Many discussions about the future of the workplace focus on the element of remote workers, but the return to office is an essential building block for hybrid work. It’s also going more slowly than anticipated.

A spring 2022 survey of 160 major employers, conducted by The Partnership for New York City, found that more than 75% of firms are set to implement a hybrid model, but the larger the company, the slower the pace of return to office.

Why are things going so slowly? Because workers are unwilling to return.

A recent European survey found that on average 64% of workers are reluctant to return to the workplace, from a low of 56% in the Netherlands to a high of 83% in Ireland.

In the pre-pandemic world, things like game rooms, free snacks, and cool office design were used to create excitement among employees for being in the office. Today, these incentives have been replaced by HR policies, placemaking, and organizational design underpinned with a technical infrastructure that enables hybrid work.

THREE CONSIDERATIONS FOR CREATING A BETTER WORK ENVIRONMENT

The three most important elements to focus on in the return to office are people, spaces, and technology.

Meet employees’ changed expectations and attitudes. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work. Someone early in their career may want to be in more often for the camaraderie, while established workers with families may prefer to be in on as few days as possible. With the autonomy many employees developed through remote working, managers who feel employees need to be in the office to be micromanaged are a detriment. Take roles and function into consideration and make more granular decisions about what makes sense.

Recognize the role of place in building workplace culture. 66% of businesses are considering remodeling their company spaces for hybrid work. While many organizations clearly understand that the traditional approach to office space won’t work, it’s also important to take a new approach to the function of office space. As you redesign your space, consider how your new environment communicates your values and culture.

Animate your return to office with technology. Technology sets in motion the interactions that solve issues, generate new ideas, express culture, and bring colleagues together. From workplace apps that bring people together in the right place at the right time to immersive video conferencing experiences, technology repositions your office as an intelligent hub for remote and face-to-face collaboration.

TURN YOUR RETURN TO OFFICE INTO A RESET FOR THE LONG TERM

With hybrid work becoming our new reality, many organizations are struggling to tackle their return to office at a functional level, while missing the underlying culture, structure, and values necessary to support all employees.

To help you navigate a strong return to office that sets your company up to succeed as workplaces continue to evolve, Poly has partnered with the experts at WORKTECH Academy.  Our latest white paper combines key insights, with input from technical and design leaders, and real-world examples to help your return to office strategy create a strong foundation for hybrid working.

Read The Journey to Hybrid Working: A Reset For Return To Office?  to learn more research-based considerations about people, spaces, and technology in your return to office planning.

Return-to-office planning has IT decision makers brainstorming how they will change phone set ups to suit their company’s hybrid working model. Welcoming workers back into the office with setups from 2019 and early 2020 would be chaos. Those phones were fine for personal, basic office use, but they are not designed to support the hybrid work model so many companies are embracing.

Frost and Sullivan forecasts that 47 percent of workers will be hybrid and 30 percent of office spaces will be dedicated to hoteling. What’s even more interesting, is that they predict that 30 percent of the companies surveyed will be providing desktop phones to their remote workers to help them be as productive as possible.

Can today’s desktop phones really meet the evolving needs of a post-pandemic professional—in the office and at home? Yes, yes, they can, and Poly is proud to introduce the Poly Edge E series to help empower hybrid teams.

Introducing the Poly Edge E Series

Our Poly Edge E series is thoughtfully designed to meet the challenges of a hybrid workforce. The first thing you’ll notice about these phones is their attractive design. The look, feel, texture, lighting, and the thoughtfully crafted user experience—everything about them is inviting.

And the sound? It’s Poly’s signature professional-grade audio quality through-and-through, delivering the crystal-clear conversations users expect. All this while Poly’s Acoustic Fence and NoiseBlockAI technologies keep conversations on track by eliminating distracting background noise, like a coworker’s chatter or a roommate’s call going on in the background.

The post-pandemic workforce is also concerned about germ-spread in the office and at home. Microban® antimicrobial product protection is an awesome feature that solves this concern and it’s now an inherent part of the Poly Edge E series phones. It’s been added during the manufacturing process for the entire series, meaning it won’t wash off or wear away. But, more than anything, the Poly Edge E Series is a solution that makes hybrid work easy for users and IT decision makers.

