[HN Gopher] Microsoft researched what made employees happy
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft researched what made employees happy
Author : alok-g
Score : 100 points
Date : 2022-07-10 19:01 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.zdnet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.zdnet.com)
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| I think it should be healthy to be allowed to simply do your job
| if you are an engineer. If you are a good one you'll know when
| you need help and when you need to grind.
|
| Instead you are constantly in a state of being micro managed by
| people who think that if they have lots of meetings and gather
| lots of metrics that will increase productivity but it's a silly
| idea when you think about it
|
| The only thing that gets work done is well...doing work and any
| amount of time you take away from that isn't productive 9/10
| times.
| shitpostbot wrote:
| alexklarjr wrote:
| Microsoft outlook and spreadsheets is what every employer crave
| obvsly
| bawolff wrote:
| Is this really all that surprising? In school everyone always
| complains about group work sucking.
| haswell wrote:
| I think this is a good anecdote that reiterates the kind of
| "collaboration" the article is talking about, but is not the
| "real" collaboration people strive for.
|
| The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was
| because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher
| outcome. Collaboration can unlock outcomes that can't be
| achieved as an individual, but collaboration can't be the
| desired end state.
| pojzon wrote:
| > The reason group projects in school felt so terrible was
| because the end goal was collaboration, not some higher
| outcome
|
| At least in my school the end goal was never collaboration
| but getting a good grade. Thus individuals who cared did most
| if not all work.
|
| Those group projects had sense only if you were paired with
| equally skilled and motivated ppl.
|
| And ofcourse you had to LIKE them. Its exteremely hard to be
| cooperative with ppl you consider as assholes.
| haswell wrote:
| I'm sure that was _your_ end goal, but when someone assigns
| a collaborative project, it's usually to teach students how
| to collaborate, while forgetting that just forcing a group
| to do the same task together is not the same thing as
| collaborating.
|
| It is from this base that problems emerge, IMO.
|
| Kind of like "synergy", which is a real thing, but hard to
| define and difficult to artificially achieve.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Group work has all the bad attributes:
|
| - can't be fired
|
| - reward is low
|
| - members often have the exact skillset.
|
| - nobody has superior authority. How does one even make a
| decision where people disagree?
|
| Teachers have no experience working in the real world and will
| often say "you will need to learn to work with bad people".
|
| Meanwhile every successful person will tell you to fire bad
| people as soon as possible.
|
| If you assign a bunch of low performers to Steve Jobs and tell
| him he can't fire them and have to give them work, even Steve
| Jobs would probably fail.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > In school everyone always complains about group work sucking
|
| I supervised software engineering projects at university. It
| works well when students in a group have similar motivation and
| abilities. This is the case when they are free to choose who
| they collaborate with. Otherwise, students are usually
| frustrated.
|
| In a company, teams can be much more heterogeneous (cultural
| background, skills, age, social status, experience...), and the
| pressure is higher: goals can be loosely defined, evaluation is
| less fair, stakes are higher for everyone, managers can be less
| benevolent than teachers...
| ergocoder wrote:
| > managers can be less benevolent than teachers...
|
| Depend on what benevolent here means.
|
| It is much easier to address low performers in a company
| setting.
| pjmorris wrote:
| FTA:
|
| "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."
| lucb1e wrote:
| TL;DR^, came here to post the same quote (they are citing the
| original authors here). The rest of the article is filler and
| speculation based on this statement.
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| > 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?
|
| I recently worked at a company that hired Agile consultants to
| install SAFe. We had PI planning each quarter, which ran for 3
| full days. At its conclusion, the consultants, leaders, and PMO
| always called it "successful collaboration." I guess they were
| having lots of fun ... but the engineers were not. Most of it was
| us guessing estimates for things 6 weeks out, and management
| turning that into commitments. Needless to say, this whole circus
| became negative experience for almost all the producers.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| For people who don't know SAFe, here is the diagram:
| https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/deli...
| pixelrevision wrote:
| Lol they should just change the name of "agile" to "brittle"
| and go with the slogan of "processes over people"
| brikil wrote:
| That reminds me of the cell biology diagrams from grade
| school.
| wsostt wrote:
| How do you propose stopping estimates from becoming
| commitments? Genuinely asking because I struggle to not do this
| as a manager.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| It starts understanding the meaning of the word "estimate" in
| the English language.
| jpswade wrote:
| It says "five fewer collaboration hours". It's not clear how many
| hours of collaboration we're talking.
|
| It'd be interesting to see the actual figures before drawing a
| conclusion.
|
| On one hand I can imagine if you're spending all your time in
| meetings it would be frustrating, meanwhile I've what happens
| when teams don't collaborate, it's not a pleasant experience, it
| just causes tension to build up.
| Groxx wrote:
| Is there a link to the study anywhere? I'm curious what kind of
| "internal network" survives removing 17 people while being more
| productive.
|
| Certainly some do. But it means very very different things if
| their network was closer to 20 people or 200+.
| caminante wrote:
| The ZDNet article links to the HBR article [0].
|
| Which traces to this networking measurement article [1].
|
| [0] https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-
| thri...
|
| [1] https://hbr.org/2020/08/can-you-be-too-well-connected
| Groxx wrote:
| Both of those mention "network" without really saying what
| they consider a network, and without even an average number,
| as far as can tell :/ they spend much more time talking about
| how many meetings and emails are involved. (And their meeting
| load sounds low! Dang, all of my managers have had like 30+
| per week. Though I don't think I've ever sent as many emails
| as even their low end lists. Maybe they're just avoiding
| Teams...)
| caminante wrote:
| _> and without even an average number, as far as can tell_
|
| Taking their analysis at face value, the average/median
| doesn't matter. This was a relative comparison for people
| that were (i) motivated; and (ii) had work-life balance.
|
| "network" was a function of how many people you interacted
| with via email/meetings. It's not surprising that people
| with better work life balance had less interactions. It is
| slightly surprising (IMHO) that people with less
| interactions were also more motivated.
| Groxx wrote:
| It matters how much of a reduction 17 implies. Scale-free
| numbers can be extremely misleading.
|
| E.g. last half, I had about 350 separate people I DM'd.
| Per year I generally break 500. If you include the size
| of email _groups_ I have sent messages to, I 'm
| consistently over 1,000 most months, possibly over 2,000
| (maybe even significantly more). Microsoft has around
| _180,000_ employees, that number could trivially go much
| much higher if I worked there.
|
| 17 is nothing if that's the criteria. Probably just
| noise, and you'll likely get different results next year.
|
| For people I would _consider to be my network_... 30-40?
| Maybe 50? They 're the ones I actually interact with
| repeatedly on purpose. Reducing that by 17 is
| substantial, and I don't think I'd be as useful if I cut
| that size.
| underwater wrote:
| Some companies have a culture that favours meetings and cross-
| team builds over documentation and internal platforms. It might
| just be that someone doing more collaboration is working on more
| ill-defined problems, or are at a different part of the
| development cycle.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Collaboration is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.
| just_boost_it wrote:
| The structure of the experiment seems to have been just a
| correlation between collaborative hours and some measure of
| happiness. I wonder if the causation doesn't run the other way to
| what they propose though. When I'm happy in work, I don't really
| feel the need to have to work to grow my network outside my team.
| I have worked a job though where things just weren't clicking, so
| I did put more effort into trying to make them click by meeting
| people. That would have included getting involved in more
| projects, and doing a bit more collaborative work.
| drewcoo wrote:
| This.
|
| Things aren't going so well at work? Work harder. Work more.
| Then burn out and quit, of course.
| greenthrow wrote:
| There's no one answer to what is going to make people happy. Some
| people prefer being solo, some people prefer a close knit team,
| and every variation. The key for people leaders is to let your
| team do what works best for them.
| Madmallard wrote:
| I don't know if I would trust a scummy anti-customer company to
| know what works best for people.
| tpmx wrote:
| My experience: Collaborating closely with smart people makes you
| happy. It can be so exhilarating - in a sustained way for a long
| time, if you're lucky and the universe aligns correctly.
|
| And yes, frequent interruptions are okay in this context. You get
| into a rhythm.
| haswell wrote:
| I think there is a major framing issue here.
|
| Speaking for myself, and the many colleagues I've spoken to about
| this, collaboration isn't the issue.
|
| "Collaboration" is the issue.
|
| I've had some of my most meaningful (and happiness-inducing)
| experiences at work when collaborating deeply with colleagues.
|
| I've had some of the most frustrating experiences at work when
| "collaborating".
|
| The distinction simply being: "Collaboration" in the form of
| "interacting in realtime" or "existing in the same space" can
| also be 99% distraction.
