Jaime Teevan: When you start thinking about returning to the workplace, you can look at what we lose when we move remote? And what do we gain? Let’s do the stuff that’s better remote, remote and do the stuff that’s worse remote back in person. That suggests, large group meetings we can probably keep remote. First, there’s some pretty cool things about being able to share the slides, have in-meeting parallel chat, or see people’s names and know who everybody is, like those are actually benefits. On the other hand, meeting new people is something that you should really do face to face.
Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling The Web, a podcast of the Web Science Trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web.
Our guest today is Jaime Teevan — you just listened to her talk about what work is better done in-person versus remotely as we prepare for the Next Normal. Dr. Teevan is chief scientist for Microsoft’s Experiences and Devices, where she’s charged with creating the future of productivity. Previously, she was the technical adviser to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, where she led its productivity team. She developed the first personalized search algorithm used by Bing and introduced microproductivity into the office. Jaime was recognized as one of the MIT Technology Review Innovators under 35, and has received many awards, including the Anita Borg Early Career Award, the Karen Spärck Jones award, and the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR for short) Test of Time award. Welcome, Jaime.
Jaime Teevan: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Noshir Contractor: I want to start right now with the new report that you helped put together at Microsoft titled “The new future of work,” research from Microsoft into the pandemic’s impact on work practices. This was an excellent compilation of insights that came out of what I understand was a ongoing cross company initiative to coordinate efforts towards understanding the impact of remote work.
Jaime Teevan: We’re in the middle of a pretty significant transition that, if we don’t come out of it better, then we’re going to come out of it worse. It’s really an opportunity ahead of us to create a new and better future of work. Prior to the pandemic, we were already in the midst of a pretty significant change in how people get things done, with a move to the cloud, and the proliferation of Edge devices and real advances in artificial intelligence. But COVID took this primordial goo that was ripe for innovation, and it provided a spark. I mean, most of us moved from working from the office to working from home, literally, in a day. I’m pretty sure I have a plant back at my office that is dead. I haven’t seen it since last March.
And as a productivity company, Microsoft is really interested in understanding work practices and how people get things done. And we have a lot of sensors in place with which we can see work. So we obviously have large scale telemetry data of how people are using our products. We have really rich customer panels that we set up with all sorts of different customers to get more direct feedback. We use survey instruments. We’re also a large company, just all on our own, you know, hundreds of 1000s of employees who are working and had to shift from in-person work to remote work. So last March, when COVID hit all of these sensors shifted to focus on remote work.
Researchers from across the company came together in what we believe is the largest research effort to happen to understand changing work practices. And the cool thing about that is sort of all of the different non-traditional ways that people are coming together, too, we have all of these converging methods quantitative and qualitative, all sorts of different approaches, we even have EEG studies of people’s brains, and we look at a number of different populations.
Noshir Contractor: In your report, you talk about a lot of different areas, and I want to just pick on a few of them. The first one was the impact of this sudden switch to collaboration and meetings. can you talk a little bit about what these findings are in terms of how we change the nature of collaboration? To what extent did it broaden our networks at work or deepen our networks at work?
Jaime Teevan: Now, it’s a great question, because a lot of the insights from web science actually apply here, where we have seen really interesting evolutions of people’s networks as a result of the shift of remote work. When we moved remote, we had a lot of social capital that we had built up from interacting with people face to face, and we’ve spent the past year spending down that social capital. So when you look at the networks, and the way that people work together, what you see is actually our strong ties are the people that we are close to and work with, well, they have stayed relatively strong, and we continue to meet one on one with our managers, our close collaborators. But our weak ties, or the people we don’t know as well, those are atrophying. So like collaboration trends in Microsoft Teams, and Outlook, show that communications with those outside of our immediate teams have diminished with their move to remote. You can see large group chats have decreased nominally by 5%, whereas the one on one chat, those have increased by 87%. So we’re doing increased communication, and interaction with people we know well, we’re doing decreased communication with the people we don’t know well, and that’s gonna have a lot of consequences for like how work gets done moving forward.
