What Happened When Microsoft Analyzed Its Own Remote Work Patterns? (hbr.org) 79
Harvard Business Review just published a new analysis by the director of Microsoft's Workplace Analytics team, a director on Microsoft's workplace intelligence team, and the editor of Microsoft Workplace Insights.
"Four months ago we realized that our company, like so many others, was undergoing an immediate and unplanned shift to remote work..."
"So, we launched an experiment to measure how the work patterns across our group were changing, using Workplace Analytics, which measures everyday work in Microsoft 365, and anonymous sentiment surveys..." [O]ur research revealed that workdays were lengthening — people were "on" four more hours a week, on average. Our survey shed light on one possible explanation: Employees said they were carving out pockets of personal time to care for children, grab some fresh air or exercise, and walk the dog. To accommodate these breaks, people were likely signing into work earlier and signing off later...
One data point stunned us: the rise of the 30-minute meeting... We had 22% more meetings of 30 minutes or less and 11% fewer meetings of more than one hour. This was surprising. In recent decades meetings have generally gotten longer, and research shows it has had a negative effect on employee productivity and happiness. Our flip to shorter meetings had come about organically, not from any management mandate. And according to our sentiment survey, the change was appreciated. Suddenly the specter of an hour-long meeting seemed to demand more scrutiny. (Does it really need to be that long? Is this a wise use of everyone's time?) This is one of the many ways that the remote-work period could have a long-term impact...
Our colleagues in China, who have already moved large parts of their workforces back to the office, are seeing that some of the habits that emerged during remote work, such as more reliance on instant messaging and longer workweeks, have continued even after the return.
Other interesting observations:
"Four months ago we realized that our company, like so many others, was undergoing an immediate and unplanned shift to remote work..."
"So, we launched an experiment to measure how the work patterns across our group were changing, using Workplace Analytics, which measures everyday work in Microsoft 365, and anonymous sentiment surveys..." [O]ur research revealed that workdays were lengthening — people were "on" four more hours a week, on average. Our survey shed light on one possible explanation: Employees said they were carving out pockets of personal time to care for children, grab some fresh air or exercise, and walk the dog. To accommodate these breaks, people were likely signing into work earlier and signing off later...
One data point stunned us: the rise of the 30-minute meeting... We had 22% more meetings of 30 minutes or less and 11% fewer meetings of more than one hour. This was surprising. In recent decades meetings have generally gotten longer, and research shows it has had a negative effect on employee productivity and happiness. Our flip to shorter meetings had come about organically, not from any management mandate. And according to our sentiment survey, the change was appreciated. Suddenly the specter of an hour-long meeting seemed to demand more scrutiny. (Does it really need to be that long? Is this a wise use of everyone's time?) This is one of the many ways that the remote-work period could have a long-term impact...
Our colleagues in China, who have already moved large parts of their workforces back to the office, are seeing that some of the habits that emerged during remote work, such as more reliance on instant messaging and longer workweeks, have continued even after the return.
Other interesting observations:
- "Employees who had well-protected weekends suddenly have blurrier work-life boundaries. The 10% of employees who previously had the least weekend collaboration — less than 10 minutes — saw that amount triple within a month."
- "Responding to the lack of natural touchpoints — grabbing lunch in the cafeteria, popping by someone's desk — employees found new ones. In our group, these ranged from group lunches to happy hours with themes such as 'pajama day' and 'meet my pet.' Overall, social meetings went up 10% in a month."
- "Multitasking during meetings didn't spike even though people weren't in the same room..."
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It looks like a penis, only smaller.
How to work, without actualy working (Score:5, Insightful)
Do it all the time, and it does not matter whether I am in the office or not. I can also be actually working while it looks like I am not working.
Welcome to analytics... where someone is definitely going to lose their jobs because the didn't game the same.
Businesses make up the games and humans adapt to them... no amount of this weak ass AI and analytics will ever get businesses what they want... and that is a highly productive workforce that works for literal fucking peanuts.