Easy to Pair

Anyone in the office or at home who likes to step away from their desk to pace and think or just to visit the kitchen will enjoy the Poly Edge E series’ Bluetooth pairing ability and range. Users can easily connect their Bluetooth headset to their desk phone with the Poly Edge E220, E320, E350, E450 and E550 models. Not only can you pair your Bluetooth headset, but you can also pair your smartphone. This allows users to answer their mobile phone’s incoming call from the Edge E desk phone and take advantage of the phone’s advanced noise blocking features. In a hybrid working environment, that’s a game change as it makes for a seamless communications experience.

Easy to Install and Support

Many home offices and some newer office buildings are not wired for ethernet. Instead, these spaces rely on Wi-Fi for connection, making the Poly Edge E350, E450 and E550 phones a natural fit. When these phones are first powered up, the Wi-Fi setup screen is presented immediately—no hunting expedition through the settings required. It’s that easy.

Easy troubleshooting and access to ongoing support is equally, if not more, important for a hybrid workforce. The good news is that all Edge E series phones offer new diagnostic tests and a configurable support contacts menu, making it simple for users to self-test their phone or contact support as needed. Just remember that a Wi-Fi connected phone requires a power adapter accessory when not powered over via ethernet.

Easier with NFC Technology

Hot-desking or hoteling has been around for a while, just like hybrid work, but it traditionally features a manual login process via a password or a pin code, which are shockingly easy to forget. Unlike other desk phones, the Poly Edge E series is designed with near-field communication (NFC) technology, which service providers can leverage to simplify the phone’s hot-desking assignment. Imagine opening an app on your smartphone and using it to make the Edge E desk phone yours for the day. Android smartphone users can also use NFC to simplify mobile phone pairing to the Edge E phone. Desk phones with easier hot-desking and simpler mobile pairing are the kind of solutions that makes hybrid work easy to support.

Easy to be Inclusive

Phones are a necessary part of daily life and yet they not typically designed inclusively. This is an especially meaningful pain point for those with impaired vision and for the IT decision makers who are doing their best to accommodate a diverse workforce. Fortunately, the Poly Edge E series was designed to be more accessible, offering features like text-to-speech capabilities and customizable bigger or bold fonts.

When the new text-to-speech feature is enabled, the phone will audibly announce the incoming caller displayed. Audio confirmation of feature keys pressed also empowers the user with the confidence to have smooth, professional interactions. It’s features like these that make phones more accessible and, therefore, more inclusive.

Taming IT Chaos with Supporting a Hybrid Workforce is Easier with the Right Technology

The Poly Edge E Series are our most versatile, inclusive phones to date. They make it easy for IT professionals to equip their hybrid workforce so everyone can work effectively from wherever they need to be. Recognizing the value in our Poly Edge E Series, many service providers who support Poly Open SIP IP phones are currently in the process of certifying and onboarding the Poly Edge E series.

The Poly Edge E phones are available to order now and will begin to ship worldwide in August. To learn more, reach out to your Poly Sales representative or, visit Poly.com.

Grant Thornton is a large accounting firm with over a hundred meeting rooms across Australia. Like many firms, they used the timing of the COVID-19 pandemic to upgrade and modernize their rooms.  They knew they needed to undertake a digital transformation journey to modernize, simplify and standardize their user experiences across many locations, while at the same time upgrading from Skype for Business to a native Microsoft Teams Solution.

They wanted their employees to collaborate as equals – whether they were working from home, on the go or in the office.  Their search was for a solution that would simply and easily replace their existing room systems without having to reinvent the wheel.

After researching the space in detail, Grant Thornton selected a suite of Poly systems to meet their needs.  The Poly Studio X30s they selected were more cost effective than the MTR options they reviewed, and they were so simple to install that they could manage the deployment internally – which also resulted in significant cost savings for the project.

Supplementing those, Poly Studio X50s and G7500s handled the larger and more complex rooms in the project.  Because all of these systems had the same user interface and firmware, Grant Thornton could standardize their user experience across all locations.  And, because they were all Android based appliances, they were able to easily slide into rooms to replace previously existing devices with only minor tweaks needed to existing automation and control systems.

