Flexibility, choices, benefits! For everyone!! Except the working stiff who loses yet more of his/her paycheck to a politician’s campaign promise.
3
Valuable insights worthy of follow up. It's great to know that frequent, middle-manager, one-on-one meetings with their direct reports are strong predictors of success. What about front-line managers and seniors managers? Also, what's the nature of the meetings? Are they just performance-monitoring oriented, or are they relationship building and or coaching and developmentally focused? Meetings for the sake of meeting, whether one-on-one or with 20 people need to be purpose-driven and valuable to both (all) parties, otherwise you get what the article describes - disengaged staff.
1
My new employer uses Outlook and I do get the weekly analytics that sum up my meetings schedule and so-called focus time. The problem is, even when I don't have meetings scheduled, I'm a slave to the tool called Slack, which Outlook doesn't record. I was assigned to 3 separate product teams, using two separate Slack "workspaces" (meaning, I have to toggle from one to the other). In each workspace are multiple channels I am expected to monitor, including discussions on design, product development, and a "calendar." I muted the latter because it was being used for every one of maybe 20 people to report they were leaving early, going to pick up their kids, etc etc. To me, a calendar should be used for showing your days on vacation or out sick, not an hourly report of your time. That turns salaried workers into clock-punchers. Literally, that ONE channel would push a dozen or more messages an hour.
Last week, I sent a Slack message about where a meeting was being held because the organizer routinely misses that key info in invites, and was messaged back, well, didn't you see in the Calendar channel that it was cancelled? Um, no.
If Outlook could track hours spent monitoring Slack channels, it would show how little "focus time" I and my coworkers actually have. The constant requirement for multi-tasking, coupled with an organizational failure to set rules around instant messaging is driving this close-to-retirement worker even closer to retirement.
5
"Mr. Ostrum and the analytics team showed managers the data and urged them to audit how many meetings they scheduled and to be honest about which were essential. On the employee end, they encouraged engineers and other nonmanagers to schedule time on their calendars for the kind of independent concentration..."
mystery of the valuable employees? how to win in everyday business?
a lot of wasted time and effort could be saved by assuming that time and effort (for listening, reading, writing and meeting preparation) has an opportunity cost. running one's mouth, aka brainstorming, is better left for small groups of intimate colleagues--not larger and more formal meeting groups--that can tolerate a probable 95% nonsense or irrelevant data and only a probable 5% valuable insight.
alternatively, if managers would _pay overtime rates_ to meeting attendees, methinks that employees would quickly become less miserable and managers would quickly become more careful with using people's valuable time. put your money where your mouth is.
1
I find it interesting they think that having a boss with lots of contacts throughout the company passes along that "attitude." That's not what that boss does. She passes along the contacts themselves. Solitary bosses have no other departments they can introduce their employees to.
For meetings, I often suggest calculating the total salary cost for it and comparing that to the action item list produced from the meeting. That encourages
1. cutting down on the number of attendees,
2. cutting down on the length of the meetings and
3. actually producing action items.
10
Is Microsoft paying Dawn Klinghoffer the gazillions she deserves?
Talk about making a meaningful difference in employee life, satisfaction, growth and desire not to leave a workplace!
I could never understand the people in HR. Dawn I can understand (and envy).
5
My wife works with employees at several top IT companies. She says Microsoft managers are the worst, making outrageous expectations. For example, "I want your team to work 6 days a week and an extra 1:30 hour per day until the project completes". Hmmmm... so who's going to pick up the children from school?
Obviously, all at no extra cost. Never mind baby sitters cost £10/hr here.
Any surprise attrition rates are sky-high?
3
I find that modern project methodologies put store in meetings. They want everybody to collaborate and share and work together. For people who are technical it’s misery because they like to focus and work on problems. My guess is that Management thought they were following modern practices and that’s why the excessive meetings weren’t identified earlier as the problem. I wish they’d come do that analysis where I work because we’ve had a lot of meetings scheduled into our project, and a lot of turnover.
1
Modern day slavery! Your life is not your own anymore. Scary times.
4
Except slaves never got paid. Perhaps modern day servitude.
3
When automated calendars first came into our office (mid-'90s, I think), I started blocking time for the work that only I could do. Otherwise the schedule looked like it was wide-open for anyone to ask for a meeting. And I was one of the only senior managers in my company who didn't need to come in on weekends to get work done. I also started keeping my door almost closed. The office culture was that doors were open unless there was a private meeting or a bad situation brewing - so managers who closed their doors completely immediately gave rise to loads of unproductive gossip. But by leaving the door open by only a couple of inches I was able to ward off eye contact with passersby and to convey that I needed to get work done. Maybe I should have been an advisor to Microsoft.
13
I always looked at meetings as interruptions to real work. And found that 2 hours was my limit for any meeting, beyond which I would get unbearably antsy. I totally agree with minimizing meetings, whether with many or few attendees!
3
I’m a Microsoft employee and can tell you that they’re seriously invested in their workforce. I’ve been with Microsoft for almost three years and every 6-8 months we get some new benefit, whether it’s a stipend for gym fees/workout equipment or an increase in the number of no-cost-to-you counseling sessions you get per year (company provided therapist or bring-your-own). I’m an average code monkey (not management) and I love working for Microsoft. I feel like, from corporate down, there’s a culture of worker appreciation. I’ve been at small and large companies before, and this is my favorite so far.
6
It's amazing that people think they can be managers without actually having a relationship with staff. I've seen this everywhere I've ever worked.
Get to know your people. That's what builds trust and trust is what allows people to voice their concerns and to give you the answers you need to solve your problems with resorting to putting together an expensive, time-consuming analytics team.
It seems to me that Microsoft could have easily solved this if they had trust and communication between management and employees and they used that trust to have conversations with people about why they weren't happy.
I guarantee it was no mystery to the employees that too many useless meetings were causing frustration and unhappiness. Why was it such a mystery to the management? And why did it take an entire "analytics" team to crunch numbers to find answers that were right in front on their faces?
These people are patting themselves on the back for solving this equation when they should be embarrassed that they had to go to such extremes to figure out something so stupidly obvious.
16
This article reminds me of how ill-prepared we all are to deal with the new demands of work and technology. Guess I’d expect granddaddy Microsoft to have trouble with this - a lot of differences between 1980’s MS and 2019 MS.
Labor unions in the last century fought for the work week hours, pay, and other benefits. We are way over due for another labor movement. What those folks fought for to create a better work environment we seem to pride ourselves with by working all the time, 3 jobs because one doesn’t pay the bills and no healthcare or vacation pay.
9
Feel that the many comments saying why didn't they just "ask the employees" or "use common sense" doesn't reflect big companies as they are.
WHICH employees would you ask? The ones obsessed with the problems with the vending machines or the lack of parking close to the building?
WHOSE common sense would you use? Those who have grown up with no culture but screen culture and few if any human contacts??
I just hope they use the data they bought....more likely is the scenario where they have more meetings to discuss this issue and more "must read" emails about it.
There is something extremely insidious about the concept described in this article. Much like 1960's rosy projections about progress and how it benefits mankind, the dark side is left out, for a good reason. The idea of having your boss monitoring what you are doing every second will, inevitably, lead to abuse. In the name of "work life balance" they are initiating a surveillance "state" within their company and applauding it. The part left out is the likelihood of "metrics" for minimum performance expectations and the ability to spy on the employees to insure this minimum is being met. The laughable "revelation" that meetings about meetings is detrimental to morale, appears to me to be a cover for this type of surveillance of workers. Welcome to "1984"!
10
The Mystery of the Miserable Employees?
What mystery? This is a Winner Take All Economy, right? Looks like whomever wrote this might've missed that only the rich are the winners, and if winners take all - then guess what that makes the rest of us.
12
How to exploit your employees more efficiently through science.
