Microsoft Corporation Work-Life Issues Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation Work-Life Issues

Microsoft attracts very driven, intelligent, passionate and Type -- A personalities that think little of time spent at work, they think in terms of results. Adding in the intensity required to stay competitive in one of the world's most demanding industries - computer software - and the perfect set of circumstances are in place for a company that focuses entirely on results, little on balancing the lives of their employees. In fact Microsoft is the size and dominance they are given the work/life imbalance they have perpetuated in their thirty years of existence. Long-time Microsoft employees argue that the company literally is where they are today due to the massive contributions of many talented individuals where their work at Microsoft was the center of their lives for years.

This all-or-nothing mentality separates the Microsoft culture between the old-line employees and the ones who have been there less than five years. New employees are given a two-day orientation on work-life commitment from Microsoft, in addition to a binder full of programs the company is offering, all aimed at alleviating the reputation the company has of being out of balance for employees.

In fact many of the newer employees, on their independent blogs, say the company is moving in the direction of making work-life balance a higher priority yet there is much to go. Michael L. Brundage writes a blog on his experiences working at Microsoft, where today he is currently working on the Xbox 360 product life. He writes that inside Microsoft, their focus on software and its development tools and culture around expertise, personal freedom, company leadership, and influence on both the broader software industry and in the specific sector they are working in. Mr. Brundage says there is however an unreality to working at Microsoft, where many employees only use Microsoft-developed and supported products and applications, rarely getting a glimpse of what the rest of the software world is going through in terms of making applications work together. Integration to other platforms, therefore, is a foreign concept for many of the software developers at Microsoft. The lack of expertise with how to manage employees to a work-life balance is also a major part of the weakness of the Microsoft culture today, and the fact that schedules and making deadlines are far more important than any personal needs pervades many workgroups. The competition to be on time with products, the remote area Microsoft is located in, and the fact that so many working professionals without families live in the Seattle area all make work-life balance difficult to achieve for many employees of Microsoft who have families. The continued exodus of key members of the MSN Search team to Google illustrates how the work-life balance is more fiction than fact according to Greene (2005). His article from Business Week paints a very accurate picture of the Microsoft culture and the challenges it faces in terms of continuing its momentum forward. Paradoxically Microsoft's competitive challenges are becoming so significant with open source software challenging their operating systems business and he challenges of competing with Google they could use a healthy dose of work-life balance giving them a boost to ingenuity and development. Only through giving employees their freedom in how they define their schedules and how they complete tasks will Microsoft be able to accomplish this competitive goal according to Pratt (2006). Pratt's article defines many of the strategies companies are relying on to provide their employees the flexibility and freedom to achieve work-life balance, and the resulting increases in productivity. Many companies struggle with work-life balance as it cannot be quantified and measured. The ROI of work-life balance may very well be in attracting and retaining professionals in the prime of their careers when they also typically have children at home or elderly parents to take care of.