With many companies in the Philippines starting to work on-site once again, many 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 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.
