Podcast
Podcast
- 13 Jan 2021
- Managing the Future of Work
Keeping remote workers at the center of the action
Bill Kerr: The pivot of companies to remote work in March 2020 accelerated the future of work. Before Covid-19, few people used video conferencing, and now people spend hours in meetings using this technology, as well as instant messaging. How will these mediums change the future of work? What happens to a business communications company when it transitions to remote work while increasing demand on services provided? Better technology could help foster hybrid work models and long-term changes in how employees engage with colleagues.
Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. Our guest today is Michael Peachey, vice president of user experience at RingCentral, a Silicon Valley–based company that provides software-as-a-service solutions for business communications. Michael is going to share with us how RingCentral pivoted to remote work, how user experience [UX] is changing due to increased use of video conferencing, and what he thinks about hybrid models for remote work in a post–Covid-19 world. Welcome to the podcast, Michael.
Michael Peachey: Hi, Bill. Great to be here.
Kerr: Michael, why don’t you tell us a bit about your background, kind of give us one of those Twitter link career summaries, and then move us into a little bit of what RingCentral offers and some of your clients.
Peachey: Sure. So, personally, I run RingCentral’s global user experience research and design organizations. From a RingCentral standpoint, our mission is to keep people—our customers and their employees—connected and productive. And we’ve got a specific focus on knowledge workers in the organizations that employ them.
Kerr: And talk us through a little bit the range of how you work with companies to keep people connected. And is this a plug-in that sits in with other offerings that the companies are using, or do you try to provide the full suite of services?
Peachey: So specifically what keeping people connected and productive means is that we give them phone and messaging and video collaboration tools that are well integrated with each other so that you and your co-workers can work to get stuff done, and then seamlessly switch between those modalities while you’re working together. So, a lot of our organizations, for example, are global, and then, of course, everybody is remote. And what that means is, some people need to use video to communicate because they can do it in real time. But their co-workers, who may be in another geography, are using more store-and-forward messaging kinds of channels to participate in that collaboration. So, the idea is to kind of let everybody pick what’s most effective or most efficient for them, and then have that full suite of collaboration—the voice, the video, and the text messaging.
Kerr: And as you think about it in a global context, you’re also needing to go across various languages, or is that kind of one of the services that’s coming down the line?
Peachey: So we don’t have specific translation stuff that would let you, for example, as a non-native English speaker, communicate with an English-speaking audience. We do support a number of different languages out there, but that kind of cross-language collaboration isn’t really part of it.
Kerr: I’m curious whether you have a roadmap of when that might be, because a lot of us are, I guess, looking forward to something like that to help out.
Peachey: Well, I think that, particularly in meetings, one of the things that we’re looking forward to is in that kind of closed-captioning live transcript of a meeting. And then you can easily take a half a step forward and think about, well, what would it mean for me, as somebody who struggles to speak Mandarin, to participate more fully in a Mandarin-context meeting, because I’ve got my own English language crawl down there. So that’s certainly something that we look out on the horizon as a way to level the playing field for all the participants in the ecosystem.
Kerr: That’s great. So if we think about Covid and how it’s really up-ended our lives over the last eight or nine months, tell us about how RingCentral experienced this demand shock that happened in March 2020, and then the months that followed, and in particular, what that shock then meant in terms of what you felt were the best offerings you could give to customers, stuff that your companies were asking for that maybe were not as important before March. How did your product bundle need to change as a consequence of Covid?
Peachey: Sure. So when we think about that adjusting to the Covid back in March of 2020, there were really two ways that RingCentral needed to think about that question. First, like everyone, we didn’t start the year with some sort of plan to send everyone home in March. So when the shelter-in-place orders came out, we had to sort that out in real time, just like anyone else. On top of that, as an organization that supports other organizations in their own communication and collaboration among their workforce, we had a responsibility to support our customers and our non-customers, our potential customers, in their own transition to that work-from-anywhere remote situation. So I think it’s like, when we’re thinking about this stuff, it’s really important to recognize that everyone’s experience is different. We’re a knowledge workforce. So our disruption was fairly easy to just send everybody home to their desks. We had portable careers. But a lot of people don’t have that privilege. They can’t just pick up and move to a home office. So when we, at the beginning of this, looked at health care workers, community organizations, K–12 schools, community colleges, et cetera, these organizations have got boots on the ground in critical roles. So one thing that we did was immediately create a free SKU, a free offering, that bundled our telephony voice and messaging and meetings together for those organizations with a free offering to say, “Look, go do the thing you need to do to support your communities.” So we had one example up in Seattle, there’s an organization called Neighborcare Health. They’ve got about 75,000 low-income and otherwise disadvantaged clients. A lot of their communication with their clients is by phone, but they’re no longer in the office so that you can’t use your office network for that. You’ve got to route these calls to volunteers’ cell phones, but you don’t want your volunteers giving out their personal phone numbers. So with the RingCentral network that clients can call a business number that rings through on the personal device of the volunteer. So that lets the organization communicate with their clients. And then, of course, all the employees and volunteers in the organization use the messaging and video channels to do their own collaboration.
