The outbreak of COVID-19 this past March has been a massive game changer for pretty much every industry out there. One critical change it caused was the rise of what is often referred to as the "hybrid workforce." The hybrid workforce, an inevitable result of social distancing, combines employees working both from home and from the office. It therefore requires companies to adopt new means of communicating and collaborating with workers while not sharing the same physical space. Enter UC.
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Richard Trestain[/caption]
According to Richard Trestain, the Jabra Product Marketing Manager for the EMEA North region, the increasing adoption of UC technologies by various business sectors is more of an acceleration of an existing process than the birth of a new one.
"UC has been around for quite some time. It's already the biggest technological enabler of remote communication and collaboration. But since March, what we've seen is the pace and the scale in the adoption and the innovation that's kicked off immediately."
Huddle Rooms and Webcams
So, who's adopting UC technologies and why?
According to Trestain, most companies are saying they're going to restructure to accommodate themselves to the new reality.
"According to a recent PwC survey, around 3/4 of all businesses say they are going to reconfigure their offices," says Trestain." Why? Because before COVID, there was the rise of the huddle rooms – small meeting rooms meant for 4-6 people. UC can help bring people from disparate teams all around the world into one meeting room – join video, share ideas. But in the current situation most people don't want to go into a small, crowded meeting room."
Jabra has some interesting things to offer in this department.
"We have a video solution called PanaCast which is perfect for that. What's really unique about it is, it has a 180° view. This means that if you get 3 people in a huddle room (COVID compliant) – all of you could be seen. You could all sit 2 metres away from each other – which means you could now go back into the huddle room without concern"
Johnny Has Left the Meeting
Another sector that has been facing some unfamiliar challenges, and using UC to deal with them, is education.
"We're not entirely sure what's going to happen yet, but it appears that for some students, their entire university education – at least for the foreseeable future – may now be virtual," says Trestain.
UC platforms were all pretty quick to come up with new remote-learning features.
"The platforms – Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google – are all developing great things in education. Teams is actually quite suited to Education, because you can simply swap 'team' for 'class'. Also, Microsoft's new features will make it feel like a real classroom. For instance, if say, Johnny leaves the meeting – the teacher knows it."
