{"id":741973,"date":"2021-04-27T09:50:14","date_gmt":"2021-04-27T16:50:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-blog-post&p=741973"},"modified":"2021-04-27T09:51:33","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T16:51:33","slug":"who-am-i-right-now-helping-very-small-businesses-manage-work-vs-life","status":"publish","type":"msr-blog-post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/articles\/who-am-i-right-now-helping-very-small-businesses-manage-work-vs-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Who am I right now: Helping very small businesses manage work vs. life"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kent Lowry (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\"a<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo credit: iStock<\/p>\n

The many hats that a small business owner must wear, often simultaneously or with quick changes, is a well-worn but continually accurate concept. Multiple product teams at Microsoft are focusing on small and even very small businesses (VSBs), which we\u2019re defining as having up to 10 full-time employees, including solopreneurs. VSBs consist of 1.8 billion internet-connected people worldwide, so this segment represents a large, diverse group of people. Their deeply felt needs are key for us to understand and address. We want to examine how our technologies can better help them manage their tasks efficiently, particularly when they are responsible for so many of the underpinnings needed to keep their businesses running smoothly.<\/p>\n

One of the aspects we\u2019ve delved into lately is how VSB owners manage their personal versus business online identities. VSBs rarely have dedicated IT resources \u2013 in fact, IT manager is one of the hats that a VSB owner typically wears \u2013 so this puts more of a burden on them to manage their various identities online, as well as those of their employees.<\/p>\n

Who am I right now? <\/em>
\nVSBs often alternate among work and personal tasks during working hours, (and this was the case even before the COVID-19 pandemic and working from home). When doing so involves switching between work and life account sign-ins, it\u2019s not uncommon for VSBs to forget which one they\u2019re in and then send communications from or to the \u2018wrong\u2019 account. This then causes additional frustration, work, and time lost in mitigating any resulting confusion. More work needs to be done in finding ways for identity management to help users recognize which identity they\u2019ve logged into and to make account switching as friction free as possible.<\/p>\n

It’s more complicated than business vs. personal<\/em>
\nWe started with a hypothesis that VSB owners need to manage two aspects of their lives: business and personal. We quickly found that this was an oversimplification. For example, a VSB owner who is enrolled in school would need business, personal, and school identities to keep organized. Or, a solopreneur might need two separate work identities: One for their own work, and another for work done with collaborators, in addition to personal communications. Designing systems that can accommodate greater levels of complexity with their data and communications will be key. There\u2019s no \u2018one size fits all,\u2019 so some level of customization and nuance is required to meet user needs when it comes to managing multiple online identities.<\/p>\n

Blurred lines between documents and communications<\/em>
\nKeeping a strict division between business and personal matters is easier for some VSB owners than others, and\/or may not be possible in all situations. Having control over when to be \u201con\u201d for work is often the reason some solopreneurs struck out on their own, but subsequently it can be difficult for some VSB owners to achieve the separation that they may desire. Even when keeping identities separate is mostly possible, some VSB owners will experience overlap between identities when, for example, a friend or family member contacts them via their personal email to ask for a project bid or provide a referral.<\/p>\n

Some VSB owners struggle with how to characterize some documents; for example, whether taxes, resumes, and cover letters should be designated as personal or business documents.<\/p>\n

We’d like to help users by automatically classifying e-mail, documents, and other information for them. But if the VSB owners themselves have difficulty deciding whether some information is personal or business, this indicates that any autoclassification will sometimes be inaccurate, and therefore may require user intervention.<\/p>\n

Fear of missing out on priorities <\/em>
\nFor VSB owners, ensuring that they always have immediate visibility to any business-related communications is a key driver to maintaining separate online identities. They don\u2019t want to lose track of business communications amid their busy lives. Sorting through communications can be further complicated by the prevalence of junk email and spam in consumer accounts.<\/p>\n

Helping users build \u2013 and maintain \u2013 a wall between personal and business communications is a key job that technology can do to help users once they create a business identity.<\/p>\n

We plan to continue delving into the needs of the VSB segment to understand more about how technology can help throughout their entire user journey, as well as understanding their employees\u2019 needs and pain points. As far as managing their work versus personal lives, the lines may remain blurred, but we can find ways to help users navigate between them effectively with confidence.<\/p>\n

What do you think? If you are a VSB owner or work with one, how does this align with the pain points you’ve seen them experience? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or\u00a0follow us on Facebook (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and join the conversation.<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

Kent Lowry is a Principal Product Planner and Customer-Driven change agent at Microsoft. <\/em>As a Product Planner, he drives formative and evaluative research to inform product strategy, and he also has a role driving culture change to inculcate customer-driven attitudes and behaviors within the engineering culture at Microsoft. <\/em>Kent is adept at identifying the nexus of human needs with tech solutions. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Helping users build \u2013 and maintain \u2013 a wall between personal and business communications is a key job that technology can do to help users once they create a business identity. We plan to continue delving into the needs of the VSB segment to understand more about how technology can help throughout their entire user journey, as well as understanding their employees\u2019 needs and pain points.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38703,"featured_media":741979,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-content-parent":616842,"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"class_list":["post-741973","msr-blog-post","type-msr-blog-post","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_assoc_parent":{"id":616842,"type":"group"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/741973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-blog-post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38703"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/741973\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":742534,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-blog-post\/741973\/revisions\/742534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/741979"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=741973"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=741973"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=741973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}