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March 10, 2022 12:02 am

Microsoft's Return Puts Focus On Workers Who Are Skipping the Office

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Microsoft Corp. has begun calling employees back to its headquarters in recent weeks, but its return-to-office strategy hinges on hybrid work. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, companies are navigating the messy transition to the workplace after a two-year hiatus during the pandemic. Microsoft has a unique perspective since it sells remote collaboration tools that compete with Zoom and Cisco. Even as workers trickle back to their desks, the company's leaders are focused on those employees who aren't working in the office. "It's counterintuitive," Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Modern Work at Microsoft, said in an interview. "You have to design your physical space for the people who aren't there." At The Hive, its test center a few miles from its Redmond, Washington campus, engineers roll office chairs back and forth and shift camera angles around to capture the optimal teleconference environment. Staffers down the hall pose as remote attendees, providing immediate feedback. A full-size replica of a room Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella and other senior leadership use for top-level meetings fills a warehouse floor. What they've found is that small tweaks can really improve the experience, making those daily calls less of a grind. The typical conference table, for example, was redesigned to a triangle pointed away from the screens, or a truncated semi-circle facing the screen, United Nations-style. Both setups address a big problem with standard conference rooms: Attendees don't fully face the camera, and in-person participants migrate toward each other. Meantime, at Microsoft's headquarters last week, occupancy jumped 142% from the prior one, according to the company, which declined to provide further details. The mood resembled a college move-in day, with giddy staffers excited to no longer be stuck at home. [...] While Microsoft executives from Nadella on down have been promoting the idea of the so-called metaverse to connect workers in various locations, the company also says it knows it has to take it slow. "We're just trying to meet people where they are," Spataro said. "You kind of have to crawl before you can move to a fully virtual world."

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