Kerr: That’s great services you provided in the immediate aftermath of the transition. I’m curious for those types of use cases, are they becoming more formalized? Do you think, even in a post–Covid-19 world—and as we record this, we’ve had two weeks now of being able to celebrate that a vaccine, or actually multiple vaccines, appear to be effective and starting to be rolled out. Do you anticipate those kinds of offerings being important afterwards?
Peachey: Yeah, I think absolutely. I mean, 2020 is coming to an end as we speak. And as you said, there’s a vaccine out on the horizon. But I don’t think that means that 2021 is going to look like 2019. We’ve rung the bell on this work-from-anywhere. And I think that that changes everything. As we look forward to a hybrid workforce—where you’ve got some people in the building and some people remote—these collaboration experiences get even more difficult, I think, than just the straightforward work from home.
Kerr: Yeah. I’d like to circle back in a minute here and talk more about your vision or perspective about the post-Covid hybrid workforce. But before we leave March 2020, it’s one of those interesting cases where a company that sells and builds large-scale communication products suddenly needs to start using the products, themselves. And I’m curious whether, as RingCentral moved into this remote environment, did you learn anything different about how this should work as a consequence of a you, as a company, needing to go through this yourself?
Peachey: As a user experience organization, our job is to try to understand the experiences of our users. So we’ve always been big users of our products. Our UX team, the team that I run, has got a significant presence throughout the US. So we’ve got a lot of people here in the Bay Area, we’ve got designers in Boulder, Colorado; and Denver and Fort Lauderdale. We’ve got a significant presence in Xiamen, China; Odesa, Ukraine; St. Petersburg, Russia; Paris; et cetera. So we’re already pretty used to this time-shifting and remote collaboration. But when we got sent home like everybody else, we had to do that times 10. We were a little luckier than most, because we saw this coming sooner. Having a team in Xiamen, that work-from-home thing happened there a couple of weeks before it did here in the US. So we had some really good insights from that. And in fact, here in the US, on our team, we did a two-day work-from-home trial run that just happened to be the week before we got the shelter-in-place order. And from there, we just started experimenting. So for example, we spun up an always-on meeting. So we’ve got—I’ve turned it off for the podcast here—but I’ve usually got an always-on meeting running on one of my monitors. It might just be a couple of people with headphones on working, but we get that social connection that we all really craved, especially in the beginning when we were missing that emotional and social piece.
Kerr: Yeah. I’ve read about that in an article that you wrote. Tell us a little bit more about this desire to have this always-on presence among your team. Was there resistance to that? And what’s been some of the tangible benefits, just at a micro level among your team, from having that capability?
Peachey: Yeah, so that was the really interesting question that we wanted to explore as a design team, was where was that balance between craving the social and emotional connection to your co-workers—people that you were used to seeing on a regular basis—and that kind of Orwellian oversight of, “Is this just going to be used to check up on me?” And we didn’t know how that was going to work out, but we wanted to try it ourselves. So we created this always-on on meeting—luckily, we’ve got access to cool tech—just to see how it worked. And what we discovered is that really quickly that feeling, or that fear that, “Oh, this is just so the boss can see if I’m at my desk and working” went away. It turned out to not be a thing at all for people. And after a while, people realized like, you know what, I’m not really at my desk all that much during the day anyway, even at work. But what was nice was that sense of, “There’s other people there. Like, I recognize these faces,” even if all they were doing was working with their headphones on and not talking. So like I said, I’d have that meeting running on my monitor while I’m doing anything else. And if someone’s got a question, they can turn their audio on and “Hey, Peachey, XYZ,” and you can give them an answer. But we had that community that really helped us stay connected, I think, and emotionally healthy.
