Microsoft researched what made employees happy

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-researched-what-made-employees-truly-happy-one-result-was-startling/

by alok-g • 4 years ago

201 171 4 years ago

bawolff• 4 years ago

Is this really all that surprising? In school everyone always complains about group work sucking.

haswell4• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

yodsanklai• 4 years ago

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...

ergocoder2• 4 years ago

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.

closeparen4• 4 years ago

In my corporate software projects, a particular engineer owns the outcome. They have lines of communication with the managers of other assigned engineers, and considerable pull in their performance reviews and promotions.

The floor is that someone cares and the others will make what could be mistaken for a good-faith effort, which is lightyears better than a school project.

ergocoder2• 4 years ago

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.

lucb1e4• 4 years ago

School group work doesn't have to be bad.

We had a semester-spanning 6-person group project during my software engineering study. Long story short, by the fourth and final semester project, I cooked up a recipe that solved some of these problems. I had re-invented having a manager.

Because I was good at coding, and by this semester this was known so people trusted me to not just idle around, I could propose on day 1 that I'd just be the 'manager' with no assigned share of the work. I'd be the solver of problems as they popped up, the person that goes around making sure nobody is stuck and everyone can work. And also that everyone does work, which turned out to be important because the notorious Joel was assigned to us and, indeed, he barely showed up and didn't do work at home either. After some conversations, going back-and-forth, and spending time on this, I managed to convince the teachers to officially kick him out after about three weeks (into a ~half-year semester). The rest of the semester, I spent most of the project time helping with problems that others were stuck on. (Not that I was a superbly amazing coder, but two know more than one and this really helped our pace.)

It's a real shame that was the last semester of that study because the setup worked like a dream. Two of the group members weren't so strong in coding and we were one person down with roughly the same workload (though for this, too, I had some time to spend on 'lobbying', and we got a slight reduction), but by juggling tasks correctly and sitting together when necessary, it ended up working really well. One guy in particular I remember wasn't too good at the job, but he would always work hard and, once unstuck, make good progress for the day. Great guy, always in good spirits, fun to work with and I'd hire him today if he applied despite the mediocre skills. I think knowing his strengths and weaknesses (knowing what tasks to assign and do some pair programming) is all you need to have a great colleague in him that cheers up five others and is still a net-positive in the amount of work done.

closeparen4• 4 years ago

It is perhaps surprising to a management class that believes collaboration is the ultimate good in all circumstances and you can never have enough of it.

just_boost_it• 4 years ago

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.

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

This.

Things aren't going so well at work? Work harder. Work more. Then burn out and quit, of course.

haswell4• 4 years ago

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.

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

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.

haswell4• 4 years ago

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.

diarrhea• 4 years ago

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.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

"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.

matwood2• 4 years ago

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.

baxtr3• 4 years ago

infantilizing

Curious to understand this better. Could you give some examples?

ehnto• 4 years ago

That doesn't really capture the nuance either. Autonomy can be isolating too. Collaboration is something your team needs to at least enable if not explicitly foster.

smugma• 4 years ago

The article links to another article by the same author about a restaurant and its secret to success in keeping staff 20-30+ years being autonomy:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-restaurant-owner-gives-tech-...

mejutoco• 4 years ago

I believe this is key. Reading texts about early industrial revolution there is this concept of alienation, and I think it can be applied to a lot of jobs pretty well.

Having a stake in the result and freedom to choose which exact job to perform at a time to accomplish the result, as opposed to a top-down approach seems to be more satisfying as an employee.

At the time of industrial revolution the comparison is often between farming (where the farmer works hard but has some autonomy) and the factory, with more specialized and repetitive tasks.

mrexroad• 4 years ago

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• 4 years ago

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.

skirmish• 4 years ago

I work in a FAANG, and performance reviews are all about component ownership and getting other people to work for you (leadership!) but never ever about helping somebody else. What collaboration can we talk about when it is so explicitly discouraged by management?

more_corn• 4 years ago

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.

closeparen4• 4 years ago

Collaboration implies underlying work. Something the collaborators are doing together in addition to talking. The vast majority of the talking in my corporate environment either has no such referent, or is a one-sided accounting of the work you are doing up to someone whose job it is to allocate your time or supervise that work, not to personally advance it with you.

