The word “decision” is perhaps one of the terms that can best define 2022 for the Human Resources areas. This year has been key to define new working modelsespecially to decide whether the home office It will continue full time or it will remain in hybrid work, a scheme that is gaining more space in the preferences of companies.
But even implementing hybrid work has not been an easy affair. Organizations have had to answer questions like how many days should people come back? For what tasks will employees return to the office? How to offer a different experience?
“We are returning to a model where our associates will come twice a month in this first stage. In these two times that they will come, what they will do is connect with their work teams”, shared Alejandra Arellano, deputy director of Human Resources of Becton Dickinson (BD) Corporate Mexico.
According to PageGroup, the incentive of the team interaction is the most determining factor that is defining the transition to hybrid work of organizations in Latin America, followed by remote productivity.
“We were visualizing how we were going to return, we said two days, then three. It has been a constant process of change”, acknowledged Alejandra Arellano. East hybrid work model it is part of a global brand strategy to redefine its work model. In Mexico, BD invested 1.1 million dollars to redesign its corporate offices.
However, part of the success in the transition to the hybrid scheme has been the active listening process to find out the interests and needs of its collaborators, who have expressed their satisfaction with remote work, but have recognized that they miss interaction with colleagues. of work.
According to the Top Employers Institute, the hybrid work is one of the trends in 2022 that Human Resources should pay attention to. This modality is making it possible to recover “the closeness and warmth of personal relationships, which contribute to the integration and identification of the employee with the company”, but guaranteeing a conciliation between the work and personal life to the employees.
Nestlé is another of the companies that is already operating its hybrid model with a suggestion of two days in the office per week. After two years of teleworking, his collaborators returned for a few days of “reunion” that included activities related to physical and emotional well-being, coexistence with teams, among other spaces, with the aim of recovering the taste for the office and mark a new stage in the way of working.
“In this reunion we made a great opening that internally we call extraordinary people, it is the entire hybrid work strategy of our organization. What we did is talk about a flexible reunion in which we seek is to promote agreements between teams and their work dynamics. We wanted everyone to understand that this is a new way of working and we are doing it differently,” said Nora Villafuerte, Vice President of Human Resources at Nestlé Mexico.
However, the way of working is not the only thing that has changed in this modality, assured the executive. “The boards also change, in all these months we have dedicated ourselves to installing equipment to manage remote and hybrid boards. Everything changes, even the way of managing benefits”.
In this sense, the specialist commented that Nestlé is evaluating keeping the activities of the reunion in the office as a policy to have these spaces once a month. “We are inviting the leaders to announce in advance when the activation will be so that the teams attend, interact and have fun together. This is one of the things that will be different in the way you work. With the pandemic, everything changed and whoever does not understand it will have less chance of attracting talent.”
New key to attract talent
Maria Isabel Botero, deputy director of Scotiabank Mexico, agrees that hybrid work is part of the evolution that companies must have to maintain competitiveness in the talent attraction and retention. “It was something that happened very rarely, but after working remotely we removed those urban myths that people did not work.”
The bank recently joined the group of companies that are returning to offices with a hybrid scheme. Like other companies, the bank redesigned its workspaces to make them more collaborative, eliminating directors’ offices, for example.
“What we did was adjust the physical sites with ecosystems, which is where the post-pandemic re-entry meets the new way of working in the future and they are collaborative spaces. When you return with schemes of the future, where there are no longer offices for the bosses, you no longer return to the same. That interaction helps a lot and that’s why people go to the office,” said Maria Isabel Botero.
The hybrid model implemented by Scotiabank is a mixture of 60% time in the office and 40% at home, with the flexibility to distribute the days as best suits the employee.
According to the study Hybrid Work 2022 of Cisco, the 73% of workers At a global level, he considers that his organization needs to rethink its organizational culture in the face of new work models.
After the experience with the new work model, Alejandra Arellano assured that the hybrid work It implies a total change in the way of working, not only in terms of space, but also in the commitment to technology, behavior in flexible models and new leadership.
The leaders of Human Resources consulted agree that the hybrid models and the change in organizational culture around these work schemes will be key to attracting talent, since employees are more aware of the importance of the balance between personal and work life and do not want to lose the flexibility achieved in the last two years.