What Makes Workers 'Thrive'? Microsoft Study Suggests Shorter Workweeks and Les...
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What Makes Workers 'Thrive'? Microsoft Study Suggests Shorter Workweeks and Less Collaboration
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Microsoft describes "thriving" at work as being "energized and empowered to do meaningful work."
So Microsoft's "people analytics" chief and its "culture measurements" director teamed up for a report in Harvard Business Review exploring "as we enter the hybrid work era... how thriving can be unlocked across different work locations, professions, and ways of working."
ZDNet columnist Chris Matyszczyk took special note of the researchers' observation that "Employees who weren't thriving talked about experiencing siloes, bureaucracy, and a lack of collaboration," asking playfully, "Does that sound like Microsoft to you?"
Klinghoffer and McCune were undeterred in their search for the secret of happiness. They examined those who spoke most positively about thriving at work and work-life balance. They reached a startling picture of a happy Microsoft employee. They said: "By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata, we found that those with the best of both worlds had five fewer hours in their workweek span, five fewer collaboration hours, three more focus hours, and 17 fewer employees in their internal network size."
Five fewer collaboration hours? 17 fewer employees in their internal network? Does this suggest that the teamwork mantra isn't working so well? Does it, in fact, intimate that collaboration may have become a buzzword for a collective that is more a bureaucracy than a truly productive organism?
Klinghoffer and McCune say collaboration isn't bad in itself. However, they say: "It is important to be mindful of how intense collaboration can impact work-life balance, and leaders and employees alike should guard against that intensity becoming 24/7."
If you're a leader, you have a way to stop it. If you're an employee, not so much.
The Microsoft researchers' conclusion? "Thriving takes a village" (highlighting the importance of managers), and that "the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion — from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to struggling with politics and bureaucracy."
Matyszczyk's conclusion? "It's heartening to learn, though, that perhaps the most important element to making an employee happy at work is giving them time to, well, actually work."
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I found the best ideas come from individuals who meet with a group occasionally in a bar or other non-work style setting to discuss stuff and ideas casually seems to work better. Forcefully working on something with others in my experience does not work as well.
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Googlers used to go to Mollie Magees after work to drink and talk business. Yahooers also went to Mollie Magees after work to drink and listen. Goolge security eventually told Googlers to STFU at Mollie Magees.
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by sg_oneill ( 159032 ) on Sunday July 10, 2022 @10:44PM (#62691894)
I worked at a large online travel agency once owned by a very noisy old scottish man, and the tradition there was at 3pm every friday the entire office (About 150 of us) descended on the local british style bar and we all got to drinking on the bosses dime. It was *amazing* how much good collaboration happened in that environment. Just open talks about work and the projects and stuff.
What I think made the difference is in that environment everyone was equal. You'd have an intern sinking pots of ale with the boss and CTO and giving his take on life in the trench whilst listening to the boss talk about what was happening in the world of giant company politics. My team stopped being shy around me and I got a really good insight into the real problems the mostly youngster team had so my project management was more on point and able to best deploy these kids to their best potential while making sure that anything that was screwing with morale was something I could bring the big boss over and have him join in the talk without any of the kids being intimidated, because frankly most of them where a bit innebriated.
It worked really really well. Its a damn miracle nobody wrapped their cars around trees on the way home however. You'd be amazed how drunk everyone gets when its a scottsman buying the rounds.
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You got suckered. It was cheaper to pay you with booze than wages. I see people at work all day. The last thing I want is to spend more time around them.
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Not every day after work, or even every Friday, but once a couple of weeks or three surely can be fun, no?
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I vote "No." I choose my friends carefully and value my time away from the office. Mandatory "fun" and "collaboration" whether it's on the company's dime or not sounds more stressful than a "stand up meeting" or whatever the latest trend is. Sounds like more of the same "extrovert sets the policy" and less useful paradigm.
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Nobody said they weren't getting paid. We had beer at Tivoli for the same reason, on site no less, every Friday. Nice perk for a salaried job.
