Microsoft Research Podcast - 125 - New Future of Work: Driving innovation via cross-company research with Jaime Teevan and Brent Hecht

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

For Microsoft researchers, COVID-19 was a call to action. The reimagining of work practices had long been an area of study, but existing and new questions that needed immediate answers surfaced as companies and their employees quickly adjusted to significantly different working conditions. Teams from across the Microsoft organizational chart pooled their unique expertise together under The New Future of Work initiative. The results have informed product features designed to better support remote work and are now being used to help companies, including Microsoft, usher their workforces into a future of hybrid work. In this episode of The New Future of Work series of the podcast, Chief Scientist Jaime Teevan and Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht of the Experiences and Devices group in Microsoft share how an internal SharePoint document led to what they believe is the largest collection of research on the pandemic’s impact on work. They’ll discuss the role of research during times of disruption, the widening scope of productivity tools, why going back to work two to three days a week is ideal, and what else companies should keep in mind as they decide on new work models. https://www.microsoft.com/research

I knew this was going to be a time in which research would need to come to the service of the company in a big way. There are tons and tons and tons of work questions which affected, again, Microsoft ourselves, like how we actually get work done, as well as all of our customers using all of our products. And when tons of questions emerge, that's when research should be shining and doing its best work. COVID-19 forced an unexpected, rapid shift in the way that workplaces conduct business. In response, Microsoft employees quickly coordinated the expertise and experience of teams across the company to understand the switch to remote work and its impact. The results, which were captured in the New Future of Work report, have helped shape how Microsoft serves its customers and our internal policy. I'm Jamie Teevan, and welcome to the Microsoft Research Podcast.

In this series, we're going to talk to researchers from different areas of the company about how work practices have changed and what that means for creating a new and better future of work. But first, we're going to talk about what went into creating the report with Brent Hecht, who is one of the report's editors. Brent is Director of Applied Science here at Microsoft and an expert in human AI interaction. He is also a professor at Northwestern University. A lot of his research focuses on understanding and mitigating the cultural, geographic, and economic biases that are reflected and reinforced by technology. And to tell you the truth, we've been really fortunate to not only be able to learn from Brent this year about how work has changed, but also to have him working hard to ensure

that those changes end up having a positive impact on the world. Welcome, Brent. Thanks, Jamie. So help me paint a picture of the research that is included in the report. Tell me a little bit about the different kinds of research that are covered there. Oh boy, it's almost easier to tell you what isn't covered there. The joke we have is that it's a bit of a Star Wars bar of research in a very big Star Wars bar. So we have people from really all parts of the company. We have folks coming from the office team, the team's team, you know, these types of products that folks use at work, but then also people from Xbox and LinkedIn, of course, Microsoft Research, which is an amazing

research institution that's been around for a number of years. And we also have folks who apply all sorts of different methods. So there are people applying the state-of-the-art in terms of causal inference from telemetry data. There are folks who rely on very in-depth interviews with customers and with users. There are folks who do survey work. So we're really looking at the changes in work practices that have occurred through all sorts of different lenses. In the context of Microsoft research, we tend to think a lot of the more academic research that happens at Microsoft. Can you tell me a little bit more about the kinds of research that happen outside of Microsoft research? Oh yeah, for sure. You know, there's all sorts of

new knowledge discovery mechanisms in Microsoft and new capability discovery mechanisms in Microsoft outside of Microsoft research or as the cool kids call it, MSR. In particular, we have folks who are data scientists who are masters at wrangling telemetry to answer questions. We have folks who are UX researchers, and they go out and talk to customers, again, in a very in-depth way and try to understand what they're experiencing and how to help them have a better work experience. We have folks who do a lot of incubation stuff.

So from a research perspective, this reminds me a bit of like the system building line of work that occurs in fields like HCI, where folks, they have a hypothesis and they test that hypothesis by basically trying to build out a system. Folks in HR who are doing surveys and other sort of business analytics work.

