KEYNOTE EXTENDED ABSTRACT

How the Web Will Shape the Hybrid Work Era:
A Keynote at WWW 2022
Jaime Teevan
MicrosoftUSA
teevan@microsoft.com

Abstract
The web has been a driving force for innovation and transformation in how people work for thepast several decades, enabling new forms of collaboration, the ability to collect data at scale,and, eventually, significant improvements in artificial intelligence. The COVID-19 pandemic,
however, created a phase change that accelerated this transformation by requiring anyone
who could possibly work remotely to do so. In my keynote at the ACM Web Conference
2022, I reflected on the impact of the web and remote work on work practices, and discussed
the opportunities and challenges for the coming Hybrid Work Era. As researchers we must
intentionally revisit how online and physical spaces interact so that we can create a new –and better – future of work.
Date: 29 April 2022.

1

The Web and Work Practices

I first encountered the web in 1994, the same year as the first WWW conference, and my initial
experiences were underwhelming given there was limited content available and it was difficult todiscover new content. However, I soon became fascinated by web search, which transformed what
was there into something useful by allowing people to find what they were looking for. Web search
was one of the first web services that people used at scale, and one of the most interesting things
to emerge from that is that search providers quickly figured out how to use the behavioral data
generated by users’ queries and clicks to improve its performance.
This was the beginning of a feedback loop that has since become ubiquitous in web applications:
Engagement produces data, data drives improvement, and improvement drives more engagement.
This feedback loop is accelerated by experimentation, where different experiences are comparedbased on behavioral data, and by artificial intelligence, where the data is fed back into the system
to learn from it directly. The results have been impressive, as evidenced by many of the papers
presented at the Web Conference and other related venues that build on these loops.
The ability to observe people’s interactions at scale has been a foundational shift driven by theweb, as it has enabled applications to move to the cloud, collect new types of data from mobiledevices and sensors, and make use of the data to drive improvements in AI and experimentation.
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In the process, the web has transformed work practices by enabling new forms of collaboration,communication, and coordination across time and space. For example, the web has supported theemergence of online communities, crowdsourcing platforms, and social media networks that allow
people to share knowledge, solve problems, and create value together. The web has also enabled
new modes of work, including gig work and open innovation, that challenge traditional boundaries
and assumptions about organizations, teams, and careers [Kuttur et al., 2013].

2

Remote Work and Collaboration

This shift was then significantly accelerated in March 2020 by the COVID-19 pandemic. A significant portion of the working global population moved from in-office work to working from home,and became, overnight, unwitting participants in a giant, uncontrolled, natural experiment into
remote work [Teevan et al., 2021]. As the Chief Scientist for Microsoft’s core productivity products, my job is to use research to drive product innovation. When I first took the role, this was a
hard task, despite all of the innovations driven by the web, given the size, scale, and success of Microsoft’s products. The pandemic had many negative consequences, but one positive consequenceis that it, ironically, made my job easier by creating a huge demand for research and innovationin our products in order to effectively respond to rapidly changing work practices. As a result,researchers from across the company came together to launch the New Future of Work initiative[Teevan et al., 2021, 2022], which we believe is the world’s largest research effort on post-COVID
work practices. We used a variety of methods, including telemetry data, customer panels, surveys,studies of our own employees, and even EEG studies of people’s brains, to study the impact andimplications of remote work. Our findings can be found here1 .
One of the first insights to emerge from this research was that people were still productive while
remote, according to self-report data and activity metrics [Teevan et al., 2021]. For example, thenumber and velocity of pull requests by developers increased slightly, while their size remained
consistent. The average time in meetings and the number of emails sent also increased. Although
this insight may seem obvious now, few believed this was true prior to the pandemic. And it may
be that the technology was not actually ready to support remote work at scale prior. That being
said, in 2020 the need for social distancing forced work behavior to become digitally mediated,
and we were able to do these things thanks to the web and other technologies.
However, while people were able to remain productive the shift came with many challenges:
long hours [WorkLab, 2021], a lack of focus [Cao et al., 2021], blurred boundaries between work andhome [Iqbal et al., 2020], and atrophied social networks [Yang et al., 2021]. For example, remote
work significantly changed people’s collaboration patterns. In a study by Yang et al. [2021],
we looked at large-scale telemetry data to see at how collaboration patterns changed following
COVID. We compared the anonymized collaboration patterns of two groups: Microsoft employees
who worked remotely before the pandemic and employees who shifted to working remotely during
the pandemic. We then used causal analysis to isolate the effects of remote work from the effectsof the pandemic.
We found that remote work caused a 5% decrease in synchronous meeting time, and an increasein email and IM messages, indicating a move to asynchronous collaboration. We also found that1

http://aka.ms/nfw

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remote work increased intra-group connections, but decreased cross-group connections by 25%,
suggesting that teams adapted to do more loosely coupled work while remote. These findings
show how we can use the massive digital transformation brought about by remote work to see
and understand the relationships, the communication modes, and the impacts of our tools andenvironments on collaboration.

