With many companies in the Philippines starting to work on-site once again, a number of organizations had been experimenting with hybrid work for more than a year now. The question remains: will “hybrid work” work in the Philippines?
Microsoft recently released its second annual Work Trend Index report entitled “Great Expectations: Making Hybrid Work Work” and announced new features across Microsoft Teams, Microsoft 365, Surface Hub, and Microsoft Viva all aimed at empowering hybrid work and addressing employees’ new expectations for the workplace.
I had the privilege of visiting the new Microsoft Philippines office in One Ayala, Makati City to know more about this recent study and to personally see how the software company is implementing hybrid work for their organization.
The research clearly makes us realize that we are not the same people who went home to work in early 2020. The way people define the role of work in their lives has changed, and organizations are faced with challenges on how to meet employees’ new expectations while balancing business outcomes during this unpredictable economy.
“How can you make ‘hybrid work’ work for every organization? Different organizations have different approaches. We are at this transition phase where we’re trying to find out what’s gonna work even in terms of policies. In our annual Work Trend Index report, we try to understand the trends in how people work and we established that hybrid work is here to stay,” according to Vett Watson, Modern Work & Security Business Lead at Microsoft Philippines.
The 2022 Work Trend Index outlines five (05) urgent trends from an external study of 31,000 people in 31 countries (including the Philippines) along with an analysis of trillions of productivity signals in Microsoft 365 and labor trends on LinkedIn:
- Employees have a new “worth it” equation.
Some 67% of employees in the Philippines say they’re more likely to prioritize their health and wellbeing over work than before the pandemic. And the Great Reshuffle isn’t over: 46% of Gen Z and Millennials in the Philippines are likely to consider changing employers in the year ahead. - Managers feel wedged between leadership and employee expectations.
The majority of leaders (69%) in the Philippines say their company is planning a return to full-time in-person work in the year ahead, compared to 50% globally. 46% of managers in the Philippines say leadership at their company is out of touch with employee expectations and 81% of managers in the Philippines say they don’t have the influence or resources to drive change for their team. - Leaders need to make the office worth the commute.
According to 48% of hybrid employees in the Philippines, their biggest challenge is knowing when and why to come into the office yet only 38% of leaders have created team agreements to define these new norms. - Flexible work doesn’t have to mean “always on.”
66% of workers in the Philippines are open to using immersive digital spaces for meetings in the next year, compared to 52% globally. - Rebuilding social capital looks different in a hybrid world.
With 60% of hybrid workers in the Philippines considering a shift to full-remote in the year ahead, companies cannot rely solely on the office to recoup the social capital we’ve lost over the past two years. 43% of leaders in the Philippines say relationship-building is the greatest challenge of having employees work hybrid or remote.
“There’s no erasing the lived experience and lasting impact of the past two years, as flexibility and well-being have become non-negotiables for employees. By embracing and adapting to these new expectations, organizations can set their people and their business up for long-term success,” said Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice-President, Modern Work at Microsoft.
Five (05) years after the launch of Microsoft Teams, more than 270 million people globally rely on the business communications platform for hybrid work. Making “hybrid work” work for everyone will require intentional leadership around how, when, and where to work, plus technology will play a key role for it to succeed.
Microsoft Products Innovation to Improve the Hybrid Work Experience
To further improve the hybrid work experience, Microsoft has lined up a number of product innovations to be rolled out in the coming days.
Towards the end of this month, Teams Connect Shared Channels will be available in public preview and it will enable collaboration with people inside and outside of the organization from a shared workspace.
To bridge the gap between digital and physical workspaces, a new meeting layout for Teams Rooms, front row, is now available in preview.
New touch-enabled display solutions for Teams Rooms from Neat and Yealink are in the process of being certified for Teams Rooms on Android. These devices combine audio, video, touch display and compute in a single unit — allowing easy deployment and enhanced collaboration experiences. The new AI-powered Microsoft Surface Hub 2 Smart Camera uses automatic framing technology to dynamically adjust your Teams video feed to provide remote team members with a dynamic view of in-room interactions.
The language interpretation feature in Teams enables live interpreters to convert what the speaker says into another language in near real-time. The meeting organizer can assign interpreters and select up to 16 source and target language combinations, while attendees will hear the translation.
Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams offers a rich set of new capabilities that bring visual collaboration to life, including collaboration cursors, more than 50 new templates, contextual reactions, and the ability to open existing boards and collaborate with external colleagues in Teams meetings.
To improve hybrid brainstorming, completion of action items, and making decisions together without having to switch contexts or apps, Microsoft is introducing Loop components in Outlook mail. RSVPing for a meeting in Outlook now allows attendees to note whether they plan to join in person or virtually.
Microsoft is introducing a new offering in Microsoft Teams Phone called Operator Connect Mobile, in partnership with some of the world’s largest telecom operators. This assigns a single business-provided mobile phone number for desktop and mobile devices, making it seamless to move calls across networks and devices with no interruptions.
With vibrant and fun styling, over 1,800 new 3D fluent emojis can infuse expression and playfulness into messages. And with the skin tone selector, users have the option to pick emojis that better represents themselves.
To support flexible work styles, two PowerPoint experiences, cameo, and recording studio, are being brought together. This will make it possible for presenters to deliver presentations with PowerPoint Live in Teams, whether or not they attend the meeting.
A new feature called the Inspiration library is coming to Microsoft Viva in public preview as part of the Viva Insights app in Teams. The library is designed to give employees, managers, and leaders easy access to thought leadership and best practices from top sources such as “Harvard Business Review” and “Thrive.”