Preparing for the Hybrid Future with EPOS

Ensuring quality audio experience wherever you work

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Published: December 17, 2020

Maya Middlemiss

After the turbulence of 2020, it’s easy to forget that the shift to remote work was already a trend well underway prior to the global health crisis, driven by globalisation, automation, and the wealth of UC and cloud tools available to knowledge workers worldwide.

Research by Frost and Sullivan for EPOS has identified the hybrid workspace as a key trend for 2021, as some executives return to centralised office locations, while others choose to work from anywhere — which will no longer be limited by lockdown constraints to work from home.

Like every paradigm shift, the remote work revolution brings challenges as well as opportunities, and the chance for organisations to differentiate themselves in how they respond to both. Investing in the right technologies to facilitate and support a workforce liberated to engage where they feel most productive and effective will be fundamental to success in a competitive business environment, and the research underlined the importance of the audio environment in creating the right conditions for focused and deep work — wherever it is being done. However, the research indicates that 95% of workers find their concentration suffers due to deficient sound, whether from interruption and disturbance (in any location), or background noise and poor audio quality on video and audio interactions.

Everyone deserves to hear and be heard

While it’s impossible to quantify the opportunity cost of deals unclosed due to audio glitches or a lifetime of office background noise on an individual’s lost hearing in later life, the researchers identified that direct costs of 29 minutes per week were the average, simply due to asking for information to be repeated and clarified.

And as those moments of “sorry, what did you say?” add up measurably, lost too is the frictionless collaboration experience, the joy of flow in deep work, and all the productivity tied up in these zones of working without interruption. For people experiencing physical distance and disconnection from colleagues for the first time, a sub-par audio environment enhances isolation and damages spontaneity, easily leading to a decline in morale and team culture — which is simply unacceptable and unnecessary, with the options available to us today.

In early 2020 many compromises were made in the name of business continuity, from an explosion of shadow IT to utterly non-ergonomic desk and chair combinations. At the start of lockdown people made do, as they struggled to keep working somehow or other. Unsurprisingly many also turned to consumer-grade audio equipment they already had at home, without realising the impact this had on their user experience and productivity, at times which were already challenging.

The right choice for the future

But we are no longer in the disaster recovery stage, and businesses are making strategic decisions about how to enable location-independent productivity for their teams, in sustainable and effective ways. The need for quality, professional-grade audio equipment is proven beyond doubt, and the pairing of high-quality headsets and mics with the right communications software is the key to unlocking enterprise-grade work from anywhere policies, which will support business continuity — whatever 2021 brings our way.

Learn more by reading the EPOS-sponsored Frost and Sullivan ebook Prepare Your Business For Hybrid Work.

 

 

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