“The complexity of our larger rooms with significant automation” provided an additional challenge, according to Carlo De-Fazio, Technology Officer at Grant Thornton.  “These rooms can sit between 20 and 250 people in any given video conference, and each individual room refit would have required significant investment to make it Microsoft Teams compatible.”

He explained that their research and comparisons quickly showed the Poly solutions to be the best option on the market.  “Not only was the cost of the [Poly] units less expensive than the Windows-based devices, but the installation was far simpler. Cabling locations, including various parts to the unit, were fewer, and the overall footprint was lighter,” said Carlo. “This meant we could do the installation ourselves, which not only saved money on the devices but the installation cost as well,” he added.

Over a series of months Grant Thornton started retrofitting the rooms themselves (with light touch support from their local vendors NQAV and Generation-e.)  “It became obvious how easy the device setup was, and the user experience was solid. Each month new features were added to the devices, and they quickly surpassed the Windows devices for feature parity” Carlo explained.  “The new rooms performed brilliantly. They look so professional, and our people have picked up the new interface very swiftly,” he highlighted.

“We saved millions of dollars and still had a premium finish” he explained.  However, he pointed out that in reality, “the saving was not as significant [to us] compared to how nice the new equipment is. The rooms look brilliant, and the devices were easy to setup. Overall, we could not be happier with our approach and outcome.”

Click above to hear Carlo explain in his own words.

When Grant Thornton looked for a solution that would allow their over fourteen-thousand employees to make hybrid working a seamless experience – no matter where they were working from – Poly systems were clearly the right answer.  To find out more about how Poly solutions can be the right answer for your organizations, and to learn about Poly’s unique, next-generation innovations like Poly Director AI and NoiseBlock AI, reach out to your local Poly representative.

SECURE A ONE-TIME DISCOUNT ON YOUR FIRST POLY MICROSOFT TEAMS ROOM

Poly is delighted to offer a unique, one-time discount on your first Microsoft Teams Room. This offer applies to both the Poly Studio Focus and Small/Medium Room Kits for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

For more information about Poly’s solutions for Microsoft Teams, contact a Poly representative or head to Poly.com!

For companies and institutions around the world, the pressure is on to create a plan to bring in new technology to support the return-to-office and enable productivity for hybrid teams. Hybrid is a complex new model which constitutes a fundamental challenge in how we will work moving forward. According to Microsoft’s latest Work Trends Index from March 2022, 38 percent of the workforce are now hybrid workers (an increase of seven points since 2021) and more than half of all workers (53 percent) are likely to consider transitioning to hybrid work this year.

Along with this evolution of the workforce, we’ve seen a rapid change in the technology designed to solve the problems introduced with the shift to hybrid. New solutions are rapidly coming to market, including webcams and speakerphones designed for home offices, headsets for mobile workers and video conferencing solutions that enable organizations to retrofit office space for a new era of collaboration.

With all this new tech coming to market, it’s imperative to stay up to date on the latest solutions. One of the best ways to accomplish this is through the simplicity and speed of a virtual briefing at one of our Poly Experience Centers. Here are three ways that virtual briefings can improve your productivity and help ease the transition to hybrid work:

1. Quick virtual demonstrations let you see new features and products. Short on time, but don’t want to miss out on the latest and greatest technology updates? With the click of a button, you can be connected to experts who give several technology demonstrations through an innovative virtual studio. In just 20 minutes, you’ll gain a good understanding of the benefits of the latest collaborative solutions.
2. Ready for a more in-depth tour, but unable to travel to a Poly Experience Center? Get a customized virtual briefing! In 1-2 hours, you can receive a customized, in-depth virtual briefing that is tailored specifically for your collaboration needs. Poly’s sales leadership and technical experts will be on hand to answer your questions and explain the business benefits. These in-depth tours are especially great for multinational corporations or those with complex network and infrastructure requirements. Special NDA roadmap sessions with virtual demonstrations are also available.
3. Host a virtual briefing event to educate your peers, partners and customers on the best solutions for hybrid work and return-to-office. If you have stakeholders in different locations, you can help them gain a faster, better understanding of collaborative technology solutions through a virtual briefing event. These don’t demand a big budget or long planning cycles—in 1-2 weeks, we can help you set up a nationwide virtual briefing event. The sessions can be coordinated and co-hosted with specific ecosystem and alliance partners, such as Microsoft, Zoom or Tencent Meeting, to best suit your environment and collaboration needs.

