Considerations for the hybrid workplace

The challenge of hybrid working

Adapting to change

After a year of remote work, employees have found a different work/life balance and want these benefits to continue. How do we provide environments that meet these changing needs, be it at home, at the office or a flexible workplace? What support can we provide to our Gen-Z employees at the beginning of their career?

Managing occupancy

How can we ensure that the office doesn’t get too crowded? How do we keep desk spaces at the required distance and how do we monitor as regulations and requirements change? How can we provide an excellent and frictionless visitor experience from the moment they arrive?

Wellness for the occupants

How can we measure and improve air quality in the building? How can we improve employee health?
How do we provide a comfortable working environment? How do we maintain engagement and inclusivity for our users?

Network connectivity

Is bandwidth sufficient to support cloud applications and video conferencing? Can I have cellular as a backup in case our main connection has issues?

The challenge of hybrid working

Making spaces work

We need to move away from traditional open office desks and create useful collaboration areas keeping remote participants in mind, but we don’t know where to start. How can we make better use of space?

Legacy technology

How can we successfully transition our employees from legacy solutions in favor of intuitive services, such as cloud collaboration platforms, that engage teams and individuals regardless of location?

Employee productivity

How do we create a workplace that is flexible and inclusive for all? Which solutions can help us to rethink how work gets done, from modern meetings to document collaboration, knowledge management and other asynchronous ways of collaborating?

Application performance

How can we measure whether our cloud applications are delivering good performance, and how do we gain visibility into an increasingly complex architecture of remote, on-premises and cloud?

Security challenges

How can we protect our users and data from threats and data loss, while streamlining secure access, authentication and protection into a single place?

Enable frictionless
collaboration

Cloud collaboration tools support distributed working models and give equal standing to remote and
in-person participants. Videoconferencing solutions and meeting spaces, designed with hybrid in mind, deliver an inviting and frictionless experience from when the meeting is booked until it ends.

A physical office with a cohesive ecosystem of meeting room devices that operate with minimal touch,
in-room control panels, and outside-the-room booking panels take meeting experiences to the next level. Unified management of the components enables IT to more easily manage the physical office space.

Meet the new Cisco Webex.

Calling, meetings, messaging,
and events in the cloud for teams
of all sizes.

Know your space and deliver
a consistent user experience

As your organization prepares to reopen offices and support distributed working models, employees expect a safe working environment.

Optimize your space, understanding which areas are utilized, enabling space reservations, managing occupancy, and connecting remote and in-person employees, partners, and customers. Improve health and safety with systems for monitoring social distancing, density, cleanliness, noise and air quality.

Migrate to cloud collaboration

NTT Managed Collaboration Services provide flexible managed service deployment and integration options to meet your unified communications environment today, while supporting your business’ future requirements.

74% of new unified
communications licenses will
be cloud-based by 2024.

Gartner 2020 Magic Quadrant for Unified
Communications as a Service, Worldwide

Cloud collaboration solutions allow all your employees to work seamlessly, wherever they are and on any device as well as regularly providing new features and enhancements.

Wellness-oriented features help employees better manage their time, avoid stress and excessive after-hours work, using nudge technology and pattern detection. AI is embedded, providing innovative ways to surface your organization’s data, ultimately simplifying the employee’s day.

But the challenge is maintaining your legacy estate while integrating existing applications with future-state technology. You then need to focus on ongoing administration to provide a quality of service that keeps users happy while patching to improve the experience and roll-out new features in tandem to their
cloud-side release.

Network strategies to support
different workstyles

The rapid introduction of collaboration platforms to ensure business continuity, the ability to support
high-performing applications wherever they reside, and a focus on identity-based security have both impacted the network and the need to reassess how it’s designed.

The network must be optimized within, to and across hybrid IT environments, deliver agility by connecting edge to multicloud platforms through transformed WAN and connectivity, and connect edge devices and things (smart workplaces, smart hospitals, smart manufacturing) through campus networks.

Central to all this is exactly how the network fabric enables different devices, systems, and people to operate in support of business outcomes, so that organizations comprehend the data generated to
garner insight into those outcomes.

The network fabric underpins the way we engage employees and ensure their wellbeing through a connected world—in the cloud, at the edge, and at the core.

When devising a network strategy across wired, wireless and cellular technology, organizations will need to determine whether the network can deliver effectively
for different workstyles and tasks to be performed.

Performance. All the time.

Hybrid workers have become accustomed to high quality digital applications and frictionless connections, allowing them to collaborate and be productive from anywhere. These applications have become a key cornerstone of the employee’s work-life, and users expect good reliability.

However, with the introduction of cloud collaboration solutions, and users not being physically in the office, the complexity increases, as do the touch-points.

Modern performance management solutions help you identify bottlenecks and resource constraints
before they become an issue. Being able to visualize your applications’ performance, and your extended ecosystem of vendors in one place, empowers your IT team to better support your critical applications
and save time.

Secure by design.
Private by default.

Organizations need to consider robust work-from-home and remote working solutions that offer more flexible support and enterprise-grade security to get the most from ongoing remote work scenarios.

Regardless of the method of connection, security remains paramount to deliver flexibility without placing data or employees at risk. Zero trust and SASE are top-of-mind as people move to cloud platforms and companies start embarking on a single design for network and security, based on the activities and workstyles of their employees.

The modern security journey will see organizations moving to a simpler, smarter security plane, reducing complexity with a single point of administration for all security appliances and policies, both in cloud and on-premises.