And then of course, we have folks in real estate and security, our arm that manages the campus, who also use a wide variety of methodologies that are easily understood as research, but aren't typically published. What about the populations being studied? I gather there's probably the same kind of range in populations as there are in methods. Oh, yes. So, you know, again, it's kind of like who isn't being studied. So we started out a lot by looking at ourselves, actually, just because, you know, this was a situation in which Microsoft experienced a shift along with the rest of the world, in fact,

a little bit earlier, right? So like, the Redmond campus was one of the first major offices to get sent home in the United States. And so we started looking at ourselves. And so we looked at all sorts of different functions at Microsoft. So engineers, PMs, folks in all sorts of different roles. But then, of course, we branched out and talked to customers in a huge variety of industries. We had researchers talking to folks who were running small and medium-sized businesses. We had folks who looked at populations in the United States, in India, in Europe, folks that looked at populations that we hypothesized might be having specific types of challenges. So new hires, the unique challenges facing women, all sorts of different populations. That's not to say that we don't have more populations to study.

We definitely do. But it was a pretty diverse set. And so with so many teams involved in the project, everyone coming into this must be bringing different goals and different things that they're trying to get out of the research that's happening. What were the goals of the initiative? Like how were the findings being used by Microsoft? It's a great question, Jamie. So, this initiative, and we can talk more about how we got started, it really was an amazing accomplishment of turning chaos into order. And one way that we did that was we sort of built a consensus around four goals. The first goal is just foundational. We decided that, you know, the whole company needs to be sharing knowledge and collaborating on research as we all sort of uncover what this new mode of work is looking like and how best to support it. You know, blocking, tackling, following research best practices. So when you have findings, you share those out. If you're working in the same area, you build on the findings that were

shared out and then you share those findings back, right? You look at prior work that's been done. Remote work is not a new thing. It's been around for a really long time, actually. The term telecommuting came out of the oil crisis in the 1970s. And so we look back, do we need to ask this question? Or has someone asked this question before? We're really lucky in that way in that Microsoft research actually has been for multiple decades a real leader in understanding and supporting remote work. So we had folks around who could point us to their papers and Friar papers as well.

So that's foundational. And that allows us to create this enormous body of research, which is in large part reported out in the New Future of Work report. So that's the foundation. Then the question is, how can we make this research most beneficial to our customers and to the world? And so we focused our efforts along those lines into three categories. One was thought leadership. So we wanted to make sure that we were communicating our research to the public, making sure that the public understood that we get that they're facing challenges and that we're working on those challenges and making sure that our leaders in the company were updated with the latest findings so they could communicate those findings out to the many people that they talk to every day.

Secondly, we had internal impact. So Microsoft has a strong culture of dogfooding, which means sort of using our own products and making sure they're great before we ship them out. We took that same approach with regards to our own work practices. So a shining example of that is as HR was defining Microsoft's own post-pandemic work practices, we were in that room and we made sure that the policies that were being put in place aligned with the best available data. We were able to do that, which is wonderful. And then third, and this one's the most straightforward, we wanted to make sure that the research was available to product leaders at the minute they needed it, right? So helping to inspire new features,

helping to solve challenges, helping them understand the user problems that folks were facing through a lot of sweat and a lot of effort. And we were able to make progress along all three of those types of impacts. There is very significant progress as well. You mentioned that there's over 30 years of remote research that has come out of Microsoft

Research. What are we able to learn from that work? Oh, boy. Again, it's kind of like, what are we not able to learn? You know, doing research on new work practices that emerged during the pandemic, there was always sort of a paradox in that a lot of the questions had been asked in the past, and we can learn a lot from literature, but they all also required an update. So in some ways, they were both asked and not asked. To the extent they've been asked, the MSR research really,

really helped us out. So number one is the best people to ask for research in a topic that you want to learn quickly about are the people who've been doing research in that topic for a long time. And we had lots of people to ask. So I spent a lot of April, May, June, and this was the case for a lot of the researchers who participated, you know, in our initiative, reading papers that were suggested by MSR folks, you know, including their own. You know, more specifically, MSR had some very interesting work, you know, even in the 90s in a domain that we're starting to see a lot of product movement in. This is sort of trying to think about ways that we might have live connections

with people that are persistent versus, you know, just through sort of the meeting architecture. There has been a lot of research, sort of like second and third order research that we can just sort of skip that first step. That research allowed us to do this. Thinking about things like, for instance, when we want to keep our camera on, when we want to keep the camera off. Sean Rintel at MSR has done some interesting work highlighting that making people turn on the camera might not be the best idea for many types of meetings. We wrote a great blog post that summarized

all of this literature. let's talk a little bit about last year in March and April and what that was like you were new to Microsoft at the time I know I had just moved out of Microsoft Research and into the product teams. And, you know, we were there to really try to help our products move into the future and, you know, bring about the future of work. And then COVID hit and we all got sent home. What was your initial reaction to that? Well, you know, you and I were sharing our initial reactions quite a bit. You know, there were so many. One was that I knew this was going to be a time in which

research would need to come to the service of the company in a big way. So as we all shifted home, an enormous amount of ambiguity that affected almost every business decision emerged, right? It wasn't just work, but there were economic questions, of course, health questions as well, but there were tons and tons and tons of work questions, which affected, again, Microsoft ourselves, like how we actually get work done, as well as all of our customers using all of our products. And when tons of questions emerge, that's when research should be shining and doing its best work.