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to talk to Poly experts and see more hybrid work solutions during these live, highly productive virtual sessions. A virtual briefing is an excellent step toward finding the ideal solution for your organization’s needs and workstyles. To schedule a personalized demonstration, contact your Poly Account Manager or Partner.

For more information, visit the Poly Experience Program page on our website.

Chan Chen is Poly’s Experience & Demonstration Lead for the Asia Pacific region.

Remote working is what most people are now used to. That may be 100 percent remote or a few days per week as offices are re-opening. But what about the communications tools that remote workers were ‘used to’ even before Covid days? Those they feel make them as productive as possible, like the familiar desk phone. Poly’s latest persona research shows that 25 percent of enterprise employees still expect desk phones for home use. This can be a deployment, configuration, and maintenance nightmare for IT – just adding to the hybrid working chaos. Fear no more…

Poly is pleased to help tame the IT chaos with the CCX 505, the latest addition to our CCX Business Media Phone line with easy built-in Wi-Fi connectivity that is simple to connect and simple to use – perfect for the home office.

Remote Working is Tough:

A major challenge for remote working is feeling confident when in meetings and taking calls. The ideal work environment definitely doesn’t include the loud background noise or lack of connectivity that often come with a home office. These are the common pain points that Poly is dedicated to solving for remote workers, and that’s where the CCX 505 Business Media Phone comes in.

With award-winning audio technology such as Poly HD Voice and Poly Acoustic Clarity, users hear every nuance, voice inflection and social audio que, so they can communicate with confidence. Of course, those on the other end of the call or meeting need to hear clearly also. Fortunately, Poly’s Acoustic Fence and NoiseBlock AI eliminate distracting background noise, so one never has to worry about an untimely doorbell or pet.

The CCX 505 at Home

The CCX 505 would typically be considered an in-office communication tool. However, with the easy built-in Wi-Fi connectivity and advanced technology, it is a go-to selection for home desk phones. (Just be sure to pick up an accessory power supply, since the CCX 505 comes with a Power Over Ethernet cable by default.)

The CCX 505 features a five-inch color touchscreen—just one tap and you have access to all your contacts, meetings and settings. All CCX phones run on the Poly UC Software, powered by Android 9, providing an ever-evolving platform with features that can be updated via the cloud. Android 9 is already set to update in advance of our Microsoft Teams certification renewal, which is detailed in this Poly article.

The CCX 505 easily pairs with Poly headsets for hands free flexibility. The choice in USB ports, with a USB A and USB C both available on one desk phone, allows users to plug in their preferred headset or tether your phone to the laptop, using it as a speakerphone with a handset.

The CCX Family

The CCX 505 is the most recent model to join the Wi-Fi club, but the CCX family has a product for any workstyle or persona. The CCX 600 and CCX 700, for example, feature larger screens to better meet the needs of management teams or a Connected Executive. The CCX 700 in particular offers an integrated camera, which aligns best with those who require video through Zoom and other service providers. Although our CCX 505 works great with your team’s Remote Collaborator, if you don’t need a touchscreen interface, the Poly VVX 250, VVX 350 and VVX 450 are also great options that can be Wi-Fi enabled by adding a Poly USB Wi-Fi adapter.

How to Purchase the CCX 505 IP Phone

The CCX 505 is available in August so give your service provider a call and encourage them to make the switch! Or take some time and visit our Poly Desk Phones page to learn more about the CCX line.

Last December, we introduced a native Dialpad Meetings app experience for our Poly Studio X series—the latest step in the growing partnership between Dialpad and Poly. Together, we’ve continued to develop and enhance our offerings, and we’re excited about what’s coming next.

Let’s take a look at how far Dialpad and Poly have come with Dialpad Meetings for Rooms and what’s in store for the days ahead.

The Road so far for Hybrid Meetings

We’ve made solid progress since Dialpad Meetings for Rooms launched. Not only has there been plenty of demand and early adoption—especially with existing Dialpad Meetings customers—but customers have also chosen to upgrade their old devices. Their new Poly devices help them easily and fully leverage the solution for their web conferencing needs.

As Dialpad customers transition their workforces back to the office (or adopt a hybrid work environment), they’ve begun deploying room hardware. In fact, the rise of hybrid work has made room hardware more important than ever, as it helps connect in-office and remote employees in a way that makes it feel like everyone’s in the same room.

And it’s no wonder why customers are choosing Dialpad Meetings for Rooms! After all, it can be set up and launched in minutes, and joining meetings just takes a click. Dialpad Meetings is designed for efficient hybrid collaboration, so you can start or join meetings instantly from any device.

From there, you can enjoy Poly’s immersive audio and video capabilities, making it feel as if all participants are in the same room. It comes complete with next-gen beamforming microphones and Poly’s NoiseBlockAI to help you clearly hear everyone in the room without distractions.

All the while, Dialpad AI provides real-time transcriptions, so every note you need is available in an instant. You can even use the Miro integration to set up a digital whiteboard for everyone to collaborate on, regardless of your location.

What’s next?

We have plans for future capabilities that will help make meetings better, easier and more equitable for both participants in the room and those joining remotely. These include:

• New mobile controller options, so it’s even easier to join meetings from personal devices.
• Additional controls for the TC8, designed to make the in-room experience smoother and more efficient.
• New AI upgrades to streamline workflows.
• New devices to expand the hardware portfolio, including the upcoming Poly Trio C60.

Whether you’re communicating between office locations or joining from the comfort of your home, Dialpad and Poly will be there to create the greatest meeting experience possible. To learn more about Dialpad Meetings for Rooms, visit Dialpad.com

As employees return to the office, often adopting a hybrid working model, there is increasing pressure on IT to move beyond a break-fix model to keep teams at peak performance. Employees are relying on IT to help them be at their best, deliver results, stay in the flow and communicate effectively. Employees want to enjoy the experience of being back in the office with their co-workers, have the time to catch up and chat, and not worry about the technology in the meeting room they have booked.

Poly Remote Monitoring is designed for customers that want to provide proactive support to end-users. Even if you have the skillset to fix issues sometimes monitoring the status of meeting room devices can seem like a full-time challenge. Poly Remote Monitoring provides multi-vendor support and can monitor devices from leading vendors, including those that are native Zoom or Microsoft Teams. It’s a scalable, cloud-based, multi-tenant solution, based on ITIL framework and backed by global Poly services capabilities.

The service sets you up with data gathering tools that expertly monitor your collaboration and infrastructure environments and provides remote proactive and predictive monitoring to reduce outages so that you can concentrate on correcting and adjusting devices before problems occur. Poly will notify you of any potential problems and offer simple automated alerting and integration into your existing ticketing systems so you have time to resolve the issue before it causes any disruption to employees’ meetings.

There are three parts to our room-based Remote Monitoring platform which you can see in our 15-minute demonstration:

1. Dashboard that monitors current events and provides real-time information on the health of your organization’s collaboration devices – all devices, infrastructure, video, and audio endpoints. The dashboard includes a section that displays the top ten issues for you to be aware of, e.g. network latency or a problematic device that needs looking at.
2. Notifications that you can set up. You can configure alerts via email or via an optional ServiceNow integration – which sends you a notification if an issue is detected in real-time such as problems with memory, CPU utilization, packet loss or if the device is no longer reachable.
3. Reporting is created on demand and downloadable in Excel format and you can look at things such as availability, packet loss, unique events, a summary of your device estate, and utilization.

The Benefits of Remote Monitoring

• Significant cost reductions together with increased operational efficiency ‒ saves you the expense and complexity of building and managing an in-house built monitoring solution. Leverages Poly’s extensive experience in managing real-time communications systems and a rule set developed over a decade to eliminate false positives and just alert those issues which require attention.
• Ensures efficient network infrastructure control and management – monitor devices, networks and endpoints quickly and painlessly – you only need to get involved if there is a potential problem.
• Clear insights – dashboards providing advanced and intuitive reporting capabilities.
• 24×7 continuous monitoring in real-time – multiple locations provide you the flexibility to scale globally are all monitored using the same best practices and using the Poly remote team means that your own staff doesn’t have to be onsite 24×7.
• Reductions in time to resolve an incident ‒ your systems are remotely monitored and you are alerted of any potential problems with enhanced issue identification and information which you can then monitor more closely and take preventative/corrective action before it becomes a major issue.
• Improvements in customer satisfaction and adoption ‒ by being proactive you can save downtime and reduce end-user dissatisfaction; end users will be more likely to book office-based collaboration solutions if they have a seamless experience.
• Security – by using a locally hosted collector which sends traffic one way (outbound) only, the solution is inherently secure and is typically quickly approved by your IT Security team.
• Increased productivity ‒ The IT team can resolve issues more quickly and end users don’t have to report the issue and wait for it to be fixed, costing hours in productivity as the IT team is already on it and can reassign alternative meeting rooms/systems if required.