17
As a physician at a large healthcare organization in Seattle, this article makes me chuckle. In light of decreasing employee engagement scores, new “values” branding was rolled out with mandatory training required. This is after changes were implemented to see more patients in less time with less staff, despite communicated patient safety concerns by clinical staff. And then higher ups wonder why there’s high turnover rates. I heard from a healthcare administrator who proposed yoga to combat burnout, and in focus groups found out that staff instead wanted enough time to eat and pee while safely caring for patients. I’m a fan of data (and evidence based medicine), but survey data is ineffective when communicated concerns are not addressed. Every burnout/engagement survey ought to have free text boxes; and work culture should be such that folks don’t think it’s futile to communicate concerns.
33
@ That is the kicker about those surveys, they never give you a spot to write exactly what the problems are. Everything is couched in the HR employee issue flavor of the month with multiple choice questions. They are worse than the political survey mailers I get during election season. I wonder if these healthcare corporations that have acquired our community's hospitals are really different regionally or just run by one big one behind multiple layers.
16
@Kathy OR when they do give you a spot to write what the problems are, employees are often hesitant to tell the truth for fear of reprisal (because anonymous work surveys are never really anonymous).
12
My biggest takeaway after reading this article: "I do not want to work at Microsoft."
13
Offer half time work with full time health benefits, is my solution - you will have a much bigger field to choose from and the employees will be much happier. A lot of the reason one has to keep a 40 hour or more a week job these days is for health care, and there reallly is no alternative, for your normal person. Half time jobs do not offer any health care at all usually. So I say, let them get full health care benefits for less than 40 h ours of work, and you will solve the ennui. Also lets all take the entire month of August off, like the French, two weeks at Easter and Three weeks at Christmans..Now you are talking a good work life balance..
69
@grace thorsen Yuh, work-life so-called 'balance,' basically, consists of 'balancing' one's 'life' on a razor's edge. Good luck with that.
3
@grace thorsen
AMEN TO THAT.
The American Puritanical work ethic these days of 50-70 hour weeks leaves no time for spending time at home with family when family is available and you are not exhausted at 8:00 , haven't had dinner yet and have emails and paperwork to catch up on at home.
9
I tell my employees that I don’t believe in work life balance. There is only life and that it is important for all of us to fell that the time we spend working is a valuable use of their life.
I meet 1:1 with each of them for an hour at least every other week to focus on their priorities and how we can work better together.
That is just one way that I personally focus on us as people, teammates, and individuals.
2
Or, you know, you could have just asked the folks what their 3 biggest complaints were.
I guess that would be too simple.
18
27 hours a week (about 2/3 of the work week) in big useless meetings. No wonder people are unhappy. No wonder Microsoft software is so bad.
You don't need fancy "analytics" to learn that. Just ask people, informally, what they like and dislike about their jobs.
20
This article demonstrates, to me, the power of metrics to, potentially, do good, and/or, at the same time, or despite the goodness potential, the likelihood exists that metrics will 'bend' behavior, even if one thinks one 'understands,' in a less than desirable direction. I'm reminded of the epocryphal story of the pheomenon in the now-defunct Soviet Union, where, in many of the state and other buildings, chandeliers were breaking, falling and smashing to smithereens. No one could seem to understand why this was going on: earthquake, sabotage, what was the underlying dynamic. So, they examined what are now call 'analytics.' The consultants, subsequently, found that managers of chandelier factories were rewarded by the gross weight - the overall poundage - of chandeliers produced by their factories. So, rational managers in chandelier factories produced fairly few, but very heavy chandeliers; thus, the root cause of the proximate symptom. I'm also reminded of the 'wisdom' of the currently-somewhat-under-fire 'broken windows' theory of policing; i.e., prosecute the small offenses, like the old squeegee guys and, as the 'saying' goes: Lock 'Em Up. Seemed to work. Until... we came to the realization that we incarcerate way too many folks, especially those of color; the whole society is the worse for it. So, which is it? Or, maybe we didn't understand, in the first place, and we still don't understand... STEM programs are also the current education panacea: everyone a coder...
4
my last employer was the type of place that loved to have meetings. One of my managers would hold a Monday morning team meeting lasted one hour, talk about what you accomplished the week before and what you hoped to accomplish in the coming week. Anything beyond that was a one on one meeting as needed. He was a rarity, his team was always on top.
Other teams held meeting that would last hours with nothing being accomplished aside from some people who loved to hear themselves talk. They got nothing accomplished and generally had terrible results. No one wanted to work on these teams.
Reason to be learned....Let your employees do their jobs; most know what they are doing; they do not need to be micro managed!!
11
Back in the previous century a person I reported to related this mantra from someone he once reported to:
"8 to 5 is for meetings. 5 to 8 is for work."
As for blocking time on your calendar, good luck with that. Anyone above you (or their admin) declares a meeting "mandatory" and tells you to "clear your calendar" and there goes your reservation.
5
working in an office sucks and is depressing over time. it doesn't matter how nice they are, humans need to be connected to nature or we become depressed.
Amazon in Seattle created the biodome loaded with plants and windows, this is a move in the right direction for office workers.
13
I think the point of this article is less on the insight and more on the process of discovering it. The Fitbit and baseball analogies illustrate another point: that we all want to be successful in our work and might appreciate objective data to spot the gaps that intuition didn't fill. No doubt the analysis helped to rule out other hypotheses that Microsoft's leadership may have entertained. And quantifying the impact of a problem is the first step in remedying it.
But heed this warning from a humble statistician: with great power comes great responsibility. Anyone who misuses data to apply one-size-fits-all controls doesn't understand that averages apply to no one.
10
I think the bloated meeting issue comes down to this: Extroverts (i.e. MBAs wanting company and attention) managing introverts (i.e. tech, engineers, etc, just wanting to do their jobs). IMO, minimize the extroverts and let the introverts run free and you'd see an amazing bump in happiness and productivity.
109
As an introvert this was my immediate thought. I’m not alone in that diagnosis it seems.
22
@PNRN As an introverted team leader, I hated to RUN meetings, so I didn't have many, and those I did have were more update/discussion (both ways) sessions in my office with 2-3 people. The data center ran like clockwork. But in a previous assignment, in Personnel, we had nothing but meetings all day long. I was about to leave the company when a transfer opened up. I think the reason managers are tempted to have so many people in a meeting is so that all will hear what is being said, but a summary note afterwards to all concerned would serve better. (As long as responses or rebuttals to the summary afterwards are respected.)
4
@PNRN based on my own experience I completely agree. It always seemed that the extrovert managers were happiest surrounded by their team at meetings that would be called for - basically nothing that couldn’t be conveyed by summary in an email.
I had a friend, an extrovert manager, and who shocked me by saying her favorite thing to do on a Friday when she didn’t feel like working was to - call a meeting!!!!
2
So thanks to big data - a miraculous new invention that businesses are investing billions in - we now know that tons of large pointless meetings are demoralizing, one-to-one communication and support is key to good management, and forging personal connections across an organization is valuable. Thank God we're investing so much in this amazing new way of coming to conclusions that are self-evident to any thoughtful person who has worked in a large organization!!
24
@BE perhaps thoughtful people who work in large organizations like you mention already feel like meetings are a waste of time. And perhaps it seems investing in big data to study this was a waste of time. But my takeaway from reading this article is twofold.
First: when workers tell their management that meetings are a waste of time, does that actually lead to fewer meetings? Do you think management listens to their workers when they complain about meetings? Or do you think they just dismiss those concerns and schedule even more meetings for the sake of "fostering collaboration" and flag people who don't go to meetings as "not team players"? The value of this data is that the evidence that big useless meetings are counterproductive is now staring management in their faces, and they now have to respond.
