End of old-school professionalism?
How to create a more comfortable, genuine work experience — whether in an office building or at the kitchen table
Over the past year, much has been made of where, when and how we work. But the sweeping shift to working remotely has raised a deeper question that we’re still not sure how to answer: Who are we at work? The pandemic has scrambled so much of the “normal” professional experience — commutes, workspaces, business hours, child care, business travel — that it’s also rewiring our concept of professionalism itself.
For me, “professionalism” began 18 years ago when I started as an intern at Microsoft. Today, I lead a team creating the next generation of communication and creation experiences for Microsoft 365. As you can imagine, design at Microsoft has changed dramatically over the years, and that includes how people collaborate.
Weathering the professional effects of COVID-19 together has introduced an authenticity to digital communication that can strengthen how we relate at work, even — or perhaps, especially — in remote environments. It offers humanizing glimpses into areas of our lives that may have previously been walled off from our co-workers.
The pandemic is accelerating a new definition of professionalism that’s refreshingly human. Here are three key ways I’m seeing this happen within and beyond Microsoft.
Energy is the new time management.
For years, product designers have focused on designing collaboration and productivity tools with time management in mind. If you could just manage your time better, you’d be able to get more done. But the pandemic made it clear that energy is even more important than time.
A new type of always-on work culture, parents trying to focus while still helping their kids learn, social isolation — the exhaustion is palpable and the effects are very real. This saps the energy that fuels achievement.
This is critical because so many industries no longer define productivity as how much a person can churn out in a period of time. Instead, productivity is measured by the creativity and innovation brought to the workplace. That kind of deep thinking and originality takes energy, and we struggle with inspiration when we are fatigued, overworked, distracted or even just while digesting lunch.
We can pick up on these energetic cues in person, sensing when someone’s batteries are low and need recharging. To help digitally communicate this, we’ve been actively exploring ways to support people’s emotional and physiological realities. Let’s make it easy for someone to share their personal preference for afternoon busy work but not creative brainstorms, because that’s when their energy dips.
Expressive feedback promotes belonging.
Productivity, creativity and innovation all thrive on real-time, in-person feedback, which our largely remote reality has vaporized. The nonverbal cues that encourage you to continue your presentation at the right speed, indicate someone has a question, or reassure you that a joke landed the right way are critical to our work and how we feel about it.
While augmenting this kind of interaction with more expressive digital communication channels has been in the works at Microsoft for years, this crisis has added urgency and intentionality to our efforts to introduce new features like instant reactions or chat bubbles, and increased people’s interest in using them.
So, even if this may not be your preferred communication style, it may resonate with others, particularly those who already feel sidelined. And when you can give agency and create space for other people in your organization — which ultimately enhances productivity and innovation — it’s worth reconsidering your personal definition of “professional.”
Professional doesn’t equal emotionless.
That chance to redefine professional norms — particularly as a global collective — is rare and exciting. Work norms have persisted since the 1800s. They’ve dictated “acceptable” workplace behaviors and hierarchies. But those systems also have created biases, inequities and assumptions.
If we can create modalities that support authentic expression and then promote a culture that normalizes their use, it’s a step and hopefully a silver lining of all we have had to endure over the past year.
My team at Microsoft plans to continue to invest and innovate across all of the surfaces where someone “shows up” online. Beyond instant reactions and better backgrounds for video calls, we’re creating non-hominoid avatars with human expressions and GIFs and emojis that eschew more Western norms..
The hope is that these experiences feel comfortable and genuine, underpinned by confidence, energy and positivity. That’s what we need to be bringing to work with us each day, whether we’re going to an office building or to the kitchen table.
For those of us who’ve been working remotely for more than a year, the return to the office will be gradual, creating a hybrid environment for the foreseeable future — maybe forever. It’s exciting to imagine the lasting impact on what it means to be professional. Perhaps we’ll all come to embrace a different, durable, more human kind of professionalism so we can all achieve more and know each other more deeply.