Noshir Contractor: Absolutely. So we see that the technology is being used to deepen our networks, rather than to broaden the networks. And as you pointed out, the number of weak ties falling has consequences. Because again, we know from prior research that weak ties are very important in terms of engendering and fostering innovation and new ideas. Which is surprising though, Jaime, because in some ways, you could say that the technology now enables us to reach out more easily to people, when we are unfettered by geographic boundaries, etc. But even though technologically, it’s possible, what your research finds is that that’s not what people are doing.
Jaime Teevan: You probably remember at the start of the pandemic, like virtual happy hours were a thing. I feel like we’ve all gotten too tired. But like, at the start of the pandemic, it was amazing, I was like Oooh, I’m hanging out with my uncles and my friends on the East Coast and and all these people, I was like, Ooh, I’m doing regular time with them. And it was amazing. And I don’t do it anymore. I think it just gets — it’s just work to sort of maintain that broad network.
Noshir Contractor: One of the things that you also talk about in the report is the impact not just on collaboration and meetings, but also on personal productivity and well-being, including the ways in which this has meant working from home or living at work, take your pick, means that you’re breaking down boundaries, both to space and of time. Can you talk a little bit about what you found in that context?
Jaime Teevan: There’s a lot packed up in that question. We were using space as a technology to get work done right, space was delineating the start of the work day, and the end of the work day, it was creating natural boundaries between home and work. It was creating opportunities for serendipitous conversations and spontaneous interaction. it was actually a useful limiting function for meetings, because you could only have as many people who could fit into a meeting room, and now everybody can join any meeting they ever want to. So there were all sorts of values in how we were using space as a technology. And that went away.
It stopped providing useful temporal boundaries for us. So we saw that people were sending a lot more messages in the weekends or after hours, I think the number of IM’s that people send between 6pm and midnight went up 52%. And people who didn’t normally work on weekends saw their weekend collaboration, triple. So the kind of time boundaries that we were used to went away.
It’s nice, because like, now, I can be like, Oh, it’s lunchtime, I’m going to take a walk and hang out with my kids. Or I can say, I’m a morning person. So I like to wake up early, and I like to go to bed at eight. And that works. But it does make the coordination of work practices, very challenging, because your personal decisions are never decisions that just impact you. They impact other people.
People are working from different states or different countries are really rethinking about where they live. Our mutual colleague, Brent Hecht had a really interesting point, where a lot of the movement that used to happen was along latitudinal lines, because actually, it’s similar latitudes, you have similar environmental factors, like the same crops that grow at a certain latitude will do so elsewhere. And now what you’re actually starting to see is movement around longitudinal lines instead, because that’s when you’re on the same time zone. And we haven’t really figured out how to solve the timezone issue.
Noshir Contractor: You touched on the idea of giving you autonomy to be able to go for a walk in the middle of the day, etc. And that brings up of course, issues of those of us who have the economic resources to have a life that allows us to do that, as compared to those who might not have the opportunity.
Jaime Teevan: There’s several things embedded in that as well. So the report that we’re discussing right now focuses primarily on information workers, which represents a sizable portion of the world population in the country, but obviously not everybody. So after the pandemic, you saw about a third of people stay working in the workplace as essential workers. You saw about a third of folks furloughed because they, their physical presence was required to work and they couldn’t and they weren’t deemed necessary to go into work. And then you saw about a third of people move from in person work to remote work and that primarily is the information worker population that we’re looking at, and these populations are quite different demographically as well.
A lot of the burden of having to either return to the workplace or being furloughed, falls on people of color, falls on women, falls disproportionately on different people. Even when you look within the third, that transition from face to face work to remote work, you see pretty significant differential impact there as well. Business Leaders tend to be weathering the storm more successfully than others. Caregivers, and in particularly mothers, have had real challenges, particularly with children being at a school and having to pick up child care.