Second: companies pour money into studying all sorts of things. The market. Future projections. Where they should concentrate their advertising. But Microsoft actually spent money studying something unique: how to make their employees happier. That tells me something about Microsoft and its culture, and makes me think, hey, this is a company that might be worth joining if I were in that industry.
There are still baseball teams that pooh-pooh analytics. And baseball players who do the same. My opinion: good. As long as my team (the Dodgers) values it, I'm glad to see other teams in our division dismiss it. In fact, I hope the rest of the NL West continues to ignore analytics!
10
@Tony Chan I’m a Microsoft employee and can tell you that they’re seriously invested in their workforce. I’ve been with Microsoft for almost three years, and every 6-8 months we get some new benefit - whether it’s a stipend for gym fees/workout equipment or an increase in the number of no-cost-to-you counseling sessions you get per year (company provided therapist or bring-your-own). I’m an average code monkey (not management) and I love working for Microsoft. I feel like, from corporate down, there’s a culture of worker appreciation. I’ve been at small and large companies before, and this is my favorite so far.
This article explains why spending millions and hours of time to create a system to analyze data is worth more than just asking your employees what’s wrong or right. Amazing.
17
Quoting from a commenter below: "long, wordy, circuitous article ..."
12
Duh. Meetings are an organized destruction of time.
13
i had to laugh at this comments section, a long parade of trees looking for a forest.
this is the future, folks. what are the big bits of news? (1) international megacorporations are becoming more mega; (2) people who want to make a boatload of bucks ("modern capitalists") must work at a mega (don't care which); (3) mega is already evolving ways to trap worker data and use that data to "diagnose" corporate productivity; (4) the use of biotrackers (Fitbit) is seriously introduced as a relevant ingredient.
most of you are probably unaware of similar advances in agribusiness. herds are now collared with electronic sensors that report wirelessly to a central computer. when a cow comes into estrus the computer beeps and a cowhand (not a robot -- not yet!) can go out and fertilize the cow by hand. this is how your kid's milk gets to your breakfast table.
how are modern corporate workers different from those cows? well, they can attend a meeting to discuss things; they can produce a kind of manure called "digital exhaust;" they can whine about overwork; they can fret about their portfolio; they can assure that climate change isn't *their* fault -- but! produce the milk of profit, they must.
working in veal pen productivity cubicles, tracked electronically on corporate metrics, how are they different from a herd of lifestock?
why, they can take little selfies and post them on social media selfie pages for other selfie souls to "like".
aaaww ... so cute.
19
@drollere
Yikes! I couldn't agree more with your excellent summary. And you didn't even get to the Moneyball; I kept wondering as I read this, what all that simultaneous monitoring of angle to bat, etc was doing to the plain old joy of the game? Sure, earning a million dollar contract has got to bring a player some pleasure, but is it worth the sheer joy of one whole-hearted, go for it, swing at the ball?
The world is becoming a sad, straightened place and I don't see an end to it; not one to bring joy anyway.
12
In the 1990s I was the stateside IT support (along with CAO/CFO) for our US subsidiary of the largest Nordic securities broker/dealer, headquartered in Stockholm. The best staff meetings I have ever attended occurred at 4am my time for all of our worldwide IT team. I set my alarm for 3:50 and participated by phone from my bed. Each of the dozen or so attendees was encouraged to raise concerns and propose solutions. In addition to chairing the meeting and raising his own concerns the head of IT made sure responsibility for needed tasks was specifically assigned and accepted. He took notes and by the time I arrived in the office that morning a memo from him summarizing the meeting and memorializing the task assignments in writing was in my Email inbox. I never asked him whether he learned to do this somewhere or if it was of his own devising. It surely was incredibly efficient for him as well as for the rest of us.
7
At my last academic job, there was an administrator who liked to call meetings of departments or occasionally the entire faculty, aside from the normal faculty meetings. For the most part, these meetings were intended to announce (at great length) policies or decisions that were not up for discussion and that he could have communicated to us by memo.
As one of my colleagues remarked, "He thinks his job is to hold meetings, but what he's really doing is interfering with our job, our class prep and research."
30
The 1920s writings of Mary Parker Follett would be relevant for managers. She is the basis for theories around networks and horizontal relationships in organizations. Too bad Microsoft software does not focus to facilitate these aspects of productivity. It shows in their own company that data analytics are required to find common sense solutions.
Like baseball both data and good old fashion common sense are necessary.
4
"Ultimately, the work-life balance reports from his employees rebounded, the device unit suffered no outflow of talent, and Microsoft has continued making gains in the hardware market."
Where's the data?
3
This makes the FIRE movement make sense. If we have a winner take all economy, you should save as much as you can so you can transition to an owner. If we have a winner take all economy, most people won't have true careers because mathematically we all can't be winners.
18
Oh, brave new world that has such solutions in it!
8
Big meetings waste workers time and make them unhappy. No kidding. It hardly takes heavy, geeky data analysis or a long, wordy, circuitous article to know this.
Workers meet in productive small group ways all the time at the office, the lab at lunch. Big meetings are mostly for making big bosses feel up to date and useful but they interrupt workers workflow. The bigger the meeting the more likely you include workers for who the content is irrelevant.
One other point. Reducing workers to piles of data to be analyzed hardly sends a 'You are valued' message.
29
Surely, Mr. Irwin, as an economics correspondent you know that it is inaccurate to refer to employees and prospective employees as capitalists. Bill Gates is a capitalist. Microsoft employees are by definition labor. One of the reasons that late stage capitalism manages to hang in by its broken claws in the US is the inability of way too many people to recognize that distinction.
35
I think this article and the problem at Microsoft have something in common, overcomplicating. This article took a lot of different turns in talking about the primary problem with the Microsoft device team, but also meandered through baseball, tech eating everything, and career advice. It little more concise focus in both place would probably do both the writer of this article and the Microsoft manager a lot of good.
22
Economics is not science.
Economists are not scientists.
There are too many unknowns and variables to craft the double-blind controlled experimental tests that provide repeatable predictable results.
Economics is gender, color aka race, ethnicity, national origin, sectarian, education, politics and history plus arithmetic.
There is no science in politics nor any other social 'science'.
7
Meetings always get the blame. An easy target and weak cause analysis. I don’t know the cause of the malaise at Microsoft ( although anyone who has had to use their software for 8 hours straight might have some ideas) but I do know the feeling of working in an office and trying to convince yourself that you are doing something worthwhile. I used to pass a construction site on my way home, after a few months there was a building to show for their work, mine was harder to quantify.
Ps agree with those that commented this article was bloated.
16
How many words is this article? And with detours down a couple rabbit holes a la baseball for the revelation that “too many meetings” cause worker unhappiness? As another commentator wrote, Dilbert figured this out some time ago. Maybe it’s that the super companies in the new economy don’t want to listen to workers, they need to see the obvious in numbers for workers to be believed. I agree that data mining may be the answer to “winning” in this economy but this is a terrible example. Can we see something beyond Moneyball (great example) but not so obvious as Microsoft’s data “revelation”?
19
Why didn't someone go out to a coffee shop and sit down with an employee? You can find out what's wrong and what's right a lot sooner and cheaper!
What's wrong is anything that comes between me and my task. What's right is anything that enables me to do my task quicker and easier.
I always remember "Management by Walking Around". What ever happened to talking with people?
40
@Charles Coleman
I have a manager who walks around. You can tell her whatever you want, but she will never (and I do mean never) take any action.
I guess she thinks she's placating us by listening to our grievances?
1
Hmm, it looks like the folks at Microsoft are very happy to spend their time and money reinventing the wheel simply because they've never heard of program evaluation or organizational psychology.
24
The problem of this method is that it uses a system of total control over their employees' lives (in terms of the amount of information collected) to find out what should have been obvious.
At least they were concerned about the employees' "happiness", although the article makes clear the reason was they were "valuable" employees. I wonder if they take half as much care for the well-being of their plant workers.
