Reading I NEED HELP ON MY HOMEWORK

d202f71586ece25fd07aa7cd039f1102 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.

All right, hello, so my name is Frank and I'm representative from a group within the class at University of California, Santa Barbara, entitled Organization Communication. Our purpose here today is to gain an in-depth perspective from work professionals relating to a specific topic that our group has selected to write about specifically flexible and virtual collaboration. Regarding confidentiality, none of your answers, nor your name, will be discussed nor described outside of our classroom.

Anything that may or may not have been recorded or noted will be deleted by the end of the seminar 2024, session eight quarter. The main reason for this interview is to discuss the part that remote workplace within your file of work. We ask you to speak freely with holding nothing back, whether your thoughts be negative or positive so that we may gain as honest perspective about this subject as possible, as this will all be held in confidentially.

Now that we've entrusted ourselves and our purpose for being here today, we'd like to get some information regarding yourself and your place of work. So what's your name first? Hi, my name is Brandon Po and I am a senior software developer at Microsoft. Okay, so what's the role are you expected to uphold at your respective organization? So my job is to write software as the primary responsibility, support our service as it runs in production, and as a senior I'm expected to collaborate and help coach and train other employees.

Okay, so what qualifications did you require in order to successfully acquire this position? So mine's a little different. Most people enter this field with a bachelor or master's degree in computer science. They can start out as a software engineer one out of university with a four-year degree.

I don't have a degree, so I was able to get the job with experience. I had experience in the field already that kind of made up for my lack of education. Um, so do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Can you repeat that? Yeah, do you have any previous experience relating to what you currently do at your organization? Currently, no.

So I had originally started at my organization in IT, and I had previous experience in IT before I joined the organization, which was in 2005. Since then, my software development experience I have through my work. Okay, so thank you for providing that information, and now that we've gotten some background information about you, we'd like to ask you some questions relating to how remote work plays a role in your organization.

So how much of the work is remote, and how many of your employees are working remotely? For my particular team, I would say at any given time, um, probably 50% of the team is working remote at least. When I say my team, it's about 25 people. Um, everybody works remote at some point during the week.

They're kind of snapped to a particular schedule where everybody comes into the office, almost everybody comes into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then many people are remote other than that. On top of that, we also have co-workers that are in different locations. So we have quite a few people in Atlanta, Georgia, and we also have one who works out of India, and then a couple people who are just 100% remote, and they're not based out of their own particular office.

Okay, so how do you determine which positions in your organization should or should not be a remote position? So a lot of it, at least for our team, comes down to the preference of the employee that's getting hired. All right, software engineering is a very competitive industry. Finding good software engineers is hard.

So when we find a good software engineer, we typically will accommodate them and either have them work remote, or they will also have the option of going to probably, like, I think most of our on-prem hire is going into our Atlanta office these days. So they basically have the choice of saying, yes, I want to go to Atlanta, or I'm going to be remote. Now, some of that is actually coming back to Redmond.

Some of our positions are opening up in Redmond as well. So they kind of have a choice of all of those things. Okay, thank you.

And how do you manage workplace conflict in the context that one party involved in working remotely and one is in person? I mean, we've been doing this for a while, the remote work, even before COVID. People would work from home for a day or two a week a lot of times, or work later in the evening, come to work, and then we need to go pick up their kids from school, and then go home and work some more. So remote work has been in our organization for a while.

Those were a little rare, but everybody worked from home. We always had the capability of working from home, at least some part, some fashion. Since then, you know, when COVID happened, everybody was remote.

So it was, you know, a steep learning curve for a lot of people. And now these days, we're just flexible. So we're kind of used to it.

Again, especially with the Redmond office. It's just normal at this point to have these conversations. The toughest part is the time zone differences for a lot of things.

Atlanta and Redmond have a three hour time zone difference. India has a much, much, much larger time zone difference. So those are the hardest things, especially for people

who have kids out here in Redmond, where they might go in a little later because they got to get the kids to school and everything.

That's a big difference between when somebody might have started in Atlanta working that day, versus when you get into the office. So the number of hours that are available to collaborate with some people is much smaller than if you all worked in the same office. We're all physically in the same place.

I got eight hours to talk to somebody. But for a lot of cases, if we're working with people on the East Coast, that might be only three or four hours. Oh, wow.

All right. What do you believe to be the advantages and disadvantages for remote work? Some of the advantages is you get to be flexible, right? I can do a little work, take care of some personal things, and then get back to work right away. I can work later.

I can start work earlier. So those are some of the advantages for me personally. Disadvantages are mostly around just collaboration, especially around the time zones, like I mentioned.

The other ones are just around, if I'm in the office with people and I have a question, I can turn around and I can see, oh, that person would know the answer to this. And I can just turn around and say, hey, so-and-so, I've got this problem. What do you think? And they can just answer it.

Otherwise, if that person is a remote person, I've got to look to see, are they online on another call, right? Because in order to do anything, you've got to get into a call with somebody. Or you type them a message, and hopefully what your question is can be typed in one or two sentences. You can do it that way.

