Hybrid Workplace for a future-ready business

Cutting-edge collaboration is the mantra for post-pandemic business growth

Besides causing widespread loss to business, the global pandemic of 2020 also brought to the brim, a rather overdue realization – one that is challenging the basic manner in which we work. Businesses far and wide have realized that the best place to conduct business may not really be the all-important workplace. Post-pandemic, it is estimated that a meagre 12% want to return to full-time office work. Businesses are using this statistic to move fundamentally improve how people work. A lot of them are choosing to adopt the concept of a hybrid workplace as the best fit for the new and improved normal.

Setting the premise

All across the world, work cultures are changing. Businesses are re-looking at their real-estate investments and realigning them to suit a new model of working where, at any given point of time anywhere in the world, only a minimal workforce is present in the so called workplace. It is certain that work from home will be adopted in the years to come, far and wide across businesses of all sizes, and across industries. While this disruptive new work paradigm is a direct result of the pandemic, the corporate world is exploring this opportunity to realign and refresh the basic culture of work and employee productivity.

From precise to being adaptable

At the core, businesses realize that the philosophy to a successful business has changed from being precise to being adaptable. Earlier, efficiency was measured in terms of precision or the exactness of the product in relation to customer needs. Today, this has changed to the magnitude of adaptability to customer needs and aspirations. Even within an organization, the precision of work goals has morphed into the flexibility one is able to provide to their workforce, to work on any device, and at any location. In short, both the external customer needs and internal outlook to IT has changed from precision to adaptability. As such, the definition of collaboration has evolved.

Today, most corporate employees are working on their Personal Computer devices, mainly through a home Wi-Fi system. Fundamentally, the home Wi-Fi systems were not built with enterprise grade data security. Also, to ensure seamless productivity, the ‘screen’ and experience should be one that was used in the original workplace setup. Overnight, IT had to fast mitigate these challenges. Extrapolating this challenge in the area of collaboration, businesses are finding that three things – user experience, scale and reach, and flexibility are of supreme importance in the new scheme of things. Collaboration, as we know, is the backbone for any business, and hence, it is one of the first challenges that a CIO is tasked with solving. It takes a singular data leak at one of the 15,000 employees’ endpoint to expose the entire corporate network, and if the leakage occurs from a collaboration tool, millions of data pieces that can be misused. Hence, the level of security and trust is a no-compromise component of any business, today.

Cisco – redefining collaboration

Cisco has been a global leader in the area of enterprise-class collaboration. With decades of research and technical knowhow to back them, Cisco collaboration tools have consistently evolved over time, and today are one of the very few brands that has pandemic-ready solutions for businesses of all sizes.

Built over a robust layer of security, Cisco collaboration solutions today redefine work environments – from connectivity software to display hardware to cloud security to endpoint devices, backed by round-the-clock technical support and extreme ease-of-installation. The new-generation collaboration solutions from Cisco are flexible and sync up with multiple other solutions, providing to businesses, a consistently watertight level of security, along with useful meeting tools like virtual notes, and translations, among others. In order to digitally transform a business, collaboration is paramount, and Cisco helps achieve this through its tools and solutions.

The Business Resiliency challenge

In a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), CFOs of more than half the enterprises in the world are seriously considering remote working as a permanent fixture, long after the current global pandemic is over. Additionally, more than 50% of all enterprises are also looking at long-term IT investments and deployments to make their business future-proof. These two statistics point towards another important challenge of the current times – Business Resiliency.

Managing business in an uncertain future

It pundits define business resiliency as a strategy to counter sudden interruption in business or an unexpected economic stress that organizations have to suddenly deal with, to ensure that their business recovers as soon as the economy does. While there are multiple facets of business resiliency ranging from personnel psychology to IT security, the core premise is to integrate the disparate IT processes working in silos, and manage them centrally. In other words, digital transformation of individual IT processes is imperative to prepare global businesses for the uncertain future. Cisco globally resonates the belief that changes today will help manage the uncertainty of tomorrow. To this end, Cisco offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions to help businesses reimagine and redesign their IT.

Secure and seamless workspaces

CTOs today have to provide an enterprise-class experience in their employees’ home computing network, adding to the already challenging scenario of threats and data attacks. To ensure that workers are productive and operate in a flexible environment, businesses have to optimize workers across a complex matrix of cost, performance and security. One of the biggest challenges here is to ensure consistency of work and seamless security across network protocols, endpoint devices, and quality of connectivity.

Eventually, some employees will return to the workplace, others will continue to work from home and businesses will realign to this model fuelled by the human resilience of their workforce. Both the workforce and the workplace should prepare themselves for a post-pandemic onslaught.

Collaboration with purpose

Currently, the basic need is to optimize the office footprint and provide a flexible working environment, where the employee’s home is the new collaboration hub, and the workplace is used to maintain basic humane connect. Diving deeper, this means that a substantial chunk of the workers who work remotely will be armed with collaboration software and purpose-built devices to ensure actionable teamwork, irrespective of location. On the workplace end, return to work must be made safe, with a rotating cast of office workers, who come to office on a need-to basis.

This presents a two-pronged challenge – one, the core work culture and community needs to be retained with a minimal, rotating workforce, and businesses need to look at the reduced workforce to optimize technology interventions to provide a better user experience.