|
| "Real" collaboration - the kind where the collective
| consciousness of the group results in outcomes that could not
| have been achieved solo - is where the magic lies.
|
| I'm absolutely happier with more autonomy and less distraction.
| But that is not the antithesis of collaboration.
|
| A pendulum that swings too far in the other direction will leave
| folks feeling isolated, and will reduce the potential of a group.
| Finding the right balance and distinguishing between real
| collaborative interaction vs. "acting out" something that looks
| like collaboration on the surface is critical.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Collaboration has its place for when you need it. Sure, you can
| get great results despite paying the mental cost of
| collaborating (which is even higher if it's happening through a
| computer screen).
|
| The problem is that we see the great results of occasional
| collaboration and we want more of that. Creating more
| artificial collaboration when you're capable of doing the task
| by yourself will just be expensive (both in terms of salary and
| mental health): it's not the answer.
| diarrhea wrote:
| This is a great insight. Mapping productivity over
| collaboration intensity is a concave function. Its maximum is
| nowhere near the extreme ends.
|
| Yet, if people _are_ near the maximum they might desire more
| of what has worked in getting them there, but to their right
| they'll only find decline.
|
| This is such a common fallacy I wonder if it has a name.
| haswell wrote:
| > _Sure, you can get great results despite paying the mental
| cost of collaborating_
|
| When I refer to the beneficial kind of collaboration, I'm
| referring to the kind where the cost of _not_ collaborating
| is to not achieve the outcome at all.
|
| Paul McCartney is an excellent musician on his own. The
| Beatles achieved something as a group that no individual can
| achieve on their own.
|
| I agree that adding collaboration in a setting that doesn't
| require it just adds mental cost. But in other settings, that
| mental cost is minimal compared to the enhanced output.
|
| > _Creating more artificial collaboration when you 're
| capable of doing the task by yourself will just be expensive_
|
| We're on the same page here. That's what I mean by
| "Collaboration" in quotes. The kind that is not necessary.
|
| My main point/issue is that the article doesn't seem to
| really acknowledge or explore that there is a good/bad kind.
| Just focusing on "employees need more time to do their actual
| work" is not useful if that employee's actual work actually
| does require some form of collaboration.
|
| The ability to distinguish between the two seems to be the
| core issue that requires exploration.
| mrexroad wrote:
| Too many orgs conflate communication and collaboration. The
| heavy handed push for "Collaboration" always seems to stem from
| folks with anxiety around feeling left out, and leadership who
| is equally disconnected. E.g. "I'm hearing you're not being
| very collaborative, spend more time bringing others along!"
| When really the problem is lack of communication and
| transparency creates fear/uncertainty/doubt. With that said,
| communication and coordination are the foundations for
| collaboration. Some orgs address those well, most don't; too
| often it falls on the right interpersonal dynamics to create
| the environment for meaningful collaboration where 1+1=3.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Exactly the same for me: some of my best work _and_ most
| enjoyable time has been collaborating _closely_ with people.
| And yet, some of my _worst_ time has been in settings that can
| _also_ be described as collaborative!
|
| What made a difference? I see it as having two types of
| "collaboration": _working together_ vs _working on the same
| thing in parallel_.
|
| The problem is that the formal processes managers use to
| ostensibly encourage collaboration--and, of course, to track
| and direct individual work--push _hard_ towards the latter
| model. Everybody working on their own tasks makes the work so
| much more legible! Having some other person or some process
| determine who works on what, when and then implicitly (or
| explicitly!) judging people based on how quickly they complete
| "their" tasks is not only awful for autonomy and job
| satisfaction but also actively makes it _harder_ to collaborate
| meaningfully. I 've worked on teams where people were afraid to
| spend too much time working together or helping each other
| because they didn't want to "waste" the other person's time--
| after all, you're clearly wasting time if you aren't
| consistently producing finished tickets!--which is absolutely
| toxic for creativity, culture _and_ collaboration, but also a
| natural response to the incentives and structure imposed by the
| process.
|
| I'm gradually starting to look for my next job and finding a
| culture where I can _actually_ collaborate is one of my main
| goals, but it seems hard to evaluate from the outside. It 's
| not clear how much an individual manager can do to foster the
| right sort of environment--a lot depends on the culture and
| structure at higher levels on the organization, as well as
| cross-team interactions--and it's the sort of thing where
| everyone is going to _say_ their team is collaborative (and
| even _believe_ it), and I don 't see how a team could _show_
| rather than just _say_ that.
