So welcome everyone. Thank you for joining today. We will be talking about digital leadership in the future of work, meaning how has leadership evolved and what are some practices that you can do in order to be a successful leader in this hybrid workplace.So there's two topics I will cover today. The first one is I'll give you some information about the research that we have done at Microsoft in terms of leadership and hybrid work. And then at the end, I will give you some practical tips that you can start implementing already today in order to make yourself a more inclusive leader in this new reality. So let's start. Um a few months ago, we did a study Microsoft and BC G together in terms of how, how we are building resilience in the hybrid world. And what we realized is that most people were actually very happy to be able to work from home uh because we can dress more casually, we can have our pets alongside and so on. Of course, depending on the situation, some people were very happy, others were not so happy. But at the beginning, everybody was like, yeah, we can work from home. And very quickly, we realized that actually productivity maybe was lower for the teams. We had less innovation, less engagement.

And people felt that we all felt we had more work to do and there was really no boundaries between work and um and the office. So given that this has brought this kind of paradox, like it's great to work from home, but maybe, maybe it's not really that great. So that's why now we see that the hybrid work is actually the solution and this is where we are all moving towards. And in, in the most recent study from a couple of months ago at Microsoft, we, we found seven trends in the hybrid work or in the hybrid world. And I would like to focus on these three for today, actually, basically just on the second one. But I think these three are important, basically flexible work is here to stay. So there is no going back to normal. And I think we all know this and what this means is we have to really prepare on how are we gonna continue to live in this hybrid world? It's no longer remote, it's no longer face to face. It's now hybrid. Um We also found out the leaders seem to be out of touch as to what employees actually need, employees seem to be struggling more than we realized.

So this was also a very interesting finding because when we asked everyone leaders were not very much struggling during this pandemic, but all the people were and I will show you a chart about who is actually struggling, who has been struggling with this type of work. Um And then if you see high, highly productive um employees, sometimes this is masking uh people who are really exhausted and they think that they have to respond right away and be available all the time. So these are um these are, this is the chart that I told you about. So basically, when they ask, are you thriving or are you surviving in this remote um world? Most leaders on the left, you see more than 60% of leaders say I'm thriving. I love it. And but you see like almost 70% on the left of people who are single and have maybe no family, they cannot date or don't have a spouse. Um They, they are struggling or surviving. That's how they see it. And yeah, so we need to find a way to help different populations of employees. So even though leaders may think like things are fine, everything is great. I have everything I need. Um Our workforce has many different types of demographics who are actually struggling. So and and this is important because over 40% of the global workforce is saying that they are probably going to leave their current employer. And we know how expensive it is when people leave their employers.

So it it's an important topic that we need to be aware of and what is the solution. So there, there's many solutions. But this is a framework from, from the study from BC G study in terms of how do we have to change or, or what needs to shift in, in our mindset, in, in the leader's mindset mostly um from this study. And it says that we have to change our leadership approach from what it used to be, which you see on the left, which is basically directive, performance driven problem solving, driven into what you see on the right, which is a more inspiring leadership. So that's what you see here. A a little bit more empathetic trust based. You have to trust your people that they are gonna be doing the work that they need to be doing, but not by, you know, directing them, but basically by inspiring them. Um servant leadership is another concept that you may or may not have heard about. If you haven't, maybe you can read about it later. But it's basically this concept where you are no longer, let's say the leader is no longer the king and everybody else has to the leader. But it's the other way around. It's this concept of leaders keep last and leaders are should enable the people to do their work.

Because if we see that people are actually not really thriving necessarily in this, in this type of hybrid work. Um we need to see and care for the people and, and, and see how we can serve them because if we don't do that, they are not gonna be able to do their best work. So we don't perform um in terms of feedback, also two way feedback, empathetic. So this is where the world is moving and remote world. And hybrid work has enabled this or accelerated this type of leadership style shift into the smaller one. So in a nutshell, what is it that you can do now that we know? Well, we need to adjust our leadership style. We need to, we need to do something. Um These are three of the things that, that we recommend at Microsoft. There's, there's many things and you can read the report. I I would uh I have a link to this presentation so you will be able to get it later and the link of the report is inside. So basically, this is the three things that I think are important to, to create a plan so that you have extreme flexibility for people. If people want to work, for example, um from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.

and then have a break of two hours because this is what works for them and then work in the night or things like that. It's it's good that we are flexible because then people say they know that they can show up when they can show up when they bring their best energy and we are not pressing them that hey, you have to come to the office every day and you have to do this because then people disengage and they're not gonna give us their best second.