But if it's more complicated than that, then you've got to get on a call with them. And there's other people that are doing that too. So it's a lot harder to get your spot in line, you know? Yeah, true.

And spend more time on that. And so what technologies have you found most helpful for remote communication? And is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? So, I mean, being a Microsoft, the technology that we use is Microsoft Teams, right? Okay. We developed that, and we have unlimited access to it.

And it is one of the two most commonly used, commonly recommended software for remote work. So those tools are pretty good. We have a lot of options there for what we call either synchronous communication, where the other person is actively responding to you, and you're expecting kind of a real time thing.

Or what we call async communication, which is, I don't need immediate answer. Let me just post a question, and somebody will get to it when they get to it. So we have the

capability of doing that as well as just face-to-face video calls.

So, you know, the tools are great. What was the second half of the question? The second one is, is it difficult to communicate with remote employees? I mean, again, the difficulty is around scheduling and getting a hold of them, basically, right? You know, again, especially time zones, and then adding distance on top of that. Like, you know, we have great technology, but when we're collaborating with people in India, you know, there's actually a delay in your conversation, right? You say something, it's another 10 minutes, it's another second before they hear it, and then when they repeat, it's another second before it comes back.

So when you have multiple people on the call, and somebody's trying to answer your question, you can have people talking over each other, just because they didn't realize when they started talking, somebody else had already started talking. So there's that kind of thing, too, as well as people, you know, some people may not have a good connection, so they'll drop in and out, they may not hear what you said, they may, you know, disappear in the middle of their call, because they lost connection to the meeting. So, you know, those are problems you don't have in face-to-face.

So it's just something you've got to adjust to. So how long has it been since your company has decided to adopt remote working? Like I mentioned before, like, we've always had some bit of remote work. Even before COVID, yeah.

Yep. You know, even prior to COVID, we've had some, we've had remote work capabilities, we've had a few people here and there that were actually fully remote and weren't based out of an office. But those were kind of the exceptions, right? Most people were in the office and worked out of the office and worked face-to-face.

But once COVID hit, we were fully remote. And the nice thing was, is because we had the capabilities before and people have used it before, it wasn't that hard of a transition. Obviously, there was a transition, but it wasn't that difficult since we were already familiar with the tools.

Yeah. Okay. And how long did it take for your company to transition into part-time remote work? And was the transition easy to accept for yourself and your colleagues? Yeah, I mean, it was almost overnight that we had to.

Now, obviously, it took some time to adapt, but I would say it didn't take that long, right? After a week or so, we were kind of, we're able to just pick it up and run with it. Okay. And how do you feel that working remotely has affected your work-life balance? Well, that's a little trickier because you've got to watch yourself.

But the fact that it's flexible is good because you can gain that flexibility by, you know, I'm working at home. There's not people watching your every move. If I need to stop and

take care of some other things, I can do that.

If I need to run out and run some errands, I can do that and hop back on a little bit later and just work a little later that night. But the trouble is, you have to watch yourself because you can get started earlier because there's no commute and you can just keep going and nobody's going to stop you. So you've got to make sure you're not putting in too many hours.

Okay. So do you fellow employees agree or disagree with the following statement, remote work is beneficial for our organization? I think pretty much everyone on my team would absolutely agree with that. Okay.

I think most people at Microsoft would agree with that. Now there's some that don't and there's some positions where, you know, it doesn't work as well as others. But for the work that I do, it's absolutely beneficial.

How does training differentiate between remote and in-person employees? No more classroom-based training for a lot of things. Most of our training is now online, either. Most of it is async as well, where it's not like a live training class anymore.

We do have those, but most of the stuff is pre-recorded or, you know, they did a live session and they recorded it and now it's available for everybody to watch. Whereas before COVID, we did do more kind of classroom-based. Everybody gets together for two days and does this, you know, big training project.

We don't really have those anymore. It's all online and it's all able to be done in smaller chunks. Okay.

And yeah, thank you for your response. And before we end things off today, we have a few closing questions we'd like to inquire about. Is there anything that I haven't already asked that you'd like to mention regarding remote work? You know, our team has a remote-first mentality.

So our organizational leaders enjoy the flexibility of remote work, but Microsoft is a large company, so there's lots of different organizations there. And every organization has their capability of making their own choices around it. But ours, you know, we started issuing, everybody gets a laptop, nobody gets a desktop anymore, which is different than how it used to be.

And, you know, it's very flexible and it's a very nice environment to be when there is that trust around, you know, I trust that my employees are going to do the right thing. A lot of times when this doesn't work is when there is not that trust. So I think trust is a pretty important thing to having remote work be successful.

Okay. Would you like for your real name to be used in our interviews results, or would

you rather use a fake name? And if so, would you like that to be? I'm fine with my real name. Okay.

All right. And thank you so much for your time and answers. Your response have provided a circle inside for our group in regards to learning how remote work has affected the professional file.

Thank you so much. Glad to help. Thank you.

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