Noshir Contractor: Your report does talk about some of these societal effects that are both negative and positive. Some argue it’s the K effect, some people are doing better in the situation, others are doing worse, The overrepresentation of BIPOC workers and firstline and others on site. Your report also notes that the layoffs resulting from the work from home is disproportionately affected women, African American and Hispanics.
Jaime Teevan: The K effect is a good description of it. And my background is personalization, I think about how people, there’s individual variation across people. So there’s a piece of me that, that almost rolled my eyes as I’m like, oh, there’s a lot of variation within the impact of COVID. Like, yeah, tell me something new. But when you dig into the data, ‘s just an order of magnitude different than what we’re seeing anywhere else. It’s hitting in interesting ways, even in like, the work setups.
So even when both parents are able to work, women are much more likely to have their workspace be set up in a shared space, more likely to be interrupted. There’s variation by job role, as well. You’re seeing a particular challenge around well-being with managers and a particular bump in numbers of hours worked among them, new employees, anybody who’s changed roles, is having challenges as well. So you’re seeing a bunch of challenges showing up along a number of dimensions.
Noshir Contractor: Being a company that is involved in software and software engineering, your report also points out that software engineering got slightly more productive, actually, but also came with accompanying burnout.
Jaime Teevan: One of the things that I get asked about this report a lot is “Ooh, what surprised you about the findings. And we forget how surprising it is that people were able to work remotely at all. It is true, we’re seeing developers are productive, we’re seeing information workers in general are being surprisingly productive by the standard metrics But it’s coming at a huge cost, I think we can all feel that. There’s real hits to our well being and working in shared spaces, working longer hours.
People are being productive, but it has really driven a significant shift in the way that business leaders are thinking about work, to recognize that work isn’t just about, the stuff we’re doing. But it is about the person we bring to the task. It’s about the networks we have, you’d mentioned well being, it’s about our ability to respond well and be thoughtful and make the connections we need and not sort of be living in our panicked mind. When you talk about taking a crisis and trying to make it positive, I think that’s one of the potential positive outcomes of this, is that holistic view we’re increasingly taking towards work.
Noshir Contractor: A s we begin to see our way out of this pandemic, hopefully in the near future, people are talking about moving from the new normal, to the next normal, and no one expects that next normal to be remotely similar to the old normal. One of the things that I found quite interesting,, about the report was your efforts at trying to see what of these learnings and insights are going to stay post-COVID? People talk about the hybrid model. What are your thoughts about what that hybrid model might look like moving to the stage of post COVID?
Jaime Teevan: It is hard to imagine. And as researchers, we like to make good, thoughtful data driven decisions, and we don’t like to get ahead of our skis. And yet, everybody right now is having to make important big long term decisions based on very little short term data. And that’s hard.
We do have some places we can look to make this easier. Microsoft has offices in China, and China has actually opened up and we can start looking at what hybrid work looks like there and the kinds of decisions that people are making. The truth is even though we don’t really know the answers, we have a pretty good sense. And being able to make a decision from some data is better than being able to make it with none.
So we do have some recommendations that we’re making. When you start thinking about returning to the workplace, you can look at what we lose when we move remote? And what do we gain. Let’s do the stuff that’s better remote, remote and do the stuff that’s worse remote back in person. That suggests, large group meetings, we can probably keep remote first. There’s some pretty cool things about being able to share the slides, have in-meeting parallel chat, or see people’s names and know who everybody is, like those are actually benefits. On the other hand, meeting new people is something that you should really do face to face.
Noshir Contractor: One of the studies that you have recently been involved in has been doing a large scale analysis trying to isolate the effects of working from home on collaboration activities, but removing or controlling for all the other effects of COVID-19. Can you tell us about how that led you to some results that might be counterintuitive?