Kerr: One of the consequences of Covid-19 is that we have pushed the use of communication technologies and video conferencing and other forms of connection much further down the adoption curve. Maybe before March, we were really more about lead users and early adopters and kind of very high-end knowledge workers that were engaged in these technologies. And now lots and lots of the workforce—all the way down to my daughter’s second-grade teacher—is engaged in some form of communication, remote-collaboration type work. And I’m just curious, from a user-design-experience kind of perspective, is there a different touchpoint that people more broadly are looking for, compared to the lead users or some ways that you’ve added some features to your products to make them more friendly to a mass audience?
Peachey: When you think about the early adopters, and they approach a new product or a new technology, and they’re early in that cycle, but they’re still adopting, they’ve still got to figure out what it is. A late adopter has got that same experience. They’re going from, “I don’t understand this tech, and I haven’t used it before” to, “Now I’m engaging and using it.” So the early adopters and the late adopters have got largely the same experience. One difference that we do see is kind of the level of people’s willingness or eagerness to embrace a new tech. So we’ve had to really think through, how do you simplify those experiences to somebody who’s maybe not as keen to do things in a new way? But I think the biggest difference that we saw before Covid in this great work-from-anywhere experiment in March to afterwards was a shift in people’s mindset—ours, our customers, and their employees’. Before Covid, the discussions were really a lot about, “How do I keep my teams engaged with their priorities? How do I keep people productive when they’re remote?” And then, when Covid started, that was the big question, right? Like, “Oh no, I’m going to lose productivity because people are going to be working in their pajamas, and they’re not going to be as engaged.” Of course, as we all know at this point, that didn’t happen. What happened was that people started working more, they started working harder. We actually saw increases in our own productivity. And we heard the same being reported from our customers. The issue that we didn’t see coming was the impact of the meeting fatigue and the stress on productivity. That the biggest threat to a productive workforce isn’t slacking, it’s becoming overly stressed. And that shifted our focus from a user-experience standpoint and design standpoint to, “How do we de-stress that collaboration experience?” Because people work; that wasn’t the problem. It was the stress [that lowers productivity]. So they’re really a couple of things that I worry about every day. We’ve seen in our research that people crave this genuine emotional and social connection. I was talking about that always-on meeting. We did this study about connected culture, and we went out and we looked at organizations that were thriving and organizations that were struggling. And what we saw is, those orgs that invest in a connected culture with training, tools, and support do better than those that don’t—like 2:1. So we’re building tools to support that connectivity. The second thing is that, as much as an organization like RingCentral worries about phone and messaging apps and meeting apps and how people do this stuff, actual people don’t want to call and message and meet. They just do that because that’s the way to get stuff done. So if we focus on helping them get stuff done, rather than helping them make a phone call or have a meeting, that’s really driving their piece. That’s driving the thing that they want to accomplish.
Kerr: Yeah. That’s very interesting. Just to interject and kind of frame that in a way that I’m trying to digest it, you’re increasingly shifting toward the task that needs to be done, rather than the method that’s being employed. And if you can do that effectively, then you can reduce some of the fatigue that people are experiencing in this virtual environment in the many ways that they’ve got to be online throughout the day.
Peachey: Exactly. So the tools need to get out of people’s way. The tool is a tool. It’s a means to an end. And the end is some sort of organizational outcome, right? Like a group of people have gotten together to solve a problem the organization needs solving. The meeting, the phone call, the message—that’s just a way to get that stuff done. So we’ve got to work really hard to get rid of what we call these “micro-aggravations” in products. And we’ve all experienced these—those little moments that distract you from what you’re trying to get done. They take some sort of cognitive load. They confuse you or annoy you in some way. All of that stuff in the software keeps you from your outcome, which is getting stuff done. Like, one of my pet peeves is what happens with Screen Share. The number of times a day I hear somebody say, “Can everybody see my screen?” So we’ve got a project that we’re putting in place that is going to reassure presenters that one, everybody can see your screen, and also give you some real-time feedback on your pacing and whether or not your audience is engaged—you know, kind of like a virtual friend in the audience that’s smiling and nodding at you, or kind of waving to speed up or slow down. So those kinds of things, if we can pull those annoyances out of the product, let you get stuff done instead of using software.
Kerr: Well, I know a whole bunch of MBA students at Harvard Business School that would really like you to install among all of their faculty members that bot that’s going to provide the feedback so that we don’t keep asking that question, because it’s persistent. I’m sure at some point, you guys filled up an entire whiteboard of all of these sort of “micro” things that get in the way of us performing as well as we could. And you’re working down the ones that are most important. How far are we down your list? Do you have like another two years’ worth of places that we could streamline this process? Or were there really some big ones that, once we get past the screen-sharing, we’ve accomplished most of the goal?