A good litmus test is what someone's calendar looks like. People who are in wall to wall meetings every day (managers, Staff+ engineers, TPMs, etc) can never, properly speaking, collaborate, since there is no time where they could be doing the work being collaborated on. They have coordination and supervisory functions that may be valuable, even indispensable, but what they do is different from collaboration.

agumonkey• 4 years ago

a good collaboration aims at making parties very independent at some points. because you all shared the same outlook and plan and can now go on your own way until the next mental rendez-vous.

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

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.

underwater• 4 years ago

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.

tpmx• 4 years ago

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.

indiantinker• 4 years ago

… and made Teams

tester756• 4 years ago

Teams are weird as fuck.

They're relatively decent, but their chat is so shitty that student could rewrite it in a week and it'd work better,

simply because s/he wouldnt come with an idea of pasting text's font too.

I haven't found it to be useful over like two years of using Teams, but it creates problems very often.

Discord's chat is times better and more reliable because on Teams sometimes you cannot escape from `` block

clumsysmurf• 4 years ago

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.

spaetzleesser2• 4 years ago

For people who don't know SAFe, here is the diagram: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/deli...

brikil• 4 years ago

That reminds me of the cell biology diagrams from grade school.

pixelrevision• 4 years ago

Lol they should just change the name of “agile” to “brittle” and go with the slogan of “processes over people”

semicolon_storm• 4 years ago

Amazing how they can pack so much into a diagram yet still show absolutely nothing of value for understanding SAFe.

zbird• 4 years ago

And to think that there are people who get paid for this.

moistly• 4 years ago

How does upper management look at that and not immediately say “Hey, waittasec, this is clearly bullshit!”?

wsostt• 4 years ago

How do you propose stopping estimates from becoming commitments? Genuinely asking because I struggle to not do this as a manager.

mkoubaa• 4 years ago

It starts understanding the meaning of the word "estimate" in the English language.

dd444fgdfg• 4 years ago

Imagine a timeline from left to right. On the left is where there's the least knowledge about the project, and on the right the most (when the project is done). Estimates are made at the far left, when the developers know the least. So as you move along the timeline and more knowledge is discovered, you need to reset expectations frequently.

CSMastermind2• 4 years ago

Part of the answer is don't give estimates when you can help it. I've had a lot of success just having a roadmap and telling people, this is what we're working on now, this is what's next in the pipeline, and here's where you can track our progress for yourself.

Another tip I have is to constrain estimates to board timescales like Q3 or H2 when you are able to (there are certain business scenarios that do require estimates).

A similar thing you can do is give your "estimate" not in the form of a date but in the form of ambiguity and scale. Or better yet just state the factors that would go into giving an estimate without offering one.

Lastly I'd suggest just not shying away from commitments but making them about effort not outcome. "I have 3 developers working on this full time and it will be their sole focus until we ship. Nothing you say or do is going to get this feature launched any faster than it's going to be now."

closeparen4• 4 years ago

I think the demand for timeline commitments comes from a worry that otherwise the request will never be done, or that it will languish in the queue behind less important things.

Where possible, I try to frame my relationship with my stakeholders in terms of their priority order for their requests of me, and to demonstrate consistent progress on that stream. Thus, we have an understanding that the things they ask for do get done, and they want a particular one done sooner, they can move it up in the stack rank.

doctor_eval2• 4 years ago

You could start by not doing estimates? Instead, take an educated guess of the complexity of the problem and then ask how long the enterprise is willing to commit to implementing it.

Estimates are just a way of delegating responsibility downwards. The organisation is rarely asked to estimate how much a feature is worth, despite this being probably the more important factor.

grayclhn• 4 years ago

If you need to actually make meaningful commitments, you need to track how long stories/projects/whatever actually take, and use the data to make a prediction. Subjective “estimates” can be an input, but they’re basically guesses.

ohthehugemanate3• 4 years ago

If you run estimates with an abstracted unit of measurement ("ideal developer days," "story points," "cups of coffee," "tshirt sizes" etc), then you get three important super powers for this.

1) Your long range timelines come with a specific, quantified error margin. It's no longer "we'll be done by December 15," it's "we'll be done by December 15 with a 95% confidence, or January 15 with a 99% confidence." (Not to mention, those CIs are real and so your estimates have a very high degree of certainty)

2) your estimates have explicit conditions built in, most notably "based on our current understanding of the work." The door is already explicitly open to respond to feature requests, changes, or just new information with an estimate change.

3) Your estimate adjusts very quickly, so the conversations from #2 are also clear.

