Hybrid work is here to stay. Although remote work has been a topic of discussion for a while, more employees are now facing unexpected challenges when returning to the office.
The number of meetings has only gone up in the last two years. There has been a 252% increase in weekly time spent in meetings, for the average Teams user since February 2020, according to the
Microsoft Work Trend Index 2022 report. Many meetings remain online to include all participants—some remote and some in the office—in a hybrid team.
Those working from the office face the following experiential issues:
- Multiple online participants in the same room: Leading to that audio whine we all dislike
- Choppy Audio: Due to office network issues or ambient noises
- Bad video experiences: Unnecessary background disturbances in the meeting spaces
- Group Video Fails: when many co-workers try to fit into a small laptop camera
Collaboration technology can address these challenges and elevate employee experience in the office. Microsoft recently announced its Rooms offerings, which foster inclusiveness, are easy to use, and turns any shared space into a Teams Room with a wide selection of devices and features. Combining the Microsoft Teams application with the hardware in a meeting space and audio-echo can eliminate noise feedback. The video experience can be made richer and remote participants have a presence in the room, while in-room participants can retain their identity and not get lost in the crowd.
Meeting spaces ranging from small huddle areas to large conference rooms can transform with a rich, collaborative Teams experience that's simple to use, deploy, and manage. Meetings can start on time with one-touch join, then instantly projected to the display in the room and shared with remote participants.
Microsoft Teams continues to innovate, bringing changes to help the hybrid model work. Whether it is around eye contact, sense of presence, tools that capture body language, or fluid-remote collaboration on whiteboards and PowerPoint,
Microsoft uses a combination of research and prototyping to help improve the employee collaboration experience, whether remote or in a conference room.
When looking at a collaboration and communication suite that’s perfect for the needs of your workforce, you want a cloud solution that helps all your hybrid-work employees to stay connected seamlessly across the globe and be responsive to customer and market needs.
Imagine migrating smoothly to that cloud-based system, with a custom design and migration plan, with all security and compliance needs met and all the training and support you need. Then, using this system across multiple geographies—manufacturing locations, corporate offices, retail stores, and show rooms, and distribution outlets—with no hiccups in connectivity, no delays in deployment, no worries about compliance with regulatory statutes of various countries, and the ability to predict and proactively resolve potential issues, and much more. Imagine the sheer magnitude of the power this seamless communication can give you to serve your employees, partners, and customers.
As companies look for that ideal collaboration experience, we understand that the journey to unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions is complex. In such an environment, it is best to work with a partner who can provide all voice infrastructure needs, and drive the following in the engagement:
- A smooth transition to UCaaS starts with end-to-end management, an audit of the legacy systems, followed by an identification of potential risks and performance-sensitive workloads, creation of a robust migration plan for managing the shift optimally, and deployment that considers all security and business continuity aspects.
- Integration capabilities such as cloud video interoperability for legacy video endpoints and intelligent collaboration monitoring for quality of service
- Assessment and re-design of Teams meeting rooms considering technology, culture, and physical aspects of the enterprise.
- Training users for successful adoption of the new systems
- Ability to drill down into user experience using advanced analytics capabilities like quickly identifying user experience and utilization, spotting trends across usage modalities with session dashboards, and accessing global session detail views that enable advanced troubleshooting at every layer of the technology stack
- Proactive troubleshooting abilities, including the ability to predict potential risks and having a backup in place so that business continuity is not affected by any outages
- An integrated service level agreement that covers transport, platform, and application layer during migration and lifecycle
- Reducing vendor sprawl by choosing a single platform that covers all your collaboration and connectivity needs
- Ability to deploy across the globe, in multiple countries and sites that span different regulatory needs and telecom compliance requirements
- Leveraging the partnership with the cloud calling platforms to drive optimized commercials and support to create the winning solution
Tata Communications offers a comprehensive solution fabric, called Tata Communications GlobalRapide, for enterprises trying to establish a hybrid working model and helps address the return-to-office and remote employee experience issues.
The solution offers managed services, automated tools, a simplified user experience, enhanced interoperability, regulatory compliance, secure collaboration, and advanced monitoring in conjunction with cloud-based calling platforms like Microsoft Teams, as referenced above.
When it comes to elevating your employee experience, Tata Communications is your partner for unified communications and collaboration. Learn more
when you visit our website.