18
Bloated meetings. I saw this time waster again and again in a large healthcare system. One of the culprits? Executives who seem to love to hear themselves talk, demand an audience, and seem to suffer from some kind of (need for) attention disorder. When I mentioned the amount of time spent in unproductive meetings that had no agenda/talking points, didn't end on time and lacked accountability for follow up actions, well "the tallest blade of grass is the first one to be mowed down."
51
I have worked for several large and small corporations. I probably would be best described as a “middle manager”, but most of the time I also was a subject matter expert (SME). As a SME, I did most of my work independently - just me and my computer, churning out spreadsheets and negotiating contracts. I could control my work product enough that I could derive personal satisfaction from completing and accomplishing something once in a while. In fact, that sense of accomplishment was my primary motivator. The more meetings I attended - and I attended a LOT of meetings - the fewer opportunities I had to accomplish anything. Days on which I went home exhausted from working hard and accomplishing nothing were my worst days. It sounds like Microsoft - like a lot of corporations - had lost sight of this basic human need to accomplish something. If all of your days are “worst” days, work and life are out of balance no matter what time you go home.
26
@QSAT
Nothing like spending 8-10 hours in the office, engaged (answering emails, attending meetings, answering questions, filling in forms), and have nothing to show for it at the end of the day to make someone crazy.
18
If there was a message for "pragmatic capitalists" it was to see all the metrics of your employees' behavior {!}. What advice is there for mere employees of super-firms, let alone everyone else in the workplace? -- I'm sure everyone who has ever been in a meeting or read a Dilbert cartoon already knew the problem.
11
"[C]ompanies that dominate their fields" are not necessarily "well managed."
8
So the way for a worker in this economy to "win" is to hope that their bosses collect and analyze data about them to optimize their work performance? Paying people what they're worth, allowing them time to rest, and giving them benefits/job security is obsolete. Companies should instead use data to increase workers' output. Perfect! I feel great about this whole paradigm, I'm sure it will lead to lots of happiness and joy for workers.
45
Wait.... did I just here everything that is delightful, warm, human, fun, and personally gratifying go down the drain? Why, yes. Yes, I did.
14
Best Buy is another good example where data crunching revealed the small demographic that was buying out of proportion to their size. The focus on that demographic gave the corp. a huge competitive edge. What a wonderful concept that managers and employees can benefit from intelligent number crunching in their own business practices. Hope enough of them read this essay.
1
@Curiouser
All they had to do was go to one of their stores and look at the lines at cash registers: Middle-aged women buying baseball gloves (or whatever Best Buy sells).
No "data crunching".
A close friend recently left Microsoft after 15 years. One of his major complaints centered around the endless meetings. He often said there was no time to get his own work done because so much time was spent in meetings. That, and reading a daily flood of emails that were not pertinent to him, yet he had to read “just in case.”
Seattle is also home to Amazon, and employees regularly move back and forth between Amazon and Microsoft. It was customary for newly hired managers to bring over their friends from Amazon to fill management positions under their umbrella whether they had relevant experience and skills or not. This created a slow-down while these managers were brought up to speed on the business they were now overseeing. In some cases, these new hires never really did grasp the issues at hand, so it became a waiting game until the lack of productivity was recognized higher up.
Microsoft is an excellent company with many truly exceptional employees. It seems that they may need to be more vigilant in the hiring of mid-level managers, and more proactive in overseeing precious employee work time.
13
The adage "If you can't measure it you can't manage it" has gotten a bit out of hand. Now it's more like "Quantitative data is the only information worth considering." If you don't have the analytics to back up your qualitative or intuitive know-how, your solution will not be accepted.
But by all means, hire more people and buy a few companies so you can figure out what's going on with your people, before you AI them out of existence.
14
I'm retired now but when I was employed the one thing I dreaded were group meetings. They were usually a waste of time and very little was accomplished. I couldn't wait to get out of there and get back to work. The most productive meetings were one on one. I didn't need extensive analysis to come to that conclusion,
22
The problem is MBA management, a degree for stupid people. Technical employees don’t want to waste time with your useless meetings.
When I as in school in the 70s, anyone taking business classes as either stupid, lazy or a stoner. A MBA is a joke of a degree.
34
Remember the Challenger tragedy, where management, many who possessed no technical or engineering degrees over ruled the engineers in their decision to launch despite launch parameters being exceeded? The Challenger crew was sacrificed by ignorant people. Criminal negligence charges should have been brought. The Boeing Max debacle is the same.
People with MBAs have no place in a technical department, the results are always bad.
46
@Paulie
Same can be said of corporate Health Systems (Not healthcare) now in place. We have abrogated all responsibility for helping people lead better lives with appropriate medical, nursing, pharmaceutical, surgical (etc) care
Choices. It's a huge loss. Don't people see this?
21
@Paulie There were engineers at Morton Thiokol who were opposed to the launch by NASA that morning because of the freezing temperatures on the platform. It's amazing that managers did not seem to understand that warm temperatures year-round was a major reason the launch platform was located in Florida in the first place.
You're right that NASA knuckled under to the politics of "lighting the candle" just hours before President Reagan's State of the Union address.
With excellent staff and engineers, managers need to have the wisdom to know when not to intervene.
8
I generally learn from Mr. Irwin's articles but this one reads like a rather pompous and self-important rediscovery of issues articulated much more entertainingly in "Parkinson's Law", a short and witty book first published in 1958 and still in print which describes problems large organizations discover in running themselves. Not surprisingly, C. Northcote Parkinson, its author, uncovered the law over years working in the British Civil Service.
11
As someone who worked as a line maintenance person t a major airline, the only time we had a meeting was to impart a technical problem with the aircraft that needed to be addressed immediately. We got the info and left, usually within a hour.
When I took my one and only office job at a aerospace manufacturer as a technical writer I endured innumerable meetings that imparted absolutely no information. What is wrong with the office management with this meeting culture? I suspect they are just trying to prove to their MBA superiors that they are doing something.
You want to kill a company, hire a bunch of MBAs.
26
Too bad we didn't use analytics to decide to move all employees in my org into crowded open space.
14
Large meetings intended only to bolster management's sense of self-worth have been a problem for decades. Typically they are the sign of a complacent organization with a long established and profitable product (photographic film, for instance).
The thing is, this problem has also been known for decades. It's amazing how the science of data analytics produced an outcome that the executives should have understood already. I get the feeling that the analytics were simply the right flag flying at the right time. So they didn't initiate the change, they just made the change acceptable to the organization.
13
I've managed teams of software developers for 40 years. Our software is used for internal systems at Microsoft, and we developed on top of Microsoft products, so I regularly commuted to Redmond WA for year and know "how Microsoft works".
I take issue with Mr Irwin's analysis. Tech is stressful and the hours are insane. What I try to do is build a team, and I protect them like an angry mother bear. I try to create an "island" of serenity and creativity. I manage them at an emotional level as well as a technical one. That's my job.
I don't need metrics to know what my team is experiencing.
The teams at Microsoft that I dealt with were brutally honest with each other. The tone was set by Mr Gates, who if you ever got email from was astounding for for it's insight, clarity, and honesty. Every protocol for corporate email protocol Mr Gates broke.
For all it's techy-ness software development is a human endeavor. If things are not going well it's because the corporate culture and/or management team is not proficient in the human component.
20
Did anyone think of just asking the employees what aspect of life/work balance they were referring to?
Answer: I get home too late.
Question: Why can't you leave earlier?
Answer: I have to get my work done late in the day because of all these meetings we have.
Bingo! You don't need big data to figure this out. Then you look into the meetings and it'd be obvious that there are too many people do get anything done.
I don't think the advantages of having enough data to reach this conclusion without human contact outweigh the disadvantages of the endless surveying, monitoring, etc required to produce that data.
