The Future of Work: More Fluid and Less Stressful

Thoughts about technology that is inclusive, trusted, and creates a more sustainable world

These posts represent my personal views on the future of the digital economy powered by the cloud and artificial intelligence. Unless otherwise indicated, they do not represent the official views of Microsoft.

Last month I wrote about the comparatively privileged status enjoyed by those of us who are able to work from home. By that, I meant that being able to work from home correlates with education and the use of computers, attributes that generally correlate with income and social class. People who can work from home often belong to the category that Robert Reich called “symbolic analysts.” Let’s never forget that the mass embrace of working from home during the coronavirus pandemic has been made possible because millions of other people—who are movers of things rather than symbols—have continued to do essential front-line jobs that cannot be performed remotely.

But of course, working from home also has real problems. Today I want to present some new Microsoft research about those problems and ask whether technology can at least partially alleviate them.

First, let’s remind ourselves of just how extraordinary the growth in online meetings has been during the pandemic. In just 19 days last March, worldwide usage of Microsoft Teams was multiplied by a factor of almost five, rising from 560 million meeting minutes per day to 2.7 billion.

A change that enormous in the behavior of so many people cannot have been entirely neutral in its impact on their daily lives. Consider what the daily routine of someone working from home for weeks and months on end looks like. For many of us—certainly for me—a typical work-from-home day consists of one video conference after another interspersed with email, chat messaging, and interruptions from children and family life. If you have the impression that this kind of non-stop video conferencing can be stressful, new research by Microsoft’s Human Factors Labs says that you are right.

Video meetings with work colleagues require sustained concentration, but often deprive us of the social and environmental cues we would get in a normal meeting in a physical conference room. Analysis of the brain waves of video meeting participants in an experimental lab setting reveals that fatigue begins to set in after just 30 or 40 minutes. A recommendation emerging from this research is that, whenever possible, video meetings should be limited to 30 minutes, and people with multiple such meetings per day should make a point of taking breaks to “let their brains recharge” every two hours or so.

But can we do better than just keeping meetings short (highly desirable!) and being sure to take breaks? In particular, can smart technology make video meetings less tiring? The engineers who develop Microsoft Teams think that the answer is yes. They have just rolled out a new feature called Together mode. This works by using AI to digitally place participants in a shared background. Depending on your taste, the background can be anything—a library, a room with an ocean view, an auditorium, or a conventional conference room. Click here for a short YouTube video with more examples of shared backgrounds in Teams Together mode.

People participating in a video call can see each other in the shared environment and can more readily pick up non-verbal cues from each other, which can make their conversation more natural. This isn’t just speculation. Lab measurements of people’s brain waves show that this kind of clever visual presentation of a meeting really does cause less fatigue in participants.

Not all of the new kinds of stress brought on by work from home are caused by technology or the fatigue of long video conferences. Most of us know that working from the privacy of our own homes can come with practical inconveniences beyond the well-known issue of interruptions by children and family. For example, a recent Microsoft survey of Teams users found that only about 35% of people currently working from home have dedicated home offices. Working from the dining room table may be less comfortable than sitting in an ergonomic chair at the office with one or several widescreen monitors in front of you.

But paradoxically, our research also shows that the blurring of frontiers between work and family/leisure actually makes it easier to take stress-relieving or family-related breaks during the formal workday. When all your work colleagues are also working from home, it’s easier for them to understand why you sometimes need to go offline during the middle of the day to deal with family or just take a break—they feel exactly the same need themselves.

The flip side of this blurring of frontiers is that people are now much more likely to interact with work colleagues during off-hours via things like chat messaging or email. Perhaps these last few months will have taught us that our pre-pandemic civilization’s rigid separation between work and leisure time was artificial and even a source of unnecessary stress.

Having said all this, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that working from home all or most of the time will become the new normal for most people. I don’t think it will. Microsoft’s research indicates that the future of work is likely to be a fluid mix of in-person and remote collaboration. As the Microsoft executive in charge of Teams, Jared Spataro, puts it:

“While the future of work will be more remote than it has ever been before, the physical office space—which brings benefits like connected, ergonomic workspaces and opportunities for social connecting and team bonding—will likely remain a core part of the future of work.”