I recently had the privilege of attending UC Expo 2022 in London – Europe’s number one unified communications event.
The expo brought together thousands of communications and collaboration industry leaders and IT decision makers to explore the theme of ‘Breaking Down Silos’ in the hybrid working world. It was a fantastic opportunity for tech professionals to come together and learn from one-another about the current and long-term trends in communications and collaboration.
While there, I had the opportunity to talk about the true cost of dysfunctional tech in the hybrid world. In this blog, I share why it’s critical to stop and think about what happens when your technology doesn’t function as it should, how this impacts your employees, and how IR Collaborate is best place to help you make the hybrid workplace work.
Navigating the evolving nature of hybrid work
We know hybrid work will continue to develop rapidly, and organizations are still navigating their way through the transition to suit the needs of their respective workplaces. This has created new challenges for organizations as they prepare for the evolving future of work – be it reshaping the workplace, digitization, remote working, distributed workforces, or asynchronous and virtual collaboration.
But have you stopped to think about how these challenges and dysfunctional technology is costing your organization and your investment in your employees?
On average, your employees are spending between 50-60% of their time on communication platforms at work. If these platforms aren’t performing as they should, employee's productivity begins to drop, and this impacts your bottom line.
The employee experience
Remote work is here to stay. It is the single most important development in digital transformation in the last few years. But even after more than two years of remote working, 35% of employees see poor connectivity and network issues as hindrances in their working dynamic.
There are several common fundamental flaws in hybrid work we see often from a technical point of view, including:
- inconsistent quality of remote network connections
- in-office corporate networks not equipped to handle
- increased demands of hybrid work, particularly video incompatible devices
- sub-par audio and video
- workspaces not optimized for hybrid collaboration – both home workspaces and in-office
- meeting spaces security risks when faced with managing multiple devices and networks
- the absence of immediate on-site technical support.
Your employees and users expect to be able to do their work seamlessly from anywhere. It is critical to therefore balance user experience with the increasing complexity of managing hybrid environments and the proliferation of devices.
Maintaining an issue-free communications and collaboration ecosystem is critical to ensure the desired productivity of your organization, but moreover to prioritize people and deliver great experiences, all of which impact your bottom line.
You can find out more about how to successfully adopt hybrid working practices in our comprehensive guide: The Ultimate Guide to Future-Proofing the Hybrid Workplace 2.0
A single point of view
We know that a single point of visibility is one of the biggest challenges Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and the like face in today’s work environment. While multiple technologies in your ecosystem might contribute to data richness, it is important to be able to analyze that data and gather actionable business insights from it.
According to Gartner, CIOs have turned their collective attention to implementing and supporting remote work along with ensuring that the experience of the remote worker supports the desired productivity of their organization. Organizations are working around a mix of cloud, on-premises and hybrid solutions which further increases complexity. In complex environments, maintaining an issue-free ecosystem is challenging.
Within the unified communications domain, the hybrid work model and convergence of multiple collaboration capabilities into major cloud collaboration tools such as Zoom, WebEx, and Teams increase the reliance on and criticality of these tools. As a result, there is now a greater need than ever to maintain, monitor and ensure their performance quality.
How can IR help?
Creating a seamless, harmonious, and successful hybrid workplace means that all devices and applications needed to do the job, are performing at optimal level. Monitoring and performance management is vital if you’re going to future-proof the hybrid workplace. Without the ability to take a precise look at your entire communications and collaboration environment, it’s impossible to see where problems are occurring and fix them.
IR Collaborate provides end-to-end visibility for communications and collaboration ecosystems, thus helping your organization break down silos and accelerate digital transformation. You can get the intelligent insights you need to harness new ways to bring your employees together, from wherever they are.
