From remote to hybrid work: the technology needed to connect home and office

Welcome to the exciting new world of hybrid work.

“About 60% of the workforce is choosing the hybrid option,” said Suzanne Adnams, an analyst at Gartner, “which means the ideal thing is to work from home and go to the office three days a week.”

If I earned a dollar for every time I heard “two to three days at the office” when reporting this column, a socially distanced steak dinner would be on me.

What is not so clear? Where will you go when you get to the office. It depends on your employer. Here are three possible options:

• Tables tables: Business, as always. You will still have your own table, but perhaps now your chair and your colleague’s chair are further apart.

• Hot table: The horribly named trend where employees don’t have a permanently assigned table. Also known as hoteling, flexing or desk swapping, this is becoming the main hybrid option for an important reason: it doesn’t make sense to have one table per person if people come only a few times a week.

• Without table: The office is not for solo work, but for collaboration. So, instead of tables, there are mainly group meeting areas, with a private phone booth here and there. Companies like Dropbox have committed themselves to this route.

I certainly cannot say in detail what will happen in your company, but I can say that this hybrid life will make you even more dependent on your technology tools. The technology that allows us to work from anywhere (laptops and smartphones, video calling, Slack) is also the technology that can make this so confusing.

Your colleagues are on the whiteboard in the office, but are you stuck at home in a small Zoom box? You survive the journey to the office, only to find that you left the USB-C dongle on the kitchen table. Hey, Bob from accounting, stop yelling at your video call. This is not your basement!

But I have hope. Not only did we prove our technological resilience when we embarked on the Great Work at Home Experiment a year ago, but the manufacturers of our most trusted products are paying attention and adapting to this next phase. Here are some of the biggest hybrid challenges and some potential solutions.

I am back on the good old path, but on my hot table, I have nothing, not even a stained mug of coffee.

There are no two ways to do this, you will need a larger grant. And for the record: anyone who says a backpack is only for high school students is wrong.

When you go to your building (assuming you remember where it is), you may need to pick up the phone. Your employer may require Covid-era health check-ins and other precautions, but it may also give you the opportunity to reserve your workspace, through systems like Robin or Salesforce’s Work.com.

Congratulations, you have arrived at “your” table. I can’t guess at the technology that will be available when you get there, but I hope it’s pretty basic, especially if you bring BYOL (you know, bring your own laptop).

In Salesforcein

In redesigned spaces, for example, employees are given only one table and two monitors side by side, Jo-ann Olsovsky, the company’s chief information officer, told me.

At least Salesforce employees will be able to keep other belongings in cabinets and easily obtain other technology peripherals – mice, keyboards, headsets, chargers – from technology vending machines located in offices. You don’t pay. Simply pass the employee’s badge, click the item button and pick it up from the bottom tray.

If the vending machines in your office only distribute obsolete Doritos, you can order things through your IT department. Regardless, you will probably be dragging your favorite equipment from side to side. Certainly, more expensive equipment that you don’t have – tablets, microphones, noise-canceling headphones – will be in your bag.

For the smallest things – batteries, charging cables, a mouse and various adapters to connect drives, memory cards and cables to your laptop – you will need a dongle bag. Don’t have one yet? Oh, you must. What I just bought, the InCase nylon accessory organizer, has mesh pockets and handles to organize different cables and adapters. It’s listed for $ 50, but I bought it for $ 15.

I am in the office with some colleagues. Other colleagues are at home.

If you think that coming back to the office means the end of video calls, I have some bad news for you. From now on, most meetings will have a video component and there will be even more cameras in the office – not just in conference rooms.

“It’s hard to imagine going into an office right now and all those little enclosed spaces that could have a phone not being video enabled,” Logitech Chief Executive Bracken Darrell told me, adding that he expects some companies to put webcams on the rise. desk stations as well.

Executives working on collaboration platforms at Microsoft,

Google, Slack and Zoom said that a fundamental need is for employees at home and at work to feel they are on an equal footing when they are on calls and working together. Here are the initiatives they launched:

Microsoft Teams: A system called Teams Rooms connects conference rooms with remote users who wish to participate. Speech recognition on new compatible speakers can identify who is speaking in a room and the person’s name will appear on the screen. You also won’t be ashamed to call from home: a new presenter mode removes the background from your video and places it in front of the presentation or places the presentation in a box over your shoulder in “reporter mode”.

Google workspace: Google also provides speakers and cameras for the office, but as people leave the home, they will use their phones more for video calls. An update to the Google Meet for Phone app will better show people in the video. A next update to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides will include the ability to override voice and video chat while people work on documents together.

Slack: An audio room feature is coming, so users can quickly join a conference call. Think Clubhouse, but for quick meetings. The company, which Salesforce has agreed to buy, is also adding a feature to share pre-recorded video messages. This can help a manager send an announcement to everyone, whether they are in the office or at home.

Enlargement: The star of the pandemic explosion has its own conference room service called, tell me, Zoom Rooms. The company’s Zoom Rooms Controller app for iOS and Android allows people in the conference room to control meetings from their phones – without having to touch the dirty shared keyboard or room control panel.

A bigger challenge: what if the personal meeting includes some physical items, such as a whiteboard? How do people at home monitor and contribute?

Google and Microsoft tried to make this easier. Microsoft makes Surface Hub – a giant Windows tablet for offices that runs the Microsoft Whiteboard application connected to the cloud. Those on a call from Microsoft Teams can view and add to the digital whiteboard. Same idea with Google’s Jamboard. People in the office can scribble on the giant screen and people in a Google Meet video call can see and add items to it. Zoom works with third-party hardware manufacturers to integrate the whiteboard.

I’m working from home today – how do I share this with the world?

The advantage of all this is that being stuck at home will not be as bad as before. You are already improving your configuration and some companies even plan to continue subsidizing employees’ home office needs. And now that you have got used to exaggerating the communication of your schedule and deadlines? Keep doing this, wherever you are.

Google added some resources to its calendar to help, including what it calls “targetable hours of work”. You can make it clear to colleagues where you are working or if you are doing something else, such as exercising or getting around. Slack is also exploring adding more status options to indicate its whereabouts.

This return to the office may have an ingenious name – hybrid work – but make no mistake, it is as hybrid as Frankenstein’s monster. Just remember, a year ago we went through a very cataclysmic job change and will do it again. Just don’t forget the dog.

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Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]