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In all fairness arent you a bit antisocial anyway? Uou did pick archie bunker as your profile name:-)
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The Microsoft study was about what made people feel productive, but they didn't measure actual productivity.
You seem to be saying the same: Drinking with your coworkers made you feel better.
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TL/DR: Measuring productivity is not always as easy as it would seem to be.
There is a qualitative/quantitative issue here. It seems you're arguing that the attributes measured--proxy attributes to be sure, are invalid because they are qualitative? The tricky thing is not all measures can be quantitative nor can all measures be direct.
Take for instance the question of "Does TDD improve productivity?" Well, there are lots of issues that show up like "how close to TDD counts?" and "development team skill" a
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You have touched upon the stupidity of the SMART goal mantra (and the annoying forced cute acronym plague),
Bean counters want everything to be specific and measurable because "beans" and "counting". But a lot of human endeavor cannot be usefully quantified in this way. There is a whole literature on the problems with trying to force everything into this framework.
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by Kisai ( 213879 ) on Sunday July 10, 2022 @10:56PM (#62691906)
It depends. If you have a group of, oh 25, people, roughly the correct "manager to subordinates" ratio, and you force them to all work on the same project, you will have maybe only 5 people in that group who actually want to do that project. The other 20 are dead-weight because they would rather work on something else that is more in their wheelhouse.
So the lesson to learn is that how you create your team matters. Find people who are genuinely interested in the project, and LET THEM WORK ON IT. Don't promote them to manager or team lead just because they've been there the longest, or are the most responsible, promote them to those positions because they're the ones that would do the project themselves, solo, if given the opportunity, and thus can decide which people in their teams are best to delegate that task to.
What I find, past and present, is that often there is someone (eg a manager) who is just so head-up-their-ass about divesting responsibilities from themselves, that they don't actually know who wants to work on things, let along who would actually be good at working on that thing.
Like, everywhere I've ever worked, I've wound up coding things, even if not a SINGLE job I've had had anything to do with coding. This is because I identify efficiencies that can be had through automations that don't need to be supervised.
Being able to identify when something saves significant effort through automation is better than training staff to do things they either don't want to do, or are bored. The vast majority of data-entry jobs exist, only because they are cheaper to hire a human than it is to write a program that can do the thing, because they don't want to pay ongoing licensing costs for something that could save them money.
Hence, when it comes to collaborative efforts, you need to focus on the collaborative efforts that result in "something productive", because a lot of "meetings" in the office are unproductive, make-busy things.
You should only have a collaborative meeting when you need to get a resolution to something and need to figure out whom it should be delegated to. When you have a collaboration meeting, basically you only have two people that are doing any work, everyone else in the meeting is doing nothing.
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Same for meetings. I got more stuff done and things agreed on in the 5 minute coffee breaks than in the 50 minutes of meeting. The reason for this is simple: No protocol. People talk freely about why the hell they're stalling and you can more easily find a solution where both sides are happy.
There's quite a few protocols that read, if summarized, "50 minutes of nothing, 5 minutes break, 5 minutes deal seal".
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Don't forget the presence of management on the call, looking to have your little interlock serve as status updates and way to assess employee performance. So the meetings become pointless preening to look good and 'get credit' while simultaneously trying to avoid saying the things that might possibly be perceived as failing to do your job, or even something that would rock the boat on 'status' and trigger even more meetings from panicked management.
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Its ironic given that Microsoft is one of the largest sellers of collaboration software suites and services.
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we need to start lowering full time hours and extreme OT or make that long OT be payed
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Fire me. I dare you.
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Yep, there's more than a century of research into the "working week" & what numbers of hours make people more productive. Originally believed to be 35-40 hours but nowadays even that's being questioned, hence the current projects trying out the 4-day week. Unfortunately, we seem doomed to keep repeating re-discovering the benefits of working a reasonable number of hours over & over again.
BTW, workers are terrible at identifying what or how working makes them more productive. Don't ask them, just ob
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companies who do pair or mob programming full time. A modern fad which makes your employees stressed, unproductive and unable to achieve any personal success, and which makes the work environment hostile to any introvert people.
