The Return to Work
Overcoming the Physical Obstacles of Remote Working
During the pandemic we all “made do”. We made the best of what we had and tried to keep things going. Now that we are returning to work, we will ALL be working differently because Hybrid Working is here to stay.
To be clear, the move to hybrid work isn’t an extension of the remote worker strategy that organisations deployed during the pandemic. It’s much bigger than that. And will have a pronounced impact on how organisations find and manage talent, their IT infrastructure, application choices, and much more.
At the centre of this transition is the collaboration platform. To make the hybrid workplace a success, remote workers need easy, immersive connections to their HQ, be that an office, college, oil rig – whatever. No matter their location, connections need to feel as though you could touch the person you are speaking to – even though they may be on the other side of the world.
This is because it is a fundamental fact that creativity is borne from human interaction and we cannot collaborate with others if we are detached from our environment. So where face-to-face is no longer possible, we have to create a seamless set-up to encourage collaboration, innovation, diversity of thought and general creative cross-pollination.
Zoom calls and the like just won’t cut it long-term for organisations that thrive on the innovation of their people and who wish to maintain a strong corporate culture. Zoom fatigue is real and feeds into the issues people have had in safeguarding mental health whilst working through lockdown. And this is quite apart from the constant tech’ issues of logging in, dropping connections, starts and stops and having to diarise when you will chat to a colleague.
Googles “Project Starline” gives us a glimpse into what may be possible in the future, but right now Clients are embracing hybrid working by using Video Window. A platform that creates a natural extension of physical space for inter-office and remote teams.
Collaboration Squared was borne from our deep value of human connection. And we carefully developed Video Window to create a seamless extension of physical space and ensure workers feel more connected with each other – as if they were sharing that same space.
Our clients are using Video Window for many different reasons, but ultimately help their teams achieve their highest level of success possible. Transforming how people collaborate and communicate and the relationships they form.
With video conferencing solutions as clever as Video Window, teams have removed the physical obstacles of working apart. They chat on an ad hoc basis as though they were chatting to someone in the office, they collaborate on white boards as if they were sharing the same marker pen and they never have to worry about passwords, logging in, Wi-Fi connections, security – or anything else that people in the same room don’t have to contend with.
This is removing the physical obstacles. This is how people connect without touch. This is the future of remote working.
Of course, providing the physical portal for connection is not the entire solution, it is just the beginning… There are much wider questions around how much choice should employees have and how can employers weave the necessary flexibility into their human resource planning? IT Security becomes much more difficult as does the ensuring that workers have adequate resources to work effectively outside of HQ…
In our next articles we will look at the some of these issues as well as the research behind the decisions pioneering organisations have made in implementing their hybrid workplace.
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