Peachey: I think this is one of these false-horizon situations, where you look at the range of hills in front of you and you think, “Oh, if I could just get to the top of that, I’d be all set.” And by the time you get there, you realize there’s another higher range behind that and another higher range behind that. I’m not worried that I’m going to run out of problems to solve. My fear is trying to keep up with the pace of innovation that’s out there. So, maybe we’re 70 percent of the way up the first hill, but how many hills behind that? We don’t really know. And I think that this first part of the experiment, this work-from-anywhere piece, is a much simpler problem than what’s coming up, which is the hybrid environment.
Kerr: Yeah. So let’s move to that, because we’re recording this in early December of 2020, and there’s hope that soon a vaccine will start being distributed. And so, knock on wood, maybe by the late spring or early summer, perhaps, we can have a new hybrid reality emerge. How are you at RingCentral anticipating this future? Because this, for you, is a very important kind of business environment that you’re going to be in in six months’ time. What’s the scenarios that you are most likely going to experience? And then, what will those future hills look like in terms of the technology solutions that people need to be effective in them?
Peachey: I think we’ve all pretty much sorted out this work-from-home piece, right? Like be connected, get the right tools, have some online happy hours. As a leader, check in with your team frequently, and support their whole person. Don’t just ask them about their to-do lists, but ask them how they’re feeling. We know that’s working, and we’ve seen some relative winners and losers within different industries that we serve based on how connected an organization can get. But the hybrid workforce, the piece that’s coming next, where some are in the office and some are remote, is going to be different because work-from-home was a level playing field. Everybody got sent home. Everybody had the same issues. But hybrid’s not going to be fair. In a hybrid world, individuals who are trying to evolve their careers are going to have a disadvantage when they’re remote versus their peers that are in the office. Because when you’re in the office, you’ve got access to information, you’ve got much easier collaboration, you’ve got much better social support than people who don’t share a physical space. So those who are remote are going to have to work a lot harder to remain connected and relevant. So as we think about our products, we have to think about, not just how does Bob and Martha collaborate with each other when they’re both sitting in their home offices, but what happens when Martha’s back in the office with 10 people having a whiteboard session and Bob and five other people on the team are at home trying to participate in that collaboration? So we have to think about our meeting-rooms products—those things that project a meeting up on the big-screen TV with the cameras and let everybody be seen remotely—with video products, so that people are participating in real time at home to participate in that brainstorm. And then going onto the time-shifting piece, right? Like, how do I capture that information that’s in that real-time meeting, digest it down into actionable to-dos, which can be stored someplace in a message, and then retrieved later by somebody who wasn’t in the actual meeting so they can participate as well? So it’s a whole different set of challenges, and it’s both exciting and worrisome.
Kerr: Yeah. It’s fascinating. As you think about the worker experience and kind of tips for the worker, there’s been a lot of adoption of best practices about how should you set up your cameras so that you’re looking at your best on a video conference. What are you anticipating is going to be the pressure or what the worker on the opposite side will need to learn or be able to adapt for the hybrid environment?
Peachey: We think about this in three levels. There’s the organizations that are competing with each other, and some are going to thrive versus their peers. There’s leaders within the organizations. And then there’s those knowledge workers that are trying to optimize their careers. And there’s a different challenge at each of those levels. I would say to somebody—particularly somebody who’s starting out in their career in this new hybrid world—“You’ve got to establish the relationships and those social connections.” And that’s going to be a lot harder if you’re the remote person. So it’s more than just getting your camera set up and having a nice non-distracting background and not doing meetings from your bedroom with an unmade bed. But it’s about being the first person in the room on that meeting. It’s about knowing everybody who’s going to be on that call. It’s about being very clear with the agenda and the next steps and actively becoming involved, replicating those experiences that you’d have if you were in the office. And then for leaders, I think we’re going to see a new class of leader emerge with a softer set of skills than the current leaders who thrive, because what we’ve seen with our customers and with the connected culture research is that it’s not about assigning tasks and monitoring progress. People know how to do that. But the leaders who are able to bring in the entire power of their remote workforce at full capacity versus a leader who’s only getting half the horsepower out of the remote team, those leaders are going to thrive, right? Their teams are going to be more successful. They’re the ones that are going to get the good projects, and they’re going to get the attention, the resources in the organization. And then, of course, those organizations that create those hybrid-connected cultures for their leaders are going to thrive versus their peers.
