With 210,000 connected stakeholders operating across 170+ countries and 500+ offices, Cisco recognizes that innovating an immersive and inclusive hybrid work model is crucial to its success. Paul Chapman, Cisco’s vice president of security and collaboration, provides some insight into Cisco’s journey. At the same time, Chapman underscores the need to tackle the hybrid work challenge as a holistic transformation and organization change management initiative, not as just a technology play.
Q: How does Cisco envision the hybrid work model?
A: This is a multiyear journey of transformation. We have had a flash-flood transition that is accelerating the transformation, and hybrid is no longer the future of work; it’s the now of work.
As a global company, Cisco is building an engaged and connected workforce by reimagining hybrid work and collaboration at scale. We believe the work experience should be designed around and for the workers, wherever they are. We have to get people to shift mindsets to think about the work experience being a state of mind and not a location. We have to think about work being broken up into purpose, whether it’s concentration work, collaboration work, ideation work, training, or socialization — which is what is missing most in today’s environment.
The fact is hybrid work is different and harder than how we used to work before. Nearly every meeting going forward will have distributed participants, and most office workspaces — the ones that were already aging and abandoned two years ago — are not set up to accommodate this. In the past, there was little focus on home workspaces, but now they’re considered an extension of our offices and home productivity is paramount. In the past, remote participants were the exception, and now we need to be inclusive of people working anywhere, and we need to give them flexibility in order to retain them.
Cisco has been innovating across our portfolio to drive employee productivity, well-being, and inclusivity. We’re focusing on the criticality of getting the full spectrum of interactions, meetings, and events right — from 1:1 calls and small meetings up to the largest hybrid customer conferences. As the stakes and risks go up, you need technology and partners that can help you get there.
Q: Many IT organizations view hybrid work as a technology problem. How does Cisco view the challenge?
A: Hybrid work is permanent, and it’s mission-critical. And it isn’t a technology problem alone. It’s really about new models and an opportunity for transformation, so it needs to be elevated to that level of conversation. Making hybrid work a great experience for everyone requires a triad of Human Resources, Facilities, and Technology to come together to curate the desired outcome for the company.
It’s very important we as leaders understand what’s going on inside our organizations — and equality of experience is something we need to focus on. Remote participants have traditionally been second-class participants, but now we need to be thinking about everyone being distributed, we have to think about the cognitive overload of our employees and the digital exhaust we all breathe every day. We need to create immersive and friction-free experiences for everyone, whether for people with disabilities or for people who have a different first language.
Of course, technology is extremely important to make this happen — with everything from purpose-built devices to investments in intelligent audio and video. We’re now using our People Insights capability, which provides personal intelligence back to individuals so they can understand their own working patterns, such as how many meetings they’re in and how many are with groups or specific direct reports. Individuals can use these insights to create better experiences for themselves and others.
Q: What are the biggest challenges Cisco and other organizations should expect to face?
A: Companies need to recognize that this is an organizational change that requires groups and leaders to think strategically and intentionally about the outcomes they want to achieve. One challenge for organizations is in thinking through their approaches to cybersecurity. We now operate in a borderless environment with boundless endpoints and attack vectors, so hybrid work strategies must deeply consider the security posture of the company. We are fortunate in that Cisco runs one of the largest security businesses in the world, and every day we help to protect 100% of the Fortune 100, including Cisco.
Another challenge is in transforming the workplace so it becomes a place of purpose and makes the office re-earn the commute. In the majority of organizations, the physical environment is not very flexible. Now we need to reconfigure and design for flexibility and agility in our real estate. We also need to design our workspaces to help ensure health, safety, and sustainability.
A third challenge is inclusivity, and meetings are the new battleground for this. Using technologies like audio and camera intelligence, real-time language translation, and meeting transcriptions, we can create immersive and inclusive experiences that help employees lean in, not lean back. We have to understand the human element of what’s happening, because we didn’t work this way prior to the pandemic.
Q: Based on Cisco’s own experiences, can you recommend some best practices that can help other organizations?
A: The first thing is to focus on the outcomes. Hybrid work models can’t be solved in isolation. It requires Human Resources for culture, inclusivity, and well-being; Facilities for space allocation, safety, sustainability, and efficiency; and IT for technology, which is more than just software. You need collaboration tools and devices for immersive experiences in every type of meeting and event; networking for connectivity, smart building technology, and manageability; and security for access controls and threat mitigation across all uses, devices, networks, and applications. Therefore, focusing on outcomes is the key to getting alignment across all these disciplines on investments and resources.
Next, think through your workplace design. You must come up with a plan that is flexible to support all employees, and you have to allow for work/life blending to occur as easily as it did before you opened your offices back up. Today employees expect to work from home or the office with increased flexibility — and you need to design an environment for where everyone is in the office, no one is in the office, and every possible combination in between.
As part of designing for flexibility, organizations need to think about how to help employees who may be going into the office but have never met another employee face-to-face. Managers will play a crucial role in fostering team bonding, acting as dot connectors, and helping to rebuild the social capital that looks different in a hybrid world. You need to have partners like Cisco that can hide the complexity and bring solutions that cover the full spectrum of collaboration needs. If you do all that right, you will be able to adapt and be more flexible and agile for what lies around the corner.
Cisco’s hybrid work snapshot
- 210,000 connected stakeholders (employees, contractors, etc.)
- 170+ countries
- 10,000 Webex meetings per hour
- 140 million Webex app messages per month
- 105 million minutes of background noise removal per month
- 125,000+ meetings per month with real-time translations turned on
- 100+ languages translated
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