65
It seems that the Microsoft manager was oblivious to his own mismanagement. His lack of self-awareness did not allow him to see the problem till it was presented to him as data. It's a culture that allows for the manager to advance his own career while his "team" to suffer silently. Smaller meetings are more intimate, less analytical yet often offering greater insight and creativity. However intimacy is problematic for scale analytics.
I met a young woman this weekend who sheepishly said worked at Facebook. She was looking to leave.
17
The link via your and your readers discussion here with that of Eduardo Porter's column in today's NY Times Sunday Review is that both discussions concern declining worker productivity. In Porter's case, he attributes the decline in worker productivity at least partially to the aging of the workforce and older workers' lack of modern tech skills.
However, you and your readers' take on the issue is that meetings with large numbers of participants are wasteful of employees' time because little is accomplished in such large groups by most attendees. To make up for this wasteful time, employees must engage their job issues by themselves, or in much smaller, more innovative groups where they can freely engage with each other.
Interestingly, Porter cites a study showing that over the past 15 years the aging workforce has reduced productivity by about -0.25% to -0.70%, annually. For 15 years, a reduction of -0.70% per year in worker productivity would amount to a reduction in overall worker productivity of about -10% for this period. Since: [(0.993)^15 = 0.9000], or a 10% reduction. So, ceteris paribus, just from an aging workforce, per this analysis, productivity declines by about -10.00%.
As the fiscal stimulus from the recent tax cuts flares out, a return to low GDP growth of about +2% may garner more political discussion, as it is a source of increasing income inequality.
[6/17/2019 M 11:25 am Greenville NC]
5
Workers often feel that "analytics" is data raining down on them from above. Why not set up unit-based research teams to set goals, monitor interventions and generate (and own and influence) their own data instead of having it pushed at them from somewhere else?
5
This article high-lights the economic problem with data analysics.
How much money did Microsoft spend to validate something that they could have known intuitively? Or by asking the right question?
Most data analytics can help your business in some way, but can it help your business enough to justify the cost?
7
Oh come on. Robots will fix all this with AI in the near future. No more dissatisfaction.
3
Instead of just using analytics, how about asking people why the are not happy--and then doing something about what they say (even if it hurts management's feelings or sense of control)?
28
These “extensive surveys” didn’t include a question as to WHY employees were dissatisfied? Seems that would be the logical next question to ask in a survey as such.
27
It’s always about the “WHY.” Couldn’t agree more, yet this question is rarely asked in any survey.
6
I don't agree that analytics cannot help you if you want to make great art or change the world. If anything, analytics is needed more here than in other instances. Everyone who is passionate about their career wants some type of success - whether it is monetary or not. Analytics, if you can get your hands on data, can help guide you. I am an illustrator with a certificate in Illustration, an ever-expanding portfolio, and lots of determination to make a go of a career in illustration. Lots of people have given me advice on what has worked for them, as if it is a tested method for everyone. All that their advice is is what has worked for them. There is no data, just anecdotes that haven't been tabulated and analyzed. Yet I believe that there probably is data that would help. It is just really hard to find it. No one thought that the romantic, nostalgic game of baseball could be analyzed before Bill James invented sabermetrics.
4
It’s great that the numbers confirm what leaders with strong observational skills, a dose of humility and good ole’ common sense already knew. Having worked for a Fortune 50 company over much of my career, I am more worried about those who misapply, miss-read and outright abuse the results of deep statistical analysis. Many an executive only takes the slivers of consulting work seriously that are most in alignment with their previous thoughts and biases. We provide executives so much data that they often only use it as a smorgasbord to pick through and satisfy their type “A” appetite to always be correct. All the statistical analysis in the world won’t be able to solve this baked in human flaw called ego. For every Warren Buffet with the humility to quickly call out Wells Fargo, there are three Boeing CEOs who need to be savaged for a month before they even show a hint that they understand how misguided their thinking was. It’s funny how many billions of dollars are spent on consultants, just to try and corse correct the management mistakes of leaders who shouldn’t be there in the first place.
25
Klinghofer data mining Microsoft's records found the Hewlett-Packard approach to staffing to be the most ideal. Um, don't most B-schools teach the HP way in at least one lesson?
5
When I worked I loved meetings because it gave the illusion of working and got you close to the boss while you were doing nothing. I always noticed that people came to meetings uninvited for the same reason. And I guess holding meetings gave the bosses the illusion that they were managing.
37
@Rich Murphy Big meetings = "Look how important I am, boss...look at me! Look at me!" Total waste of time.
9
This is a game which has only one winning strategy: do not play.
17
So. all this data and analysis (and money) to find out what they could have found out by treating people as humans rather than data points - just talking with them.
And, after all of this, they still miss the point. All the meeting times, work at home etc is not the point - the point is people feeling as if they are not being treated as a person. They go to useless meetings - so they have to bring work home (been there, done that).
Most of us figured that out decades ago and when we became managers, put in place an amazing thing called a meeting agenda. Tight meetings with specific goals and summaries at the end with stated tasks assigned to (and confirmed that they were understood by) particular people in the meeting. Specific follow ups (one on one or by small group) to move projects forward and find out snags at the ground level. Solve the problems with .... wait for it ... the people actually doing the work who know what the problems are and usually have the best insights for solutions (you can keep McKinsey, I’ll take my team’s feedback any day -and they’re a better value for the money).
The punchline to the joke is the Fitbit type analysis of employees’ productivity. The one learning point from this whole thing is to treat employees (receptionists to VPs) as if they’re human beings - listen to them, hear what their feedback and suggestions are.
Instead, their solution to treating employees as if they’re machines is to track them as if they are ... machines
61
@Other
Talk to people? Are you kidding, this in the age of instant message, Skype message or whatever and email? Having worked at large and mid-sized companies the past 10 years, I've discovered that employees and managers communicate more indirectly than they do in person or even by phone.
Also, most of these companies did an annual survey about employees' satisfaction with their jobs and the company. These People Pulse surveys left most people as skeptical as ever that things would improve.
The only time I was heard by management was when new management came in to ask questions about my department. This is when they heard that our department's manager focused mostly on the bottomline and seldom considered the people.
Big corporations will always be challenged to know how best to keep employees satisfied.
3
Did Microsoft pay for this article? It sure reads that way. But this is not just me being snarky, and here's why: When Microsoft got back into hardware with Surface, its products were pricey, fragile, underwhelming, and overpriced. (Some people feel they still are.) But Microsoft got past that by basically buying fans: giving away hardware to easily-impressed online influencers, cutting deals with highly visible organizations such as the National Football League, and continually seeding pundits with a canned storyline about Microsoft's renaissance as a hardware company. Now that this fake-it-instead-of-making-it strategy has paid off, MS has moved on to the next phase: consolidating its synthetic success into a reputation for management genius. An article like this will certainly help.
15
@JL Williams I love my Surface. It is superior to the other tablets and laptops that I have used and owned in almost every way. I also loved my windows phone which was far technologically superior to the i-phone I now own. It didn't have the product placement that apple buys so wasn't "cool" and did not sell but almost every techie I know agrees with me.
4
Don't forget the Zune! Widely acknowledged among techies to be superior to the iPod
1
@Cranky @LBS
You guys are punking us, yes?
1
Maybe, just maybe, it might be worth rethinking the whole "winner take all" thing. A society with a few 'winners' and a lot of 'losers' is not likely to survive.
71
I've been studying something related for over a decade: the number and types of people we connect with in daily life. The data 'big reveal' leads to stunning - and actionable - insights that can't come any other way.
By age 6, kids connect with at least 150 others.
A mid-career mom with a house, spouse, and three kids connects with no fewer than 500.
To keep a child safe when diagnosed with celiac, asthma or a food allergy, parents spend the equivalent of nine working days to communicate with those who need to know.
