Vice Presidents of HR at Natura &Co and PepsiCo tell how they are preparing for the challenge of hybrid work next year

In the era of hybrid work and the home office, offices have gained a new function, and who explains it is PepsiCo's vice president of human resources, Fabio Barbagli, with the company's mantra: "The office remains super relevant, but changes its purpose. Now it's the 4Cs: collaboration, creation, connection and celebration,” he explains. 

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According to the corporate risk management consultancy AON, the pandemic led 73,3% of companies to implement remote work policies. Before 2020, 68,5% of them did not have the home office model in their daily lives. For 2022, the fire test for the hybrid model will be highlighted among companies. Even though it has proven to be more complex, the current goal of companies is to maintain the gains from remote work and continue to discover the best way to proceed with the hybrid model.

With the refurbishment of the PepsiCo office in São Paulo, the coffee shop, which used to be secondary, gained prominence and became a noble space. “Where you used to quickly stop by for a coffee and then come back to answer an email at your desk, now we've discovered that location is much more important than that. In the future, we want the most noble space to be the coffee shop”, says Barbagli.

With more than 12 thousand employees in Brazil, only 10% of them work in the administrative part and use the PepsiCo office. For these, the model will be a flexible hybrid, starting in 2022.  

In the survey by the consultancy Think Work Lab, with about 70 companies in Brazil about this work model, the HRs showed indecision on two very important and more bureaucratic points that appease the opinion of those who prefer to work in a hybrid way.

Among those who responded to the survey, 24% said they still do not have clarity about contract change or which groups would be covered. And 25% still haven't defined how the hybrid's benefits will be managed.

 “I would say that the biggest barrier is labor legislation. It is not a matter of cost decisions, we are willing to absorb a higher cost. The biggest difficulty is labor”, says PepsiCo's VP about the uncertainties that still worry him.

As per the 2018 labor legislation, up to two days of work from home are considered the traditional form of contract. After that, the model becomes telecommuting, or hybrid, as the employee is out of the office for more days. And this fact changes the way the contract should be administered.

The new hybrid reality

The new reality that companies will face with the hybrid model is still complex. Even the companies that prepared themselves during the nearly two years of the pandemic, such as Natura & Co, which established a multidisciplinary group to study the new work model for the post-pandemic, still prefer to adapt the model as necessary, without be fully established in advance.

With the “new normal”, three forms of work will have to coexist in companies like Google and Embraer: the fully face-to-face, the hybrid (with different proportions of days in the office and flexibility) and also the 100% remote. 

“You can't go back or start anything from scratch. You take what you've learned so far, include it [in the culture] and transcend it. Take one more step. It is in this sense that we will work”, says Natura's vice-president, Flavio Pesiguelo, about the new challenges that the company will have to face.

Above structural and technological changes, such as the renovation of offices, Flavio believes that the hybrid will change the leadership manual of companies for good.

Just as the use of the office will be guided by PepsiCo's 4C's, he gives his guiding words for the leadership of the future: guide, develop and empower.