The only result will be people become depressed and jumping off factory building... kinda like china. This will become just another way to oppress people. Businesses need to accept that people are not capable of actually working as long as they think they can. More than enough studies have clued us in.
Re:How to work, without actualy working (Score:5, Informative)
My first coding job was for a defense contractor. About three months after I started, the boss invited me into his office and told me I was getting a raise for being the most productive person on the team.
This made no sense to me since we didn't have Git, CVS, or even RCS, so there was no accurate way to know who was doing what.
I eventually figured out that it was how I filled out my timesheet. I split 100% of my time up between the projects I was working on. But my co-workers assigned overhead work and time sitting in meetings to "admin".
So all of my time was billable to the taxpayer, while theirs was not.
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Wow, did they eventually figure out what was going on?
I am sure the boss knew. But he couldn't just come right out and tell everyone to bill admin time to clients. So the raise was his way of telling me to keep doing it (wink wink) but with plausible deniability, just in case the company was ever audited.
My co-workers never knew. I didn't tell them I got the raise and I certainly didn't tell them why.
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This isn't always a bad thing. I asked this question recently as our timesheet has fields for "travel" in them. I used to bill 4 hours a week for travel to get to a site until my boss said, no you don't "travel". "Travel" is a pointless activity that no one in the department does, and with justification when we are travelling to or from a site we are doing it for a reason and as such book it to the project itself.
The same applies to all our overhead activities. Admin meetings get booked to projects on the b
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When I worked consulting, I would billed Admin time to the customers. As long as the Admin work was centered around the customer.
One time I was trapped in my customers elevator for an hour. I billed them for that time.
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If you're hired to work on one specific project, then all of your time in the office is in support of that project. It seems pretty simple.
It seems simple, but it isn't.
If there's a meeting, it's probably in support of that project (other than annual sexual harassment trainings or whatever -- but even that might be for that one project if you are only working on that project all year).
If a meeting is a project meeting, you can bill the client for that time because it's work on their project. But if the meeting is a general meeting, then you can't bill any client for that time. All the interpersonal shit that goes on in the office, some of which generates meetings, is just "wasted" from the standpoint of billing.
(other than annual sexual harassment trainings or whatever -- but even that might be for that one project if you are only working on that project all year).
If the customer for some reason required it, and that reason isn't based on misconduct, then you can bill them. Otherwise the business has to eat it.
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I mostly agree with you, but there's a gray area: On-call support.
On one hand, yes, you should fill the dead time with something useful to the project.
On the other hand, your actual job is to pick up the phone on the first or second ring and be able to provide instant support.
I often find myself getting sucked into other stuff the short busy time I have each year where I need to be responsive to clients. Transitioning from that to a support call isn't instant, and getting browsers back to the right place, l
Re:How to work, without actualy working (Score:5, Informative)
Having previously worked for a defense contractor, what gets quite annoying is that you effectively have two jobs as part of your employment. There's the "job" of working on your assigned project, and there's the "job" of being an employee of your company. This distinction becomes even clearer when your project has its own facility and management structure that might be independent of the company you get your paycheck from.
At times, its felt like you needed to put in 50 hours of work a week just to get 40 "on the timecard". Doubly so if you're one of those uptight folks with a stick up their ass about timecards. This is probably why I rarely volunteered for anything that didn't count against putting in my hours, especially when my main project wasn't engaging enough to actually pass the time.
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I eventually figured out that it was how I filled out my timesheet. I split 100% of my time up between the projects I was working on. But my co-workers assigned overhead work and time sitting in meetings to "admin".
I've had the same in reverse. I once sat in a team meeting where it was discussed which percentage of work time billable to customers would be a reasonable target. One guy said "100%", and went on to claim that he reaches that goal constantly.
I was new to the team, so I waited if someone else spoke up, but nobody did. I wonder to this day which customer he billed that team meeting to.
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I look at it as business expenses and those all get passed on to the customer. Businesses aren't charity. You can realistically charge anything you want for your services and as long as the client is ultimately satisfied with the work produced in the time it was produced for the price, then all is good.