Kerr: As you think about the leader question, one approach is going to be learning by doing, but that involves lots of mistakes and some heartaches and some pains along the way. What would be a strategy for the business managers and leaders that are listening to this podcast to get themselves ready for that future? Are there resources or places that you would recommend going to learn how to build this muscle?
Peachey: Half of that answer is: We don’t know yet. What exactly is this hybrid world going to look like? And who’s going to thrive in it is not 100 percent clear. And I think that’s really exciting. When you rearrange the furniture, all bets are off. And in my most optimistic framework, I think about those leaders who are going to have an ability to step forward and lead in a new way. How are you going to learn to do that, I think, is going to be a question of observing very carefully what works and what doesn’t work. And then going out and looking for those sources of coaching and information and inspiration that are, like I said, some of the softer skills. It’s, how do you include people? How do you make sure that people are involved? How do you check in and support the whole authentic being of that person on your team? You didn’t use to have to do that, but particularly for remote workers, if you build that human connection, if you nurture that social and emotional piece, you’re going to get more out of that person. That person’s going to be happier, and you’re going to do better.
Kerr: So, Michael, how do you see career advancement changing for those that be full-time remote versus hybrid and in-person?
Peachey: This is the thing that keeps me up at night. So career paths are going to be different for these two cohorts—the people who are not on-site and the people who are on-site, because the rules are different for these two groups. And I think the ones who are going to be impacted the most are going to be younger workers, people who are new to the job force that don’t have established relationship-building skills, don’t have the opportunity to build those relationships. Our research on connected cultures and other people’s research have shown that, for example, women bear the greater burden when working remote. They’ve got less-attractive home workspaces, they’re more distracted from their jobs. Minorities and non-native speakers are also at a disadvantage. There are two things that have to happen here. One is, those organizations that invest in the training and the tools and the culture to build these connected cultures are going to thrive. We uncovered this sort of idea of the “connected culture champion” in a number of the customers that we’ve spoken to. These are people that have sprung up organically to coach and inspire their peers, their teams, in that connected environment. Online training is going to be really important, particularly focusing on giving leaders and managers the soft skills that have always been important, but I think are even more important now. And it’s going to be incumbent, I think, on workers and leaders to really actively and intentionally invest in understanding the new environment. So in my most pessimistic moments, I really worry about a new normal of these haves and have-nots, fueled by the hybrid environment. These remote workers are going to be disadvantaged, are going to suffer. Those on-site are going to get the strategic projects. Those remote are going to get the task works. And like I said, the haves and the have-nots are going to break in pretty traditional ways. But in my more optimistic moments, I really see the future of work enabling the disadvantaged, empowering everybody’s ability to contribute. So when somebody who’s a stay-at-home caregiver for a parent or a child or for whatever reason has got the ability to participate remotely because of the tools and the training in that connected culture with their on-site peers, we’ve done a good thing for that person, we’ve done a good thing for the organization, because they’re getting the most out of everybody. Or you brought up earlier the idea of the geographies and language challenges. You picture a future where the tools and the technologies allow somebody with a non-native speaker—somebody who has more difficulty in comprehension or a thicker accent—when they can participate fully remotely, again, we’ve done a really good thing there in supporting that person. So it’s that future, it’s that optimism, that really gets me out of bed every day and to go charge in at work and try to solve those problems to build that tomorrow.
Kerr: Michael, one final question. And it’s about the field of user experience. This is a fast-moving field, I think all the time. And it’s certainly gone through a significant shift over the last eight months. What do you see as the future of user experience? And if this podcast were to land in the lap of a young professional trying to get started in this area, what would be some advice you might give them?
Peachey: I think if I were talking to somebody who’s looking to start out in user experience in this new world, in this new hybrid world, I think that the communication and collaboration products and anything related to helping people get stuff done—so, task management and training and resources like that—are some really interesting spaces to get involved. And you’ve got this great remote opportunity to study and learn from audiences. One of the big challenges in UX is getting to understand your user and your audience. And when everybody’s in a building someplace, you’ve got to go travel to them. Our research has gotten a lot easier now because everybody’s online. It’s super easy to spin up a focus group, because you don’t have to pay people to travel and pay for their parking and buy them lunch. They’re all participating from their living room. So I think it’s a really exciting time in UX, and a lot of the rules haven’t been written yet. So what do I say to a young person? I say, “Get involved, start figuring it out.”
Kerr: Michael Peachey is the vice president of user experience at RingCentral. Michael, thanks so much for joining us.
Peachey: Thanks for having me, Bill. I appreciate it.
Kerr:We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website, hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.