already had squad slack channels, it's just we're no longer in the office, so we don't interact as much cross-squad.
The cross-squad collaboration is more aligned with new greenfield work, where there is now clear benefits from this approach.
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Fair enough. I don't entirely agree with the logic, but everywhere is different. We tend to have very similar cross-squad comms as we used to because various squads were geographically distributed anyway, even when in the office. Can't walk to someone's desk to interrupt when they're 500 miles away. Funnily enough the last in-person cross-squad collab had people on a flight with some Covid cases, so there's that little reminder that being in the office ain't all that. Lots of the newer non-technical people
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The interesting aspect we now face, as people do slowly start returning to the office (my company is doing an "if you want to", max 20% occupancy), is that you may as well just work at home, because it's likely over 50% of your team will be.
We're starting to try and arrange occasional "whole team at the office", but a lot of the team are simply not comfortable with it.
They are either shielding - perhaps expecting a child, are shielding themselves, due to being at high risk, or like me, at higher risk simply
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The problem is always, people/companies not embracing it to work effectively. When people keep looking at the "office" as the "normal" to return to, it means everything they do is a "stop gap" measure and they don't adapt to the new reality and THAT is what hurts productivity. If you are always looking over your shoulder at what you THINK IT SHOULD be as opposed to working with the reality, you are only really working about 50% of the time..
Microsoft innovates? (Score:2)
News to me. Oh, wait, they have new vulnerabilities in their crappy software all the time! They must be talking about that ...
Of course remote work impacts communication (Score:2)
Of course remote work impacts communication. That's obvious. Whatever bandwidth an ISP provides pales in comparison to physically holding out your laptop to someone else in real life.
So fix it Microsoft! Allows more than just one user to present their desktop in Microsoft Teams
I believe that (Score:2)
Let's face it, the MS collaboration tools are rubbish. Use some sensible tools and you'll get different results.
Do it for the environment (Score:2)
I know that looking at someones tail lights and sucking in exhaust fumes in a frustrating drive is something everyone looks forward to everyday however taking cars and commuters off the road means less carbon in the atmosphere.
Maybe this is an adaptation that we have to make, maybe we have to sacrifice sitting in traffic for hours a day for the greater good.
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C'mon, MS can't even take proper care of environment variables.
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C'mon, MS can't even take proper care of environment variables.
Think local, scope global!
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I know that looking at someones tail lights and sucking in exhaust fumes in a frustrating drive is something everyone looks forward to everyday
Oh yeah I missed that part for sure. *cough*
And who doesn't miss buying once or twice a week, getting into (or barely avoiding) accidents, the joy of traffic jams, having to drive in shitty weather, paying $400/month for parking....the list goes on and on.
As I've said before, I've set foot in my last office. Period, full stop.
The equated one's network size with innovation (Score:2)
Ghoul-funded study finds in favor of ghoul biases? (Score:2)
Wow, I am so shocked!
Next in the series: "Fox-Funded Study Shows That Hens Are Most Productive Inside Houses Guarded By Foxes".
problems with "less rich" forms of communication (Score:2)
Are they kidding? I get it you get facial cues and quicker back and forth. But you also don't get cut and pasted professionally diagrams, links to sources, snippets of code etc etc.
You also can't easily refer back to the conversation later. At best you have what you remember/think the guy said at the meeting last week. Email: you can refresh your memory, use it as a checklist for features etc etc.
Lastly and hugely important: meetings are prone to ad hoc very complicated questions. I hate being put on the sp
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You also can't easily refer back to the conversation later. At best you have what you remember/think the guy said at the meeting last week.
Yes you can, it's called a transcript. Teams generates one automatically for any recorded meeting. It's actually a pretty handy feature.
