The Covid-19 pandemic has long ended, but businesses of all sizes still struggle with returning to the office. Cisco recently released a Global Hybrid Work Study detailing how the reality of the in-office experience compares to employee expectations. I spoke to Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and CMO of Webex by Cisco, to find out how employees really feel about returning to the office versus working remote, as well as how to run an effective hybrid office.
Hybrid workplace technology solutions for small businesses
Rieva Lesonsky: Some bigger businesses are insisting on returning to the office. Does allowing remote work help small businesses attract more employees?
Aruna Ravichandran: Companies that embrace a hybrid work model will not only attract the best talent but also foster creativity, productivity, and employee satisfaction. While we all understand the benefits of hybrid work, the question we often hear is, “How do we make hybrid work work?”
Cisco’s recent global study reveals a surprising truth: employees are happy to return to the office, provided the spaces support seamless collaboration, social interaction, and creative brainstorming. While 72% of employees feel positive about returning to the office, only 47% believe their work environments are equipped for this new era of hybrid work. It’s time to advocate for and design office spaces that truly support how employees want to work together.
We’ve proven that individual work can be done from anywhere. Today’s offices must provide collaborative experiences, but the employers we surveyed reported that more than 50% of office space is still allocated to personal working spaces.
I thought the most interesting revelation was that even the spaces built for collaboration are not working, with 75% of employees saying current meeting rooms do not enhance productivity and 70% of employers reporting inconsistency in the experience of remote and in-office participants.
Regardless of business size, organizations need to be able to provide incredible experiences for all employees. The tools to enable those experiences include great conferencing technology, video-enabled and interoperable devices, and digitized workspaces. Doing this successfully could even give small businesses a competitive edge in attracting talent against larger organizations.
Lesonsky: What are the advantages and disadvantages of running a fully remote company, requiring everyone to return to the office, or running a hybrid business?
Ravichandran: The role of the office is fundamentally changing. People come into the office to collaborate, not work by themselves. To create offices that support collaboration, the office must be a magnet, not a mandate. This requires a reimagination of the workspace.
For too many companies, the hybrid meeting experience is broken. For example, when there’s a meeting in a conference room and one remote employee joins the meeting, it’s hard for them to feel included. They may not see or hear everyone clearly, pick up on facial expressions and body language, or participate in whiteboarding. People shouldn’t feel excluded just because they’re not physically in the room.
Businesses should seek to video-enable every space and create the feeling of really being in the room. And they also need to modernize their workspaces to optimize them for effective hybrid meetings—everything from the devices to the space layouts, furniture, and even environmental controls. They need the infrastructure to provide the bandwidth and performance that hybrid meetings demand.
Geography isn’t a prerequisite for success in many jobs. Hybrid work enables businesses to engage a global workforce and makes for a more inclusive future. But we can’t just mandate that everyone return to the office. Mandates don’t work. They are a regression, deeply impacting productivity and employee satisfaction if we try to get back to how things were before the Covid-19 pandemic sent people home. I believe organizations need to afford people flexibility.
How to run a more effective hybrid company
Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash
Lesonsky: To run a hybrid business effectively, do you need to have a minimum number of employees?
Ravichandran: Businesses of any size can effectively operate a hybrid work model. Due to the pandemic, Cisco went from having hundreds of corporate offices to over 70,000 remote offices in a matter of days. This was made possible through innovation in technology and collaboration tools.
We are on the brink of a massive transition. Hybrid work is both different and harder than how we worked the past two years. This means we have to embrace different work styles and empower our employees to work where they’re most productive. For some, that’s in the office, and for others, it’s at home or anywhere in between.
It’s important to embrace employees’ choices by fostering an environment where they feel included and engaged. Giving employees equal access to career advancements, pay raises, and advanced technology, whether they are at home or in the office, is key to ensuring a fair and balanced workplace.
Lesonsky: Are there minimum tech requirements you recommend to effectively run a remote or hybrid company?
Ravichandran: The minimum requirement for great hybrid experiences is video-enabling every space and interoperability. When company leaders think about returning to the office, our old habits kick in, and we may start planning head count, budget, infrastructure, and technology requirements.
However, with many companies and their employees now embracing hybrid work, it will require whole new habits and a new mindset for managing teams that are moving between working from home, the office, or the road on any given day or time. In this new world of work, the needs of your people must come first, or you will risk losing them to other companies that are savvier and more adaptable to the changing needs of their employees.
Lesonsky: Any tips for making online meetings run more smoothly?
Ravichandran: AI can help everyone who attends or misses a meeting get the right information—insights on what was discussed, follow-up action items, and decisions that were made. We use AI extensively for things like removing background noise, ensuring high video quality even with low bandwidth, and real-time transcriptions and translations.
The next game changer is generative AI, which you can use to summarize a missed meeting, catch users up on all the action items from a series of meetings they may have missed, or generate a recap of the dialog in a collaboration space over time. There’s also a stacking effect here: if users have better video and audio quality, they get better conversions to text, which gives them more accurate translations and better results.
Is the future of the workplace hybrid?
Lesonsky: Where do you think the workplace is headed? Five years from now, what do you see?
Ravichandran: I believe AI will make a large impact on the future of the workplace. As employees increasingly come back to the office, there is an enormous opportunity to leverage AI to enhance productivity and deliver simplicity. AI will revolutionize the way we work, making it easier, faster, and more efficient. By automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks, it allows us to focus on more complex and creative work.
Video and audio intelligence capabilities will help ensure everyone can participate equally when they collaborate, regardless of where or how they work. Solutions like noise removal and voice optimization help workers be clearly heard without disruptive background noise. The use and integration of AI-enhanced technologies like these will make collaboration more personalized and efficient.