Rebuilding culture is very important. It is. It's, yeah, it's really critical for, for this type of um new world and digital exhaustion is also a topic and I will give you a few tips in the next slides about how to, how to fight that because we are on this type of calls all the time. Um And if we go from one meeting to the other, to the other, to the other and then somebody expects somebody and the boss expects somebody and something from you, then we are exhausted at the end of the day. Or sometimes we just keep working through the night because we just have so much to do and it's important that we, we have that um in our mind. So we give you now a few practical tips that you can implement in order to achieve these four goals. So first, we will be talking about screen fatigue and very quick tips. Some of them, you may know already others what may be new to you, how to improve attention when you are in a meeting or when you're talking to, to your team, improving team culture and making your meetings more inclusive, meaning everybody will be felt that, that they are being heard.

Um So here is the first um topic, reducing screen fatigue. We recommend you to have shorter meetings. So this one hour meetings are already too exhausting. People have to be sometimes on camera, somebody's presenting one hour is really, really a long time. So we encourage you to try 15 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes max meetings. If you really have to tell people a lot of things and maybe send it in advance in writing and then use the meeting just for discussion. If you have to tell people, hey, we have these changes, you can just post it in a channel like Microsoft teams, for example, or an email and say, hey, uh this is the things and in the meeting, we will take 20 minutes, 30 minutes to discuss. That's what we're gonna do have, if you have to have a meeting, which is longer than an hour, then we encourage you to take breaks either five or 10 minutes depending on how long is your meeting. We also encourage you to not exceed two hours for a meeting. Otherwise people will start to multitask or check their email, check their phone. And if you want them to really be pay attention and not have fatigue from your meeting, then that's what we recommend to keep everyone's attention. We uh recommend you to, for example, create your own font.

So that what you see there is something I typed with my font. So that's my handwriting, but I didn't write it with a pen. I actually created a font and when I type, it's, it's my, my own handwriting. Um The link to that font is, is there. So if you want to um I will send you the presentation. So here is the link to how you can do that. Um And then the other tips that we have is rethink powerpoint. So do you have to have slides? So for this lecture, I, I have powerpoint because I am giving a session. But if you are in a meeting, do you really need to have a powerpoint slide? Maybe you don't, maybe you just want to talk to people or maybe you want to have a white board. Um For the second tip, use the meeting as I said, don't use the meeting as a lecture, use it as a discussion, ask people what they're thinking. Hey, what do you think about this and that? Use the meeting to meet and not to lecture. So send the agenda in advance including the time for the breaks. Um Yeah, because if people know, for example, OK, this is a 30 minute meeting. No, well, 30 minutes you don't need a break. But if it's a two hour meeting, but we were go, we are going to have two breaks at this time and at this time, so then they know they can make a phone call at the time, they can check their email there will be a break.

So you ask them, give me your attention, I will give you the break later. Then, in terms of improving team culture, what can you do for your team? For example, you can plan for informal meetups. Um And I think by now everybody does this type of coffee, virtual coffees and things like that. So one thing you can do is for your team, say, OK, every Monday and Friday at 10 a.m. we are having half an hour in the calendar optional. You don't have to join anybody that feels that wants to chat and talk informally. You join. If you don't join nobody, it doesn't matter. But it's like a, a free space for people to connect, allow for a synchronous work. So a synchronous work means you don't expect that people are working exactly at the same time as you are. So if, if you, if it's, I don't know 8 p.m. and you are busy working on a presentation or on something and you send a message to someone, hey, can you please send me this? They should know that it's not expected that they reply right away or even next the next morning at 8 a.m. that it's OK if people have different times when they work as long as everybody works, right? Um So if you allow that this, this makes it better for people walking meetings are also important.