No reason to itemize the bill.
P.S. Obviously you have to charge competitive prices but the rest is business efficiencies to maximize profits.
P.S.S. Put another way, the only way the business exist is to provi
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I look at it as business expenses and those all get passed on to the customer.
Yes, but to charge an internal meeting to one customer and not to the others is wrong.
Those meetings should be included in the overhead calculations that determine the rates you charge. Same for things like trainings, sick leave, paid days off, etc.
I don't say those costs shouldn't be taken into account. I say that billing those hours to a specific customer is wrong. I'll go a step further: I'd consider it fraud.
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To be fair at the time you were the most productive person on the team. As the others were put on unproductive tasks.
As I have advanced in my career, my productivity has doped. I am no longer to push out code as fast as I use to be. This is multi-fold explanation.
1. I have to be prepared for the meetings
2. I am in a lot more meetings.
3. After the meetings I need to build an action plan
4. I have to relay the action plan to the Lower Level Members evs to do the actual work.
5. I handle a few High Visibility
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That's an ethical problem, and your boss should have given you guidance about how to fill that sheet out.
From my days at a defense contractor; (Lockheed Martin), we had a yearly training video (15 minutes?) detailing how to properly fill out timesheets and bill time, and the practice of billing non-project time to projects, while seemingly rather benign, is actually very illegal. (AFAIK; the bigger problem is: when the company does not spell this out in their policy, or take an effort to make sure employee
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When trying to explain to Execs how to use Data Analytics. I always try to explain to them, it is the beginning of the decision making process not the end.
If the Execs use the Data as their core decision making criteria. People will just hack the system. Eg the old times they use to judge coding by lines of code, so the coders will write and copy and paste a lot of code, just to keep their numbers up. Telephone Support Staff monitored on response time to answer the phone, will pick up the phone and put the
So F'ing what? (Score:1)
So, 10% spent 30 minutes a weekend responding to emails. Cry me a river. I've worked from home in the tech industry for 30+ years. An extra 20 minutes during a week end is mice nuts, considering no one on salary can expect to work less than (the ostensibly standard) 40 hours, + 30 minutes a week.
I'd be happy to go back in time to trade a few 60-80 hour weeks
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I'd be happy to go back in time to trade a few 60-80 hour weeks for some 40.5 hour ones.
Yeah most people probably would but that's not an option in most cases really.
The issue isn't so much the 30 minutes, it's just having to think about work at all. I don't hate my job but I'm glad to shut it all down on Friday and have two days I don't need to worry about any of this stuff. Same reason our company recommends take at least two weeks off in a row during the year.
This sounds exactly like what I am seeing (Score:5, Interesting)
All of these data points agree with what I have seen also since the pandemic started.
The funny thing is though, I was working at home full time for years before the pandemic...
But somehow, all of the time spent with fewer options to go anywhere, has I think resulted in people simply working more - probably because partially bored. As a result even those who would not normally work extra, end up working some extra...
The only thing that was the same before is short meetings, one thing I really I really like about working at home is that most meetings are way more to the point, everyone has stuff to do either around the home or for work so that contributes to meetings not lingering on.
I also agree that part of the longer hours are people taking care of home things mid-day - just way nicer to do that stuff during the day even if you end up working a bit longer.
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Remote workers complain about work time bleeding into their off time, but don't forget about all those errand trips and dog walks you take during office hours. And as to that last point in the summary, how exactly can they tell whether people are "multitasking" during meetings? Remote meetings tend to elicit advanced multitasking creativity.
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I'm able to call in to most meetings, which allows multitasking. Doing email while the meeting doesn't involve me, or whatever, but it's also a great help to be able to look stuff up during a meeting and have immediate answers.
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And as to that last point in the summary, how exactly can they tell whether people are "multitasking" during meetings? Remote meetings tend to elicit advanced multitasking creativity.
It's Microsoft so chances are all their employees are on Windows 10. Windows 10 is designed to be spyware, Microsoft absolutely has the ability to pull up what's running on an employee's machine and do things like monitor active processes for analytical purposes.
