Focus On Flexibility
In a hybrid environment, technology must be inherently flexible enough to allow everyone the opportunity to choose the means of communication they favor without facing performance or participation challenges.
“Flexibility has become more important [because] the ways we’re communicating are changing,” says Khan. “This means our tools must be flexible to adapt to where I’m working from and how I might want to communicate.”
Cisco’s redesigned Webex app lets employees join meetings the way that’s best for them: with or without video, from laptops or over their phones. The app also detects and compensates for connectivity issues to ensure an effortless employee experience, wherever the employee might be.
“When I can collaborate the way I want, that’s flexibility,” says Khan. “It is probably the number-one thing to keep productivity up and to keep employees engaged.”
Prioritize Inclusion
Meetings must also be inclusive of all participants—whether they’re in the room, on a webcam or dialed in over speakerphone.
The first step, says Khan, is deploying technology that recognizes physical cues like raising or clapping one’s hands. “Built using artificial intelligence, our software recognizes this and communicates to the far end that [a participant] is trying to say something,” he explains.
Other factors must be considered, too, such as language barriers. “Not everybody is a native English speaker,” Khan says. “How do they participate? How will they follow along?”
What of participants with disabilities or other impairments? What happens if a local ISP can’t accommodate live video?
To keep everyone engaged equally—whatever their specific needs—Cisco’s AI-powered Webex Assistant provides live transcription and translation into over 100 languages during meetings.
“Cisco’s mission is to power an inclusive future for all,” Khan says.
Support Workers Everywhere
Ask five employees for their feelings on hybrid work, and you’ll get five different answers. Both returning to the office and staying at home will create their own anxieties, and managers must understand, appreciate and solve for a wide spectrum of concerns. All are valid, and most can be assuaged through empathetic policies, supported by the right technology.
“Employee well-being has become front and center,” says Khan. “Increasingly, my conversations about collaboration are not just with IT departments or the CIO but also with human resources, people officers and employee leaders.”
Cisco provides several tools that help employees make decisions around their own well-being. The Personal Insights tool, for example, tracks and analyzes time spent in meetings and other data points that often go unnoticed by employees. The point is to help employees manage their time better and establish personal preferences about how they spend it.
This data, Khan notes, is for the employee’s eyes only; it isn’t made available to the enterprise or the HR department. Personal Insights was built to help employees create the work-life balance they need, on their own terms.
Enhance Security
With remote work came a greater risk surface: more locations, more devices, more opportunities for error. This will hardly change as some employees return to the office. In fact, cybersecurity may become even more complicated in a hybrid world.
“The security posture [has] fundamentally changed,” Khan says.
The solution lies in choosing technology that not only comes with end-to-end security built in, but can also expand its protocols as needed.
“Cisco has a fundamental advantage because we are a security company,” he says. “We delivered a fantastic collaboration experience during those first few weeks of going home. [Now] we’re able to keep that first-class user experience while slowly adding additional layers of security.”
Khan specifically cites Umbrella, a device-based cloud product that ensures all employees are communicating securely, whether they’re “on campus” or working remotely. It represents just one example of how Cisco is “upping the security bar” without compromising the end-user experience.
Manage Experiences
Managing a hybrid workforce is “fundamentally harder ... because of the visibility,” Khan says. That is, the lack of visibility—into an employee’s local network, for example.
Enter Cisco’s Control Hub, a management portal that sits at the center of the employee experience. “It provides a complete 360-degree view of all collaboration tools,” Khan explains.
Such comprehensiveness, he says, is another of Cisco’s advantages. “Others might [have visibility] into the meetings portion of your experience, but they may not have control over the network,” he says. “Or maybe there’s visibility into your phone call, but not [into] CPU utilization or security software.”
Cisco can provide this holistic view precisely because it puts into place these additional key “pieces,” Khan says. The result is a new standard in managing collaboration solutions, in analyzing the data they generate and in their security—to the benefit of both organization and employee.
Whether they’re returning to the office, staying remote or finding their balance in between, most employees will confront new realities in the coming months. So will their managers. To make hybrid environments work for everyone, leaders must face this future with open eyes—and, of course, with the right technology.
For more about the solutions that will drive hybrid work,
visit webex.com.