Cisco: Workers like the hybrid model, but crave better offices

Those numbers do not necessarily reflect employee preferences. In the Americas, for instance, 25% of respondents said that they preferred working from home, noticeably above APAC at 17% and Europe at 18%. Hybrid working models, however, were roughly equal in popularity across the three regions studied, with 32% in the Americas preferring them, along with 35% in APAC and 31% in Europe.

Workplace disconnect

Regardless of specific attitudes toward attendance policies, the recognition that offices are ill-equipped to handle the advent of new technologies and the changing needs of modern workers is widespread, Cisco’s numbers suggest.

Only 47% of employees surveyed said their work environments are suitably equipped for hybrid work. Most office space is set up for employees to work individually, just as they can at home, and not set up for meetings or group work, Cisco found. But even where meeting rooms did exist, they often did little for productivity. One of the biggest causes of this was a lack of audio and video endpoints for conferencing software, identified as a stumbling block by 41% of employers in the Americas, 52% in Asia-Pacific, and 42% in Europe.