Jaime Teevan: What we’ve been doing is essentially, yes, trying to partition out what, what is going on right now, because we’re in the middle of a global health crisis and what’s going on because we’re working remotely, because it’s not, the same. (Laughs). One of the ways that we do that is by looking at prior to that pandemic, people who were working remotely, and so then you can see for those people how their behavior changed, before and after March, as compared to other people who moved from working in-person. It’s hard to control for absolutely everything, but it actually shows the folks who were working remotely beforehand, they didn’t have such a significant increase in meetings, as the rest of us, A lot of different sources of evidence that we have looked at, suggests there is an expertise that comes with remote work, and as we figure that out, then it becomes easier. We’ve all had this crash course in remote work now. So that as we return to the workplace, we’re going to be able to carry that over and still use it a little bit.
Noshir Contractor: I thought it was interesting that the results of this study point to the fact that working from home, after taking into account the partitioning of the COVID issues, actually resulted in less time on collaboration and more focus time.
Jaime Teevan: In general, one of the benefits of working from home is focus. People report some additional distraction from from children and kids and pets and leaf blowers. I feel like there’s a leaf blower in every meeting. (Laughs) But working from home is quite good for focused work.
Noshir Contractor: Speaking of focus, one of the things that you have also been looking at in a study is the role of multitasking. Until now, Jaime, when people said multitasking, it seemed to be a four letter word. But your research finds that multitasking in meetings has both positive and negative effects.
Jaime Teevan: First of all, it’s kind of cool that we can actually measure multitasking better than we could before. Every conversation you have is digitally mediated, everything you do is and that provides us so much more information and so much more insight. And so you can look at exactly how often does somebody email during a meeting? And you can say, Oh, I actually know the answer now. 30% of people email during a meeting, and then you can start looking at which meetings do people email in and which ones don’t they? It becomes interesting to start thinking about how you can sort of peripherally pay attention to a meeting, to jump in when it’s relevant. And think of all these long meetings that you go to, that there’s a lot of stuff you don’t care about, what if you were able to focus on it, right when it was relevant.
The other thing we’re seeing a lot of is and I wouldn’t call it multitasking, sometimes we’re calling it deliberative tasking, it’s actually doing multiple things on a single task. So you can see during a meeting, there’s a parallel chat going on. And often the parallel chat’s quite rich and has a lot happening in it. And there’s a conversation and maybe you’ve got the deck open, and you’re going through the deck, as well. And doing all of those different things on the same task makes for a really rich, deep interaction. It’s exhausting. It’s part of what makes meetings even more exhausting, but it’s a really intense and deep way to engage on a task.
Noshir Contractor: And and you’re absolutely right, that the reason we are talking about so many of the insights that we are able to glean is because we are working on the web. And that’s why this is such an important area of work, in terms of web science, and being able to leverage these various forms of data telemetry, as you call it, and one of the things that Microsoft has invested in over the last few years, is what used to be called workplace analytics and has recently been renamed as Viva insights. And the idea here, if I understand that correctly, is that if we are able to get all this insight about the way we work, and how we work, what if we could provide that information back to the workers and back to the organization’s?
Jaime Teevan: So In recent years, we’ve really seen the value of data and behavioral data in particular, and I absolutely credit the web for that, as well. The real insight with Viva insights is actually that that same data, when you start aggregating and looking at data over time actually allows you to understand, introspect and respond to things. And particularly during a disruption like COVID, the ability to understand what’s happening and make good decisions to be resilient to disruptions is, is a real, is really important.
Noshir Contractor: And at the same time, there are many who are also extremely concerned about the privacy implications of these data, who gets to see these data, what if these data are in some ways corrupted, and somebody is making decisions about you, including your job based on some kind of flawed data? So how are you and your colleagues thinking about the quality assurance issues associated with these data?