You can make commitments under those circumstances a lot more easily.

mch82• 4 years ago

One thing to do is to show your estimates as distribution curves instead of averages. It can be helpful to choose estimates from a Fibonacci scale. Set the pessimistic estimate high enough that it’ll rarely be missed.

Edit: I change the units based on how far out I’m estimating. If I’m estimating the next six weeks, I’ll use hours. If I’m estimating a roadmap I’ll use weeks. The numbers get large quickly (1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144). It’s rare you’ll find yourself planning farther than 2 years out (104 weeks).

As you work, keep updating the estimated time remaining. If the initial estimate for a task is an 8 (between 5 and 13), keep reporting 8 until your estimate falls below 8, then report 5 (between 3 and 8). Avoid reporting intermediate values like 7.

bdavisx• 4 years ago

LOL, safe uses an "agile release train", because everyone knows how agile trains are. They can stop on a dime and move in any direction, the very definition of agility.

jpswade• 4 years ago

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.

Madmallard• 4 years ago

I don't know if I would trust a scummy anti-customer company to know what works best for people.

Groxx4• 4 years ago

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+.

caminante3• 4 years ago

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

Groxx4• 4 years ago

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...)

andsoitis• 4 years ago

Collaboration is a means to an end, not a goal in itself.

greenthrow• 4 years ago

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.

thenerdhead• 4 years ago

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.

anonymoushn3• 4 years ago

What does "five fewer hours in their workweek span" mean?

lucb1e4• 4 years ago

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.

drewcoo2• 4 years ago

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!

SMAAART• 4 years ago

TL;DR: for Microsoft, it's "to be energized and empowered to do meaningful work."

sedatk• 4 years ago

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.

cosmiccatnap• 4 years ago

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.

pjmorris• 4 years ago

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."

lucb1e4• 4 years ago

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.

dredmorbius• 4 years ago

It would be awfully useful to know what the baseline from which the 5 & 17 fewer reductions are based on.

markmark• 4 years ago

So if they are looking at calendar data does "five fewer collaboration hours" only mean five fewer hours in meetings?

Some of the funnest and most productive work I've done was a project with three others where we were all in a single office. We were completely ad-hoc with working alone, pair programming, having quick design discussions, whatever was needed at the time. There was an enormous amount of collaboration (and an enormous amount of deep, solo work), but there were no meetings in my calendar.

Meanwhile in pretty much any job I have had my happiness has gone down the more full my official calendar becomes.

alexklarjr• 4 years ago

Microsoft outlook and spreadsheets is what every employer crave obvsly

givemeethekeys• 4 years ago

I hope they mention money, because sufficient amount of money will make me very happy.

shmerl• 4 years ago

Reminds me this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh6Nh8w6f8

spywaregorilla• 4 years ago

I've done some work adjacent to this. Not this project, not with microsoft. By internal network size they probably mean people you have a lot of traffic with in meetings and emails. Presuming they're competent they probably only look at interactions with small groups or 1:1. By collaboration they just mean meetings with coworkers.

Without having read in detail, its likely just drawing correlations between communication metrics and survey results.

Lots of companies are paralyzed big their meeting culture. It's not really a surprise to anyone. But the data can paint it a bit more clearly if people don't know quite how to articulate the problem. It's pretty much always the same in a large org.

gerdesj• 4 years ago

What this article is dancing around is: Our employees are doing fuck all or just enough and we have managed to create an environment that actively encourages this behaviour.

You'd (not) be surprised how often this happens. $BIG_TECH hire people clever enough to look after themselves as well as their employer.

Now, what makes people happy? This doesn't:

https://hbr.org/2022/06/why-microsoft-measures-employee-thri...?

daxfohl• 4 years ago

Yeah as long as I have a bunch of grunt work, unnecessary fire drills, canceled projects, 2 AM pages, and low pay I'm a happy camper.

outside1234• 4 years ago

They should research paying people at market next vs. not (current state) to see what the difference is :)

adenozine• 4 years ago

Is it not zoom calls and pizza parties? /s

partomniscient• 4 years ago

Pity it seems like they haven't researched what makes customers happy...

water8• 4 years ago

If people said their real feelings the results wluld be about 99.9% sex

badrabbit• 4 years ago

What a joke. Anything but compensation. For the right salary I would be happy with all this.

donatj• 4 years ago

By combining sentiment data with de-identified calendar and email metadata

For some reason the idea of my company using my email and calendar for stats like this bugs me a lot more than the idea of just reading them directly.

Microsoft researched what made employees happy

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