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 Today in Health it, the story is gonna be a three day look at the work from home study that Microsoft did and what we can learn from it. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT at channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged today.

No sponsor. But if you would do me a favor, check out our website. We just spent a month, the month of March redoing the entire thing. The goal was to unlock the content that we had amassed over doing close to 400 interviews. Actually, much more than that. If I think about it, if you have a chance to shoot me a note with any suggestions on design, usability, anything else you can think of, please do that.

They have a lot of great insights in this, so I'm gonna break it down in over a couple of days. I think this is a very important topic, a timely topic, something that we need to get right, and so they've identified, let's see, seven trends. Seven trends that are going on, and I'm gonna cover the first three today, and we will go from there.

The, uh, the obvious one, flexible work is here to stay and here's what they cite. Business leaders are on the brink of major change to accommodate what employees want. Which is the best of both worlds, and they have some metrics here. 66% of leaders say their company is considering redesigning office space for hybrid work.

You know, once that happens, we're bought in, right? We're heading down this path. So that's 66%. 73% of employees want flexible remote work options to stay, and 67% of employees want more in-person work or collaboration. . Post pandemic. Alright, so you have a bunch of things at work in here. So, hybrid work is inevitable.

It is starting to be solidified as part of our common practices, our way of approaching things as organizations. So that's the first major finding. . The second finding is that leaders are out of touch with employees and need a wake up call. 61% of leaders say that they are thriving right now, 23 percentage points higher than those without decision making authority, which means if it's 61%, 23% less than that are struggling if they don't have decision making.

Capabilities and employees are starting to feel disconnected. 37% say their companies are asking too much of them at a time like this. Gen Z women, frontline workers, and those new to their careers reported struggling the most this past year. They have an interesting graph here. Most leaders in this study were male information workers with an established career.

The near opposite of those struggling most, and then they sort of mapped it out. Business leaders, 61% are thriving, 39% are struggling, married, 46% are thriving, 54% are struggling. And this is their, their feelings . Towards how they are doing as an employee. Working moms, 44% are thriving, 56% are struggling.

Gen Z, 40% are thriving, 60% are struggling Frontline workers, 39% are thriving. I. 61% are struggling new employees, 36% are thriving, 64% are struggling, and that's one of the areas we talked about earlier this week, which is adjusting your practices around those new employees, getting them connected. But it also appears there's an awful lot of our other employees that even though they may.

like the freedom and flexibility of remote work environment are struggling somewhat with regard to this. And single people, 33% are thriving and 67% are struggling. And I think the first, so what is going to be. Do you have your finger on the pulse of the employees, all of your staff? Do you know where they're coming from?

Do you know what category they fall into? Married, working mob, gen Z, frontline workers. Have you even thought about it from that perspective? And then have you broken down the things that are working for them in this environment and the things that aren't working for them in this environment? I relied very heavily when I was ACIO on

These poll surveys. We did poll surveys of the organization, of my organization, of the IT organization probably about three or four times a year. and we just collected information and sometimes it, it was, you know, just a three or four question survey, which would get us the feedback we needed to just know how the organization was go doing.

But it was during those busy times, during the EMR implementation, during the major projects that we increased the level of communication with the team to make sure that we were not burning people out, making sure that we understood where they were going. And that's gonna be one of the, so whats so. Get your finger on the pulse of what's going on.

Understand where your organization's going is another one of the, so whats from the first thing, if we are redesigning the workspace, are you preparing your staff for that new reality when they come into the office for the first time and recognize that, hey, they don't have a permanent space anymore, that is a significant psychological adjustment for people to make.

The third item in this study, and probably the last thing we're gonna cover for today is high productivity is masking an exhausted workforce. And this is really true in healthcare. We knew this was true last year, especially when the frontline workers were working so hard. One of the things that was maybe not as obvious was the impact on the people who were behind the scenes.

Uh, the people who were working out of their homes who were adjusting to this and they were . Really feeling a new way of doing work. And we were measuring their productivity based on how much stuff they were getting done. And they got a ton of stuff done. We rose to the occasion, the teams rose to the occasion and they did what they needed to do.

But potentially we didn't recognize how much of a toll that was taking on the workforce. And they cite some interesting statistics in this. And one year in time spent in meetings and chats per person each week continue to climb 148% more meetings. This year, 40.6 billion emails have gone out. 45% more chats, 66% more documents have been created.

The digital overload is real, and it is climbing, and the work-life balance becomes very challenging when it's hard to really differentiate when you're at work and when you're at home and the emails keep coming in. . And the workload continues and you feel like there's never a break. This is where leaders have to step up.

We have to understand where our workforce is at. Some of the other statistics, one in five Global survey respondents say their employer doesn't care about their work-life balance, 54% feel overworked, 39% feel exhausted. What are those percentages in your organization? What are those percentages? In your department and trillions of productivity signals from Microsoft 365, quantify the precise digital exhaustion.

Workers are feeling weekly. Time spent in meetings has more than doubled. You get the picture. It's all those stats we were talking about. There is a lot going on, a lot to process, and these are people who are also dealing with. A global pandemic. They're dealing with the impact on their family, their kids, a significant growth in work requirements, and this is taking a toll on us and it's taking a toll on our workforce.

We have to recognize that this has to be addressed at some point. I love this study. This study is giving us a lot to think about and really a lot to talk about. I'm gonna go into some of the other seven things over the next couple of days, and they just break it down into a lot more detail, and I think it's worth.

Taking the time to do this. This is something we have to get right and something that we are going to have to examine as we get closer to that day where you can choose to come back to the office and what does that look like? All right. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note.

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Thanks for listening. That's all for now.