wfh - The Lazy M

Seattle has a long history of being a company town and being swept along with the boom/bust economic cycles that they bring. From timber and railroads to airplanes and software, the local culture here is as steeped in "workin' for the man" as any rust-belt city.

In a previous boom cycle, Boeing, then the dominant employer in the Puget Sound region, came to be known as the Lazy B. With a bloated work force and almost nonexistent competition to spur product innovation due to a near-monopoly, cadres of employees performed micro-cog roles at a pace only a Zen master could perceive. Getting on the payroll meant solid benefits, wages, job security and the bragging rights of working for a true engineering company. With a sclerotic corporate culture where risk was rewarded with scorn and fear, it became easier for employees to while away the hours and take for granted how good they had it.

There was more fat on Boeing's payroll than a deep-fried Twinkie.

Is this starting to sound familiar?

But just like political scare-mongering before an election, the bust came, and it was ugly for the employees and the region. And the shareholders took a bath.

You might think that an engineering company like Boeing would have documented how they got themselves into that pickle and instituted policies and procedures to flatten out the amplitude of the boom/bust cycle. You also might expect that leadership would have made these changes a core part of a revitalized culture. Sadly, you'd be mistaken.

Which brings us around to Microsoft, another eningeering-focused, monopolistic Puget Sound employer with a burgeoning work force and a culture that feels broken along with a leadership team that seems incapable of fixing it.

It is with some trepidation that I raise a concrete example of management's inability to keep people accountable and productive, and in my estimation, drives a non-trivial amount EPS down each quarter. It is, dear readers, all the emails that begin with: wfh.

wfh, for those not on the inside, stands for working from home, and it is the biggest fiction that exists at Microsoft today.

I myself have used wfh from time to time to get all sorts of things done. I've worked from home to get my car fixed. I've worked from home to attend to family matters. I've worked from home to work on a crunch project without interruptions. I've worked from home to go and exercise. I've worked from home to go shopping. I've worked from home to take care of my pets. I've worked from home to finish that novel I was up until 3am reading the night before. And I've worked from home just to goof off.

I also know that I'm not the only one. I know people who wfh or schedule four-hour meetings to go and work out, shop, go tanning, or work on a pet project. It is endemic. It crosses all levels, from individual contributor to management. And there is no accountability around it.

No one is ever chastised for wfh, because it would jeopardize the manager's own wfh privileges.

The fact that management and leadership lets corporate productivity ooze away with wfh is scandalous. There are no formal rules about telecommuting, there are no check-ins with management about work completed (which is a whole other topic unto itself) when wfh and the fact that the correlation between wfh and nice weather is so obvious, only a bribed customs agent could miss it.

What other company in the world can afford to have such a portion of its work force unaccountable for its time? Only a company with operating margins above 40%.

As much as I hate to shine the light on the nondisclosed perk of wfh and I'd hate to see it go away entirely, I'd rather have more butts in chairs doing work instead of laundry at home. Cracking down on this might also have the pleasant side effects of exposing sandbaggers and being the nudge certain members of the idle vested class need to move on.

There is no way to say how much wfh has slowed us down as an organization or link wfh to product delays. I do know that from my chair, the constant flow of wfh into my inbox makes me question how hard I really need to be working some days.

My fourth request of management and leadership is to find the will to tackle this issue and improve our productivity before the last person leaving Microsoft is asked to turn out the lights.