How Microsoft views remote work amid Silicon Valley backlash

Shawn Villaron, vice president and general manager of Microsoft's PowerPoint and Office products, says Silicon Valley's backlash to remote work is often too simplistic.

Remote work in the tech world is under fire.

Last week, Meta ordered employees back to the office at least three days a week starting in September.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called fully remote work "one of the tech industry's worst mistakes," while Elon Musk blasted fully remote tech workers as the entitled "laptop class."

Shawn Villaron, a 27-year Microsoft veteran and one of the executives leading the tech giant's 4,500 employees in Silicon Valley, offered a different take: Let managers make the call on how employees should do their work.

"I don't think we can paint with a big brush," he told The Examiner. "There are some groups and some products and some companies where it works. There are other places where it doesn't work. Let's get the people who are closest to the ground truth to make those decisions."

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.

"Our philosophy is about getting the decision making closest to the experts," Villaron, vice president and general manager of Microsoft's PowerPoint and Office products, said.

In an interview with The Examiner, Villaron explained why he thinks a rigid policy against remote work is counterproductive. This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

There's a raging debate on whether remote work in tech works. What's Microsoft's view? Our approach to hybrid work is centered around flexibility. The idea is to empower the employee and their manager to make the best decision that balances those interests.

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.

In general, we ask them to express their interest in one of three ways. The first way is: I would like to work three or more days a week in the office. If the employee and the manager are on the same page that becomes the plan of record. No problem.

The other choice may be: I want to work one or two days in the office and have flexibility on the balance of the week. Again, if the employee and the manager come to an agreement, we’re fully supportive of that, and that becomes the plan of record until something changes.

There's a third option which is the one that's more aggressive where it is about fully remote. Again, we go through the same process. The manager and the employee have a conversation. If they come to an agreement that's going to work for everybody. What we asked them to do is to go talk to their vice president. So they’ll come to me. They’ll make the case. I’ll have a conversation. And then once I approve it, that becomes the plan for that particular employee.

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. But that's different from a hardware team where maybe you need to be in the lab. You need specialized equipment. If I were to run the hardware team like I run PowerPoint, I probably wouldn't get the best results and vice versa.

Can you give me examples of when you said, "Yeah, fully remote is fine?" And can you give an example of when you said no? What it comes down to is: Is the employee in good standing? Are they doing great work? Do they have the support system for their management chain, their peers, and their network to be able to thrive?

From a business perspective: Can we run the business, can we achieve our commitments if this employee happens to relocate?

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.

So in my case on PowerPoint, I’ve never actually declined a request for remote work.

Now what would cause me to decline a request for remote work is if somebody is not in good standing. For example, we may have a very early-career employee who is still learning the codebase and the normal processes. I would strongly encourage them to reconsider going fully remote if they haven't fully acclimated to the team. But again, we find that in most cases, we are quite effective at remote work.

I’m familiar with the concept of a scrum, in which software developers gather in a room to throw around ideas about a project. That's something that can be done remotely, in your view. Absolutely. What's really amazing at Microsoft is we’ve approached this from a point of view of experimentation. When we went remote to the beginning of COVID, we had lots of hypotheses around how things like scrums would work.

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.

What this allowed us to do is change our culture. It was a culture of curiosity, a culture of trying things and learning and always looking at opportunities to do better.

We believe this is a durable change in society. If you look at the percentage of remote work over the last 50, 60 years, about every 15 years the percentage of remote workers doubled. What COVID did was about 30 years of acceleration all at once. As we’re exiting COVID, what we’re finding is that it's established a new baseline. And we expect that that same trend of increasing amounts of remote work is going to continue going forward.

The Microsoft PowerPoint team, pictured above meeting in Mountain View, has been encouraged to experiment during the era of remote work. "What this allowed us to do is change our culture. It was a culture of curiosity, a culture of trying things and learning and always looking at opportunities to do better," executive Shawn Villaron told The Examiner.

What do you think were some of the things that got lost after the COVID lockdowns? With a scrum, you have developers having a dynamic discussion about how to solve a problem. COVID changed that. What were your biggest concerns about what you are losing in a remote work environment? 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.

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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.

But we create moments where we say, "Hey, there's going to be one day this month that really is worth your time to overcome the friction of a commute to come in." We often will center that on celebrations and social capital, interpersonal communication. That allows us to reenergize the team and get going for the next journey.

There are always capabilities for our remote workers to be able to dial in and participate in those things. But being very careful about managing social capital was one of my number one concerns.