With 24/7 Poly Remote Monitoring, you are set up with the data gathering tools that expertly monitor your collaboration and infrastructure environments, enabling you to quickly get to the root of the problem and effectively resolve it.

Learn More

To see if Poly Remote Monitoring is the right managed service for you download our infographic, watch a one-minute introduction video, read our brochure, and learn more about the complete range of Poly Managed Services.

The chain of reactions set in motion in 2021 will spill over into 2022. We’ve learned to expect and adapt to changes as they occur, and now, professionals across every industry are hungry for better tools and spaces that support agility, empower the individual and provide an equitable experience. These trends will shape the world of work in the coming year and will be natural extensions of the pandemic-induced changes already in motion.

To prepare for the demands of the coming year, we called upon the insights of four Poly experts from across the world: Carl Wiese, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Poly worldwide; David Danto, Director of UC Strategy and Research for North America; Pierre-Jean Châlon, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific; and Paul Clark, Senior Vice President for EMEA.

Trend 1: Hybrid Work Lives On

The pandemic may have expedited the shift to hybrid and remote work, but success within this work model heralded a new expectation. Clark explains: “Workers who relish the perks of hybrid and flexible working have no desire to return to corporate life full time. Poly research found 80% of Europe and the Middle East employees prefer to spend some days working from home. With the economy picking up, professionals want more power to choose how they work and where.” Work is now what you do, not where you do it.

“One key aspect of hybrid working is allowing the employee to be the judge of where they need to be at any given time,” said Danto. To reinforce this point, Clark asserts, “Choice is a leveler and a catalyst for easy, meaningful and productive collaboration. It presents a great opportunity for HR, IT, facilities management and the wider business to be more attuned to what employees want from their experience of work.” He continues, “Rather than being an asset that requires managing, employees have adopted a customer persona; they know what they want, why, when and how—and they’ll tell you. Ignore them and they’ll go elsewhere!”

As we look toward 2022, a trend called the “the great resignation” is sweeping the workforce. Swaths of professionals are walking out the door in favor of better opportunities. “Research shows that over 40% of workers would actively look elsewhere if their employers fail to offer hybrid working,” said Clark. The demand for flexible work is clear and businesses need to shift quickly to accommodate these new expectations if they hope to attract and retain talent. This not only entails adapting traditional work models but getting ahead of the work-from-home challenges we have all become familiar with, including video fatigue, isolation and the struggle with work/life balance. Wiese predicts, “Companies that go the extra mile to offer workspaces and technology that foster a sense of wellness and belonging – both in the office and at home – will have an advantage when attracting and retaining top performers.”

Châlon explains how this shift is already impacting the job market: “It’s led to an increasing number of job openings listing remote work as a key requirement. In 2020, about a third of job vacancies involved work that could be done remotely, largely for PMET roles. Plus, more job seekers in Asia Pacific are searching remote-first roles due to health fear associated with working in-office.” While the early days of the pandemic are behind us, health and safety continue to be a top concern as the landscape changes—especially for job seekers. We can anticipate this will remain true in the new year.

Trend 2: The Office as Collaboration Hub

As professionals take control of when they are in the office and why, fewer people will be in the office regularly and will use the space differently, encouraging businesses to restructure their offices. “Offices will no longer be physical spaces with defined, individual spots,” said Clark. “Future workplaces will be ecosystems of spaces and rooms that match the working habits or needs of different personas.” In agreement, Châlon explains, “The office becomes a collaboration hub, serving as a place for teams to brainstorm in small groups, host client meetings, celebrate milestones and work on joint projects. Professionals will need spaces dedicated to specific purposes, including hot-desking, conference rooms with easy-to-use video conferencing systems, and better cameras and monitors for desktop video meetings.”