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I'd think that only large highly profitable companies can afford to do pair programming - where you're paying 2 developers to produce the amount of work that one developer could do.
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It's a matter of finding the right pairs. A motivated guy and a brilliant, but slow/methodical, guy can really crank out top-notch work when paired together. The first guy drives the work forward, the second keeps the quality above average.
If you're just sticking people together in hopes that they'll keep each other accountable, you're going to be disappointed.
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Because more often than not, what you get is "that may not work... but I'll just blame the other guy" from both of them.
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It's interesting that they found those who thrive the most have less "collaboration" time in the data, which may mean five hours less of meetings. Yet also:
"the most common thread among those who were not thriving was a feeling of exclusion â" from a lack of collaboration to feeling left out of decisions to..."
Those who aren't doing well feel left out. Those who are doing well are left out, left alone. How do you balance that? I suppose two ways would be making people OPTIONAL on meetings, and sending over a quick email to relevant people who may not need to be at the meeting, but may want to be kept informed.
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That's what you get when you try to measure everyone with the same metric without allowing for the possibility that people with different personality traits, different jobs and among different jobs levels, require different factors to be productive. Yet another example that averaging any data insights should be made a criminal offence.
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I think it's more simple than that. The biggest issue of measuring everybody against each other is that not two people are the same. Given choice, a manager may compare everyone against a star programmer who can juggle many projects, understand how everything ties together, from Layer 1 through 7, as well as database integration, and write concise code to tie it all together. The problem is there aren't many people like that around in a company. So everyone suffers compared to the star developer. It ma
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"People do not feel left out if they are not invited to attend a meeting. They feel left out if they don’t get the output from the meeting."
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I can only imagine you don't attend a lot of meetings.
I lose almost every morning to meetings. Either in meetings or spaces between meetings too short to get anything done.
Anything important discussed? Nothing that couldn't have been an email. And some of the meetings are duplicative. 90% of them have too many people and too strict of an agenda to make me feel included in anything. Most of the meetings are to schedule things that need to be done or push to the next work window. Straight up the only important meeting is the 1 on 1 with my boss.
I gain far more information chatting with my co workers and also running into the boss of the dev team whose products I support in the break room.
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Retired now - and you cannot imagine the sheer joy of not having to attend another meeting or sit through a PowerPoint session (unless it's an occasion where I want to!).
I got used to counting the attendees and multiplying by the duration to get the 'employee equivalent' of each meeting. Very few meetings were worth the value of lost productivity. Also worth costing up the effects of "windbags" who loved the sound of their own voice and took AGES to make a point that could have been discussed in under a m
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You have to trust people and give them responsibilities, while making sure they know that support is there if they needed it.
Creating a non-judgemental environment is really important too. People should not be afraid of making mistakes, they should know that when things go wrong everyone will get on board to find solutions without assigning blame.
A flat management structure helps too, then people can go direct when they need something and become involved in decision making.
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The problem can be you have a meeting where management explains a bad decision they have made that could have been averted if they involved you earlier, so you have to have lots more meetings to convince them to make the right decision.
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The leaders usually don't have anything else to do than attend meetings. Without meetings their job is redundant.
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Then fire them. Saves a load of money that could be used to hire the desperately needed people who actually do some work.
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I've never been happier at work then when working insane hours under harsh conditions with an enthusiastic team of people trying to do something that had never been done before. I've never been less happy then when I had a 100% secure job, with almost nothing I needed to do, surrounded by people who didn't give a S*** (so I left that job)
But of course different people want different things out of their jobs.
There is a long waiting list for people who want to work at the South Pole over winter, and the ones who do it generally love it. But pick people randomly, and 99% would think it was the worst job imaginable.-
Agreed, when I feel like I am making a difference.. going days without sleep in the zone feels oddly rewarding -- not sure if it was some sort of dopamine induction or what. The last time I did that was as recent as 2020, early 2021 -- pulled crazy hours 7 days a week. I don't know about doing something like that when on salary though, it might be worker abuse. When you do work, you have to feel a level of ownership/compensation or at least the potential thereof of payoff (financial or otherwise). That's w
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No one needs narcissistic people unless they like being depressed without understanding why. You know that asshole at work that makes life a misery - that stress is the thing we all want to escape.
