Half of business leaders surveyed in Microsoft’s latest Work Trend Index are set on holding back hybrid working, suggesting their company already requires, or plans to require, full-time in-person work in the year ahead. Good luck with that.

Hybrid deniers will face serious push-back from employees who enjoy or want to keep the flexibility of hybrid working, and insist they are as, if not more, productive when working away from the office. According to Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2022, hybrid work is up seven points year-on-year, up to 38 percent, and 53 percent of workers are likely to consider transitioning to hybrid in the year ahead. For Gen Z and Millennials especially, there’s no going back. The young, best, and brightest know they are a finite resource—which means they have leverage. And they will use it to push change.

The arc of history has bent towards hybrid working. The priority now is making these new models of working work. The scale and complexity of that transition—creating systems that work, provisions for employee wellbeing and inclusion, ensuring that company culture is lived and felt everywhere, providing the right training and technology and bringing the best and brightest into the fold—is huge.

The responsibility for managing that re-engineering falls mostly—and heavily—on the COO. A new McKinsey report highlights the growing importance of the COO in the C-Suite power structure; increasingly charged with managing not only day-to-day operations and making strategy happen on the ground, they are also driving the adoption of technology and ensuring it, in turn, drives growth. 

The COO is asked to provide internal leadership and direction as they redesign work practices and systems and ensure that, as this transition happens, despite what might feel like operational turbulence—or even turmoil—productivity is not just maintained, but increased. The McKinsey report makes clear the complexity of the COO’s role and key challenges they now face, including managing talent creatively, increasing cross-functional collaboration and driving operational excellence, culturally and technologically.

There is now a yawning gap between how productive employees feel, and managers’ confidence in that productivity. Almost 90 percent of the 20,000 workers in 11 countries surveyed for Microsoft’s new Work Trend Index say they are productive at work, while only 12 percent of leaders are “fully confident” that they are. That gap needs to be closed.

All parties are yearning for that kind of structure, clarity and feedback around workload. Over 80 percent of workers say it’s important that managers help them prioritize. And a failure to offer that clarity is leading to wasted energy and effort, and burnout. Almost half of employees, and over half of managers, surveyed for the Work Trade Index said they already felt burned out at work. 

COOs can help ensure that workers have a clear sense of their priorities, while convincing leaders at all levels that they don’t need to resort to constant monitoring—physical or digital—of productivity. Effective prioritisation, though, is about more than re-ordering an unworkable to-do list. Managers need to clearly communicate and align teams around objectives and targets, but always in the context of a larger purpose. And they need to help employees manage and organize workloads in a sustainable way that is open and responsive to feedback about short-term targets and long-term goals. 

Using an employee experience platform such as Microsoft Viva, leaders can create a truly responsive and always-on feedback loop. Microsoft’s Viva Insights and Glint provide privacy-protected, AI-driven insights and actionable recommendations aimed at helping everyone work smarter and achieve balance. Viva helps leaders address unique business challenges by generating valuable insights and flexible reports, while employees can explore ways to build better work habits and prioritize wellbeing. The new Viva Goals app helps organizations align employees' works to business outcomes by leveraging the power of the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework. This way, organizations can ensure their people are working on the top priorities that are going to have the biggest impact. At the same time, employees understand how their work is making a difference. 

Collaboration is key to innovation and a company’s long-term success, but it is also key to employee satisfaction. It is the COO’s task to ensure effective collaboration, not just within teams but across functions—that marketing and operations are really aligned around mission and process, for example. 

The solution, though, is not simply to pull people back into the office under the assumption that this is where the cross-functional collaborative magic happens. Silos and faulty or blocked lines of communication exist in physical and digital workspaces. 

A new report from Microsoft Surface makes clear that while the majority of workers believe the office is the best place to build strong relationships with colleagues, the way most offices are organized and equipped, actually gets in the way of collaboration. 

Less than a third of workers surveyed said their organization had invested in technology to improve collaboration. And over 70 percent of workers say that when they do work in the office, they end up processing emails, a task they can more easily do at home. The new model office is most valuable as a meeting and collaborative place but companies have to invest in the technology and platforms that supports that collaboration and effectively recruits contributions from remote colleagues. 

Collaboration and meeting tech has to ensure that remote and in-person collaborators get an equal hearing. Microsoft is continually updating Teams Rooms to create a full-fidelity collaboration experience for those inside and outside the room, working on integrating digital whiteboards for instance, and adding Intelligent Capture technology to display physical whiteboards to remote collaborators. 

Eighty percent of the global workforce are “frontline workers” who don’t actually work in offices, so while they didn’t get caught up in the return-to-office vs hybrid debate, this does mean they have been largely excluded from much of the discussion around new ways of working—but here too, technology can create new lines of communication and ways to exchange ideas. Microsoft Viva Connections allows employees to access information and resources out in the field, and leaders to share messages and company updates, while creating a culture that reaches and embraces the frontline. Microsoft Teams and a new wave of Teams-connected tech means that frontline workers can collaborate with colleagues and managers wherever they are. And, a lack of connection with senior management is a key concern for frontline workers. According to the Work Trend Index, 76 percent of frontline workers feel bonded to each other, yet over 60 percent say their company needs to better prioritize culture and communication from the top.

The key for the COO is making sure they act on data and visualizations that makes clear the quality of collaboration happening in their organization, within and across teams. 

For hybrid to work, it has to work for everyone, everywhere, all the time. It has to work in HR and IT, in manufacturing and marketing, and it has to not just fit but improve every business process and function. It’s a big ask—and it requires a COO-led radical digitization. The right technology is essential to making hybrid work work at scale, and Microsoft has outlined the key ways you need to adopt and use technology. 

“As a first principle, get as much as you can into the cloud as quickly as you can”, says Nick Hedderman, senior director of the Modern Work business group at Microsoft UK. “Make sure your people can work securely wherever they are. Windows 11 and Microsoft 365 offer the secure foundations and must-have-tools of hybrid working.” 

Hedderman recommends the use of a collaboration platform like Teams for far more than communication; think virtual showroom, virtual demos or as an events platform: “Democratize digital innovation. Employees can use Power Platform within Teams to create apps, bots, and workflows, designed specifically around their needs, creating efficiencies and automating away repetitive tasks.”

Every business is different, and there is no one-size-fits all approach to successfully embedding hybrid working. COOs will have to improvise, experiment, test and tweak, ensuring they have the tools to collect feedback and actionable data. Managing talent, increasing effective collaboration and digitizing operations are guiding principles, and the right technology and platforms, itself constantly adapting to new needs and realities, are key to making new work systems work for everyone and deliver better outcomes, at every level. 

To find out more about how you can empower your people and teams to make hybrid work, work, download Microsoft’s The People-Powered Workplace eBook.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK