Watch our recorded webinar below and learn solutions to overcome the technical and security challenges of hybrid workers. Spend 20 minutes with us and we’ll offer some possible solutions to overcome these challenges and answer any questions you may have about moving forward long-term with a hybrid work environment.
The Hybrid Work Model is Here to Stay
Communications
Phone Calls and VoIP
Email Explosion
Messaging Mahem
Is Innovation and Creativity Diminished?
Conducting Effective Meetings
One of the things we’re getting a lot more questions about is how to have effective meetings where some folks are in the room and some folks aren’t. So obviously the main piece of advice is to make sure you’re designing for the folks that aren’t in the room. We’re seeing a lot of intelligent cameras being deployed. We actually have one here. It’s a little alley and it sits on the middle of the desk. It follows and it rotates around the room and follows the conversation. The image on the right is actually sort of a Microsoft depiction of what they think an effective meeting room should look like. You’ll notice that they’ve got the Teams on the left. They’ve got the white board which is built into Teams. You can easily share that and put that up on the screen. They’ve got the chat on the right, and then of course, down on the bottom. They’ve got sort of that together mode so you can simulate everybody being in the room.
The other thing I encourage you to take advantage of is some of these inclusive features so if somebody has a hearing or other type of disability, turning on the live captions (they just launched live transcription in meetings). What you can do inside of the meeting is turn on the live transcription. I love this feature, so if you’re speaking you don’t have to worry about scribbling down all your notes anymore. It will transcribe live who is speaking. It actually designates who said what and then it does a bang-up job of translating the words into the audio typed out text which you can download after the meeting and kept.
I encourage you to use the interactive features in there like raising your hand or the reactions they have built in to raising your hand while keeping an eye on it and looking for raising your hand in the middle of a meeting so the folks that aren’t in the room are able to engage in the conversation without necessarily having to cut in on people. I know I’m a little notorious for sort of butting in on conversations when the other person on the other end of the of the line was speaking. It was on a speaker phone so there was no way for me to kind of insert myself into the conversation and they were going on for a while. If I tried to raise my hand but they were looking at it on a cell phone—super small, really hard to see. So, as you’re thinking about these meanings, you need to think about how they’re interacting in terms of what you don’t know, what they have on their end in terms of what they’re looking and how they’re viewing things, and then of course, to have the chat going so you can chat during the middle of the meeting, and things of that nature.
Zoom supports these kinds of meeting platforms out there. Teams has all of these built into them as well. Many of our clients have Teams, so I encourage you to check these things out.
Switching Back and Forth from Hybrid to Working Onsite
All right the next thing is, does this look like you when you do come to the office or maybe first thing in the morning? Is the frustration of you jumping back and forth from being in the office to working remotely, back and forth? All of a sudden, do you look like this monster? Is it bringing out this monster in you?
One of the things that we’re getting phone calls about is people trying to get up and working quickly. They come into the office, they want to sit down and get to work but now they got to plug in all these cables and get on the internal Wi Fi, things of that nature. The technology of just the hooking up of things and getting connected and getting up and running quickly whether they’re at home or at work has become a challenge for some users. Some users handle it just fine, others not. Ergonomics is another big one. I was looking at a meeting the other day. You could tell that a bunch of these folks are going to end up calling their chiropractor because they’re looking down at the little, teeny laptop monitor. You really need to get folks set up whether they’re at home or in the office so they’re able to work ergonomically and comfortably because it will take the toll on folks again. This is not a technical challenge, this is not a security challenge, other than from a technology standpoint making sure you have some ability to set them up so that they could see their monitor and work on their keyboards and so forth without any issue. Sound has become an issue with the hybrid workforce because a lot of folks are moving to no longer using desk phones and they’re using earbuds and headsets. This one is a pretty high-quality headset; it has noise cancelling built in so if somebody’s talking around me in the room, I was actually playing music and holding my cell phone up to it earlier prior to the call. Folks could barely hear it. So, you want something that’s going to cancel out that background noise. We’re finding this to be a little bit of a problem for us here because some earbuds are more sensitive than others and they’re picking up the other conversations in the room around us. So, investing in a good quality headset is a great thing from a technology standpoint.
Working Outside 9-5?
Going Digital
Embrace Zero Trust Security
Lastly, next zero trust, this is a big one from a security standpoint. On the left is sort of the old model of how people worked, and you know we have some clients that have always been virtual, but their old model was that you were in the office and then you would build a little wall or a firewall around your network and that was your perimeter. It was relatively straightforward what you needed to protect, but now what we’ve done with this hybrid world is you just blow that wall up, the perimeter is gone, and what you have to protect has expanded exponentially because it’s not just the office anymore, it’s now potentially the person’s home network or wherever they’re working remotely.
Of course, we’re looking at enhanced endpoint security solutions that we’re rolling out to different clients. In particular, that is a Zero Trust type of approach, which means that you authorize only certain things to run and if it’s not on that list that’s being authorized then they have to request permission and access. To do that, you want to manage every device that has access to any type of corporate resource. It could be a cell phone, it could be a tablet, or it could be a workstation, and there are solutions whether you could put on cell phones or tablets to help manage and ensure. The security is that you want to draw a line between the person’s personal information and the corporate information so that you’re not inadvertently either breaking compliance or exposing potentially things to things like ransomware and things of that nature.