Is the Future of Work ‘All Hybrid, All of the Time’?

While AI has dominated much of the discourse around the UC and collaboration sector in 2023, it isn’t the only area seeing exciting innovations.

As illustrated by a fascinating Infocomm 2023, meeting room technology — and more broadly, the meeting room experience — is enjoying a golden age of progress and invention as vendors look to capitalise on the normalisation of hybrid working.

The best and brightest have observed that hybrid working not only isn’t a temporary fad but that solutions catering to the needs of a truly hybrid workforce require genuine flexibility — and the constantly-growing market will respond with enthusiasm to these kinds of reliable and flexible products.

At the heart of this trend are solutions that meaningfully engage every meeting participant, whether in the on-premises meeting room, in their home office, or anywhere else with a dependable internet connection. Three years since the pandemic-facilitated UC boom, the level of innovation the industry is experiencing is monumental.

“It’s a really fascinating evolution,” Evan Kirstel, Social Media Strategist at BCStrategies, told UC Today. “We’ve gone from work from home to all hybrid, all the time. I think the whole industry has shifted to focusing on the importance of hybrid meetings as businesses look to accommodate in-person and remote participants without them being left out of the discussion as they traditionally have been. AV solutions now need to seamlessly support those kinds of hybrid meetings.”

“Flexibility has become the new mantra, I think,” Kirstel continued. “It’s not work-from-home or in-office. It’s ‘work from anywhere’, and meetings need to be easily configurable to any type of experience. The focus now is on that employee experience, that user experience, that UX or UI. We don’t have tolerance for difficult or hard-to-use meeting technology anymore. Standards have been raised through the pandemic.”

Kirstel stressed that ease of use is “really important”. “The whole idea of design thinking when it comes to meeting spaces has come to the fore. It’s really about creating a meeting space conducive to collaboration and productivity,” he added.

The challenge with returning to the office, even in a hybrid capacity, is that many workers have experienced the home comforts of productivity-enabling set-ups they created remotely over the past few years. It might prove not easy to return to an unchanged work environment after some workers have learned they can work more productively, collaboratively and happily remotely.

“We got used to being in our living rooms and cocoons and having our space and lighting and sound the way we wanted it, and many of us got pretty good at working from home,” Kirstel said.

“But now, when we go into the office, we don’t want a sea of cubicles anymore,” he continued. “We want good lighting, we want a comfortable environment, we want temperature control, we want comfortable seating, we want cameras that make us look better. We want a distraction-free environment.

“We don’t want to faff about with meeting technology for 10 minutes before literally getting down to business. So I think the net is that all of the vendors were focused on that kind of new hybrid work experience.”

Kirstel cited Logitech’s Project Ghost as “the coolest thing (he’d) seen in a while”. Project Ghost is a video chat booth built with video conferencing technology that Logitech already sells as part of the Logitech Rally Plus, transformed into a booth created by furniture business Steelcase.

The solution works by generating a projection of a person by placing glass at an angle in front of a display. This is to create a Pepper’s Ghost effect. A camera is positioned behind the glass to create the sensation of eye contact. It is also certified for Teams and Zoom.

“It’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while,” Kirstel said. “It’s sort of a Star Trek-like presence, a huddle space with truly immersive and collaborative communication opportunities. It’s an incredible video.”

Kirstel added that solutions such as Project Ghost highlight that “lots of thought is going now into design and aesthetics and things that we didn’t really care about some time ago.”

Another key trend at this year’s Infocomm was the popularity of device management systems — a market that will surely only grow in tandem with specific hybrid working solutions, with the administrative work required to manage them effectively and seamlessly. More and more, businesses are looking for device management solutions they can introduce across the company to simplify their use for employees.

Melissa Swartz, VOIP and Cloud Phone System Expert at Swartz Consulting, told UC Today: “I’m seeing clients actually decide on a technology and implement it organisation-wide so that there’s simplicity for the users, so it’s the same no matter what room you go to.”

“In the past, I’ve seen a lot of hybrid (solutions), a little of this and a little of that, and funding really wasn’t available to do a blanket upgrade on everything. I’m actually seeing that now there’s a real effort on the part of the organisation to standardise again for that user experience that you’re talking about just to make it easier.”

“wartI’mdded that while she’s not necessarily seeing standardisation across the same products, “people are actually putting some focus into meeting technology.”