Today, employee satisfaction and talent retention are contingent on an organization’s willingness to transform its traditional office space to meet shifting expectations. According to Cisco research, 86% of respondents want to work from the office, but only 9% want to work there full time.[1]
But companies that mandate return to the office without reimagining the workspace are primed for employee pushback. The Gensler U.S. Workplace Survey[2] found that 42% of firms that mandated returns have experienced higher than normal attrition while 29% are struggling to recruit.
The reason? Workers have realized their preference for a hybrid experience with productive home offices and remote capabilities. The purpose of on-site office work has evolved to serve as a location for face-to-face collaboration, training, and in-person social interaction.
As a result, serving up the same old office space, even garnished with a smorgasbord of fresh perks, won’t be enough to coax workers back – let alone ensure productive collaboration across distributed teams.
The evolving modern workplace
The reimagined office is grounded in a smart building design with sustainable networking and high-quality audio/video to connect people in new ways. Critically, office environments must be set up for equitable collaboration. Rooms must support collaborative experiences across distributed global teams, securely and efficiently. They must support a variety of devices (mobile, laptop, large screen) that can stream high-quality audio and video across a breadth of collaboration services, including Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Cisco Webex, and Google Meet.
The in-office experience also needs to easily integrate with those who are working remotely so it feels like everyone is in the same space. The capability to include a remote participant in in-person meetings is indicative of an inclusive corporate culture, for example. This means organizations must rethink how traditional meeting rooms are built.
In addition, organizations must create comfortable spaces that account for occupancy, temperature, and air quality with a speedier network and breadth of collaboration devices. Design principles that leverage human-centered work experiences and optimizations drawn from data insights are instrumental to creating in-office experiences that benefit both workers and employers.
As IT organizations prioritize technologies to create a smart, sustainable office space, they should keep the following in mind:
- Pick your spots. It’s not necessary to spend vast amounts of money to do everything, everywhere, all at once. A simple, pragmatic approach might include upgrading Wi-Fi to support faster speeds (i.e., 6e) with embedded air quality and environmental sensors and upgraded collaboration devices that can support any service seamlessly with a “one button join.”
- Use data as your guide. A data aggregation platform such as Cisco Spaces can both ingest data and provide a stable open API for traditional real estate applications such as Building Management Systems and Workplace Management software such as IBM Tririga. The data fuels insights used to drive operational efficiencies, track assets, and monitor occupancy and density, among other use cases.
- Lead by example. Workers go where their leaders go–to really make the office “commute worthy,” leadership needs to commit to be there themselves.
For more information on Cisco’s solutions for hybrid work, click here.
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[1] Mastering Hybrid Work: A Comprehensive Guide for Productivity, Security, and Collaboration