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It’s hard to imagine, but before the pandemic, only 8% of meetings included a remote participant. The collaboration was almost always done in person. The pandemic has forced companies to quickly embrace remote working as an integral part of their business continuity strategy.
It became very clear that employees could be as productive as when they were in the office, if not more. But with this productivity, video fatigue, bandwidth issues, and blurry lines between work and personal life have increased burnout. And IT teams supporting a distributed workforce have felt the burden of these challenges.
The best of both worlds
The pandemic has raised notable concerns about remote working. Forty-nine percent of remote workers say they suffer from a sense of isolation and 32% say their connection to the corporate culture has suffered, according to Metrigy Research. The technology that allows remote working is another challenge; 90% encounter problems when working from home.
Despite such painful points, it is clear that we will not return to a model in which labor occurs only in one physical location. Today, a majority of employees, around 81%, say they don’t want to return to the office or prefer a hybrid work scenario. Fifty-seven percent expect to be in the office less than 10 days per month. Already, 98% of all meetings have at least one remote participant – an increase of over 100% in less than two years.
As companies begin to prepare to bring their employees back to the office, they also need to be prepared to embrace hybrid work, where some people will work in the office, others remotely, and still others a combination of the two.
The five elements of hybrid work
When work becomes hybrid, collaboration becomes more complicated for both employees and IT teams. Impromptu and informal face-to-face discussions are replaced by scheduled and formal meetings. Remote meeting participants may not be able to contribute in the same way as in-person participants. And IT administrators must adapt to manage and secure a growing number of devices and volume of data.
There are a lot of things to consider when your organization is deciding how best to adapt hybrid work. Successful hybrid work environments depend on five imperative traits:
- Soft: Your organization must adapt to a variety of styles and methods of collaboration and communication. Whether it’s synchronous modes of communication, one-to-one phone calls or videoconferencing with dozens of participants and group messaging for hundreds, the tools your employees use should enable all types of communication. collaboration and communication styles. These methods should provide the same quality of experience to remote and office workers, but also to those outside your organization.
- Including: 80% of communication is non-verbal, which means you need to provide equal experiences for everyone, no matter where they are, what language they speak, or whether they have a disability. Eeveryone in a hybrid meeting should feel like they are seen and heard, whether in a meeting room or remotely.
- Support : Your organization needs to empathize with employees who may be tired of working virtually but are afraid to return to the office. Empower your teams to meet meeting goals, understand work-life integration, and manage people’s most valuable asset – time.
- Secured: With hybrid working, the more workplaces and connections, devices, communications, and content, the more risk exposure your organization has. You need security that doesn’t compromise employee simplicity and efficiency, while ensuring employee privacy.
- Managed: You need a simple way to manage hybrid work infrastructure, including the easy provisioning of users and their devices, no matter where they are in the world. You should also be able to collect real-time analytics which in turn will provide proactive usage and performance insights to ensure all employees have the best possible collaboration experience.
Five imperatives, one platform
A patchwork of solutions was enough for remote working during the onset of the pandemic to keep the lights on. But today, your organization cannot afford to settle for nothing less than a well-designed and managed hybrid work platform. As the business world becomes more competitive, companies that offer the most flexible, inclusive and supportive experience to their employees have an advantage over their competitors.
Hybrid work is more than online meetings. Your technology must be adaptable and flexible for any role, work style, collaboration method, device and geographic location; bringing together the best of remote and in-person working, so that everyone has an equal voice and participation; and be secure by design and private by default.
It may seem like a tall order. But hybrid work is here to stay, and adopting a solution designed to handle it all will help your organization thrive and grow with its new hybrid model.
To learn Webex by Cisco can help your organization excel in the age of hybrid work.
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