Did you really know that though? Like, I just remember being terrified and I'm like, we're in this new place and there, you know, like big changes happen and like there's a huge fear of a big economic downturn. I'm like, they're gonna decide they don't need research. And like, what are we gonna decide they don't need research. What are we going to do? I just remember being scared.

Well, yeah, Jamie, you're right. I was scared too. We had a couple of conversations along those lines. But, you know, like I think all folks during that time period, there were a lot of thoughts going in parallel. So, you know, you can focus on work for an hour or two. Then you're thinking, oh my goodness,

what's going to happen to the world? You know, is my family going to be okay? Back to work for an hour or two. during times of economic stress and how companies that have leaned into research during those times have accelerated out of the downturns, you know, remarkably better than those that haven't. And I remember that was really valuable. And I thought the frame that you provided was useful too, where there's sort of two things that companies do in significant times of disruption. One of those things is to become highly efficient at the things that they do. And that was what was triggering my own personal fear of like, oh, no, are they going to trim research as part of that efficiency, right? But then the other piece that's also extremely important and has proved to be super important

this last year is to sort of, you know, make sure that they're in a place to accelerate out of the disruption or out of what's happening. Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, actually, Jamie, this is the first time I've reflected back on that in a while. We did that with this initiative, right? So we're now in a position to be able to accelerate into the new future of work and have tons of knowledge and tons of capability in place that I hypothesize will position Microsoft to really be able to help

our customers thrive in this new future work and create a better model of work than existed before. Yeah. Now, ironically, COVID actually made our job easier in that we have required all of this innovation this year. It would have been really hard to drive the sort of change that we've seen. So you talk about the organized chaos that was going on at that time, too. Tell me a little bit about that. So to call it organized chaos, I think isn't quite, I think that's giving us a little bit of a pass. I'd say it was chaos that we then organized. Yeah, I guess around this time, a little bit earlier last year, you and I both noticed

many, many email chains going around in leadership among sort of lower level software engineers. And in the mid tier, everyone was thinking about the types of questions that they have about remote work, how that affects, you know, the types of products we want to build new features, these types of things. I mean, our email box was completely full of these questions. Credit to you, Jamie, you recognize that it was time to move super quickly to make sure that everyone was sort of rallying around a single flag and that flag really needed to be research, right? People were asking research questions, they had false survival hypotheses, these types of things. So, you know, moving super quickly, I think it was over a weekend actually, and we can talk about work-life balance a little bit later, but that was not a time for work-life balance. And over a weekend, you know, we threw up a

SharePoint page that described, you know, here's some resources from MSR. We're aggregating all the groups that are working on different topics related to remote work. And, you know, within a week or two, we had spun up this massive initiative, the Future Remote Work Initiative, that grew to have 50 different research projects, again, from all over the company, using all sorts of different methodologies, studying all sorts of different populations, all meeting together, all having their work synthesized into, you know, six cohesive documents that were, you know, focused in specific topic areas, meeting every other week or every week at the beginning, putting on presentations for everyone, again, coordinating with leadership and so on and so forth. So we built this, what we believe is the largest cross-company research initiative

in Microsoft's history. We built it in about two weeks. So that was the chaos turning into a degree of order, at least. And the world's largest research initiative trying to understand work practices too, and how that's changed both internally and externally. I would, I would hypothesize that's the case, right? So it's, I mean, the, the team's site has 700 members. Our newsletter has about a thousand. You know, it's hard for another company to be able to have that degree of scale in terms of knowledge discovery and capability creation for changing work practices. It really was like a bit of a stone soup in that way, right? And it was sort of created the idea that we were going to collect the research. And then like it was, it was