According to Clark, this trend “will lead to significant changes in architecture, real estate, room design and investment in collaboration devices and technologies in future office buildings, as all these disciplines collide to provide the very best work experience possible.” For many companies, this means reducing office space via subleasing by leveraging a ‘core and flex’ model or reducing their carbon footprint altogether by going almost fully remote. “In Singapore, central business district office occupiers could aim to reduce their footprint by 10% to 20% over the next three years,” said Châlon. Seeing this as a potential cost-saving opportunity that also meets the demands of the modern workforce, it’s likely this trend will continue in 2022.

Trend 3: Work Equity is a Priority

Flexible work offers many opportunities but also presents a new challenge: meeting equity. To truly succeed, business leaders will need to devise workplace strategies and investments that ensure an equitable work experience for all, regardless of work base, for optimal collaboration and productivity. Châlon advises, “Access to reliable communications is key to ensuring people receive the same information, at the same time and to avoid any inadvertent bias for those not physically present in the conference room.”

Châlon adds, “The need to solve imbalanced experiences for those inside and outside the office is real. While we are all aware of the interruptions remote workers contend with, office-based employees face their own challenges, too. They may have limited access to quiet rooms for video meetings, or noise-canceling headphones and microphones for meetings from their desks. Many meeting rooms only have one video camera and microphone that cannot pan wide enough to show everyone sitting around a table, making it hard for remote workers to decipher who is talking or the nuance of what is being discussed.” Danto asserts, “There are room systems on the market today that are smart enough to always show the right shot, and platforms that give each person in the meeting, remote or in-person, the same experience. You can expect even more of these features to hit the market in 2022 and bring us closer to the equity we need.”

Trend 4: Video is the Superhero

Technology investments will go beyond deploying solutions and focus on tools that improve the employee experience. People expect easy-to-use, reliable technology that minimizes disruptions and ensures they will look and sound great. As a result, Châlon predicts, “Many organizations and sectors will adopt a no-compromise attitude to ensure the highest quality video solutions are in place to support high-level productivity, resilience and customer service.”

This means the devices that bridged the communications gap at the beginning of the pandemic are no longer cutting it. Businesses must equip professionals with tools that empower the individual and support sustainable business practices. “This will drive an increased demand in pro-grade technology and collaboration tools that simplify the user experience, and in turn, improve productivity and collaboration,” said Châlon.

Video conferencing technology as a collaboration tool unleashes new opportunities for engagement globally. It has enriched the collaborative experience manyfold over the past two years and will continue to do so in 2022. Clark states, “Collaboration is required for a happy workforce, with the link between employee well-being and business performance well-documented,” and he warns, “Organizations that fail to support a flexible workplace in 2022 will struggle to build a collaborative culture.” Wiese agrees, explaining, “Those who don’t plan for the reality of video collaboration will see a loss in employee productivity and lower overall satisfaction.” Professional-grade video conferencing solutions will be pivotal to the 2022 workforce.

Châlon points out that it’s not just corporate professionals who need tools that improve their day-to-day work and practices. Professionals in government, real estate, education and medicine are especially hungry for solutions that enhance the end-user experience. Châlon states, “The rise in telemedicine, the boom of e-commerce, digital banking, hybrid call centres and more will be fueled by the flexible workforce,” and will require the tools that support productivity and business continuity. We’ve seen many organizations from these sectors revolutionize their way of work, improving their service with Poly solutions, and it will be rewarding to see more follow their footsteps in the coming year.

Trend 5: Home Offices are Leveling Up

The continued trend toward remote and hybrid work means home offices will be leveling up. Danto explains, “Home set-ups will need to improve. A built-in camera and a set of consumer earbuds won’t cut it long term. The way knowledge workers present themselves to clients and colleagues will significantly impact how they are perceived and how successful they can be.” Now that hybrid and remote options are here to stay, the workforce will become more interested in investing in their home office. To ensure their once temporary workspace is optimized for professional, sustainable work, professionals will outfit their spaces with pro-grade technology.