If you, you can tell people, hey, we don't have to uh be in front of the screen, take your headset, take your phone, let's go for a walk. Even if I'm at home, you're at home, everybody can go for a walk and we can just talk. That is also very effective for the, for the culture of your team. And lastly, here's an example about how you can develop a working agreement. How you say, hey, let's all agree in our team, how we're going to be working? Are we gonna do this? Are we gonna communicate for vacation? How are we, which software are we gonna use? And then you can agree on that and you all work on this. So that's in terms of improving the culture, be inclusive in meetings. So sometimes you have people who are very talkative or extroverts and they may take over in the meetings or, or they really have an opinion and they will say it and then you have some other people who have an opinion but they are a little bit not so not so comfortable sharing their opinion.

So check in with people and say, hey, Anna, do you have anything to say or what do you think about that? Because otherwise if you don't do that, you will have the same three people always talking and the same other three people never talking, encourage uh the team to raise their hands. So if you use Microsoft teams, for example, or any other type of software where you have a hand raising feature, then encourage people to if, if you ask a question, hey, what do you think about that? That instead of them actually saying, and interrupting each other and talking over each other and saying, this is what I think. This is what I think. Just say, anybody who has an opinion, raise your hand and that's it. Then you go over the list of people who raise their hand and you give the word to people and say, hey, Catherine, what do you think? Ok, now we move on to this person. So everyone has the equal chance to speak if they want to record your meeting. So people don't feel that they have to join life. So if the meeting is at 8 a.m. and I have something else to do because I'm more productive at eight AMI prefer to work at eight. I can watch the recording at 5 p.m.

For example, take time to appreciate. This is uh it, it can sound very simple, right? Appreciate. But there have been studies where people value appreciation from their manager more than a bonus. So they make studies where they give people a bonus like $500 or something or they give people a appreciation, a message from their boss that says, thank you very much for doing that. And at the end, you see of of course, people are happy with the bonus and they are happy with the appreciation. But the productivity of the employee, the engagement goes much higher. When the, when the manager shows appreciation, they feel they want to help the manager. And when they get a bonus, it's like, oh, that's amazing. That's great. But they take it for granted a little bit. So take time to really appreciate your people and that's it. So we still have uh maybe a couple of minutes if you have any questions, that is the link to the to the presentation. If you go A K A dot MS Women digital, I think I will paste it now in the, in the chat as well. One second, hopefully it works here. You can download the presentation. That's the QR code to my linkedin page. Um So IAAO is asking how to make the team more active. Yeah, this is a good question because sometimes people are, you know, they don't feel so engaged.

So you can check in with people, you can call them out and say, hey, um Anna, I, I would really appreciate your opinion. What do you think? That's one thing you can do. Another thing you can do is if you're starting to change the team's culture and introducing walking meetings and making an agreement on how we're going to work. Being flexible, people will respond with, with engagement with thinking like, oh, actually, I like to work here. I actually like my manager and, and they would start to, to, to bring back also their work. Um It, it's not from one day to the other, but these are some of the of the tips that are helpful. Yes. Ok. So if you are leading people in other countries, which is 100% online, then, then it is challenging. On the other hand, everyone is at the same level, right? It's not like you have five people who are talking in the office and two people who are left behind online, everybody is online. So in that case, you can you have to take more charge of, of the workspace, of the digital workspace, how you set up your channels, how you set up the collaboration, the time zones. Um So there is some work to do there. Yeah.

And and also this, this part that you feel that your team is lazy. I I know what you mean because I, I've seen people who are not working, who, who just feel like, oh, I don't care and people who are very, very productive and often is the same person in two different contexts. So the same person, if this person is motivated and feels that the manager trusts him or her, we give, you know, if, if the person feels empowered, I have seen people who working for one manager, they give everything they have because they believe in the manager and they feel trusted and then when they change manager, they feel like, oh, I don't wanna do this for him.

I don't care and they become lazy. So it is the work of the leader to, to get the best out of people, right? To make sure that they are really contributing. It's, it's not easy in leadership. So um we have one minute left if in case you have any other question, otherwise um enjoy the rest of the conference at me. Uh Follow me on linkedin and check the presentation and reach out if you have any other questions. Thank you very much.