A spouse of a woman with breast cancer will connect with nearly 90 different types of people in the hospital alone.
A homeowner manages upwards of 20 people to care for it.
To achieve better 'work-life' balance, people need data about the 'life' part, too. This is important because people have less out-side-of-work support than in times past.
Families today are geographically separated (40% of us live an average 700 miles away), disrupted by divorce (only 20% of families are once married couples with children, the rest are single parent, divorced, remarried families), even if they do live close by, women family members (traditional caregivers) have jobs and are less available to help, and we lack deep ties to social institutions. Most of us barely know neighbors.
Luckily, data about 'life' helps find creative ways to achieve 'life' goals. Further, my research shows: get the 'life' part working better and the 'work' part will too.
11
"....more and more of the most compelling opportunities are at companies that dominate their fields — global, profitable, well managed, technologically adept." Sorry, wrong.
Studies by the U.S. Small Business Administration (https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41523.pdf) as well as other organizations find that more than 50% of net new jobs are created by small business. Size and profitability are not necessarily correlated (re: Uber, Tesla, etc., never mind GE and other "blue chip" firms). Size and being "well-managed" certainly is not correlated (insert your own favorite example here). Size and innovation? Apple bought the company that invented Siri. Google acquired the companies that invented NEST, Waze, and the Android operating system.
You can say that there are lots of great job opportunities in larger organizations, but I don't see a business case here that larger companies are more profitable, better managed, or more technically adept.
11
Your headline reminds me of the old adage, figures don't lie, but liars figure.
In other words, data is helpful up to a certain point. There are so many other factors that go into decision making.
You can tell a smoker, excess drinker, obese person that data has shown they are at a tremendous increase risk of early death but if they don't care they will not listen and a few of them will still live to a ripe old age.
10
Not bloated meeting, but boring meeting. If you make meeting fun and productive, people will come
1
Neil, great work on this article!
[Can] Data Help You Win in the Winner-Take-All Economy? Yes, absolutely. Data was a brilliant poker player, even better than Riker.
4
I worked at a company, some time ago, where we just referred to meetings as beatings, as in "Is today's beating at three or four?" And yes the beatings made us sad.
22
@Mr. Jones
Announcement: The beatings will continue unless morale improves.
29
@Mr. Jones - I don't usually laugh out loud while reading the comments section, but you brought it out of me. Spot on.
Four excellent books I use with business students and clients alike - on managing oneself, gaining fulfillment, and providing value to a thriving organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit: 1) “The First 90 Days” by Michael Watkins, which provides very practical advice on how to be most effective in reading and thriving in any culture - whether start-ups, turnarounds, growth organizations or exits; 2) “Linchpin” by Seth Godin, on how to be most productive, very valuable and, most important, happy at work, and what to do if you’re not; 3) “How to Become a Rainmaker” by Jeffrey J. Fox, an often acerbic but always spot-on little book about effectively landing and managing meetings with managers, prospects and customers; and 4) “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, whose advice about scheduling - and sticking to! - a few hours during the work week for solo concentrated planning and reflection is one of the best business books, especially for new managers.
3
A serious American problem for too many people is a chronic IMMATURITY that waits for data metrics to be able to interpret what to do, what to think and what to believe. This is just unbelievable. Acquire some imagination! Some Common Sense, develop your intuitive abilities and self feedback, and get a grip.
7
Real insights come from informally talking to your people. MBWA: "Management by Walking Around." That's how you figure out what is on people's minds and what is really happening. People often don't open up in meetings.
9
Just a helpful suggestion, not meant to disparage the article: Get to the point early. Most people have limited time in their lifes, whether its for education or intertainment. More signal, less noise, is a good guideline.
29
@Samm - My wife is breaking a lot of new ground in these fields. I forwarded the article to her with a note; "scroll down to..."
I’m the same year Shoshana Zuboff’s monumental “Surveillance Capitalism” has been published, this article doesn’t bother to wrestle with the ethics, consent, or impact issues arising from mining the digital “vapor” of employee calendars and emails. Irresponsible.
8
You have to have a pretty stupid company to require a manager's permission for an employee to interview for another position at the company. They needed data to figure this out?
Anybody who's ever worked at a company with this rule knows it just encourages people to quit, especially the smartest, most ambitious employees.
I worked for a manager who wouldn't let me leave his department because I was valuable- not withstanding that I'd be more valuable to a different department. That other department was his internal competition so it was best for him that I stay.
Of course I left.
10
@Shaun Eli Breidbart
But at least, you didn't help his internal competition. Losing you was a loss, but having you go to another group would have been worse for him.
What you expect that managers would manage for the benefit of the entire company.
3
Unfortunately data by video cameras controlled by Corporations and given to government will take away our Bedrock principles as Americans. Freedom, its obvious that this technology NOW IS BEING USED TO HURT PEOPLE. Government is using ezpass to ticket people and stores such as Target, Walmart and other big retailers are now using this Technology to listen in on customer conversations and recording their movements profiling potential shop lifters or whatever justification they claim.... The point is or nation has stripped away or freedoms from slowly plunking the feathers of a bird one feather at a time. ...... If America does not stand against this draconian way of video and audio recording in Big stores and in public places then we lost our nation. ....
9
Ironically, Microsoft could have arrived at this conclusion, with fewer people crunching fewer data, by reading an intro social science text about corporations. For decades, employee’s major complaint in otherwise sterling work environments has been the proliferation of meetings.
Why so many meetings? Because any bureaucracy - whether our government, Microsoft, or the local grocery store - wants to grow. Notice I’m not defining grow as make more product; grow as hire more people.
This bureaucratic drive exists outside of sales or profit. It’s a human characteristic to accrue power. It feels good, literally; rising in a dominance hierarchy releases pleasurable neurotransmitters. Those who rise also get more rewards: Food, salary, life choices.
So how to get power? Control. Whether village chief or CEO, a gauge of someone’s power is how many people report to them to receive orders, and how many report to those, and so on. Unsurprisingly, in complex societies, the total number of administrators tends to increase faster than the actual makers. Corporations and governments keep getting top-heavy. Yes, even the cool “horizontal” structure of tech is a hierarchy; it can get side-heavy.
Thus, if you administer, your raison d’etre is to report about meetings you led in which people you control reported to you. The more the better. Over time, such meetings become redefined as necessary and productive because after all, those who control people also control definitions.
8
This article is way too long for its content.
194
@Norman - Yes, it was a pretty long article with a very long part on baseball stats, to come out with the earth-shaking news that office meetings are boring and unproductive.
25
As usual these days with the Times, very misleading title to article. First of all anyone could have determined without complex analytics that numerous large meetings are a disaster. Second, How does all this( and it is a long non data filled article) relate to how every employee should understand the use of big data? Trite. Overly long and filled with anecdotes which are not data
6
Unfortunately, the greatest ill in big business and government go unrecognized: stupidity. What idiots schedule 27 hours a week for meetings?
8
@larry klein. Many of those idiots work in academia. They schedule three-hour meetings in the name of "transparency" and whatever buzz word might justify such a blatant waste of productive work time. If you don't attend, you can be written up or labelled in a negative way. It's a waste of tax payer money. Many capable people have to use their free time to get their research done and reports written.
2
I have to question why The New York Times has permitted its columnist Neil Irwin to use his own column to promote and sell his upcoming book? Why wouldn't The Times, if it deemed Mr. Irwin's book worthy of a review in The Times, get an outside and impartial reviewer to write about it, instead of permitting the author himself to publish an uncritical excerpt from his book in an effort to hawk his own work?
Were The Times to have employed a Readers' Representative, she would surely have taken issue with this.