The other concern is that we are always evolving our workforce. As we bring new people into the company, we need to make sure that they are set up for success. And so this caused us to change our employee onboarding process. It caused us to change some conversations we were having with the managers of those new employees: the importance of being able to meet those employees on a semi-regular basis, checking in on them perhaps more frequently than we were checking in in a world where we were always in the same building.

What percentage of your team is working fully remote? It's relatively small. What we find is that a lot of people understand the value in periodically coming into the office. Often what we’ll find is that people who exercise the option to go fully remote, they’re doing it for reasons.

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. Maybe they’re taking care of a family member, maybe they’re continuing their education, or maybe they’ve got kids in school and they don't want to relocate. And those are all great examples. And we’ve got the ability for them to thrive and contribute to our corporate mission.

So most choose a hybrid setup? Absolutely. Most are spending anywhere between one and five days a week in the office inside.

Has there ever been a time when you thought that maybe you made a mistake? We take a very reflective approach to everything we do. Like I said, our strategy is one around experimentation. There have been things where we’ve experimented and it didn't quite work. I’ll give you an example.

When we switched to a fully remote COVID world, we recognized early on that people were on calls from 7:30 a.m. to six o’clock at night. They didn't get up. They were eating at their desk. Burnout is going to be a big thing.

There's a bunch of neuroscience that says your brain actually starts to atrophy after a couple of hours. You’ve got to have those breaks.

So we decided to give people Fridays as meeting-free days. We’ll let you catch up on Friday, wonderfully thought or idea. We told the team to do it.

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. We’re going to challenge you: Every hour-long meeting, can you do it in 30 minutes? Every 30-minute meeting, can you do it asynchronously, perhaps with an email or a video presentation or something?"

That's an example where we’ve made mistakes along the way, and we lean into those like they’re phenomenal learning opportunities.

What is your reaction to Elon Musk lambasting the "laptop class" who want to be fully remote? I think we have to be measured. When we look at this, we understand we work in a wonderful world of diversity. Every one of us has a different lived experience. And the secret to what we believe is our success is that flexibility. It's understanding that we as individuals have different sets of needs and those needs change from time to time.

When my daughter was playing competitive soccer, we had early soccer practice on Wednesday. If I was told I had to be in the office on Wednesday, that was going to cause a massive problem at home.

But because I had the flexibility, I just simply worked in a different pattern that gave me that flexibility to take her to soccer. Now that soccer is over. I can work late on Wednesdays. It's not a problem. And so I think we just have to appreciate that every person is unique. Every one of us has changing personal experiences. And we can find ways where we can simultaneously thrive as an employee and deliver our business commitments as a company.

So I gather you disagree with Sam Altman's statement that fully remote work is one of the tech industry's worst mistakes. I don't think we can paint with a big brush. There are some groups and some products and some companies where it works. There are other places where it doesn't work. And that's why we believe let's get the people who are closest to the ground truth to make those decisions. We believe that if they have the right training and the right support, they will ultimately make the right decision.

Have you had conversations with other tech companies or colleagues in Silicon Valley about remote work given that it's such a big issue currently? Oh, absolutely. This is the topic of dinner parties. My best friends work for other companies in other tech companies in the Bay Area. We’re always talking about policies. We’re talking about how people are operationalizing those policies. We’re talking about how people are reacting.

The thing that I always come away with is that a company's approach to flexible work is going to tell you how successful they’re going to be from an employee retention and acquisition perspective.

Some of the data we’ve seen is that people are usually about 5% more productive when they’re working from home.

But the data that really surprised me was that the flexibility to periodically work from home was assigned the same value as an 8% pay raise. So if I give you the ability to work from home periodically, that's the equivalent of me giving you an 8% pay raise in terms of your employee satisfaction, your willingness to look at other companies. It's those kinds of conversations we have at dinner. What's happening to your employees, are they leaving? Are they unsatisfied? Or are you attracting the new set of employees because you have that more favorable posture when it comes to work?

It feels like an 8% pay raise also because they don't have to commute which helps them save money. Exactly. The average commute I saw the other day was about 70 minutes long. I live in South San Jose. The office is in Mountain View. It's about a 90-minute commute, 30 minutes in the morning, an hour in the evening.

What the data shows is that with an average 70-minute commute, an employee that can avoid that will give a full 30 minutes of that time back to their employer.

Honestly, if I was driving to work today, we wouldn't be able to do this meeting. So this is a great opportunity. I save a bunch of time, and we get to have the conversation.

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Benjamin Pimentel is The Examiner's senior technology reporter.