Future Work/Life is my newsletter in which I explore ideas focused on the future of work and how to build legendary companies & careers. If you find it interesting, please share it!
Remote Work
Does working from home damage productivity? A simple question that remote work data guru Nick Bloom asks in his piece in The Hill.
Short answer: Yes, a little.
More nuanced answer (all emphases below are mine):
The numbers paint a picture of small, positive productivity gains for hybrid work. The savings in commuting time more than offset the losses in connectivity from fewer office days. In contrast, the impact of fully remote working on productivity is typically mildly negative. Fully remote workers can struggle with mentoring, innovation and culture building. However, it appears this can be reversed with good management. Running remote teams is hard but done well can deliver strong performance.
But this is about more than just worker output. Firms care about profits — not productivity.
Working from home massively reduces overhead. It drives down recruitment and retention costs, as employees value working from home. Fully remote companies also slash office costs, and cut wages bills by enabling national or global hiring. Indeed, the widespread adoption of working from home has been a triumph of capitalism. Higher profits have led millions of firms to adopt this, generating the five-fold increase in home working many of us now enjoy.
WORK CULTURE
Former podcast guest Isabel Berwick (listen to our chat here) curates Working It, her excellent podcast/newsletter/column in the FT. This week, she raised an interesting subject that I’ve been discussing with tons of companies recently - recognition.
Recognising contribution has risen up the agenda as businesses have switched work modes. While WFH may not have significantly affected productivity (see above), a problem that existed before Covid has worsened. Namely, where it’s difficult to measure someone’s work objectively, people struggle to demonstrate the value they’re creating. And bosses either struggle to spot it or don’t do enough to recognise it.
I’ve been working on something to help solve this problem, which I’d be happy to talk to you about, but in the meantime, consider how effective simply thanking people can be:
A new report from Gallup and workplace culture specialists Workhuman found that staff who say “recognition” for their achievements is a big part of their workplace culture are 3.7 times as likely to be engaged in their work — and half as likely to experience frequent burnout — as those who don’t report this.
And yet, few companies are doing it, let alone doing it well. Which strikes me as an opportunity.
Gallup found that only 34 per cent of employees said their employer had any sort of reward programme in place. And most of those are useless — only 13 per cent of those people rate theirs as “excellent”.
AI
We are in the early stages of understanding AI's positive and negative effects on jobs and careers.
Nevertheless, as this story in The Economist reports, Microsoft is going all in on ‘copilots’ And this bet could lead them back to the top spot in the world’s most valuable companies.
Here are some standout quotes:
There is some evidence for the idea that Copilots could help cement Microsoft’s lead. In June 2022 it launched a code-generating Copilot on GitHub, a repository for code which Microsoft had bought in 2018 for $7.5bn. The model was trained using the reams of code stored on GitHub. It has quickly become an essential tool for software developers. In a survey, 90% of users told GitHub that the Copilot improved their productivity. The firm also conducted a small study that found that coders completed tasks 55% more quickly when using the tool. Some 27,000 businesses have a subscription, twice the number of three months ago. It is so popular in tech circles that the term “copilot” has become shorthand for an ai assistant, whether provided by Microsoft or not.
Microsoft says firms testing a Copilot for its “productivity” software (meaning, for email, spreadsheets, word-processing and the like) report similar benefits. Kate Johnson, the boss of Lumen, a telecoms firm, describes it as a “step function change” in the way her staff work. She uses it to look back at Teams meetings and see whether quieter employees are being given a chance to speak. It also takes instant minutes and draws up to-do lists for attendees. That helps with accountability, adds Ms Johnson: the tasks staff were meant to complete after the last meeting are “right there for everyone to see”.