Companies around the world are embracing a rapid period of change in the modern workplace. Employees are beginning to choose their own working environments, and hybrid and remote standards are growing increasingly common.

While 38% of organizations say hybrid working has improved efficiency and productivity levels in their team, there are still challenges to overcome. Business leaders need to ensure their distributed teams can still connect, collaborate, and innovate effectively, regardless of where they are.

Preserving the productivity of hybrid teams requires more than just an investment in cameras and video conferencing tools. Companies also need to implement effective strategies to ensure they empower teams and overcome collaboration challenges.

Here’s how smart meeting solutions and endpoint management systems can help companies overcome the challenges of hybrid collaboration.

The Challenges Facing Hybrid Teams

Hybrid and flexible work empowers employees to choose their own schedules, workplace locations, and more, to enhance and optimize productivity. However, it also leads to gaps between team members, which can have a negative impact on collaboration.

To optimize collaboration in the modern workplace, companies need to overcome a number of challenges, from ensuring teams can communicate clearly with reliable technologies, to minimizing the complexity of embracing new tools and services.

Some of the biggest challenges of managing the hybrid workplace include:

  • Limited adoption: Employees are often resistant to embracing new technologies they consider complex or difficult to master. Companies need to implement the right tools, and offer the correct training to ensure business-wide adoption.
  • Endpoint management: With hybrid teams using a variety of different endpoints, from desktops to tablets and smartphones, endpoint management becomes more complex. Without the right tools, companies can suffer from increased risks and technical issues.
  • Provisioning new tools: Configuring and provisioning new tools to hybrid and distributed employees can be complex. Traditional technologies often require a complex in-person setup process, which may not be suitable for the world of hybrid work.

The Benefits of Smart Meetings and Endpoint Management

Ensuring consistent collaboration and preserving productivity in the new age of hybrid work requires companies to take a new approach. Legacy ecosystems aren’t agile or flexible enough to support today’s distributed workforce. Instead, businesses need to leverage the power of the cloud, to empower and engage their team members wherever they are.

A cloud-based communication and collaboration solution offers businesses an intuitive way to enhance meetings, improve interactions, and boost employee experiences. UCaaS solutions like the GlobalRapide offering from Tata Communications combine reliable voice services, with smart meeting tools and endpoint management solutions, to deliver benefits like:

1. Accelerated Training and Adoption

With an all-in-one environment for communication, meetings, and endpoint management, companies can minimize the amount of training employees need to adopt new tools. Companies like Tata Communications can even use data-driven insights to help you optimize service adoption and change management success rates.

The faster employees can adopt new technologies, the quicker they, and the wider business can begin to unlock benefits, like improved productivity and efficiency. Additionally, because companies can encourage adoption of approved tools and services, compliance and security risks are diminished.

2. Simple Implementation and Management

To empower teams and stay ahead of the competition, companies need communication tools that are easy to implement, manage, and configure to their specific needs. A unified communication solution with smart meetings and endpoint management makes empowering your team simple.

Companies can access self-service or fully-managed web portals for provisioning, migration, and the management of crucial tools. This ensures business leaders can deliver crucial tools for collaboration to their employees quickly and easily. Plus, with monitoring and reporting tools, they can consistently upgrade the user experience.

3. Improved Collaboration and Productivity

Perhaps the most significant benefit of a UCaaS solution with integrated smart meetings and endpoint management, is the opportunity to improve collaboration. Smart meeting tools can automate the full collaboration cycle, leveraging tools like Microsoft Teams to provide rapid access to audio and video calls, messaging, and other unique features.

With access to an all-in-one platform for collaboration, teams can more easily connect with their colleagues, and spend less time jumping between applications and tools. This leads to higher levels of engagement and productivity. In fact, a Forrester study found companies who embrace UCaaS tools benefit from 2.6 times faster decision making processes.

4. Greater Security and Compliance

Combining smart meetings and endpoint/device management solutions into a single ecosystem enhances security and compliance in a number of different ways. First, companies can rapidly gain access to flexible cloud-based tools for fraud prevention and data security. Secondly, unifying a range of communication and collaboration tools makes it easier to monitor and track potential threats.

What’s more, with end point management solutions, companies can more easily configure, update, secure, and monitor the devices employees use every day. They can track their room system technologies, smartphones assigned to employees and more in one unified space.

5. Stronger Employee Experiences

With smart meetings and endpoint management tools built into a comprehensive UCaaS solution, businesses can engage and empower their teams. Not only does the right technology give employees a single pane of glass environment to access for productivity, but it can also offer supervisors and managers insights into opportunities for optimization.

For instance, the Tata Communications tools come with intelligent collaboration monitoring features, offering insights into various elements of networks, endpoints, voice status and more. Combined with advanced reporting and analytics tools, these solutions ensure businesses can rapidly spot and fix potential issues with their collaboration strategy.

The Power of Smart Meetings and Endpoint Management

The business communication space is experiencing a rapid transformation. New types of meetings, endpoints, and collaborative solutions are emerging in the landscape at an incredible pace. To thrive in this environment, and empower the next generation of employees, companies need the right tools.

A comprehensive UCaaS solution like Tata Communications’ GlobalRapide, combined with smart meeting solutions and endpoint management ensures companies can leverage the right collaborative solutions to empower their workers.

“I have personally witnessed the difference smart meeting room technology can make to employee experience, whether it is with our customers or at our own offices. Tata Communications works with multiple partners – across collaboration suites, endpoint devices and voice connectivity – to ensure that there is equity between remote participants and those who are attending a virtual meeting from a conference room in the office”

  • Nishant Shrivastava, AVP, Global Solutions Engineering, Tata Communications.


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