Collaboration changing the Hybrid Workplace

In early 2020, Enterprises had to switch to remote work almost overnight. As lockdowns stretched, employees faced huge changes to their daily lives, and managers had to be flexible about when and where teams got their jobs done; in some cases, parents changed their hours and found ways to work.

Two years on, the majority of employees have “work desk” set-ups at home that keep them productive outside traditional, in-office working patterns. Some of these employees have been granted “work from home” by employers to continue doing so; these may include people who moved away from their work location during the pandemic and now want to keep their job remotely. There are also new recruits, hired on remote contracts.

Home internet connection speeds have gone up, 60% of  US households now have fiber connectivity,  while employees have invested in better Wi-Fi and security solution amidst growing security concerns.

Employee Experience 

As workspaces are opening up, organizations are asking employees to come back to offices. It is certain that not all employees will be in the office and not all days. Those who come to the office would like to get more out of their time in the office while “anywhere” workers wouldn’t want to be left out.

Changing employee behavior and expectations have dramatically changed collaboration applications and networks enabling these collaboration tools have seen significant adoption in both sync and async applications. These applications are of a wide variety, ranging from at minimum chat applications, whiteboard, and video meetings, to the sophisticated metaverse, WebEx hologram applications, that is evolving. The underlying networking infrastructure is expected to provide a seamless experience.

In many cases, employees returning to the office have had bad experiences compared to home. Most office infrastructure in designed 10-15 years back for the needs of that time and may not scale up to expectations of the post-pandemic world and may require an upgrade.

Digital Transformation

In the hybrid world, for effective operations, IT, HR, and facilities functions need to operate with agility. Application and process from these domains need to be able to integrate with each other to provide better outcomes. These needs are enabling CIOs to lead digital transformation across different domains with goals to the driveline of business outcome with improved productivity and better collaborations.

Cisco has market-leading offers across all these industry domains that allow organizations to take advantage of the latest networking technologies namely Wi-Fi6E and Private 5G and best of breed collaboration portfolio in Cisco Webex.

Wi-Fi 6E with additional channels allows IT teams to be intentional in their design and ONLY move demanding (throughput, latency, Jitter) collaboration applications/endpoints to 6GHz while supporting existing uses case/devices on 2.4 and 5GHz channels.

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