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But somehow, all of the time spent with fewer options to go anywhere, has I think resulted in people simply working more - probably because partially bored. As a result even those who would not normally work extra, end up working some extra...
I think it has more to do with mutual gain in all honesty. When you don't blow 1-3 hours a day sitting in a car driving, don't have to spend over an hour prepping to look pretty, and it's literally a computer sitting next to your main workstation that dings when someone wants something because you're already a computer nerd sitting at a machine - shortening the response time to a few minutes at worst, and it doesn't feel like work because you're in an isolated and comfortable environment, it's trivial to s
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I agree with your points, I think that is a lot of what is going on. Especially the points about lunch, forget commutes even... how much time is wasted on lunch overhead at offices? A ton.
No Surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
The majority of people I work with are working longer and harder.
I don’t know if this a pace we can keep.
Everyone is going overboard and the project deadlines are even worse. Our company released a survey and said productivity was up 11%. That combined with not housing workers is rather insane.
I also believe those numbers are quite under reporting.
Do you know why!
Burn out is so damned high we are extending weekend breaks now.
No one knows when to stop and management doesn’t ask for a hard stop.
Eventually the pendulum will swing back, but my feelers say many people are killing them selves at the moment.
Re:No Surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
The majority of people I work with are working longer and harder.
But are they working as consistently? I mean my boss made that comment too. "You seem to be online far longer and delivering far more".
Yeah I deliver a shitload now that I'm not interrupted by someone wanting a chat at the coffee machine every 5 minutes.
And I will look like I worked a 10 hour day today, to say nothing of the coffee I'm drinking now chatting to you after spending the past 1.5hours cooking and eating lunch and then doing the dishes.
On the flip side I feel less burnt out than before. I don't have an hour of traffic to deal with each day. I can listen to relaxing music at my desk, and the other day when I slept poorly I took a midday nap.
This is work life balance, better productivity and less effort.
I'm sorry to hear that it's not working as well for you, is that because of your employer, the nature of your work, or something preventing you from optimising the situation?
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My management decided the best course of action was for us to spend copious amounts of time documenting our work instead of working. We need to create daily work logs, then summarize them weekly, then have a meeting with a supervisor who reviews the weekly summary, then they have meetings with their supervisor to share with them their review of the weekly summary of our daily work logs.
Apparently they're a little irritated that I include my time complying with their bullshit in my documentation, but hey, it
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My management decided the best course of action was for us to spend copious amounts of time documenting our work instead of working.
Oh fuck don't I know that. Well similar thing anyway. We have an internal accounting system since we're paid internally by the sites we support. That system used to be: log roughly what percentage of work you do for each site, morphed into log everything you do in 6 minute increments. When all 200 of us started booking an hour every day into overhead just to fill out the system they rolled it back to 1h buckets of activities.
And no, 1h isn't a happy medium, the original percentage was, but then the sites wh
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My big realization this past week—and I know if you've been a contractor for years, or working from home prior to this it isn't news, just let me have this—is that I don't have to work 5 days a week, I need work 40 HOURS a week. If I'm having a bad day, it's better for both me and my employer if I just fuck off and take a nap or ride my bike or play some video games and come back when I can really concentrate. The problem with working in an office is that you're in the panopticon and you have to
And productivity? (Score:3)
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I suspect 2 of them are starting to get drunk before it is time to get off work.
Working for you they gotta ease the pain somehow.
Re:Wrong sample (Score:5, Insightful)
I have workers working remotely. I'm getting termination papers ready for 10 of them (50% of those working remotely). These are hourly workers. I can tell from actively logs how much they are working.
You really should be looking into management practices here, because this has not been the norm in my experience. My company is about 75% client services and operations, where pay hovers around $40k for most of them. Average age in these departments is under 30 and I would guess half of them are at most a few years out of college. Their productivity has held steady, even considering many of them are dealing with tough family situations after the schools and day cares have shut down. While managers in these departments have to deal with a lower level of professionalism than I have to with $100k+ software engineers (like people calling in sick primarily on Mon/Fri) it hasn't been any different now than when they were in the office.
