A year of working remotely, learning, and growth.

It’s been a year. A year since we were told that we could no longer come into the office. My wife remembers March 4th specifically because it was our daughter’s birthday, and she was at the airport about to start a mother-daughter trip when I called her to say Microsoft was officially moving to remote work and I was coming home. It was strange to hear that it wasn’t safe to be in proximity to the people that I was used to seeing every day. Some of whom I spend more time with than anyone else in my life. People with whom I love to collaborate, talk, and simply smile or have an easy laugh. People who are not just colleagues, but friends, and some even as close as family. We were expecting it might happen, but when it did it was still a shock. It felt sudden. It felt uncomfortable. It felt a bit hollowing. 

I love being in the office – the energy, the creativity, the comradery. Colleagues from all backgrounds, cultures, experiences, all working together to achieve common, audacious goals. When you have been in these environments for a long time, suddenly not being there is a lot to absorb and digest. I was not only trying to figure out what was best for me and my family, but also a whole team of fellow employees, many of whom had very different sets of experiences and challenges. I came to learn about the many unique situations that suddenly needed answers to questions that previously didn’t exist. How to become a caregiver, a homeschool teacher? How to be around family 24 hours or day, or conversely how to be completely isolated with no friends or family around? My work lost some of its beautiful aspects in terms of the in-person connection and travel to see fellow employees, partners, and customers across the US and the world. It also suddenly started colliding with my home life in new and unexpected ways.

Like all of you, I did my best to adapt quickly. I created new schedules and setup space at home to work, tried to get comfortable with seeing myself on camera for the better part of a day, and got used to hearing the phrases, ‘I think you’re on mute’, ‘Can you see the slides I’m presenting?’, ‘Sorry about my dog barking’. Quite quickly it started to become what people were calling the ‘new normal’. However, I was never a fan of this phrase that was used frequently throughout the first few months of the pandemic. What we were all experiencing was far from normal. Trying to normalize people losing loved ones, their businesses, their jobs, their connections to friends and family, their daily routines, may have been a way for us to cope with this unprecedented situation, but it was extremely hard. None of us had been through this before, and none of us expected it to still be going on a year later.

But as difficult as this year has been, I’ve tried to focus on the positives and what I have been able to learn and how I have been able to grow both personally and professionally. Personally, I’m mostly thankful for the extra time I’ve been able to spend with my family. With two kids in college and one beginning his professional career, I know time with them is so precious, so the fact that we did get extra time together is priceless. Under any normal circumstances I would never have had this time and I count myself truly lucky. On a professional level, there have been many things that I’ve learned over the past year, but there are three that have really stood out for me: 

Being apart brought us closer together: This may sound contradictory, but even though I haven’t seen the team in person going on 12 months, and some new team members I have never met in person, I actually feel closer to the team than I ever have. Thanks to Microsoft Teams, I’ve had a chance to see another side of my colleagues by seeing a peek into their home lives. I’ve met wives, husbands, partners, kids, and pets! I’ve heard them open up about their challenges and concerns in a way that pre-pandemic we might not have gone into. We’ve had honest conversations about how we are coping day to day. I’ve seen the team support each other and their communities and think about much more than just themselves in very difficult periods throughout the year. These deeper connections simply wouldn’t have happened before, and when we do finally get back together in-person, I feel that these experiences have made our relationships more meaningful, and we will appreciate them that much more. Our team culture has seen a lot of positive growth during the past year, and I’m so proud of all of our team for really leaning in to make this happen.

Patience and focus have never been more important: I’ve always liked to move fast and try to achieve as much as possible as quickly as possible, but the past year has taught me that slowing down a little, being more patient and more focused can really be beneficial. Our work and home lives have merged like never before, so we’ve had to prioritize what’s really important. For our work lives that has meant figuring out not just the order of things that need be done, but more importantly, what not to do. When you work at a company like Microsoft and have such an important mission, one that has become even more vital during the pandemic, you feel like you can’t take your foot off the gas for a second and every task is important and just has to get done. That hasn’t been possible, so we have really refined our focus on what our customers need right now and what they will need in the near future. We know that in a post-pandemic world there will be aspects of our lives that will have changed permanently, so we want to ensure that wherever our customers are working, learning, creating, and playing, we are there for them when they need us the most.

Working remotely has not impacted our ability to achieve our goals: Although we have not been able to execute on every activity exactly how we wanted to, we have been able to achieve most of the goals we set out at the beginning of the year. We managed to shift quickly to executing product announcements and launches in a purely digital environment and ramped up new ways we could communicate, listen, and learn from our customers without actually being able to be in the same place as them. Across our product development, management, marketing, social media execution, and customer experiences, we have been pushed to be more creative and experiment in ways that I don’t think we would have tried before. This is another aspect that I believe will benefit us long-term as it has made us better product makers and marketers.

I always find that taking time to think and reflect helps my mindset, so I hope you are able to take a moment to find the positives and the opportunities you had to learn and grow during the past year. I’d love to hear about your experiences and wish you all a safe and successful year ahead.