Remote Work Trend Report Amol Pawar, May 3, 2020June 23, 2023 The remote work trend report is a report published by Microsoft based on their user behavior data. In the current times when most of us are working from home, this report gives us some good insights. We looked at this report from the lens of data access for B2B providers and their use. This article highlights key aspects of the report we personally liked and disliked. The Good The report has some impressive numbers. Microsoft has reported a 200% jump in “meeting minutes”. From 900 million meeting minutes on March 16th, it claims it has jumped to 2.7 billion meeting minutes in a day. Along with these meeting minutes, the report claims video calls through MS teams have increased by 1000 % in the month of March. We get a sense of wide usage of MS Teams when it says 183,000 tenants in 175 countries are using Teams for Education. So, there are just 20 countries in the world where MS Teams is not being used. Wonder which are those and what are they doing? The mobile users of MS Teams have grown by 300% from early February to March 31. This clearly indicates more people are now installing MS Teams on their phones apart from using it from their laptops Video On Please The report does look at % of people turning on their video while in a meeting as one of the metrics. It breaks it down by user countries and we have converted that data into a table here: Country Video In meetings/calls Norway and the Netherlands 60% Australia 57% Italy 53% Chile 52% Switzerland 51% Spain 49% UK, Canada, and Sweden 47% Mexico 41% US 38% Japan 39% France 37% South Africa 36% Singapore 26% India 22% The report provides an explanation of why the numbers are lower in some countries, we felt that was too simplistic an explanation. We would talk about that a bit later in this article. Key Features The report introduces us to some features of MS Teams, which is a very clever insertion. Some of the features like “Raise Hand” and “End Meeting” seem to be “inspired” from other similar platforms. Features such as “participant report” and “Real-time noise suppression” would come in very handy for most MS team users. The Bad As users of Office 365 and most used MS tools, we thought this report could have given us more. The fact that it is the first such report we are expecting more information and insights to come our way. We believe key opportunities lost from a first report perspective are: The over-simplistic interpretation of “video-on” data. The % usage of video by countries could be looked at deeply. The report takes the easy route out stating lower video % in India is due to lower internet bandwidth. Working with Small. Medium and Enterprise customers we believe MS has the necessary information to further break this user behavior by industry size, type and even time of the day to provide some interesting insights. MS Teams is essentially a bundled offering within Office 365, it would have been interesting to see how the interaction between other MS applications has increased during these times. What kind of integrated workflows are companies creating to respond to the current situation? Another example of making a simplistic assumption is when the report claims that people are adopting more flexible work schedules. Based on 1 data point of the average time between first and last use of MS Team in a day, the report tends to hypothesize flexible work schedules. Its clear MS collects and analyses multiple data points of user behavior and has access to tens of millions of data points. It is safe to believe it has the necessary capabilities to put this data to work to find meaningful correlations that could help the world of business. We hope that is the direction this series will take if not in the first report. The Ugly If you ever wanted an example of unconscious bias, look at the picture used in this report to depict work from home situation. In this picture a lady is shown to be fondly looking at her 2 kids while she is on a call with work colleagues (our assumption). However, what is disturbing to note is first, she is shown sitting in a kitchen. Is that a very subtle unconscious bias at play or are we just reading too much into this? Secondly, she is shown admiring her kids while in the middle of a work-related call. We accept the situation is completely possible irrespective of the gender of the parent however in the context of the picture, this hidden message tends to get additional layers of meaning. The other part, which is kind of known to us, but this report puts it out on the table again, is about data access. How much data should be given to an enterprise software application like MS and what it should be allowed to collect, aggregate and anonymize is a big topic. We understand the dangers while also appreciate the value of such data. It is a tricky subject. This report gives us a glimpse of the type of data MS already has access to and it did startle us for a moment. Conclusion A report from the world’s leading business application is always of value. This report does offer some insights into multiple facets of the current business situation. The intent of the report seems more to report on increased adoption, key features, and some customer use cases. In our opinion, this report should quickly move to be a decision support tool for businesses across the world than being a marketing tool for MS. You can read the report here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-meetings/ Featured HR Tech
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