interesting too, because there was just, I was amazed at all of the different corners that were doing interesting and important research. Me too. You and I have talked about that, right? So like this initiative has allowed people, you know, ourselves, like we've gotten super connected to the folks in the real estate org, for instance, right? So what person on our team is now on, they created the scientific advisory board and that person now sits on their board. They understood they have amazing research assets, you know, within the company and other parts of the company they wanted to tap into. We realized that we have amazing insights into all sorts of elements about the physical

aspects of work. And Jamie, this is something we've been talking about recently. As work practices are changing, the expertise that Microsoft has in areas that previously were more support areas, supporting the people who did product work predominantly, now that expertise is product work. So we're getting all sorts of customer questions about, you know, how are you doing real estate investments? You know, how are you doing the interior design, these types of things. And we're trying to build Teams features to support different types of meeting rooms and all sorts of these things. And then also on the HR front, right? So we have this big Microsoft Viva launch, which emerged in part out of the changing work practices we've been discussing. That's going to draw heavily on Microsoft's HR expertise.

We've traditionally considered productivity software to be, you know, Word and PowerPoint and Excel. And of course, those are incredibly important. But Veeve is an attempt to expand our definition of productivity software to do things like support people's well-being, help them turn off at the end of the day, help organizations lead when, you know, some percentages are in the office, some much larger percentage are remote. People are distributed around the world.

How can we help communicate cultural values and these types of things? So it's a big expansion in terms of what we consider to be productivity software. And the research that we've done over the last year has really highlighted how that is a research-driven expansion. The difference between word making you productive and software that helps you schedule focus time, for instance, it's not a distinction worth making. It all helps you get your job done, helps you have a better life at home, and helps you bring your best self to work.

Do you have any interesting examples of folks doing research across these boundaries, either across methodological boundaries or across organizational boundaries that came out of everyone coming together towards this common goal? You know, you and I both just came out of our biweekly call where we do, you know, a share outs of product developments and research associated with remote and hybrid work and changing modes of work in general. And, you know, for about 20 minutes, there was a discussion about how an amazing researcher in the office organization has done a year-long diary study of how people in that organization are adapting to all of this change. And, you know, you could see the eyes light up from product folks, from folks in MSR, folks at LinkedIn. Everyone's saying, wow, this is an amazing data set. And everyone had a different way to use that data set. So someone from MSR is like, this is going to be amazing for hypothesis generation. Then we can go and do some large scale, you know,

experiments or causal analyses. You know, at LinkedIn, they were thinking about trying to do some additional coding work with that data and so on and so forth. So it's just something that's very top of mind. And it was such an enjoyable, just as an individual researcher, 20 minutes, where we all kind of just brainstormed together. The other examples are just, you know, they're everywhere. So lots and lots of cases of folks in MSR getting really embedded in product teams and helping product teams address hugely important questions. As I mentioned, you know, we're in a part of the org that shows products like Office and Teams and Bing and these types of things. And a person on our team, Longqi Yang, he's embedded with our real estate and security, helping them do their research.

We've had a lot of conversations with HR. The list goes on and on and on. It's almost actually, I wonder, I'd have to double check, but some huge percentage of the projects are cross-org, which is, as anyone who's familiar with a large organization, a pretty big accomplishment. It almost seems like actually the whole initiative is a case study worth studying in the context of remote work and remote research. I wonder if there's anything that we can learn about running large-scale research collaborations from this? And I do know we

had Peggy Story with us who studies that and helped us some, but I don't know if you have additional thoughts on that. Yeah, sure. I mean, there are things we'll try to fix, but both of us are excited about thinking about this as a model, as a best practice for doing research on questions that are strategically important in a company. The default before this is if there's a strategically important question, chances are there are seven different groups working on that question in silos, right? You and I both have been in the research world

for a long time. That is not how the best research gets done. There's a reason why we submit our papers to journals that everyone reads and there's peer review and these types of things. And ironically, we can still get siloed even when it's all external and published, you know, across disciplines. This is true across disciplines. That is a big challenge. Right. Right. Right. But we are lucky in the in the

sort of public research world or the scholarly research world is a way to describe that, that there are incentives in place for us to share our work with others, very intense incentives, right? And those incentives sometimes don't exist within companies. And through this initiative, we put those in place. And I think almost without exception, everyone loved it, right? So these are folks who are deeply inquisitive, and now they have a route, relatively low-cost route, in which to get access to information they wouldn't, in which to get access to information they wouldn't have been able to get access to before. And it's a real nice example of sort of that cultural pillar that Satya drives us towards