3

Supporting People’s Goals

However, we have also seen that web-based systems, as a result of the feedback loops they employ,
can have second-order effects on people’s behavior and goals, whether we, as a research community, intended them to or not. For example, engagement-driven systems capture our attention,
sometimes at the expense of our wellbeing or our accomplishing our objectives. As researchers,
we need to be intentional about the impact the systems we invent have on people’s ability to meettheir goals, and create systems that optimize for what people want to accomplish, not just forwhat they do.
Much of my research has focused on building intelligent systems that explicitly recognize theimplicit influence they have on how people act and work to use that to people’s advantage. For
example, my early research focused on how people find and refind information [Teevan et al.,2007]. I observed that people’s past interactions influence their future searches, and used thatto improve the search experience for refinding queries [Teevan, 2008]. I also explored how thecontext surrounding a question posted to social media influences the answers other people give
[Teevan et al., 2011], and used those findings to build a chatbot that went beyond merely answering
people’s questions to actually helping other people provide better answers as well [Hecht et al.,2012]. These are examples of how we can put people at the center of the feedback loops thatdrive web applications. As large language models become increasingly important, we will need tointentionally create technology that helps them get closer to their goals as they use it.

4The Hybrid Work Era

Now, as we start to introduce physical space back into the equation, we are entering a new erain the geography of work: the Hybrid Work Era, where people will work both online and offline.
Physical space is an important technology that people have been using for millennia to work
together, as it affords collaboration, spontaneous interaction, serendipitous connection, and focus.
When space went away, people were required to rely on digital technology to substitute for what
they had previously been relying on space for.
Now, we have the opportunity to use both space and digital technology to complement eachother and create new and better ways of working. This creates all sorts of fascinating researchquestions, such as how to design goal-directed AI systems, how to enable new collaborative models, how to leverage personal data for machine learning in a privacy-preserving manner, and howto support personal information management. This keynote was intended to put a call to action
to the Web Conference community to think about how the work researchers within that community do applies broadly to the significant disruption to work practices that we are all living
through right now. The web enabled people around the world to shift to remote work, and it
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will play an important role in shaping the Hybrid Work Era. It is our responsibility to do thisthoughtfully, given the externalities we know exist, and to use our research to drive innovationand transformation.

References
Hancheng Cao, Chia-Jung Lee, Shamsi Iqbal, Mary Czerwinski, Priscilla Wong, Sean Rintel, BrentHecht, Jaime Teevan, and Longqi Yang. Large scale analysis of multitasking behavior during
remote meetings. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems (CHI 2021), May 2021.
Brent Hecht, Jaime Teevan, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Daniel Liebling. SearchBuddies: Bringing search engines into the conversation. In Proceedings of the International AAAI Conferenceon Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012), June 2012.
Shamsi Iqbal, Jina Suh, Mary Czerwinski, Gloria Mark, and Jaime Teevan. Remote work andwell-being. The New Future of Work Symposium, published by Microsoft, August 2020.
Aniket Kuttur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John
Zimmerman, Matt Lease, and John Horton. The future of crowd work. In Proceedings of the2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW 2013), February 2013.
Jaime Teevan. How people recall, recognize and reuse search results. ACM Transactions onInformation Systems (TOIS), 26(4), September 2008. Special issue on Keeping, Refinding, andSharing Personal Information.
Jaime Teevan, Eytan Adar, Rosie Jones, and Michael Potts. Information re-retrieval: Repeatqueries in Yahoo’s logs. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Conference on Research andDevelopment in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2007), June 2007.
Jaime Teevan, Meredith Ringel Morris, and Katrina Panovich. Factors affecting response quantity, quality and speed in questions asked via online social networks. In Proceedings of theInternational AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2011), July 2011.
Jaime Teevan, Brent Hecht, and Sonia Jaffe. The New Future of Work: Research from microsoft
into the pandemic’s impact on work practices. Technical Report MSR-TR-2021-1, Microsoft,January 2021. URL https://aka.ms/nfw/.
Jaime Teevan, Nancy Baym, Jenna Butler, Brent Hecht, Sonia Jaffe, Kate Nowak, Abigail Sellen,
and Longqi Yang. Microsoft New Future of Work report 2022. Technical Report MSR-TR2022-3, Microsoft, May 2022. URL https://aka.ms/nfw/.
Microsoft WorkLab. The rise of the triple peak day, December 2021. URL https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/triple-peak-day.
Longqi Yang, David Holtz, Sonia Jaffe, Siddharth Suri, Shilpi Sinha, Jeffrey Weston, Connor Joyce,Neha Parikh Shah, Kevin Sherman, Brent Hecht, and Jaime Teevan. The effects of remote workon collaboration among information workers. Nature Human Behaviour, September 2021.
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