15
Oh please! Any engineer at a large company will tell you that meetings involving more than 4 people suck the motivation and life out of everyone. The problem is that insecure low- and middle- level managers feel that meetings make their time more productive. And corporate America is full of such people. They are promoted because they can talk, and their mediocre upper level managers take that as a sign of good management potential. You don't need to analyze employee emails and calendars to figure this out. I'm sure the Microsoft people knew or suspected this to begin with, this did not emerge magically from the data as the author would have us believe it.
16
A number of commenters note that the analytics team's conclusion about large meetings is obvious, and therefore the analysis was unnecessary. But we've all dealt with organizations that have problems like the one described in this article. It can be really difficult to change these organizational behaviors even when drawbacks seem obvious. I would argue that the value of this data analysis is not in its conclusions, but in the fact that it provided specific, concrete evidence to support that conclusion (which we supposedly "all know"). The analysis includes evidence demonstrating improvement after changes are made, which reinforces motivation to make and sustain changes. It's the evidence that's persuasive, making the analysis immensely valuable.
7
This is a data-driven article but in the wrong way. Is computer analysis truly required to discover that good managers maintain ongoing individual relationships with those being supervised? Didn't we already know large meetings tend to waste time? Conversations with people and direct observation could have yielded such nuggets.
Moreover, the article had too much filler, such as the Moneyball discussion. (I'm a baseball fan, by the way, so it's not as if I disdain the topic.) A better narrative than the one the author chose--how Microsoft used lots of data to solve a problem--would have been this: Thinking falls into ruts, big data can provide more ruts, and here is one example.
4
History repeats itself even within the same company. In the late 1980s, Steve Maguire, a Microsoft manager, wrote a classic book called "Debugging the development process" (published by Microsoft Press). He used his experiences at Microsoft (then run by Bill Gates, of course) as the book's basis. (The first sentence of the book is "This book might make Microsoft look bad.")
Maguire criticized large regularly scheduled meetings, on the very rational basis that if an issue arises, it has to be dealt with right away by the people who can fix it (through an ad-hoc mini-meeting at someone's desk) rather than allowed to fester until the day of the meeting.
The only large meetings that he condoned were those of a celebratory nature (with plenty of good food and drink provided) when something major had been accomplished by the team.
It's paradoxical that his lessons seem to have been forgotten by his former company a generation later.
16
I work for a nonprofit with 39 employees. It is surprising to me how much I’m taking away from this article about how my own workplace can be improved.
9
@Cousy - Agreed. I work with nonprofits that penalize fundraisers for “not making the numbers” yet a deeper dive into how their programs are planned, directed and implemented often indicates a lack of operational efficiencies and low engagement - which deplete essential resources and cause staff burnout among those that have to pick up the slack. The fact that Irwin began this piece with a caveat about how this would not be of interest to mission-driven organizations is widely shared, even in the philanthropy press. The latter decries the fact that donors don’t want to pay for impact systems and measurement, yet donors consistently want measurement. Plus, nonprofit leaders just as stubbornly decry what they consider “corporatization” of the nonprofit sector. No wonder fundraisers turn over every 18 months or less.
6
"One of their findings was that people who worked extremely long work weeks were not necessarily more effective than those who put in a more normal 40 to 50 hours. In particular, when managers put in lots of evening and weekend hours, their employees started matching the behavior and became less engaged in their jobs"
Oh, really?! And you needed to analyze lots of data to find this out? I observed this 30 years ago by having to work for many of those kinds of bosses. Now, please pay me my huge consulting fee.
84
@Disembodied Internet Voice
At the root of the problem here is that the managers at Microsoft didn't trust or use intuition, good management practices, workplace psychology or common sense. They needed data. And so they acquired a company that analyzed the data ( at great expense and probably quite a bit of time with many meetings ).
The ironic thing is that the analytic company probably used these insights to design the algorithms used to generate the data...
3
One of the truisms I came up with over 50 years ago was “The productivity of a meeting is inversely proportional to the number of people attending and often the optimum meeting size is one.”
I’m surprised people are still discovering this.
160
@Mike Wyman we'll discuss this at the next meeting
26
@Jim let's make it recurring
3
@Mike Wyman
Exactly! Just send an email. Management NEVER listens to the peons. They're going to do whatever they want regardless of input from those of us with our boots on the ground.
2
"The issue was that their managers were clogging their schedules with overcrowded meetings, reducing available hours for tasks that rewarded more focused concentration — thinking deeply about trying to solve a problem."
Good college-level management courses teach that large meetings are notoriously inefficient. One study in the 1960's showed the recall of attendees in most large group meetings dropped well below 50% within an hour afterward. Too many large and unproductive meetings mean bored and dissatisfied employees.
It's unfortunate that Microsoft had to take on an acquisition to discover the solution and, as suggested by the author, large corporations are often tone-deaf in that way.
Managers of large staffs in major corporations often forget the fundamentals of what they learned in business school. And, a business schools should require comprehensive studies in psychology and the behavioral sciences.
It's to Mr. Ostrum's credit that he had the wisdom to seek the answers he did on staff morale, and take the advice that was offered. That's what good managers do.
17
Perhaps Microsoft might turn its attention to the impact of its own products, ostensibly developed to improve productivity, now enabling the very productivity destroyers they use data to uncover. Microsoft Outlook, allowing people anywhere in your firm to find all available time for yet another meeting, remote conferencing tools eliminating can’t get there as reason not to attend yet more meetings, instant messaging that bombards you as you try to think (after all, your calendar shows you are not in a meeting), and PowerPoint slides that must be minutely crafted in the infamous pre-meeting meeting. The Dilbert meme about the pre-pre-meeting is no joke; it is reality.
57
Reflection of my own career. I started coming in earlier than normal to have time to actually get work done before the email and phone call deluge started for the other 50% of my job, research and technical support for others. Having uninterrupted time when you are in a research position is the most productive time of all.
105
I never succeeded in internal transfers and growth in my career. This article gives me an idea for fluidity and fairness to create fresh rotation. Make it like NBA or other sports leagues with some new draft pick and inter-team worker trade game theory to make a manager who is loosing talent get some draft pick or other compensation for the loss of someone who was performing well.
4
Many of the benefits of "data" enumerated in the article are the result of observation of events and people. More data seems to result in a deeper analytical field, but observation is necessary to derive the benefits. So, is it really necessary to develop a new language to describe what is essentially management intuition? When I read Moneyball when first published I recommended that a client get deeper into sales statistics to find out who in the sales force could be much more effective. The baseball manager in Moneyball had intuition based on observation, The sales manager who did essentially the same thing on a simple spreadsheet saw some rewards. Perhaps the newer tools really are necessary in super corporations that have the overhead to deal with the necessary daily analysis, but most managers will still be using intuition based on experience and observation, and use it to maintain independence and independent thought, and perhaps protect their creativity.
5
@bob fonow You are missing the major point of the article. This isn't about "intuition," this is about decisions made after a thorough analysis of data, which itself is a process, as one first gets information, then actually processes the information to acquire knowledge. However, the article did gloss over that part.
In the past, we never had access to the amount or quality of data that we have now. Looking at numbers on a spreadsheet isn't going to reveal much to most people. One has to go through the process of analyzing it, and sometimes setting up different hypotheses to test, to clarify your understanding.
2
Automatic recovery of employee information in an organisation is exciting.
It will alleviate one of the most pressing problems that I see for workers in these organisations. It underlies the topic of the article. I experienced that such workers spend an inordinate part of their time and energy on the management function. Spending so much time in meetings to plan, coordinate and report, which are mostly management functions, is excessive. Written reporting, another management function, consumed a lot of my time and energy.
I think that the management of workers' energy underlies their dissatisfaction. The opening image of an exhausted worker, discussion of Joey Votto's "inaction" strategy, and the fact that “energy” does not appear in the article indicate the problem to me. If energy management is left to the employee then the only way to meet demands is to spend less time and energy on the life, rest and recreation part of the balance.