A company with half of their employees being as disengaged as you describe is a big red flag for your management team, not just your employees.
Re:Wrong sample (Score:4, Insightful)
You have written a long post about what your employees are and particularly are not doing.
You're their boss or their manager, I can't really tell. What do YOU do to keep them on task? Other than preparing their termination papers, I mean.
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That's the whole thing. People should be fucking adults and work. I shouldn't have to stand over your shoulder and beat you with a stick to do your job.
That I hear professionals with real jobs (I work in retail, its in my post history) put up with the same stupid stuff that I see at my work is quite surprising. One of my customers is a nurse and we talk fairly regularly. I vented about irresponsible coworkers once and she said they do the same thing at her work. She's a nurse for crying out loud and she say
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That was a long way for the GP to say that they aren't a manager, don't manage, and can't be asked to even try managing,
If I disappeared for a few hours in the middle of the day, my boss would be calling to see if I was OK. That's what successful managers do - they build relationships with their staff and look out for them.
It sounds to me that the job (and management or lack thereof) is so miserable that they don't even want to do it at home. It is pretty trivial to at least keep up the appearance of workin
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I see about a 10% overall productivity drop across our company and less professional development/mentoring being done. I might want to dig into individual statistics, which I had been avoiding doing because it isn’t “fair.” It might shed some light on what we are doing wrong.
On the non-exempt staff, I have seen more hours charged for less work done, and we fired a couple junior engineers that didn’t seem to be able to adapt to remote work. (One actually came into the office every
Breaking news! (Score:1)
A bunch of overgrown children finally learn the lesson I had been trying to teach them since I was actually a child myself.
Meetings (Score:3)
I worked for a Fortune 500 computer company. We had way too many meetings and they lasted too long. First, we had to "delay the start of the meetings" about 15 minutes to "wait for late arrivals". Gimmee a break! Those who cared to be on time had to wait for those who didn't care to be on time?
Then we dicked around at the "agenda". For about 20 or 30 minutes, we sometimes talked about something of substance but not until we heard a "summary" of the previous meeting.
Re:Meetings (Score:5, Insightful)
Many years ago I had a manager who was previously a senior army officer. He ran the best meetings ever. They had a scheduled start and stop time. The first few meetings ended up with the "wafflers" (who loved the sound of their own voices) being cut short at the end.
"But I haven't finished!!"
"You knew when the meeting was and what it was about. If we cannot run a simple meeting on time we cannot run a project to schedule. Learn to keep to the point and be concise!"
By the third project meeting, we were all working better and the amount of non productive, self aggrandisement diminished spectacularly.
He also had the guts to stand up to CxO level latecomers who wanted a 'quick recap' when they strolled in late.
"No. There are a dozen people here who were courteous enough to arrive on time. A 5 minute recap means that we'll waste a whole man hour!"
Sounds like a bit of a despot but in reality he was one of the best people to work for - a good buffer between those who did things and those who "managed" (for a very loose sense of the word managed).
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Loved your anecdote, I wish more people would do the same! Reminded me of a story
A previous boss of mine retired from the Air born rangers as a Captain and has a lot of cool stories, one about meetings.
There was a meeting he was playing host for between a general and a lot of other people. He set up the meeting rooms, got it all scheduled, got power points from ever presenter into a single slide deck, etc. It was a day long event.
He said the general arrived and told him, these people all like to hear the
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I have meetings with a guy who is like this as well. No table talk allowed, no side conversations, and most people won't pull out a phone to do something else because it moves so fast you'll miss what you're there for.
If a conversation goes on too long, he adds it to the next meeting agenda and moves on, or schedules a specific meeting to discuss.
