Microsoft 365 Corporate VP on Hybrid Work Disruption

have back with us, Jared's Pitaro. He's corporate vice president of Microsoft uh and he joins us on the phone in Redmond, Washington. Jared, great to have you back. How are you. I'm doing great, Thanks for having me. Carol. Well, well, it's great to have you here. And we don't want to give away all the data points, but we do want to kind of cue up our event on Wednesday, but tell us about the data collection. Remind our audience, you know who you're talking to, what types of questions

and information you were after. Of course, so when all of this started to happen about a year ago, you know, one of the things I knew for certain, probably the only thing I knew for certain, is that we just needed to get some data, like we needed to become students of the moment. So over the course of this last twelve month period, we have periodically been taking samples as we go out and find out across the world

how people are doing. This last report that we published is a survey of over thirty thousand people in thirty one countries. It's all sorts of different mixes of roles and industries, so you see everyone from typical knowledge worker that you might see an in office to people who are working on the front lines. We're getting a good sense of how people are feeling and what they're valuing

and what their challenges are. How are we doing? I mean, like I gotta tell you, uh, just talking to friends, reading about how people are feeling, I think a lot of people are at their wits end. You know, that is essentially what the data says. But let me let me kind of pull out a couple of points that really caught my attention. If you asked leaders, they actually say they're doing pretty well. Sixty of leaders say that they are thriving. But that's twenty three percentage points higher

than those without decision making authority. When we get down to the average worker and ask them, how are we doing? Then those numbers, I think, you know, really hit that feeling that we all feel around us. Um fifty four percent of workers globally say that they feel overworked, say that they feel exhausted. So there is a sense of exasperation that it's been a very long year and very

challenging here. Well, the thing that that says to me, Jared, is that we've got to make sure that leaders are in sync with workers, right, because leaders ultimately said policy

that's right. I mean, the way I look at this, if we take a step back for a moment, you know, I think this is one of those once in a lifetime shocks that comes to an economy, that comes to a business, that comes to organizations, and and in fact, what the data seems to point out is that leaders are not in sync, that they need a little bit of a wake up call. I think so many leaders are just kind of thinking we're going to go back to the way it was in January, and that's just

not the case. And so this wake up call, I think is a moment for all of us to look around and recognize things have changed. The labor market has changed, employee sentiment has changed, to how we do things has changed. It really is a moment that demands vision and leadership. And that's what we're trying to point out in the data is that there's there's an opportunity for so much

good there. But at the same time, if we just let it unfold on its own, under its own weight, there's an opportunity for some downside to look such a disconnect between the way that workers feel and the way that managers feel. How did the two meet? How do workers? How do you know? How do managers rise to the occasion here? Well, let's first talk a little a little

bit about what we're hearing from both sides. So when we talk to workers, we hear that over seventy percent of them want flexible remote work to stay in some forms. In other words, they're saying, I like the flexibility. Just anecdotally, when I talk to people on my team out here on the West Coast, they say things like, you know what, I'm eating breakfast with my kids for the very first time. I've never done that before. I'd like that to stick around.

So they like that. At the same time, those same people, sixty percent of them say that they want more in person time with their teams. So they're saying, please give me flexibility, but at the same time, give me the opportunity to get back in person. Now when we look at it, managers or leaders, on the other hand, they are recognizing that that flexibility is valuable. Over eight percent of them plan to keep more flexible remote from work

from home policies post pandemic. So I think the meeting the way I would term it is we want the best of all worlds. We want people to be able to work together, workers and managers to find kind of that best of all worlds set up so that everybody is getting things that that benefit them. And I believe that, you know, there's a bright future head it will grab onto them work together. Hey, Jared, what about demographic differences,

age differences when it comes to all of this. You know, we definitely saw that if we go back to that idea that we're trying to understand who's living and who's not doing so well, if I just point to gen Z, that's a very interesting data point for a sixty percent of gen Z say that they're just surviving or even struggling right now during the current set up. And so essentially what we're seeing is that this generation is more

likely to be single early in career. They are definitely feeling the effects of kind of the impact of isolation, struggle with motivation at work. They don't have the same financial means as those who are more established, and so gen Z in particular reads needs I think, you know, some energy and some attention, because after all, you know, from our perspective, they are the future of work. When we talk about it, it has to do with people, and that's the generation that's going to help us. How

