Microsoft’s Work Trend Index is a working trend index based on a survey conducted on 31,000 people in 31 countries, together with the analysis of different Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn data.

This work, titled “Great Expectations: Making hybrid work work” established the urgent working trends that the companies’ leaders cannot ignore in 2022.

These are some highlights of this report:

• 47% of the interviewees expressed their willingness to put their family and personal life first, unlike at the beginning of the pandemic.
• In regional terms, 70% of Latin Americans said they were willing to change their priorities in comparison to last year. This is the highest percentage reached in the survey.
• 43% of the interviewed employees said they wanted to change their jobs during 2022; two points less than last year.
• 50% of hybrid employees and 56% of remote workers feel they have fewer working friends in comparison to when they went to the office.
• 55% of hybrid employees and 50% of remote workers feel more alone than before at work.
• 66% of the interviewees stated that participating in chats over coffee, in this context, feels forced and more like a job duty and less like catching up with a person.

How do we change?

Having said that, every company and organization faces the challenge to keep talent and avoid their teams from falling apart. The question is: how does an organization manage to meet these new expectations that are causing hybrid and remote work among its employees, without neglecting at the same time, the commercial results in an increasingly unpredictable economy?

At AmCham’s first Innovation Sandbox 2022, Flor Palazzolo and Esteban Lett-Brown, marketing and innovation leaders at OCP TECH, talked about how the company is changing thanks to a new corporate culture that makes the most out of those people working there and, at the same time, encourages hybrid work and increases the client portfolio in the region.

Lett-Brown believes that to improve peoples’ skills, motivate workers and help them face new challenges, the innovation area is essential. Innovation is part of human resources. It is not just a business model, but the whole corporate culture package.

At OCP TECH, they came up with a framework with different roles that are necessary in a project to provide an impact solution for the customers. These are four roles with well defined profiles, that form the word HACE (DO): Habilitador (enabler), Analítico (analytical), Creativo (creative) and Emprendedor (entrepreneurial).

1. The Creative: Is responsible for new ideas and ways to do things and does not have to be necessarily aligned with the company’s objectives and possibilities.
2. The Analytical: Evaluates why, how and what resources are necessary, how are they going to be measured, what outcome they will generate and when.
3. The Enabler: At a company level is the one that bears more weight and provides the support to initiate it. Being near the chain-of-command, it is good to have the approval to move resources and advance in the right way.
4. The Entrepreneurial: Defines the process to build the solution’s architecture. Is knowledgeable about technologies and available tools and knows about its use and application.

Palazzolo believes that these four profiles are the agents of innovation and change that will make the project succeed and make the company widen its client’s portfolio and strengthen the relation with those they already have. This same happens with the teams and hybrid work: while many companies start to force the return to a pre-pandemic scheme of work, at OCP TECH, hybrid work is present in the organization’s DNA.

The proof is in this pair of coworkers who not only do not work in the same city, but not even in the same country. Palazzolo, who works from Miami and Lett-Brown from Buenos Aires stated: “We work all over the region, so we are very used to hybrid work. Cybersecurity’s hub at OCP TECH is in Colombia and they are the ones who train the whole region. We are a team that adapts to the situations because that is how we choose it.”

Palazzolo had the opportunity to tell an anecdote about how technology helps them to deepen their relations: “With the pandemic we lost the mid-morning “let’s have a coffee” to chat with our peers. That is why, with Esteban, we always schedule a call to know about the other, and how we are doing.”

In short, the key to the success of a company is dialogue; listen more and open communication channels to make the team feel the need to stay in the company, and the latter to keep consolidating its growth.