After almost two years of social isolation and with the advance of vaccination in the country, the labor market is beginning to see the possibility of a gradual return to the offices. However, with so many changes in the market driven by the pandemic, the concept of work has changed, both for companies and for employees.

According to a survey conducted by the consulting firm KPMG, 66.2% of the companies interviewed have already returned or intend to return to face-to-face in person throughout 2021, with 87.3% of respondents saying they will adopt a hybrid model. This format allows employees the flexibility to work from home and go to the offices only on certain days of the week.

Digital transformation within the labor market is something that is here to stay, and the use of platforms that help manage teams and goals or technological security software has proven to be increasingly fundamental and productive for both companies and employees who are able to better organize time, set short-term goals, and work with greater autonomy, focus, and collaboration.

Thinking about this new moment in the job market, it is important to pay attention to some tips on how companies should prepare for the office of the future:

• Adapt to flexible models

The main characteristic of the "new normal" is flexibility and, therefore, physical spaces tend to work more like a coworking, with punctual and pre-scheduled visits by employees, and less like a fixed work environment.

To meet this demand for office management, reservations of desks, chairs, vacancies, and even equipment, such as notebooks and projectors, some companies have already developed tools that help in the management of this new office format. Management platforms allow employees to perform all the desired functions, such as check-in/check-out, reservation of desks, meeting rooms, car vacancies, and equipment, all by scanning a QR Code.

• Optimize management and communication between employees and leaders

According to a Microsoft report published in March of this year, one of the main needs of employees in this new moment is proximity to their leaders and teams, as well as better management of goals and results. Despite supporting remote work, many employees feel that they are without management and, due to the lack of communication, end up overloaded with high demands and goals that do not match the day-to-day work.

A good solution to prevent teams from being out of alignment and staying engaged is the use of goal management applications that work as a social network created for each company, allowing you to monitor the results and objectives achieved by the teams, greater integration and communication between teams, creation of groups for debates, among others.

• Implement new results-oriented management methodologies

To ensure an engaged team focused on real results, in addition to improving communication between teams, another trend is to bring to the corporate environment the OKR (Objective, key-results) methodology – a management model focused on simplifying the definition and tracking of the company's objectives and key results.

These objectives are set more objectively and in accordance with the employees' day-to-day work, ensuring that teams are not overloaded and can have a clear direction to achieve the objectives, in addition to facilitating the performance of self-managing teams.

• Investing in Cybersecurity

During 2020, brute force hacker attacks on remote access services grew 704% throughout Latin America as a result of the home office. This happened because companies were not prepared for the implementation of remote work models and most of them did not have a secure digital environment, becoming an easy target for hackers.

To this end, the trend is for companies to adopt solutions that offer an uncomplicated and easily accessible login for employees, in order to ensure a 100% secure digital environment that does not put the data and documents of corporations at risk. Some software, for example, already allows access without the need to enter users, passwords, or tokens – the login is done by reading a dynamic QR Code and authenticated by an alphanumeric code automatically generated using banking technology.

*Daniel Alves, founder of Colorkrew in Brazil