do we do it though? That's like I keep I keep thinking about this from the perspective of just talking to my friends over the last year, which has been want of struggle, especially people who have kids. We only have about well, no, we we have a little bit of time. So I want to make sure that we we tease this out a little bit. What is the what is the right way for us to approach this when it comes to balancing our working lives. You did mention that for the first time parents are able to

be breakfast with their kids. But at the same time, it also means that there isn't that separation between work and home life. Yes, definitely, that's something that people are struggling with there's this idea of how do I put

boundaries on what I'm doing? So we you know, in many ways, I think that you should kind of internalize that we have become the first truly always on digital workforce, you know, and that was forced upon us starting last year, and we just didn't have the norms or the boundaries or the kind of cultural things that we needed to deal with it. So our recommendation from the data is that companies take a step back and they think about

a couple of key things. They think about new norms that they want to establish, kind of new approaches that they think will be important, and even new policies that will help them out. So Microsoft, as an example, we've we've already made the announcement that our workers can work from home of the time, and what we're trying to do there is signal we think in person time is important,

that FaceTime will be important. At the same time, we want to give employees more flexibility than they had before the pandemic to do some of those things that really matter to them. And then I'm happy to talk about kind of some of the other investments I think companies need to make because it's more than just the policy. You actually we think have to invest in key areas.

But that's a good start. Well that's interesting. So where do you think you know companies need to invest because it also sounds like on the other side, I know you guys did some work with LinkedIn. You know specifically employees are looking for that flexibility when they go searching

for a job. Absolutely, I mean, one of the data points that definitely caught my attention was the remote job postings on Lincoln increased more than five times during the pandemic, and we saw that it was women, gen z and those without graduate degrees who are more likely to apply for those jobs. So we see a really interesting thing happening here with the labor market, where again this could be a real upside coming out of this new world

of work. Now in terms of investments and things that we think that people need to do, we think that there needs to be more investment in kind of first just the people, the soft side of how work gets done. We think that companies, as an example, really need to lean into well being and helping their employees understand you just aren't going to perform well if you're trying to work twenty four seven. That's a little bit different than you know, I think most companies would would try and

do it. But how do you make that argument to a company that's just focused on the bottom line? Like, how do you convince them that this is an investment that they need to make, Like what are the numbers that you can show them that say, hey, this is something that is vital to the success of your company. You bet. I think what you do is you appeal

to the bot mine. Our perspective has been what the numbers are starting to show us is that you can't treat people like machines and try and increase their productivity by just simply increasing their uptime. It turns out humans aren't like that. Instead, you have to think about people in terms of performance, the way we think about high performance in elite athletes as an example. Those folks need to train and need their work, but they also need

downtime and they need boundaries. And that's what we're seeing from the science is that that's what companies are going to have to lean into to get the most out of their employees going forward. So there's still work to do,

but there's science there. We think we can rely on. Well, I would assume at some point to those productivity numbers show up that people are getting burned out and they're not as productive, because I definitely felt early on, you know, working from home for many months that I was incredibly productive and I got more because I wasn't commuting and there were things that weren't I wasn't doing that I

could just kind of plow into my jobs. But there was a point where, like not having that delineation jared between work and home, that I started to get burnt out. Oh. Absolutely. You know, what's what's most interesting to me is that productivity has actually either stayed the same in many industries or in some cases gone up during this time. But it's been the result of exactly what you're saying, people just working themselves so hard because they want to make

sure they're contributing to the company. Is It's fascinating to me that one of the biggest questions we feelded early on in the pandemic is will our employees really work or will they watch Netflix? And you know, twelve months into it, we're realizing, wow, did they ever work? In fact, we've got to figure out how to help them stop working. And watch the Netflix. Of course they did. You know what, It helped them to be more productive, and it was

probably the office that they watched. Indeed, they were running the fields. All right, We're gonna run, Hey, Jared, Thanks so much. Looking forward to your involvement once again with one of our Bloomberg Live events. We've got Workshift coming up on Wednesday. Jared's Pitaro, corporate vice president over at Microsoft, through on the phone from Redmond, Washington,