Try as they might, few businesses operate effectively on a fully remote basis; most struggle to find the right balance between work from home and return to office. Enter the hybrid model. Yet, even as workers adapt comfortably to working from home, businesses find it difficult to get employees into the office -- whether voluntarily or by mandate -- even if just for two or three days a week.
Business leaders are investigating a variety of approaches to induce workers to return to office. In particular, unified communications (UC) platforms can support the return to office by making collaboration even more effective. By providing better on-site collaboration experiences, the thinking goes, workers will be less inclined to stay at home.
Everyone already knows UC's value to support remote working. IT leaders now must evaluate UC's potential to make office-based collaboration better. Let's explore three factors to consider for UC's role in return to office.
1. UC features more impactful in an office setting
Whether at home or the office, the UC feature set is the same. As a result, the platform on its own is not enough to bring workers to the office. The office environment, however, is far more conducive than a remote location in encouraging collaboration through human interaction and deeper engagement.
Businesses have already invested heavily to make the office experience more enticing, including meeting rooms equipped with audiovisual (AV) technology that far outstrips any home office. This is where the richness built into UC can be showcased to great effect. Experiencing these features in a setting with team members physically present is simply more immersive than a worker sitting at a PC or tapping on a smartphone while on the couch. Team members feel more connected to each other.
Consider the group dynamics of working on a document in real time or interacting with AI to generate new ideas on the fly. While UC does extend those capabilities to wherever workers are based, the in-office experience is so much richer -- not just from having the higher-end AV tools, but also seeing and feeling the sense of engagement from folks being in the same space at the same time.
2. Direct involvement with events
Events are a recent addition to UC's existing feature set. Event capabilities enable activities to take place on a larger scale than what could be done in a meeting room. Today, most use cases center around webinars and broadcast events, but other collaboration-oriented activities could be considered -- for example, a large team where a big space is needed to meet in person or where multiple teams need to work together.
For some team members, remote work is their only option, but for others who could attend in person, being there would be so much more engaging. Home-based workers have few opportunities to meet co-workers in person, and with these events being larger than normal gatherings, this would be a great reason to go into the office.
Yes, these types of events are mostly virtual by nature because the cloud enables businesses to reach large audiences cost-effectively. UC's event capabilities are meant to deliver a great remote experience. Yet, for internal purposes -- say, team-based collaboration -- the audience isn't so big that on-site events cannot accommodate more team members than normally come to the office.
For IT leaders, the implication is to not overlook the UC platforms' events capabilities. These can be a new way to draw more workers to the office for collaboration. Employees have a natural desire to join events in person if they're given the chance.
3. Collaboration with senior managers and executives
This is more about what workers cannot do while working from home. While UC makes it easy to collaborate remotely, which is still a key value driver for enterprises, the platform offers a better experience for those in the office. This promise, however, may not be enough to get workers to return to office unless they consider the other benefits and experiences they can only get while there.
Being there, in the room with your bosses, is the best way to show your value to the organization, especially as a team player.
One of those benefits is the opportunity to collaborate with senior management in person. For workers with a gig economy mentality, this won't be of interest, but for anyone with higher career aspirations, this can be of great value. Being there, in the room with your bosses, is the best way to show your value to the organization, especially as a team player. Some of that can be conveyed remotely, but getting ahead in the workplace is about building relationships. For employees, there's no better way to do that than being in the office.
Tech-savvy workers may also be in the right place at the right time to show senior managers how to use advanced UC features to help everyone collaborate more effectively. More importantly for IT, this means focusing its efforts on senior managers and executives to become more familiar with UC's features. Not only will being hands-on with UC make execs more visible to home-based workers, but it will also help them become effective contributors when collaborating in the office.
Finally, UC platforms can support the return to office by helping companies reignite their corporate culture initiatives. UC lets IT demonstrate to senior managers how their presence is a key reason for workers to be on-site. Aside from facilitating career development and identifying future leaders, getting more workers to come in aligns well with return-to-office initiatives. In a subtle way, UC is the common denominator here, as it will be the platform for everyone -- remote workers, office workers and senior managers.
Jon Arnold is principal of J Arnold & Associates, an independent analyst providing thought leadership and go-to-market counsel with a focus on the business-level effect of communications technology on digital transformation.