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Sure but I'm back in the world with real people in the room and again asymmetry. People can run meetings better but in my experience rarely do. Whoever's called the meeting knows what they want to talk about and have a laundry list of questions they want answers to. It then becomes a quiz show for the technical folks to spit out how and how long it'd take to do things in a 1hr meeting against a least of questions the business folks spent a day putting together. Takes them a day to list what they want to ask
This report reports... (Score:2)
...feelings, not data.
Here's my proposal (Score:2, Interesting)
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That's certainly a very good point that I completely agree with. To put it more bluntly, they miss bullying employees. ;)
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Agreed. Yes, let them all congregate at the Viral Infection Center, AKA "the office" and manage each other to climax while the rest of us happily work from home.
they didn't need a study to show that (Score:2)
Linux software has stagnated, been buggy as all heck, is very unreliable and has not fared well in the worldwide software market. Oh wait, never mind.
LoB
Calling bullshit (Score:2)
If your company has shitty communication structures, then of course you lean heavily on in-person communication, and switching to remote then becomes painful.
At my job we had plenty of in-person interaction, and anyone working remote was a second class citizen who often couldn't hear what was being discussed or wasn't included in meetings and side-tables.
Now everyone is included by default, unless someone starts using private messages, which is about at the same rate it used to be. We also have to push back
Fix the processes - to commute is to pollute (Score:2)
Remote work can be made effective so do that.
Commuting is polluting, generates enormous heat and would do that even if it did not pollute, is grotesquely wasteful of time and resources, and has immense externalized costs not least including the land-wasting road net which serves it.
Physical commuting is a threat to the human race, an artifact of manual urban manufacturing and horrid and horridly expensive urban living conditions driven by concentrating too much activity in too little space.
More like (Score:2)
Many companies reporting just the opposite (Score:2)
Zune, Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC, are just some examples that come to mind. I believe the Xbox was about to be shuttered too, due to lack of management support
Personality Profiles MIA (Score:2)
hypocritical garbage (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft innovation... (Score:5, Funny)
Hey man, Windows 11 will have *rounded corners*. Utterly mind blowing, I haven't seen it yet but that's for the best, I need time to brace myself for when my decades old paradigms get blasted to hell; because Microsoft is a red hot crucible of innovation now.
Re: Microsoft innovation... (Score:2)
It has multiple desktops too. Not that this is hugely innovative. They basically are just ripping off features from Mac and Linux now.
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Yeah, SunOS OpenWindows had multiple workspaces since 1990.
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Windows 10 has had virtual desktops for a while now. Do most Windows users know this? Nope.
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That's distorting the truth of Windows 11 cutting some corners.
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But can MS also make the icons ugly by using shitty pastel colors too? Because some of them are still vaguely appealing and fucking up the colors would solve that issue.
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Mod parent funnier.
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This definitely explains why Microsoft hasn't had any innovative new products since Microsoft Bob.
Oh come on. Give Clippy some credit!
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So, same as in-person meetings.
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At least not worse.
After all, during a video call you can get some actual work accomplished while some narcissist yaks on about his oh so great achievements nobody gives half a fuck about.
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Well said. There's definitely a type that promotes the in-office argument. It's usually not the type getting the work done.
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It is always the ones who don't do anything resembling technical work that want in office time. My Home office is tuned to my work role and work style. The checking into a different cube every day workstyle I have to potentially return to is just 2 hour commute time waste of time. We asked the highest of the highest of management for a team war room style layout for the one day a week we think we need to spend together post Covid. They did not care to understand
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You know, that's gonna lead to a lot of unemployed middle managers.
Not saying that's a bad thing, only saying that you'll have a whole lot of unemployables at your hands soon if you do that.
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Because they're using MS tools for cooperation. Duh.
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The funny thing is that the only people who will believe this pre-conceived MS "research" are Windows shops who are only using Microsoft's software.
LoB
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They will look the other way when the software only runs on Microsoft Windows.
Or they'll steal the idea and bundle it into their steaming mass of an OS. A recent example is WinGet, stolen from AptGet.