I’ve seen the same thing Loryan has seen, though. Microsoft partners and consulting companies are offering up “expertise” on Copilot that I don’t believe they have. If you’re looking for guidance to help you navigate the Copilot waters, I also recommend vetting the folks who claim to be able to do that.
As the article mentions, this is a big reason why return-to-office mandates have destroyed the trust between management and employees. When I’m happily working remotely, finishing all of my tasks and projects on time, connecting with the people I need to collaborate with just fine, and reporting on the status of my work using the tools available, and you turn around and tell me that I need to be in the office to be more productive, I quickly see that for what it is. Despite the results, you don’t trust people to do their jobs.
When I hear people talking about how much more effective employees are when they make friends at work, it makes my hair stand on end a bit. Because the benefits of having good friendships don’t exist solely to make us better workers. We’re more than our work. Our work is a transaction that we take part in every day. We do work, our employer pays us. We shouldn’t let any kind of friendship or supposed loyalty blind us to that fact either. When our employers don’t consider the money they pay to be worth the work that we are doing, for whatever reason they have to think that, they have shown an uncanny willingness to let us go. There is no loyalty from that end of things and so no loyalty is deserved from the other end of the transaction either.
With all the announcements from Microsoft Ignite about Teams Premium, SharePoint Premium, CoPilot, etc. these subscription costs are about to get even higher if firms want to keep up with technological changes.
And this will remain a massive problem:
If you truly want to be an organization that supports learning, you need to put your money where your mouth is and figure out how to incentivize individual and team learning opportunities. Taking the time to learn and the time to train others, shouldn’t come at a cost to the performance review of the people who want to learn. They should be the people you want to reward and hang on to. They are the ones who will be pivotal in helping you navigate change, but they can only do that if they still work for you. Making them work double-time to make up for “lost productivity” when they try to be part of the learning culture you claim to want won’t encourage them to hang around.
In other words, I’m more than simply a worker. I’m more than a cog in the capitalist system that pays me for my labor. We all are, but we don’t always act like it, and I suspect that Helen is correct in her assumption that part of the reason is that we have prioritized work so far above and beyond the rest of our lives that we don’t have anything else to do.
That’s not a recipe for a healthy and balanced life.