Designing UC platforms for seamless collaboration anywhere

Hybrid work as a strategic imperative

Hybrid work is a critical business consideration. Remote work models -- whether fully remote or hybrid -- affect company culture, talent acquisition and retention, operating models and competitive agility. Hybrid work presents specific challenges, among them:

• Collaboration across locations and devices.
• Security across communications media and devices.
• Performance and reliability across variable internet connectivity platforms.

These issues affect teams no matter where they are located or whatever devices they may use.

An effective UC platform underpins multiple business requirements that offer significant competitive advantages, including employee engagement and productivity, business continuity and resilience and cross-geography collaboration.

These components are just as critical for on-premises workers as for remote employees, but addressing the challenges associated with distributed teams unlocks many productivity and flexibility advantages.

The critical factor: IT leaders must align the organization's UC approach with its long-term strategy.

Design UC for scale, consistency and performance

One of the most important steps is to ensure your UC platform supports the enterprise's strategic direction. To that end, designing for usability and flexibility is crucial. Consider the following challenges, design principles and attributes.

Address this core design challenge

Begin with a single core design challenge: balancing standardization and flexibility. These two imperatives define product choice and user requirements, effectively establishing your organization's UC limitations and opportunities. Each offers potential advantages.

Standardized platforms control complexity by establishing consistent user behavior, predictable device use with less integration overhead, simplified IT management, simplified governance and well-defined security and compliance configurations.

Flexibility often offers greater adoption and productivity by enabling support for varied roles and workflows, enhanced location and geographic advantages, diverse mobility options and support for a wider range of devices, including specialized or industry-specific systems.

Recognizing which of these approaches is best for your organization enables you to move on to the key design principles that define UC tool requirements.

Plan for these key design principles

Address the following key design principles early in the process:

• Seamless collaboration across locations.
• Seamless collaboration across defined endpoints, such as desktop, mobile and room systems.
• Unified endpoints that simplify UX and IT management requirements.
• Reliable performance across varied network types.

Address these essential attributes

Modern performance, scalability and compliance expectations are crucial factors in design and product selection. Define requirements for the following attributes:

• Security, including data in transit and data at rest.
• Compliance, including data sovereignty requirements for remote users and locations.
• Scalability to support workforce growth, flexibility and evolving work models.
• Interoperability with existing enterprise systems, including CRM, ERP and productivity suites.
• UX and accessibility features that provide a familiar and intuitive interface suitable for all employees.

One of the most critical design elements is frictionless capability. The UC platform needs to work regardless of employee location and established device support.

Assess mobility, reliability, and user needs

Before you can design an effective UC platform for a distributed workforce, begin with a clear understanding of how employees actually work by studying current communications and collaboration patterns. Establish use patterns across hybrid environments, including hybrid employees, frontline staff and globally distributed users. In some cases, individual users will belong to more than one category. Each group places different demands on the UC platform, devices and network performance.

Collect usage data, employee feedback and role-based analysis to identify established patterns and workflows. Include metrics for endpoint identification, device switching and mobility. A pilot program provides the opportunity to fine-tune settings before a full rollout.

Establish benchmarks and solicit user feedback during the pilot phase. Pay particular attention to the following:

• Test the UC deployment under realistic distributed user and location conditions.
• Monitor performance and consistency across regions and network types.
• Audit compliance based on typical work patterns and user habits.
• Establish training requirements that address areas of user confusion or misuse.

The pilot program is the perfect opportunity to identify challenges and define configuration standards. Once the test phase is complete, it's time to drive adoption, establish daily use objectives and evaluate outcomes.

Define measurable outcomes and drive adoption

Because your UC deployment is a strategic imperative, success is not defined by deployment but rather by adoption and use. Evaluate whether your deployment is successful through measurable outcomes, such as productivity improvements, reduced friction and downtime, improved employee satisfaction and improved collaboration metrics.

Establish an ongoing UC monitoring action plan by including the following:

• Evaluate user needs regularly.
• Adopt a continuous improvement approach.
• Ensure realistic testing during pilot and upgrade phases.
• Test carefully for hybrid, on-the-road and geographically dispersed users.
• Establish a knowledgeable support team for UC questions and challenges.
• Offer thorough training programs to drive adoption, usability and user satisfaction.

Connect adoption metrics to long-term strategic values and ROI measures.

Modern UC deployments enable employee productivity, facilitate seamless collaboration across distributed environments and support resilient, flexible work models. Instead of viewing UC platforms as collaboration tools, redefine them as strategic platforms that enhance the organization's capabilities and success. A careful and thoughtful deployment provides better alignment between UC investments and enterprise goals. It also improves the organization's ability to attract and retain talent.

Define your UC platform as a foundation for future success and growth, and empower your employees to collaborate and innovate.

Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to InformaTechTarget, The New Stack and CompTIA Blogs.