With Hybrid Work, Businesses Must Focus on Relationships
Despite technology advancements designed to reduce latency, improve audio quality and enable easy sharing of multimedia assets, video calls will never achieve connective parity with in-person meetings.
In other words, videoconference fatigue won’t evaporate as some staff members return to work. “It comes down to human nature,” explains Rick Vanover, senior director of product strategy at Veeam. “The one thing that’s missing is authentic human interaction. Companies who embrace hybrid work models that are based on human interaction are the ones who will succeed.”
To reinforce remote relationships and bolster corporate culture, companies need to support staffers regardless of where they land on the connectivity spectrum. Those returning to the workplace require safe, socially distanced meeting environments equipped with technologies capable of seamlessly connecting multiple staff members. Those working from home, meanwhile, need organizational support when it comes to connective capacity, identity management and access.
“It’s not about the new normal, it’s about the next normal,” Vanover says. “The next normal will be hybrid. We’re not going to flip back and pretend nothing happened. When organizations come back to work, it will be different. We will see that platforms that had momentum before will continue to build.”
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3 Keys to Effective Hybrid Workplaces
In practice, this means the broad adoption of videoconferencing technologies to empower meetings anytime, anywhere, and ensure remote staff have the same opportunities as their in-office counterparts to contribute and collaborate. While Vanover notes that “in the next normal, anything goes,” he suggests three steps to help companies effectively embrace the hybrid work model:
- For Vanover, “standardization is the first step. Businesses need to pick a platform and go with it.” Here, the choice of platform is less important than the commitment to consistency; organizations need to find what works best for their teams and ensure broad adoption.
- Businesses should consider adjacent service integrations that consider the entire technology ecosystem, such as file sharing solutions that are natively integrated with video collaboration tools, in turn reducing complexity for end users.
- Video meetings “have pivoted from pockets to the population,” says Vanover. As a result, he notes, “the onus is on IT to make collaboration a delightful experience,” which in turn requires transformation of IT environments to support the bandwidth, throughput and responsiveness required by digital video solutions.