It's just fantastic to have an hour meeting scheduled with him and 6-10 other people, and to have it over in something like 23 minutes. I think our record was 7 mi
30 minute meetings (Score:4, Interesting)
My department has seen this increase in 30 meetings, but it doesn't seem to be that hour long meetings are being shortened. Since no one can just drop by their coworkers' desks, our calendars are being filled with numerous 30 minute touch points. Just checking my calendar last week I had three 30 minute meetings in a row last Thursday morning titled "Touch Base" (one without the space) created by three different coworkers. Without taking too much time to go through my calendar, my guess is I am in a couple 30 minute meetings per day which would have not even been noticed by my calendar pre-Covid because they would have been someone dropping by my office, or my dropping by their office / cubicle.
This is still mostly a good thing because it has probably reduced unscheduled interruptions, but it does lead me to wonder if the increase in shorter meetings really means meetings are getting shorter instead of just having an increase in meetings overall. Since the increase in 30 minute meetings mentioned in the article was more than the decrease in hour long meetings it does seem Microsoft is seeing similar behavior that I have been seeing at my company.
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Our company was heavily remote/virtual to begin with, especially outside of a few big development hubs at the HQ and India. But especially it seems our department, many people, even if located in offices, mostly work with people located in other places. E.g. my team is 13 people in 6 different locations, and the 30-minute meeting has been the default since forever.
I think one reason is that it's the default Outlook meeting duration. But certainly 15 minutes is too short for anything but a quick question tha
Pandemic has changed everything (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing that seems glossed over is the impact of everything else in the employees' lives basically being shut down. Sure, they're spending more time working... There really isn't anything else they can do!
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Well they're also wasting less time commuting, and if they have kids (who aren't at school because schools are closed) they also have to look after them.
Well.... (Score:1)
When you're talkin' you ain't workin'
Lockdown (Score:5, Insightful)
Lockdown taught me:
- I can do 99% of my job remotely, as I always knew, I was just never allowed to.
- Meetings are a waste of time. Make it an email, at least then there's a searchable textual record and what's said is clear and unambiguous. Meeting minutes are not sufficient, and pretty much a waste of time, and even a transcription doesn't capture the outcome sufficiently succinctly. What was the outcome of the agenda item "Do we do X"? Do we do X or not? Who's responsible for doing X? I want answers, not rhetoric.
- There are a number of people who do a job that simply isn't required.
- 90% of our staff are under-trained in the basics of IT... for instance, being able to go to a link in an email, plug in / turn on their mic/camera, operate on a shared document, share a document, use another device to their usual one, connect to our services (all web-based!) from home, etc.
- Many workplaces operate better when empty, and many people work better from home. We could cut commuting in half by just letting people work from home, under the same contract they already have.
- Telephones are largely pointless except as a customer contact point. We function just as well without them.
- Everything should be web-based, just to stop dealing with all the shite of cross-platform incompatibilities. It's become very clear that the web is capable of everything you need do, just that some services on it are written like shite.
- Businesses are in no way ready for an expected event, in terms of suitable insurance, adequate funds, or processes. Literally the number of businesses that would be in the bin if it wasn't for government bailouts and furlough schemes... they don't seem to have set aside *anything* for contingency.
Lockdown should change the way we work forever. But I know in 2 years time, it'll all be forgotten about and we'll go back to the old ways.
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90% of our staff are under-trained in the basics of IT... for instance, being able to go to a link in an email, plug in / turn on their mic/camera, operate on a shared document, share a document, use another device to their usual one, connect to our services (all web-based!) from home, etc.
This is one of the things about the modern workplace that really steams my clams. Pretty much every job "requires" these skills, but then employees who lack them aren't disqualified or trained. They just push that off onto the IT department, who has to send someone to do their job for them. Meanwhile, IT jobs commonly require experience that doesn't even exist. IT always seems to get the short end.
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...they don't seem to have set aside *anything* for contingency
Well why would they? Not only will they get a bailout, but money set aside to rot in an emergency fund is money that can't be distributed to the executive team in fat bonuses and golden parachutes.
