Bosses think workers do less from home, says Microsoft

A major new survey from Microsoft reveals that bosses and workers fundamentally disagree about productivity when working from home.

Bosses worry that working from home isn’t as productive as it is in the office.

While 87% of workers felt they felt like working from home or more efficiently, 80% of managers disagreed.

More than 20,000 employees in 11 countries were interviewed for the survey.

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told the BBC this tension needed to be resolved as jobs were unlikely to ever return to pre-pandemic work habits.

“We need to overcome what we call ‘productivity paranoia’ because all the data we have shows that over 80% of individual employees consider themselves very productive – except their management thinks they are not productive.

“That means there’s a real disconnect in terms of expectations and how they feel.”

Both Mr Nadella and Ryan Roslansky, the head of Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, said employers were grappling with what may be the biggest shift in work patterns in history.

The number of fully remote jobs posted on LinkedIn has skyrocketed during the pandemic, but Mr Roslansky said the data suggested the nature of the role may have peaked.

He told the BBC that of around 14 or 15 million job postings that are usually live on LinkedIn, around 2% of those before the pandemic involved remote work. A few months ago it was still 20% and has since fallen to 15% in September.

In a time of acute labor shortages, employers must work harder to recruit, inspire and retain employees. According to Mr Nadella, this even includes Microsoft itself.

“We had 70,000 people who came to Microsoft during the pandemic, they sort of saw Microsoft through the lens of the pandemic. And now, as we think about the next phase, you have to re-energize them, re-recruit them, help them make social connections.”

By default, Microsoft employees can work from home up to 50% of the time. Anything more than that requires management approval or a move to part-time work.

Some companies are struggling to enforce new work regulations and expectations.

There was resistance to calls for Apple to return to the office three days a week starting in September, while Tesla boss Elon Musk called for being in the office 40 hours a week, sending an email with the message: “If If you don’t show up, we will assuming you’ve resigned”.

An unprecedented number of people have also changed jobs during – and since – the pandemic. In a phenomenon Microsoft has dubbed “the great reorganization,” workers born after 1997 (known as Generation Z) are nearly twice as likely to change jobs.

“At the height of our ‘great reorganization,’ we saw a 50% increase in LinkedIn members changing jobs year-over-year. Gen Z was 90%,” the report said.

By 2030, Gen Z will make up about 30% of the entire workforce, so managers need to understand them, according to LinkedIn’s CEO.

As you might expect, alongside its new observations, Microsoft has new products aimed at reducing this potential mismatch in expectations. It focuses on helping companies’ younger workers to feel a part of and learn from a company, as workers have done in the past.

The new Viva software, for example, enables direct contact with executives, online teaching and a channel for sharing personal photos – something like a company intranet site that heralds a new world of work that employers in particular find difficult to navigate.