In a virtual roundtable by CyberMedia and Cisco, Sudhir Nayar – Managing Director – Commercial, Cisco India & SAARC, articulated the new-age collaboration challenge as: “With over 10 months of remote working, increasingly more companies are getting comfortable with Virtual Collaboration tools and are able to work productivity and efficiently. However, we are noticing some of the companies are opening offices and have started to plan safe return to work. As per industry experts, moving forward, we will experience a hybrid work culture. 97% want changes to make them feel safer at work and 96% want to improve their work environments with intelligent workplace technology”.

Merging the workforce with the workplace

Understanding the premise and application of a hybrid workplace is important. Cisco believes that the foundational requirement of a hybrid workplace is to provide workers with agile, intuitive and feature-rich collaboration tools that can be seamlessly operated from any location, and provide a consistent and secure user experience. Businesses need to be cognizant of the fact that workers getting dispersed across geographies and locations creates challenges of inconsistent endpoint devices, often unreliable connectivity, and most importantly, data security. The virtual roundtable revealed that all of these can be arrested by a unified, flexible and easy-to-use collaboration solution that merges the workforce with the workplace.

Identifying the best collaboration suite

So, what forms the backbone of a successful hybrid workplace? Identifying and deploying the right collaboration solution with the best experience. This drills down to minute considerations like having the ability to switch between messaging, voice and video calls, say a virtual whiteboard is created, can it be accessed on-demand? Is the user able to view the same content irrespective of screen size and device configuration? Questions like these go a long way in eliminating investment in tools that may not be optimal in the long run. Secure storage of meeting data and its real-time retrieval by the right personnel also goes a long way in making a seamless and flexible collaboration solution purchase.

All-new Cisco Webex

Cisco Webex is one of the world’s most successful virtual collaboration solutions. Explaining how Webex blends into the new hybrid workplace mandate, Pankaj Agrawal, Director, Collaboration Business, Cisco India and SAARC says, “Cisco Webex platform is designed to support the modern hybrid workplace. It is enabled with smart features based on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. Cisco Webex Suite comes with a wide range of video conferencing products which include Software-as-a-Service tools, HD video devices, Webex Room series with high resolution cameras to provide seamless collaboration for customers working from home, working remotely or from the office.

Specially during these unprecedented times, safety is critical. Features such as Webex voice assist which provides touch-less experience and background noise removal have been most useful for customers. We have also made it easy for customers to purchase Webex Meetings through our online portal.”

Cisco recently concluded a global conference on collaboration called Cisco Webex One. Speaking at the virtual event, Jeetu Patel, SVP/GM – Security & Applications said, “The world that we live in, it’s unfortunate that opportunity is unevenly distributed, but human potential is not. Cisco fundamentally believes that technology can change that for us. This chance to level the playing field is one of the things we are excited at Cisco. There are about 3 billion digital workers in the planet and billions of those are knowledge workers and 2 billion are frontline and field workers. Cisco’s goal, regardless of the geography, language, preference and personality type is to make these 3 billion digital workers to equally participate in the global economy. To achieve this, Webex’s mission is to build an inclusive future for all, that’s our core value. Cisco wants to make Webex experience 10X better than in-person interactions. Everyone gets a seat at the table, being inclusive, empowering remote worker, enabling safe return to office and delighting customers with exceptional and seamless collaboration”.

Secure, yet flexible and easy-to-use

Companies of all sizes and across verticals can leverage from Cisco’s expertise in collaboration solutions. For instance, BPM, II and Digital Services and solutions provider, IGT solutions, a company that serves 75+ transportation and hospitality customers globally, is heavily reliant on customer experience.

“Before the pandemic, we had 25% of our employees working from home. This dramatically changed to 95% in order to keep the business running. Besides encroaching into newer verticals within the transportation and hospitality space, we had to create a global VPN gateway overnight and in order to ensure business continuity, reimagine its delivery, connectivity bandwidth and data center capacity to include a massive number of new users. To achieve this, the company chose Cisco Webex as its collaboration platform partner. With its highly secure, consistent yet user-friendly collaboration solutions, Cisco was able to help us tide over pandemic-induced challenges, while going a step further and realigning its workforce in such a manner that the company has decided to have 45% of its workforce in WFH mode in the long term,” says Roman Rafiq, VP – Global IT & Security, IGT solutions.

AI and ML enhancements

At the WebexOne conference, Cisco also announced 50 new innovations and features in the areas of intelligent customer experiences and seamless collaborations to enable smart hybrid work experiences.

The new features range from noise cancellation and speech enhancement innovations, virtual background, real-time translations, along with competencies around closed captioning and transcription, enhanced video layouts, real-time action items, a new component called Webex Huddle that allows ad-hoc meetings in a single click, besides AI for messaging and better actionable insights. While the Webex collaboration suite is seeing innovative additions, many of the new features are aimed at helping the world move to a hybrid workplace model, which many believe, is the future of collaborative business.

True collaboration is an inclusive experience. And in today’s work environment it has never been more important to connect and collaborate across the barriers that keep us apart. Cisco seems to have all the pieces of the collaboration jigsaw puzzle to make for a pretty picture in the months to come.