Enabling an effortless employee experience-November 2021

An effortless employee experience will consistently save time for the business. And in a world where your people can choose to work literally anywhere, taking away some basic frustrations could even help with retention and attracting new talent.

 

As we return to offices, it’s readily assumed that the tools we’ve become so fa­miliar with over recent months will now support a “hybrid” work­ing model – with some colleagues at home and some in the office.

In reality, however, rather than blending easily, office culture and home working culture may well clash. And because so many solu­tions and networks are fundamentally designed for office working, technology may be part of the problem.

 

The hybrid meeting

 

To explain why, let’s start in the meeting room. Four of you are around the table. Now you need to link your remote colleagues in.

 

Switch on the spiderphone (remember them?) and one col­league is waiting to be admitted. Another’s having tech problems.

 

It’s disjointed and awkward, and you’ve not even started.

 

With the meeting underway, those in the room are exchanging views naturally, picking up cues from body language. By contrast, those at home are struggling to get a word in – and when they do, voices keep breaking up.

At this point, the colleague with tech problems finally joins…

 

Hybrid isn’t just about location

 

Over the coming months, scenarios like this will be replayed across the country – unless we adapt our technology.

Businesses have a lot of what they need already. Tools such as Teams, WebEx and Slack have been designed, or rapidly enhanced over recent months, to enable collaborative, multi-loca­tion working.

 

Now, they have to be brought into the office environment.

 

Take meeting rooms. For ease, they need to be equipped with display screens, full audio and video capability and – crucially – a way of allowing people to use the same tools they rely on at home when they’re in the office.

 

But it’s not just meetings that we need to consider. Think too about ongoing collaboration be­tween teams in different locations. Instant messaging tools are crucial here: the smarter workspaces – again, the likes of Teams and Slack – make it easy to store conversa­tions. Essentially, we’re looking for an environment where every­one has access to the same tools wherever they are working.

 

Enabling an effortless employee experience

 

In the world of the contact centre, organisations have invested extensively in an “effortless” customer expe­rience, to increase customer loyalty.

 

But reducing cus­tomer effort also provides efficiency gains for the organisation, removing bottle­necks and duplication. Why not apply the same logic internally?

 

An effortless employee expe­rience will consistently save time for the business. And in a world where your people can choose to work literally anywhere, taking away some basic frustrations could even help with retention and at­tracting new talent.

 

Rethinking the network for hybrid working

 

Of course, the most common frustration is a slow connection. While sometimes that’s a user problem, there remains a funda­mental issue on the business side.

 

Pre-pandemic, networks were built on the assumption that most staff would be office-based and only a small proportion working remotely. That led to a centralised model, with capacity and network intelligence focused on the office or data centre, which remote workers accessed via a virtual private network (VPN).

 

When hundreds of people are remote that model no longer makes sense. The capacity is in the wrong place.

Instead, to deliver an effortless and consistent experience to all em­ployees, organisations need to look at a distributed model, where the power is at the network edge, closer to users. That reduces the risks of sluggish video performance – benefiting not only remote workers, but also those in the office.

 

Crucially for businesses, dis­tributed models put security controls at the edge too. By recog­nising a user’s identity, device and location, the network determines what services and applications the user can access. Instead of needing to connect to different tools in different ways, there’s a simple, consistent user experience.

 

And the business still retains control.

 

Moving to a distributed network model is arguably the biggest change in corporate net­working in a generation. But if hybrid working is the future – which most analysis supports – then a distributed model not only provides an effortless employee experience, but also gives organ­isations the agility, security and scalability needed.

 

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by Martin Cross, CTO at Connect

info@weconnect.tech