| more_corn wrote:
| Me in mind that at Microsoft and every large company. A lot of
| time is wasted in meetings. What you're seeing is that the
| happiest workers AT Microsoft are the ones with more time for
| deep work and the ones with high autonomy. That lesson is
| probably generalizable. I don't think anyone is suggesting an
| end to collaborative work.
| matwood wrote:
| They probably could have just shortened it to autonomy.
| Collaboration is great when it's not forced - hence autonomy.
|
| I also like to call autonomy to being treated like an adult. So
| much of what companies do is infantilizing now.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> infantilizing_
|
| Curious to understand this better. Could you give some
| examples?
| dotgov wrote:
| Not the OP, but I have a few from my workplace: My favorite
| example was being reminded to wear sunscreen because it is
| summer. by our "safety coordinator" at an all hands
| meeting. Or the "ladder training", where I was taught to
| use a ladder. The cause for that is is a "zero accident
| policy". Which is perceived as a good thing, and how could
| it not? Accidents are bad. Never mind the absurdity of a
| zero _accident_ policy. Criticizing a policy like that very
| quickly puts a "reckless and dangerous" stamp on you, as
| the only reason accidents do not happen is the policy. The
| policy leads to reams of paperwork being filled out which
| creates a need for more administrative personnel and as
| those people get paid to do that, it is in their best
| interest that it stays that way. So if you think about
| lifting that 50 lbs box as a healthy adult in prime
| physical condition, you better ask your safety coordinator
| first, because if anyone sees you, you will get a slap on
| the wrist. My theory is that at the heart of what I am
| describing is fear. As long as the company can demonstrate
| that the employee was instructed to play it safe, they have
| the upper hand, should it come to a lawsuit. And I have a
| hunch that it also has to do with philosophy. Some people
| _believe_ that the world can be a safe place for everyone.
| And they will control and subdue to make that a reality.
| And they are right. Lack of action is safe. What they fail
| to see is that it leads to stagnation and death.
| jfim wrote:
| The reminders to be safe are to ensure that people don't
| grow complacent about things that are dangerous.
|
| Our school has a mandatory safety training before
| students go on internships, and the reason for that is
| that interns have died in the past. A lot of things can
| be dangerous at work (including ladders) and not
| everybody is familiar with the associated hazards.
| Ladders, compressed air, electricity, machinery, confined
| spaces, chemicals, dust, and so on are all things that
| are dangerous, and the fact that they injure or kill
| people every year even though they're known hazards is a
| testament that people are too complacent around them.
| Teever wrote:
| What's wrong with telling people to wear sunscreen?
|
| What's wrong with ensuring that people know how to use a
| ladder safely?
|
| What's wrong with aspiring to have zero accidents in a
| work place?
| matwood wrote:
| Waffle parties and Hawaiian shirt days come to mind.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| Daily standups. Open office plans.
| ravishi wrote:
| Severance, an Apple TV+ show, has a good take on this. It
| does s tremendous job mocking the corporate "culture" and
| it's infantilization of the workers.
| darkmarmot wrote:
| There are thousands of examples if you work for a
| paternalistic megacorp. Case in point, our office now lets
| people "hotel" at desks, but we have to reserve them for
| time slots. We could, like the library, just sit and use
| unoccupied desks. But they add this level of control that's
| geared towards toddlers that can't operate in a shared
| public space.
| baxtr wrote:
| Must be annoying... Sounds like a poorly communicated
| capacity planning thing though?
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Does the company need capacity planning in the form of
| making everyone do extra work instead of making one
| person glance around and report on the level of free
| desks or making a button one can click only when they
| tried to find a desk and couldn't?
| rlayton2 wrote:
| Agree, and nothing tells an employee they aren't valued
| more than not providing them an adequate workspace
| baxtr wrote:
| So the extra work part is infantalizing? I am not here to
| judge, just genuinely trying to understand.
|
| PS: Should be obvious by now that I don't work for a
| "paternalistic megacorp"...
| powerhour wrote:
| It's not the extra work, it's the requirement to ask for
| permission to have a desk to do the work they're asked to
| do.