This is not to say that managers are at fault. They have just as much interest in the problem, and are themselves even busier. I just think that energy management should be put on the table and employee big data will help.
Time is easy to measure but I think the digital exhaust contains information on the mental state of workers. There is a caveat, however: privacy.
6
Does it really take extensive data analysis to figure out that meeting 27 hours a week in a job that requires a lot of individual thinking, creativity and time alone is counterproductive to both work quality per time and morale? Why didn’t Ostrum and his boss boss notice this? Could it be that he had so many - 700 -people under him? Or that he doesn’t know how to manage people, how to be a proactive hands-on manager, whether of his own managers or of just getting around and talking with staff. That such data analytics is necessary to solve such an obvious dysfunction says something about the nature of Microsoft’s organization and culture.
115
I think that the article show that the dynamics of any large system, such as the hardware division at Microsoft, is very complex. Anything complex is not intuitive. You need to collect and analyze data to find out what is important, so that positive change can be implemented.
17
@Roger
And a few of the people in those meetings are manipulative, using strategies to garner resources. The well-intentioned people find themselves exhausted from the antics of these attention hogs.
19
@Mike Page In addition to the complexity, people in large organizations get stuck in routines that are counterproductive. Until some shocking data shows up, it's difficult to get unstuck. Or there may be a penalty for speaking up about excessive meeting time. Hard data make those discussions easier to start and are a good first step in making improvements
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No mention of the impact of analytics on pitching in baseball? Data crunchers get the blame for the numerous pitching changes that have lengthened games to average over 3 hours. If everybody uses the same tools, overall performance, e.g., chance of winning game, may improve, but the customers may get dissatisfied with the overall product. I wonder whether self optimizing every moment of your work day via external devices adds up to a satisfying experience, equivalent to how fan feels after a long game. It may create a different type of burnout. Not from spending long hours st office but burning the candle st both ends for the time you do spend there. Baseball players have circuit breakers built into their routine. Office workers do not .
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I don't dispute the effectiveness of analytics, but that successful person who networks across departments is the trait of a highly effective person that doesn't require data to reveal.
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@Jeff
True story: there was a company which had an old guy who has been there forever and really didn't seem to do a whole lot of work, (other than training new hires on procedure), mostly seemed to just wander from office to office. Should have been let go but nobody had the heart. Then his wife got sick and he took a leave of absence to take care of her. The company just about fell apart when he left. Turns out that he was the major means of communication in the company, When he went from dept to dept he was telling people things they needed to know, should hear, giving managers a head's up of coming events. The company asked him to come back and immediate stated to revamp how it communicated internally.
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Yes, and what analytics would capture the impact of this guy? Putting cameras and recording devices on every employee’s head? Then analyzing the videos? The level of surveillance of employees implied in this article is frightening.
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@sjs
Great story! This type of informal communication network (some might call it the grapevine, but it's way more than that) goes unnoticed by many because it doesn't show up on org charts and the people behind it don't have it as part of their job description (which means they are not evaluated on it or rewarded for it).
One company I worked at did realize the value of informal "connectors" and tried to get a handle on it, methodize it, knowledge manage it, etc. But in trying to understand it, they made it disappear -- drained all the blood out of it and perhaps frightened off those who were talking out of school.
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When I was just starting out as an early twenty-something in a sales career, my mentor, a very gregarious happy person, told me: 25% of §y time should be out seeing customers, 50% at the office taking care of the business to keep that customer, and 25% of the time goofing off.
The "goofing off" time, say like learning something new and interesting that currently has no direct relation to success, which is my early days might have been learning how to code, is what keeps us interested, engaged and fulfilled.
I suppose instead of goofing off, he might have said day dreaming which is the fodder of visionaries.
Also, nothing about regular, overly long, overly crowded meetings. How did he, a pre-tech dinosaur, know? Intuition, I suppose. Can't get that from data crunching.
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At one unnamed organization, the purpose of meetings has been to offload the actual work, and a deadline, onto other people.
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This focus on how people do their jobs makes me think of Frederick Turner, who pioneered industrial engineering time & motion studies in the early 1900's. Effective enough to still be used, this practice is unpopular with employees and can be counter-productive because people do not like having their activities regimented. Same goes for the use of data analytics. As helpful as it can be, its success will be dependent on helping people and organizations to find and use the information, but management's instinct for control could force an organization into an artificial one-size-fits-all approach that will only encourage people to either rebel or work around the system.
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@Mike
Still, remember that we live with and benefit from Turner's (and others, like the Gilberts) work every day. If you go to McDonld's or have surgery you are in contact with the time/motion studies of Turner.
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@Mike
I believe you are referring to Frederick W. Taylor, whose work on scientific management methods in industry still proliferates today. Mr. Ostrum's perspective seems to demonstrate that the workplace "efficiency" that Taylor's work promoted can and should be transferred to a data-driven environment.
As appealing as this may seem, these concepts are based on the scientistic view that the application of science in unwarranted situations may not be amenable to application of the scientific method.
You are correct in asserting that implementation of Taylor's methodology tends to promote managerial control and a one-size-fits-all solution, and can ultimately curtail both the creativity needed in the modern workplace, as well as decreasing the job satisfaction of workers.
Finding a rewarding balance of professional and personal life is essential for one's sense of satisfaction and well-being, but recording minute-by-minute data is not. (And how much time is used up simply by inputting the data itself?)
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I think you mean the Gilbreths - Frank and Lillian — of Cheaper by the Dozen fame.
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Interesting article but I’m confused about what information employees get that helps them with their careers. If unproductive meetings are taking people away from completing their assigned individual tasks, it’s obvious that the choice employees face is to either get more productive at completing their assignments or petition to limit meetings. Only the former helps individual employees, and there’s no discussion of how statistics can provide insights to individuals in the workplace (baseball, which collects objective data on individual performance is not a good analogy).
It’s clear that big data provide a competitive market advantage to some firms. It’s also becoming clear that superstar firms are more responsible for rising inequality than individuals. But how to succeed in superstar firms is still largely dependent on elements that don’t easily lend themselves to tracking: the culture of the firm and its internal politics. Firms within an industry - particularly in mature sectors - can have dramatically different cultures. Communicating across departments is a positive in institutions that value such cross pollination, but can quickly become a negative in firms where internecine competition is widespread. Dynamism is lauded in some firms, condemned as unwarranted risk taking in others.
So perhaps the best information that an employee can get is about the culture of the firm I think executives will be reluctant to offer insights on their firms’ culture to employees.
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The big takeaway from the baseball story is that before Statcast was measuring fundamental movements, not aggregate results, with precision, using data helped, but was just pretty good - and relying on just data to answer questions would ultimately fail in a competitive environment. With Statcast, that may not be true very often.
The second part of the baseball story is that teams will increasingly do things the same with the same data, meaning at some point being good at analyzing the data will only help you break even, not get ahead. NFL star Alvin Kamara lasted until the 3rd round of the NFL draft. In baseball, star Justin Verlander cleared waivers in August before eventually being traded. No team thought his contract was worth taking on. Either the teams are not really competing or their data driven approach has created a new "groupthink" that can be exploited once in a while by someone willing take risks. It also suggests that data analysis will not win on its own.
This will someday be true in other businesses as well. Data is history, and people who can see a future change and assess its effects before they are apparent in data will be the best decision makers. The skills described in this article will always be important, just like being able to hit a straight fastball is important. But someday, probably sooner than later, these skills, just like being able to hit a fastball, will not be sufficient to separate from the pack at the highest levels of competition.
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Anyone ever hear of a audit test point? Contrary to an audit control point. Develop a narrative statement of what your seeking to investigate and then developing a program or set of questions or data to explore. The old fashion lost art of taking the time to think.
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