Narcissists and their enablers are the cancer of humanity.
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Not necessarily, just because something is evil doesn't mean it can't be used for good. There is no law of the universe that enforces a rule that evil people can't be harnessed by society for good. For example, Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Fritz Haber was evil and developed and advocated chemical weapons. But without him, millions in the world would be malnourished because he also invented the process for making nitrogen fertilizer. The same thing with Nazi engineers like Arthur Rudolph and racist eugeni
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I tried that - it doesn't work. In an organizational context it is an absolute certainty that they will simply go on to do even more evil now that they are emboldened, financed and even better equipped to do evil. It's their nature - ask the people that are forced to work with them. It is literally what Hell is. It's simply not worth the stress trying to do anything with them except run far far away.
All of the example you cite went on to do a greater evil, they all bought suffering to millions of peo
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I like my 100% secure job with almost nothing to do, allows me to crunch that long queue of personal projects and learning areas I built up.
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Your Slashdot ID, nick, and previous posts have been recorded and we have our AI working to determine who you are in order to contact your employer, so they can sue you for money not well spent!
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I know you're joking but humor me.
Don't worry, my employer knows exactly how much work I perform, and they are very happy with it.
What most seem to not comprehend (but my employer does) is that the value one adds is more important than how many hours a day they are working. My job type means I could work for 1 hour and bring enough value to cover 100 hours of not having any work to perform. People who hired me know this, I know this, everything's cool.
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I'll agree about it sucking royally to work with people who are there solely for the paycheck.
However I will not tolerate 'insane hours' on the regular. I'm not going to compromise my personal time and health because my company sucks at planning and/or hiring either the right people or enough people.
I'll give it all I've got for 40 hrs/week, with *occasional* emergency extraordinary hours, but more than that and I'm just rewarding bad leadership and letting myself get exploited as a salaried employee.
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It depends.
If your goals are shot-term, you are correct. Short-term thinking leads to gimmicky studies that make startling conclusions, that in the end neither achieve happiness nor efficiency nor profit.
If your goals are long term, then you will make decisions that might cost more in the short term, but are focused on treating people like human beings. This kind of treatment will indeed lead to efficiency, happiness, and long-term profitability.
Sadly, almost no companies these days look at things through a
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In this economy? Like hell it does.
Good people can now pick and choose what company they work for. And they will go to the company that makes them happy. Twice so if they're under 35, a generation that has long already understood that they will not retire when they're 50, so they don't put up with eating shit for a fat pay check.
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To a point. If you make a tech person happy by letting them pick whatever projects they like and work completely however they like, then even the best people may be useless to your business. One example is we had this 'hotshot developer' that the company wanted to make happy. Given all the resources he could ask for and regular exposure to the business needs he chose to... write and run benchmarks to test out all this neat equipment he could play with that had nothing to do with customer requirements. Even
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Once Microsoft found what makes employees thrive, it is going improve it. Before you know it no team will be allowed to be bigger than 17. But that does not include managers, so it will have 26 pointy hair bosses and several layers of CXOs.
You know embrace, extend and extinguish...
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Nah, they'll declare it to be 17 all-in. So your team will have the manager, the product manager, the project manager, the marketing liaison, the offshoring coordinator, the outsourcing manager, the administrative assistant, the procurement manager, two engineers they restrict from doing critical work because they are expecting and waiting for them to retire any day now, 3 disposable workers they keep as layoff fodder when forced layoffs come along, 3 interns that will be there for a few months and then di
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I've learned a single highly productive developer but with a bad, combative, and/or lowkey abusive attitude creates ripples and destroys team cohesion, splintering people into smaller groups. Those groups seem like an immune defense, letting their members focus on a new area of expertise so that it doesn't include the bad apple. I've also learned I'd rather take a moderately good developer that's easy to work with and eager to learn than a "rockstar" dev who gets angry when he's questioned, can't integrate with the tone of the team, and isn't good at teaching. Resentment also seems to build and simmer under the surface and only comes out after a year or two, as people seem naturally reluctant to gossip about their coworkers or badmouth them, and may assume they're the ones at fault because they aren't as productive or aren't as familiar with the frameworks/language.
