The commute. The race for a space in the office car park. The fight for the last remaining hot desk.
For some, they remain part of the daily dance of corporate life.
But for millions more, the pandemic has changed everything.
For them, remote working is now BAU (business as usual) – and, for businesses large and small, the ‘hybrid workplace’ has gone from worthy aspiration to strategic necessity.
Pre-pandemic, some surveys suggest just five per cent of workforces worked from home.
Today, it is more like 50 per cent and rising.
And that means the businesses around the world best-placed to adapt are the ones for whom the quality of audiovisual conference calling is now trumping mere capability.
“The workplace really is now a hybrid one in the truest sense,” says Stefan Eriksson, Swedish-based Chief Marketing Officer at global collaboration endpoints giant (and inventors of the first conference phone 30 years ago) Konftel.
“It is part work from home, part come into the office,” adds Eriksson.
“High-quality audio and video conferencing is at the very centre of that new operating model. It’s about ensuring that the call quality is uniform across the board, regardless of where a user is physically located”
“Also, people are spending longer in video meetings than they ever did pre-pandemic, so user experience is also right up there with quality, whether people are in their home or at the office. Once, video and conference calling was something we did as a last resort, now even the most business-critical meetings are conducted in that way. That’s why quality is so important.”
Konftel’s UK sales chief, Jeff May, agrees:
“You really notice if you’re in a virtual meeting and a participant’s audio and video quality pops,”
“It used to be a suit or a handbag or a watch that impressed in a physical meeting room, now it’s the sharpness and clarity of a video feed. And if you’re sharp and clear, your presentation or your negotiation or whatever it is you’re doing in that meeting is 100 per cent more impactful. If you’re choppy, then your contribution is undermined. And we’re way past the days when we can get away with blaming that on working from home.”
Konftel’s Sales Director in North America, Fredrik Hornkvist, goes even further.
“In the early days, US businesses didn’t invest in high-quality kit,” he says.
“Now they see audio and video quality as a differentiator so they are playing catch-up. Key hires are weighing up job offers based on the quality of the audio-video kit they will be given to use. And that really is a sign that the hybrid model is here for good”
It’s borne out in the latest surveys too.
According to global growth trackers Nemertes, a high percentage of organisations have increased spending on remote video conferencing capability since the pandemic began.
Significantly, many have also invested in updating and reconfiguring existing office-based video meeting rooms.
It seems that where we all do our thing really has become an irrelevance – and that what we look and sound like on-screen is the new corporate currency.
So, “lights, camera, action…!”
