📑 Highlight reel on Microsoft's hybrid work report
Spark notes for the Microsoft Work Trend Index report
Trying a new format and I think we will get the cadence down over the coming weeks. This industry is changing at a wild pace. New reports, trends, success stories, oh my.
Onto the update 🦁🐯🐻
Flippin’ through the virtual pages
Earlier this month Microsoft released a report that combined insights from both the Office 365 suite and LinkedIn (what a combo). It’s great and well worth reading over a cup of coffee.
✨ The report is 38 pages (and a beaut` for sure) so today I wanted to share some stats and insights that lept off the digital pages for me.✨
🏡🔀🏢 Hybrid is here to stay
While 73% of people want to maintain flexible remote work options, 67% are craving in-person experience
While organizations grapple with the policy challenges of adopting hybrid work, the next challenge will come with reevaluating the real estate and office layouts.
66% of business decision leaders are considering redesigning their space
The offices we are returning to were designed for Work a lá 2019, where the office was the default. We are still in the very early stages of the transition.
Challenge 1: make the office an option again
Challenge 2: redesign the space for why people want to come back
You’ll notice that they don’t really mention things like real estate cost savings at all. They are 100% focused on the employee experience, how people are digitally exhausted, how some demographics are being left behind, and how they see hybrid work and a return to the office as a major part of the solution.
- Brian Muse, CTO at Robin commenting on the report
🚧 Virtual work overload
We are more connected than ever today, virtual work means “work” is open 24/7, no longer tied to the 9-5 of an HQ.
This barrage of communications is unstructured and mostly unplanned, with 62 percent of Teams calls and meetings unscheduled or conducted ad hoc. And workers are feeling the pressure to keep up: despite meeting and chat overload, 50 percent of people respond to Teams chats within five minutes or less, a response time that has not changed year-over-year. This proves that the intensity of our workday, and what is expected of employees during this time, has increased significantly.
Hope for Hybrid
The report showed that having a hybrid approach saw a regression in the number of meetings.
Australia, meeting time increased by 125% and in China the increase was just 67%.
🧳 On the road again
If 2020 was the year of the Chief Technology Officer, then 2021 will be the year of the Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO). CHROs face the next great challenge: reimagining hiring, onboarding, and employee wellbeing in a hybrid world.
An expected 41% of people are considering looking for their next job this year, that is a 2x increase from just a few years ago.
Our research suggests Gen Z is most as risk. HR leaders should rethink onboarding and double down on support for employees early in career to ensure their ideas are heard and that they can contribute fully
I appreciate you taking the time to read all the way through, this is a new experiment for me and I appreciate it.
👋 Cheers, Brendan
P.S if you want to see my annotated version of the report, click here.