| brailsafe wrote:
| This killed my spirit at one of my previous gigs at a
| stupid megacorp. I needed the cash and told myself it was
| worth a shot, even though I had a hunch thay had ADHD and
| it just wouldn't work. I needed to isolate myself to get
| work done, but I was looked at almost in horror when I
| brought my laptop to a quiet space away from my desk. I
| didn't use spare offices because those were reserved
| ahead of time like you say. So many wasted resources.
| Back at my desk there was the constant clacking of keys
| and jackass on his bluetooth headset making sales calls
| from his open cubicle, and typing away on his mechanical
| keyboard, or buddy eating chips.
|
| It could have been a really interesting technical
| experience, because the frontend was an absolute
| nightmare, but it serviced millions of people daily and
| billions in transactions annually. But I just couldn't
| catch up with so much bullshit. The best time was when
| nobody was there, so sometimes I'd work later, but then
| I'd be chastised for not showing up to the fucking
| standup on time.
| solardev wrote:
| Not to distract from your main point, but just an aside,
| have you ever looked into misophonia? A few friends of
| mine have it and your post heavily reminded me of them
| (the chips and keyboard, especially). For them, earplugs
| and/or ANC headphones made a world of difference in being
| able to focus on their work and not be driven crazy.
|
| The open-layout office is hell for people who need quiet
| for focused work :( Sorry you had to deal with that.
| theshrike79 wrote:
| Yep, my dad was forced to this "hotel" crap too.
|
| ...but he works in a field where stuff is still 80% on
| paper and he has colleagues with self-purchased reference
| books and the ilk literally from floor to ceiling.
|
| He spent a week clearing out his office and will be going
| into full retirement now. There's no way he'll be
| spending time lugging around a pallet worth of books to a
| new hotel desk every morning - nor will he give his own
| books to the company.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| "Collaboration" is the kind where someone read an article about
| a team building a successful project with lots of collaboration
| once, so they mandate pair programming on _every_ ticket and
| mob testing for every PR.
| drewcoo wrote:
| Why do they want happy workers and how do they measure happiness?
|
| When exactly did Microsoft abandon all the lessons of
| Peopleware[1]?
|
| And what about flow[2]? I recall people blocking out calendar
| time and putting do not disturb signs on their office doors[3]
| when they needed time to get into flow. Good managers helped make
| that happen. Does that not happen there anymore?
|
| [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/67825.Peopleware
|
| [2] https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-flow-state-of-mind-How-
| succe...
|
| [3] We had actual offices, doubled up and individual. They had
| doors. It took almost 2 decades to finally work remotely so that
| I could have an office with a door again, this time in my home.
| Bliss!
| twirlock wrote:
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| I dumped my last job exactly because collaboration became the
| mantra.
|
| I tried to effect change but leadership didn't listen and my team
| wanted to apply the collaboration koolaid and be good team
| members.
|
| Glad there's research I can point to.
| indiantinker wrote:
| ... and made Teams
| SMAAART wrote:
| TL;DR: for Microsoft, it's "to be energized and empowered to do
| meaningful work."
| sedatk wrote:
| I reckon that it's not the collaboration itself makes you
| unhappy, it's the contemporary methods used such as constant
| interruptions over a multitude of communication tools, frequent
| brain-melting meetings with no obvious purpose, not having a
| solid leadership leaving the team members to their own devices.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| By reading the article, the word "collaborating" somewhat felt
| like they were referring to meetings based on the word used
| around the context of people's calendars and availability that
| week.
|
| Having less meetings and more individual contributor time will
| make anyone happy. You can at least do the job with that time and
| not stress that you will get it done that week with whatever
| artificial constraint that week has created based on the
| "collaboration" you were involved in.
|
| People like determinism, no surprises here.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| What does "five fewer hours in their workweek span" mean?
| lucb1e wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Let me also ask what 17 fewer collaborators mean. I work in a
| company with 7 employees, so I should work with negative ten
| people for optimum statistical happiness!
|
| Without the base values, the article's advice is subject to
| speculation, but I guess we could start with how the average
| bigcorp in 200? operated and go from there. Problem is, I don't
| know what those values were, either.
|
| What's also interesting to me is that working in a team of more
| than 17 people is (was?) normal, that seems like a lot of
| people to coordinate with (even at Deloitte, my direct
| coworkers (developers) were a group of 3 others, part of a
| larger team of maybe 40 (mostly pentesters) but they also all
| worked in smaller groups of 1-4). Daily stand-ups with 4 people
| were long enough for my taste.
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