1. What do you envisage being the biggest hybrid work trends of 2022?
Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms at Zoom:
“In 2022, organizations are going to revisit and rethink important decisions such as how they hire, buy technology and maintain productivity. This will require a reimagining of the workplace.
“In addition to implementing new strategies and approaches to meet the needs of this reimagined workplace, companies will embrace unified communications like never before.
“We’ll see the introduction of more innovations that prioritize employee experience and help create meaningful connections and collaboration among employees, no matter where or how they work.”
Vincent Gao, Principle Product Manager – Teams Device Solution, Yealink:
“When companies choose devices for hybrid working, we expect to see some common points of customers’ consideration.
“First, employees are demanding more professional devices to enjoy premium video and audio experience, ensuring smooth and trouble-free internal and external communication.
“Second, all-in-one or multi-functional devices will be a popular option for future workers to save effort in deployment and keep a tidy table space.”
John Harald Gronningen, President, EMEA, Pexip:
“While the traditional use of video has been for meetings between colleagues or business contacts, customer engagement is a hybrid video use case that presents exciting opportunities.
“Throughout every stage of the customer journey, video is already being used by enterprise sales teams and customer success agents to build and maintain customer relationships.
“As this use case continues to mature, it will become increasingly important that these customer workflows are seamless, secure, and easy to use. It is all about adapting the technology to the customer and their workflows, not the other way around”
2. How can companies address the inequality that has typically existed between in-office meeting participants and remote workers?
John Harald Gronningen, President, EMEA, Pexip:
“Promoting meeting equity will also require leaders to take action to adapt their organisation’s meeting culture, by defining new best practices for modern meetings and leading by example.
“When the balance in hybrid meetings is in favour of people in the office, the few people that may be participating remotely definitely miss out. If the majority of the people are in the office, maybe they should for example split up into separate rooms so that there isn’t a large group together in one room, giving a better balance to hybrid/office workers.
“In addition, the person leading the meeting need to put emphasis on facilitating the meeting correctly for those that are remote to include them. There also needs to be mindset change related to making sure that in-office participants are committed to joining hybrid meetings promptly – often Remote participants are more likely to be on time for meetings.”
Vincent Gao, Principle Product Manager – Teams Device Solution, Yealink:
“Even when a full team is working on-site in the same location, gaps in communication exist. Adding a new layer brings more challenges to remote workers on keeping every team member informed.
“Under this circumstance, companies need to purchase proper devices to keep everyone in the team engaged including cloud-based tools that can be accessed from any location and professional peripherals that provide premium UC experience no matter where work happens.
“For example, in a meeting with remote participants, a collaboration whiteboard that integrated with software such as Microsoft Teams can deliver powerful collaboration features to support team meeting and ensure everyone in the meeting can understand and share ideas freely”
3. What hardware and software do you expect to be most in demand this year to address hybrid working?
Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader UK&I, Avaya:
Gartner predicts that in 2022, 90 percent of enterprises will have CPaaS as a core IT skill set and will be self-composing what they need. This is because businesses need speed-to-value applications plus the agility to combine them with all kinds of workflows that support more touchpoints across their organisations wherever their people might be working from.
“This comes from CPaaS which will need to be combined with UCaaS workstream collaboration apps and CCaaS so these are the technology solutions that will be in demand”
Vincent Gao, Principle Product Manager – Teams Device Solution, Yealink:
“Under the hybrid working mode, people are dealing with more and more devices in daily work.
“Therefore, we expect a greater demand for all-in-one and multi-functional devices. Such devices are not only easy to install and do not require much IT intervention, but also save space on the desktop and save employees the trouble of switching between several devices.
“In addition, as video conferencing becomes more frequently used in hybrid working mode, devices that can accommodate both personal desktop monitors and standalone video conferencing terminals, and that allow both scenarios to coexist without interrupting the users’ existing workflow, will also be favoured by customers.”
4. How will hybrid work look different to now in 12 months’ time?
Jeff Smith, Head of Zoom Rooms at Zoom:
“We’re still in the early stages of this new, reimagined workplace, but in a year’s time, we’ll be in a place where work fits into a person’s needs — whether that’s scheduling or accommodating their unique work style”
“In-person office places will be optimized for the hybrid workforce and prioritize health and safety. For instance, when an employee does decide to go into the office, it will be outfitted with the solutions they need for a safe and frictionless on-site experience.
“For example, now in beta, Zoom’s Workspace Reservation enables users to easily book spaces using an interactive map whether they are on-site or remote, creating a seamless experience for all employees.”
Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader UK&I, Avaya:
“There will be reimagining of the single-job apps that currently exist, and we will get a utopian platform combining all, and more, functionality that addresses the more complete, organisation-wide experiences that we need in the new hybrid workplace.”
John Harald Gronningen, President, EMEA, Pexip:
“Office layouts will have changed to reflect the need for more but smaller meeting rooms that promote digital equity.
“From a talent acquisition perspective, it will be all about how to bring the company to the talent and not the other way around. Successful companies will have to accommodate this.”
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