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I've learned that some people will never be "team players" but all the same, sometimes a project doesn't need a team. If you've got a small-ish task that can be handled by a single person then try your "bad apples" out on it. Sometimes they aren't actually dicks, they just can't handle the bike shedding, small talk, meetings and unproductiveness that comes from "bad teams." Of course, if it turns out that their l33t rockstar code is impossible to integrate with and they refuse to co-operate on providing int
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How about 20 less? Or 40 less?
What's so magical about 5?
Here's the thing. Obviously, there is a point of diminishing returns for a reduced work week. In the end, it takes time to get work done. The study may have shown a benefit for 5 fewer hours because people are accustomed to not having that time off. But if it becomes the norm, it won't seem like a bonus any more, it will just be "normal." Then you'll have to take off another 5 hours to get the "happiness" back up.
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Not necessarily. Just like there's a point of diminishing returns for longer work days/weeks there's probably one for shorter as well. Somewhere between those will be n optimum range. We know what we have now is too high.
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I'm ok with never working again. My dream is to have a legal settlement or receive some windfall. I would have no problems tending to my home and hobbies for the rest of my life. There's nothing noble about working hard.
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+1 Insightful.
There are so many projects I have queued up, that a whole lifetime of not having to work wouldn't be enough. -
That's a stupid dream. Change your dream to producing something that people value.
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The old American dream: Work hard, climb the ladder, and eventually you will earn a lot of money, be rich and live it large.
The new American dream: Screw that, it doesn't work. Play the lottery or hope some rich bastard runs you over with his car.
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5 hours is roughly the minimum time you waste every week on pointless meetings. Or rather, 5 hours is the time you could save by cutting meetings down to the essentials where there's actually shit getting done and not some narcissist C-Level drones on about pointless crap nobody cares about.
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And if you cut 5 hours from the work week, those wasted hours wouldn't magically disappear.
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Not magically, no. But these are the 5 hours you can cut without actually losing any productivity.
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Microsoft is actually two companies: one consists of managers and the other of individual contributors. They are fiercely opposed. The only good thing about working there is money.
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What most managers thought as "collaboration" is really a guise to make useless middle managers feel useful.
The most notable example being regular progress meetings in which the manager never make any decision but only listen to the team report what has been done. The manager could have obtained the same information by looking at whatever tracking tool the team uses. But no, most managers won't feel useful unless he sits in a meeting seeing his whole team "report" their progress to him.
"Five fewer collabo
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This is also one of the reasons why productivity soared during home office and lockdown: People could go into pointless meetings and still continue working while the narcissist in front drones on about whatever drivel is interesting to him instead of having to sit there and have their mind wander about, hoping they at least don't sit with the back to the clock so they have at least a time horizon when the bullshit ends.
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STFU and let me manage my own time and interactions.
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That might be counted as "less collaboration" and indeed be helpful to many developers and sys-admins.
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A team funded by management hilights the importance of managers.
The best thing a manager can do is not mess things up.
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Not true. The best thing managers can do is to make sure the right resources are available at the right time to the right people. I.e. they could do their job.
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What is microsoft thinking?
Next they'll be saying pay matters instead of "being part of the microsoft family".
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Interesting, as Google's research pointed to something else: psychological security.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=goog... [duckduckgo.com]
(I remember because of the irony, where Google's surveillance businessmodel is about measuring everything, which as a managerial style is often harmful to the sense of psychological security)
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We are all individuals, and we are all different. Some of us will thrive under a set of circumstances that will put the brakes on some others, and vice-versa. Some of us will do so much better working from home, while some others need to be in the office to be productive. Some of us are gregarious and extroverted, whereas some others are solitary and introverted. Some of us hate team-building exercises with passion, whereas some others love them.
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