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For many businesses, tax issues limit how much contingency money they accrue. We have built up over the course of three years 6-8 weeks of expenses in contingency money. (The PPP money that we retain should add a month to that.) Most of our contingency is actually in the form of our line of credit, which is good for about four months of operation.
With COVID, I was unwilling to use the LOC; too much risk to actually being able to repay they money. Without the PPP, we would have cut pay and laid off people
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- Meetings are a waste of time. Make it an email, at least then there's a searchable textual record and what's said is clear and unambiguous. Meeting minutes are not sufficient, and pretty much a waste of time, and even a transcription doesn't capture the outcome sufficiently succinctly. What was the outcome of the agenda item "Do we do X"? Do we do X or not? Who's responsible for doing X? I want answers, not rhetoric.
There's a fair bit to unpack in here.
First, meetings aren't a waste of time if they're run properly. That's tied into your second part - recording outcomes.
I noted above that I often have meetings with someone who is a drill sergeant-like project manager. He has an agenda with allotted times for each topic, and the agenda is based on status updates and questions to resolve. The agenda is in the project management folder with the date in the name, and it's got spaces in it for the outcomes to be written in a
What happened? (Score:2)
I imagine that they had to wait an hour because the system decided to update, and then crashed anyway when they tried to get it to handle anything more than a few gigs of data. Then Teams would have inexplicably refused to share the screen for a while before allowing it but hidden all the OneNote files and refused to use both the camera AND the external mike at the same time. Everyone would have got frustrated and had a longer lunch break to make up for it.
Fewer and shorter meetings - yes! (Score:2)
Having fewer and shorter meetings is a definite feature. Possibly, when people have physically moved to a room, there is more of an investment: we are all here now, let's find more stuff to talk about. Even if that "stuff" is off-topic and irrelevant to many of the participants. With online meetings, people want to get back to work, which is only a mouse-click away. People can also come and go more easily.
One comment mentions that lots of co-workers want to have "short" (30 minute) meetings to stay in touch
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One comment mentions that lots of co-workers want to have "short" (30 minute) meetings to stay in touch. Seems to me that's likely a waste of time. Short updates and questions are best handled by mail.
Anything that involves only two participants is probably best handled in email. Then there's a record of what you discussed, and the principals both have access to it in its entirety by default.
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Anything that involves only two participants is probably best handled in email. Then there's a record of what you discussed, and the principals both have access to it in its entirety by default.
Many times you're right, but not always. I have a number of 2 person meetings from 5-30m that would be a nightmare via email and make everyone pull their hair out. A design session is done far faster by talking it thru, then an email to summarize and document the decisions. Working thru a tricky customer problem by email would make me want to commit hari-kari (we use chat regularly but sometimes a voice conversation is the correct medium). But other times, yeah, I wish people would just email me.
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Nope nope nope (Score:2)
No way I'm ever going back into an office. Nope nope nope.
I've told my manager, "Let me know when I have to come back in and I'll send you my two weeks notice."
It ain't happenin', and my manager AND his manager both feel exactly the same way about not coming back, although they have to be a little more circumspect about it than I do.
The paradigm is shifting, and all it took was a pandemic that sickened 15,000,000 people, killing 600,000 of them.
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The paradigm is shifting, and all it took was a pandemic that sickened 15,000,000 people, killing 600,000 of them.
Blood for the Blood God. Skulls for the Skull Throne.
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It will be interesting to see how it plays out. The only reason we didn’t go remote before was the challenges of mentoring. Not sure how we would onboard a junior engineer now.
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It will be interesting to see how it plays out. The only reason we didn’t go remote before was the challenges of mentoring. Not sure how we would onboard a junior engineer now.
New times, new challenges. Adapt or perish.
Or -and hear me out- the federal government could pull its head out of its ass and start testing everyone everywhere so we can try and get a handle on this shit.
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It is easy for us to adapt... we just focus on hiring experienced people. I do see a lot of companies going big on internships— that was never our model (too small to recruit the talent via that avenue). I am just concerned that opportunities for college grads will suffer for a while. We seem to keep screwing over the young’uns.
q.e.d. (Score:1)