In an interview with The Examiner, 27-year Microsoft veteran Shawn Villaron explained why he thinks a rigid policy against remote work is counterproductive.
Meta last week ordered employees back to the office at least three days a week starting in September.
The Microsoft system lets managers and their employees decide whether they work full time, in the office or have a hybrid schedule. An employee can also request to work fully remote. A manager can endorse that request to a supervising vice president who will make the final decision. We invite the manager and the individual contributor, the employee, to periodically meet throughout the year to give employees an opportunity to express their preference for how they would like to work.
Our philosophy is about getting the decision making closest to the experts. We feel that that always gives us the best outcome. Because when you look at a company like Microsoft, we have over 200,000 people in the company. In the Bay Area, we have 4,500 employees. We have people working on hardware, people working on software. We are very remote friendly. We're working on software, we've gotten very good at it.
I have a phenomenal management team. I think managers are absolutely critical to any effective hybrid strategy. My managers will make sure that only the best case has come to me. They are confident in the employees' ability to thrive. No impact on the team.Now what would cause me to decline a request for remote work is if somebody is not in good standing.
Instead of taking a one size fits approach, we encouraged each of the teams in Redmond, as well as in the Bay Area, to experiment, try something and see how it works, share your findings, and then we will all sort of move forward together as we're learning best practices. There were two things that were top of mind for me as a product leader. The first one was social capital. We're human beings. We're social animals by nature. If everyone goes remote, we run the risk that you start to lose some of that social capital.
The opportunity with hybrid work is to start finding ways to reestablish that social capital. What we do is we try to create moments to bring people together. It's always optional because we believe in flexibility. For example, we had an opportunity to hire a product manager from New York. Her personal situation was,"I can't relocate my family." Because we had the ability to allow her to work fully remote, I was able to hire a phenomenal product manager. Five years ago, I would have said,"Sorry, it's just not gonna work out." So it's a relatively small group that chooses fully remote. Usually, it's really about a personal circumstance.
You know what happened? Everybody moved Friday meetings to Monday through Thursday. And so now Monday through Thursday got even more complicated. That was one of those cases where we had to say,"Hey, we have this really good idea. But we operationalized it incorrectly." We went back to the team and said,"Sorry, folks, the challenge is to reduce your meeting load.
So I gather you disagree with Sam Altman's statement that fully remote work is one of the tech industry's worst mistakes.
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