Taking a page from its Azure scalable computing offerings, Microsoft has announced a new groundbreaking shift in its hiring and work practices. At the SHRM Human Resources Conference in San Diego this week, it unveiled its new system, which it calls “Employees as a Service”.
This new model uses a consumption based approach where Microsoft only “pays for what we use”. Chief People Officer Kathleen Hogan explained the rationale:
“It’s very hard to spin up and spin down employees, as we learned with the latest round of layoffs. So we thought, we’ve solved for this in computing in Azure, so why not apply it to people too? Instead of full time employees which are like IaaS or on-premises servers – have to keep them on all the time and a comfortable data center for them to live in – why not treat them more like Azure Functions? With EaaS, Just spin them up when you need them and shut them down when you don’t.”
Referring to them jokingly now as micro-softies (a techie nod to micro-services), Hogan said they have “done a considerable facilities management and hardware upgrade to support the changes, including new key cards, kiosks, and badge swiping stations. With micro-employees, we can assign them a small task, like writing some AI prompts, or writing and checking in 50 lines of code. They scan their badge when they start, and as soon as the task is done, they scan again, and we only pay for the time they were actually working.“
CFO Amy Hood chimed in at this point: “There is a lot of inefficiency with full time workers that eats away at your margins. I mean, does it make sense to pay for the employee to go refill a cup of coffee? For them to walk down the hall to take a leak? The 5 minute water cooler conversation about the latest episode of Rings of Power?“
Explaining the facilities changes, Hogan talked about the “importance of avoiding cold starts“:
“When you need the work done, you don’t want to be waiting for employees to arrive. To solve for this, we’ve created hot standby areas in front of every campus building, where our micro-employees wait out in the cold until they are buzzed on their phone for work to do. It’s kind of like those guys that stand out front of Home Depot, but for software engineering instead. It’s very convenient – they really need the money so there is always plenty of them hanging around ready to work.“
A fascinating approach for sure, we’ll follow it and see how it plays out.