Great Expectations: Making "Hybrid Work" Work
March 23, 2022
Share this

After sitting on the cusp of hybrid work for more than a year, many companies are at a long-awaited inflection point: the lived experience of hybrid work.

One thing from the research is clear: We are not the same people who went home to work in early 2020. The past two years have left a lasting imprint, fundamentally changing how people define the role of work in their lives. The challenge ahead for every organization is to meet employees' great new expectations head on while balancing business outcomes in an unpredictable economy.


To help leaders navigate the shift, the 2022 Work Trend Index outlines five urgent trends from an external study of 31,000 people in 31 countries along with an analysis of trillions of productivity signals in Microsoft 365 and labor trends on LinkedIn:

Employees have a new "worth it" equation

53% of employees say they're more likely to prioritize their health and well-being over work than they were before the pandemic.

And the Great Reshuffle isn't over: 52% of Generation Z and millennials are likely to consider changing employers in the year ahead, up 3% year over year.

Managers feel wedged between leadership and employee

50% of leaders say their companies are planning a return to full-time in-person work in the year ahead.

54% of managers say leadership at their companies is out of touch with employee expectations, and 74% of managers say they don't have the influence or resources to drive change for their teams.

Leaders need to make the office worth the commute

38% of hybrid employees say their biggest challenge is knowing when and why to come into the office, yet only 28% of leaders have created team agreements to define these new norms.

Flexible work doesn't have to mean "always on"

After two years, weekly meeting time for the average Teams user is up 252%, and chats sent per person each week is up 32% — and still climbing. While workday span has increased by 46 minutes, after-hours and weekend work are up 28% and 14%, respectively.

Rebuilding social capital looks different in a hybrid world

With 51% of hybrid workers considering a shift to full remote work 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 say relationship-building is the greatest challenge of having employees work in a hybrid or remote environment.

"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," said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president, Modern Work, Microsoft. "By embracing and adapting to these new expectations, organizations can set their people and their business up for long-term success."

Share this

The Latest

March 30, 2023

APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 2 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...

March 29, 2023

Most organizations suffer from some form of alert noise. Alert noise is only going to increase as organizations support cloud-native applications spanning multiple public and private clouds, including ephemeral deployments and more. It's not going to get easier for organizations to understand the signal from all those alerts being sent. So what can be done about it? ...

March 28, 2023

This blog presents the case for a radical new approach to basic information technology (IT) education. This conclusion is based on a study of courses and other forms of IT education which purport to cover IT "fundamentals" ...

March 27, 2023

To achieve maximum availability, IT leaders must employ domain-agnostic solutions that identify and escalate issues across all telemetry points. These technologies, which we refer to as Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations, create convergence — in other words, they provide IT and DevOps teams with the full picture of event management and downtime ...

March 23, 2023

APMdigest and leading IT research firm Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) are partnering to bring you the EMA-APMdigest Podcast, a new podcast focused on the latest technologies impacting IT Operations. In Episode 2 - Part 1 Pete Goldin, Editor and Publisher of APMdigest, discusses Network Observability with Shamus McGillicuddy, Vice President of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA ...

March 22, 2023

CIOs have stepped into the role of digital leader and strategic advisor, according to the 2023 Global CIO Survey from Logicalis ...

March 21, 2023

Synthetic monitoring is crucial to deploy code with confidence as catching bugs with E2E tests on staging is becoming increasingly difficult. It isn't trivial to provide realistic staging systems, especially because today's apps are intertwined with many third-party APIs ...

March 20, 2023

Recent EMA field research found that ServiceOps is either an active effort or a formal initiative in 78% of the organizations represented by a global panel of 400+ IT leaders. It is relatively early but gaining momentum across industries and organizations of all sizes globally ...

March 16, 2023

Managing availability and performance within SAP environments has long been a challenge for IT teams. But as IT environments grow more complex and dynamic, and the speed of innovation in almost every industry continues to accelerate, this situation is becoming a whole lot worse ...

March 15, 2023

Harnessing the power of network-derived intelligence and insights is critical in detecting today's increasingly sophisticated security threats across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure, according to a new research study from IDC ...