to of One Microsoft and making sure we're all working as one company. Yep, yep. And in some ways, research is an amazing use case for One Microsoft because, you know, there's no reason why two people should discover the same thing within the same company, right? Everyone should be working together and a person, the person who discovered that first should then share that information with a person who would have discovered it again. And then that person can build on that work and discover something new, right? What didn't work in the context of the collaboration? Oh, that's an interesting question. You'll not be surprised to hear me answer or provide this answer. While we were able to, I think, by several orders of magnitude, increase engagement with external research,

a lot of the knowledge discovery practices within all large firms, people are incentivized to, for instance, discover things from first principles and talk directly to customers, which is all great. But that's work that should be done in the context of knowing what's been written about that topic, you know, for a long period of time. So you can target that efforts more effectively. So I'm always dreaming about ways that we can, you know, encourage folks to engage with the literature, which a lot of these folks, you know, folks doing this knowledge discovery, amazing knowledge discovery, these aren't necessarily folks who have PhDs in computer science

or social science. These are folks who are experts at doing, for instance, UX research within industry or at Microsoft. And they bring an amazing amount of additional ways of knowing and capability to the table.

So this is one area where I hope to be able to do some scaffolding and some training and vice versa, I hope to learn from them all the tricks of the trade in terms of how they get the best data out of our customers and how to make sure to maximally support our customers in doing so.

Another thing that is ultimately a lot of the challenges associated with remote work, either we're at the intersection of computer science and social science, or were actually purely social science. And we made a ton of progress in terms of communicating the importance of deeply considering social science questions, understanding the complexity of social systems. But we still, you know, it's a journey. It's not a destination. Is there anything in particular that came out of the new future of work research that changed your own personal work practices?

Oh, yes. A number of them. You know, we were just talking about how we're going to be deploying, you know, within our own team, Jamie, the best practices for hybrid work that emerged out of our research. So going into the office three days a week, making sure at least two of those days

is, you know, are synchronized so we can get the benefits of serendipitous interaction and these types of things. So that's going to hugely shape our lives here. Otherwise, I'm about to have my first kid and hoping that remote work is shifted to hybrid work and that daycares are up and running when I emerge back from parental leave, just because the findings around folks who are managing small children are honestly, you know, very concerning. And, you know, and also speaking of concerning, this was less of an issue for me, but one of the benefits of remote work, right, is that my, I do have an office mate here. It's my

wife, Stephanie. And she's someone who really benefits from the in-person social interaction and sort of low cost social interaction that happens at work. And she was getting really frustrated with the degree to which she was feeling socially isolated. And I was able to tell her, you know, you're not alone in that. A huge percentage of people are reporting that as like the number one challenge they're having with remote work. So, you know, in the vein that when you're struggling with something, when you find that you're not alone in that struggle, at least for me, that always makes me feel a bit better. So, you know, be able to put those types of challenges in context. I think it's going to just go back to the way they are. Like, you know, sometimes it's easy

to make too big of a deal out of a disruption that's happened. Are we over-indexing on this? Chances are, no, they won't go back to the way they were. And if they do, we'll have missed a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make work better. Now, that said, I mentioned the complexity of social systems earlier. Social systems are extremely complex. And so it's difficult to predict with a great deal of precision the way things will end up in a year. That's not to say research can't tell us

how to take action. It can. What it is, is predicting, you know, several different possible outcomes. And it's also predicting a good amount of uncertainty. And business leaders like to hear that, right? Because they know how to deal with uncertainty, you diversify, et cetera, et cetera.

And we also need to prepare to support all sorts of different models of work. And in the meantime, we no longer can make an assumption that most people are working in one way, regardless of whether that's hybrid or fully remote or in the office. The best available data suggests that we're going to get some changes, but the specific changes are difficult to predict. As people are getting vaccinated and folks are headed back into the office, we're getting a ton of questions and there's a lot of uncertainty around what hybrid work is going to look like. What have we learned from this past year that we can carry forward?

Sure, yeah. And I should mention in terms of different modes of work, you know, the most likely outcome we're going to see is, again, increased diversity modes of work and then a surge in hybrid work. So understanding hybrid work is definitely something that's top of mind for us at Microsoft, primarily for our customers, but also for ourselves. So we know a lot more about full remote work than we do hybrid work because of the massive amount of attention that's been going into remote work over the past year. That said, we do know a lot about hybrid work from two sources. One is that, you know, China has been in a hybrid mode, at least at a lot of companies for over a year now. And that's true to a certain extent in other

markets as well. And we also can learn from the past literature on hybrid work. This has not been the first time where at least a small percentage of people have been going into the office, you know, four days a week and working remotely at one. And so, you know, I just finished with a bunch of colleagues writing up a sort of a best practices document that we're going to be using internally at Microsoft. And I mentioned some of this stuff before, but the literature suggests that going into the office two to three days a week is probably the best way to go, leaning more towards three. And there are a number of reasons why that's the case. One is the job satisfaction benefits, at least the best available data suggests that they max out around that point.

The effects on workplace relationships are, based on at least one decent study, negligible if you're spending at least half your time in the office, but if you spend more than half your time at home, workplace relationships deteriorate, and so on and so forth. The question then is like, how do you spend those days? So for instance, if your team is spending three days in the office, you should at least spend two of those days as a team together in the office, because so many of the benefits, including the relationship dynamics I just mentioned, happen because everyone is in the office, not just because you personally are in the office. And that actually highlights a more general point about hybrid work, but choices and work models more generally. Your individual choice does not only affect you. It's actually a lot like masks

in some ways, right? So let's say my team goes into the office and I'm not there. Well, that's a lower value experience. Let's say that a new hire, we know that new hires likely should spend more time in the office if they can. A new hire goes in the office, but there's no one, there's no one there. Well, that they might as well be at home unless, unless they have a better setup in the office. There's not a lot of reason to be there. Probably speaking, as you're making these choices, best practice in hybrid is to consider all of the ripple effects for your team, for your org, and for your entire company as well. What is one of the things that you're most proud of having accomplished this past year?

Well, that's a good question, Jamie. Let me think. It doesn't have to be what you're, it's just something that you are proud of. Most are always hard. You know, there are a couple of things that I'm really proud of, and I know you share some of these. One is this was a real opportunity to, you know, our job is to help a part of the Microsoft org understand the value of research and use that research to innovate quickly and responsibly and bring innovation to our customers in a way that creates a ton of customer benefit.

And this past year was an amazing use case for how research can help the company. So I am proud that we were able to deliver on that use case. Another thing I'm really proud of is all the relationships that have formed through the initiative that will persist long beyond even our sort of new rendition of the initiative, which will go on for some number of years, but not as long as those relationships.

I think the folks at Microsoft Research, for instance, will have a plethora of product contacts that they wouldn't have had otherwise for many, many years to come. And you know what? Another thing that's come to mind is I think the initiative helped the employees at Microsoft put their heads down during a very chaotic time and gave them a place to make a positive

impact in a way that wouldn't have existed otherwise. That's true. You know, I feel like it gave me purpose in all you know, in all of this scariness and transition. I felt like I was doing something to help the world and that felt good. Yeah. You know, and that did reflecting personally, that's something that I've always, you know, tried to do actually during times of disruption. So I'm recalling after the 2016 election, regardless of politics, it was a time of extensive disruption, right? So I ended up writing a research agenda for one area of computer science, reflecting all the problems that emerged in the 2016 election. So for instance, misinformation, email security, the need to make sure that rural areas are benefiting from the tech economy and so on and

so forth. And that turned out to be pretty useful for folks. And that felt really good because it made me feel like I could do something. And there's an element of that here as well. And as you know, that it's scaled, right? There probably were about a hundred people that were quite engaged with the initiative. And for those people, I think it had that effect. And you sort of tell like everyone, a lot of friendships emerged out of the initiative too, I think, because people went through something difficult together and did something good to help the company and more importantly, help our customers. And speaking of helping our customers, I just feel really good that we did great research that manifested itself in product directly or indirectly. So that's something that, you know, we're so heads down,

continuing to understand changing work practices and create a new and better future of work, that sometimes it's hard to come back up and look around and say, hey, yes, these products that folks are going to be able to use are better because we've really worked hard to rigorously understand changing work practices and ways to support them. Well, thank you, Brent, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in. We hope you'll continue to join us as we explore the new future of work.

You can learn a lot more about the research that we discussed today at aka.ms slash newfutureofwork. Also, be sure to subscribe for new episodes wherever you listen to your favorite shows.