With hybrid work now established as a permanent fixture, companies are reimagining physical workspaces and introducing new technologies to enable new forms of collaboration and flexible work styles. Yet, to realize the ultimate potential of hybrid work, companies have to go beyond enabling basic capabilities for remote work and empower employees with a seamless, immersive experience that enables them to engage and be fully productive regardless of location or work persona.
Although much of the focus of enabling hybrid work is on traditional knowledge workers, all types of employees need to work effectively from anywhere. That means enabling a frontline worker in a field location who needs to confer with a sales support team, or a manufacturing technician collaborating with in-office engineers to fix a machine on the shop floor.
“We need to reduce the friction so that everybody can achieve maximum productivity wherever they are—whether in the office, while driving their kids to school, or at a job site,” says Greg Smith, senior marketing manager at Cisco. “The idea is to make people as productive as possible, unlike just remote work, where there isn’t always a formal plan. We’re rethinking how it all comes together for a new way of working.”
The ability to work efficiently and effectively from anywhere requires a core technology foundation built on a framework of secure connectivity, collaboration, and enhanced visibility. That could mean knowing who’s distributed or working in the office on any given day or having real-time updates into conference room status, air quality, occupancy rates, or floating desk availability.
Employees working from home or other non-core locations should be treated to an inclusive experience that’s on par with working in the office. They should be able to easily make and receive work calls, enlist IT support, or collaborate face-to-face with anyone, enriched with capabilities such as background noise removal, video and audio intelligence, real-time transcription, and automated note taking to elevate interactions as if they were happening in a shared space. The in-person experience must evolve to give employees new ways of working and sharing resources safely so they can maximize their time and work output on in-office days—providing compelling reasons to return to the office and re-earning the commute
Building the technology foundation
Supporting the new hybrid work model requires some bedrock technologies. Among the most critical are:
- Fast and robust Wi-Fi. Gone are the days of desktops and static wire connections. Employees need to move about an office securely to take advantage of shared collaboration spaces without being tethered to a physical network connection. New video collaboration hubs, smart displays, and smart building technologies, now requisites for the modern office, also require fast and always-on Wi-Fi connections to enable seamless and efficient workspaces.
- Inclusive collaboration. Since 98% of all meetings will have at least one virtual attendee, organizations need to reimagine workspaces—from home, to office, and anywhere in between—to support flexible work styles and collaboration types that range from small meetings up to the largest hybrid events and conferences. And they need to support both synchronous and asynchronous voice, messaging, and video interactions. To ensure all employees can participate equally, modern workspaces need capabilities like cameras that can zero in on individuals in the room, interactive shared whiteboards for real-time brainstorming, and intelligent audio that optimizes for the participants’ voices so everyone can be clearly heard, no matter where they are.
- Enhanced visibility. To ensure that employees have the best experience from wherever they are working, IT organizations need real-time visibility into the key services and applications available as well as the health and performance of underlying networks. IT should be able to proactively identify Wi-Fi and network connectivity issues and monitor the application experience of remote users to ensure reliable, secure, and efficient workflows and interactions.
- A new approach to security. With a distributed and remote workforce, traditional notions of perimeter-based security are no longer relevant. Organizations must shift toward concepts such as zero trust authentication, secure edge connectivity for managed and unmanaged devices, and extensive threat prevention, detection, and remediation approaches to ensure that employees can collaborate securely, whether at home, in the company office, or from their child’s soccer field. “You can no longer apply a physical location to someone’s work,” Smith says.
Rather than accommodating hybrid remote work through a series of patchwork solutions, leading organizations are elevating employee experience and raising the bar on productivity. By embracing the hybrid model as an opportunity for transformation, forward thinking companies are now paving the way for a profitable and more inclusive future.
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