Jaime Teevan: Those are all such important questions. And I love that you include bad science in there too, because it really highlights the importance of our job as scientists. There are all sorts of challenges with aggregating understanding and making decisions based on data. And those challenges show up at the individual level with things like, you know, workplace surveillance and privacy concerns, they show up at the organizational level, when you start thinking about security issues, or data leakage from models that you might learn, and they and they show up at the societal level.
And you can see that in the conversations that are happening recently around responsible AI and ethics and competing, and just our ability to make reasonable inferences. We’re also seeing an increase in interest from countries and sort of thinking about their national interests and the data that they have in their, in their, within their boundaries. And so all of those are super important. And a place where research really comes in to help, not just to help us figure out how to do good science, make good inferences. We’re investing a lot in thinking about research related to responsible AI, research related to privacy-preserving machine learning, homomorphic encryption, differential privacy, I think there’s a lot that we need to do here. One of the things that I do like that is important not to forget, though, is this allows us to make explicit what is happening, and there’s a value to that, then you can introspect them and understand them and make decisions about what we think is correct and what we think isn’t correct. Like, the bare minimum is like we should try to not build biases into our system, the opportunity is we can understand the biases that are there and start correcting them and building systems that actually behave in a way that we that we would want things to happen in the world.
Noshir Contractor: When one one of the things that I think is important is that organizations like Viva insights,they make the possible visible, and then invite the debates that have to be had as a society about the issues of privacy, and the positive and negative impacts of it. And so I see this as being the first step and say, this is possible. Now let’s talk about how and why when and when we should be using these data and insights.
Jaime Teevan: I talked about how the web in many ways has created the current AI revolution with these feedback engagement loops, right? Where, you know, you engage with the system, data gets collected, that gets fed back in the system, the system makes better. We’ve seen that there’s problems that come out of them, as well.
But there’s an opportunity there to think about, like, how do we drive these feedback loops towards our goals and towards things that matter? So thinking of Viva insights, and this opportunity organizations have to start thinking about their organizational goals. You can start thinking about the recommendations that happen in the context of an enterprise. So we talked about how weak ties are atrophy, maybe we want people to have stronger weak ties, maybe we want Team A and Team B to be closer. And so instead of developing feedback loops that make recommendations within that context towards engagement, we can say, oh, let’s make recommendations that help Team A and Team B, be closer.
Noshir Contractor: And so in closing your as you think about the scholarship that you have done in the area of web science, and that you think needs to be done, can you give us from your point of view, what web science might have accomplished so far, and what really it needs to focus on moving forward?
Jaime Teevan: The big thing that it has accomplished is allowed us to see behavior at scale, and make decisions related to that. And then it has allowed us to see the influence of the technology we build on society at scale, as well, and start being able to quantify and understand that, and be thoughtful. And then that obviously creates a need for us to, to do that in a responsible way in a way that is thoughtful. Another thing that I’ve found interesting about the web is how dynamic it is. The web is constantly changing and there’s such an opportunity to learn from those dynamics and grow from them. I even think of just like, how much better you can understand a web page or piece of content if you don’t just see it right now, but you see its entire history. And I think we’re increasingly able to capture and understand the entire evolution of content in a way that’s really interesting. And then of course, raises all sorts of challenging problems that are associated with that.
Noshir Contractor: Well, what I will say is that we as web science community are grateful that organizations such as Microsoft Research and Microsoft more generally, is engaging with these issues in a way that you are uniquely qualified to do it because you have access to these data, and also making those insights, available to the larger scientific community.
Jaime Teevan: As a company we believe strongly that our success is other people’s success. We are a company that is designed to help other people accomplish their goals, other people get things done. And that requires a strong community, a strong academic research community and a strong business community. It’s fundamental to our mission in the world to support that.
Noshir Contractor: Jaime, thank you so much, both for your leadership in this area, your own scholarship, and also your ability of helping to steer this incredible report that I recommend strongly to anyone who’s interested in learning about how the new future work is going to be shaped. So thank you again for joining us today.
Jaime Teevan: Thank you, my pleasure.