Office collaborators must also be able to move between their home and office bases with ease. Therefore, Châlon asserts, “It is essential that office collaborators are able to use the same infrastructure in the conference room as they do their home offices. The breadth that Poly’s product portfolio brings, for example, already gives enterprises the freedom and flexibility to make it possible.” Businesses that equip their workforce with the required tools and create an equitable experience will win at home and the corporate office.

Poly and BlueJeans by Verizon have a shared mission to empower businesses to quickly and seamlessly connect and collaborate whenever and wherever work needs to get done. In the new era of hybrid working, this means connecting team members who are widely distributed across geographies and increasingly spread between the corporate offices and remote working locations.  

Back in August, we announced an exciting milestone in our partnership with the certification of Poly’s new line of personal video conferencing devices, the Poly Studio P Series, to ensure those working from home offices can be confident that they will look and sound great on every call with a reliable and seamless BlueJeans meeting experience. 

This past week at Enterprise Connect we were excited to build on our partnership with BlueJeans announcing the availability of their new Android-based version of BlueJeans Rooms, including a native app experience for the Poly Studio X family of video bars and G7500 based room systems.   

As team members are increasingly coming back to the office, they can rely on Poly and BlueJeans to outfit their huddle spaces and conference rooms with pro-grade audio and video gear that is quick to deploy, easy to use, and ensures an equitable meeting experience for everyone, regardless of whether they are in the room or joining remotely.  

What does this mean? Well, here’s a summary: 

• Simple, quick deployment: as all-in-one devices, Poly Studio X video bars make it easy to get up and running quickly.  Simply unbox, connect, and log in to your BlueJeans Rooms account and within a few minutes, your meeting room can be set up and running. 

• Easy control and content sharing: because the BlueJeans Rooms application is built into the Poly Studio X hardware, meeting participants can easily join meetings with one touch and control the experience using the Poly TC8 controller. Additionally, participants can share content wirelessly to the Poly Studio X endpoint from devices running the BlueJeans application. 

• Powerful features to get the most from meetings: Poly Studio X endpoints are packed with video and audio innovations aimed at providing a better meeting experience such as automatic camera framing, advanced microphone design, NoiseBlock AI, and Acoustic Fence.  These features help everyone to see and hear the active participants clearly while eliminating distracting noises such as typing or conversations outside of the meeting room. 

As we collectively enter this next phase of hybrid work, we could not be more excited to continue growing our partnership with BlueJeans that helps to deliver an amazing experience for our joint customers. No matter how or where you work, Poly and BlueJeans have a solution to meet your collaboration needs and ensure that every meeting participant has an equal opportunity to shine.  

To learn more, go to https://www.bluejeans.com/partners/poly 

What is the future of the call center? I know where we can find the answer…

The answer is cloudy. No meatballs though.

Covid didn’t cause a change in the future direction of call centers, it accelerated that change. Companies have been on the path of automation, remote working, and cloud for many years now – Covid did sharpen the focus on business continuity though!

At Poly we’re proud of our ability to predict, align to the latest industry trends, and create superbly designed products to exceed customer expectations. And we’re proud to join Chrome OS as they announce fully integrated solutions for call centers.

Chrome OS provides the best platform for a call center.  Enabling organizations to:

• Protect business and customer information
• Increase agent productivity
• Deploy and manage easily

Poly provides the best solutions for the employee, enabling organizations to:

• Make a real connection
• Move to the cloud
• Empower employees

We are working with Chrome OS and our existing partners at Five9, Ringcentral, Vonage, 8×8 and Citrix to launch an entirely new way for companies to provide their critical customer experience, and jointly solve challenges for the hybrid call center:

Flexible Working

• Employees can now work in the home or in the office, so they need light, portable devices that are easily transportable. Organizations need high security with many devices no longer being on premises.

Increase Productivity

• There’s no room for complexity; Devices and interfaces must ensure employees quickly and easily understand the information in front of them, and what a customer is saying to them.

Video Interactions

• With employees working remotely, team meetings and training now need video front and center to keep employees connected.  We’re seeing the rise of video customer interactions – make sure your employees are ready with devices that show their best side.

Retain Employees

• A key global challenge is how to keep your best employees.  Start by making it easy for them, empower them to make the best decisions, and ensure their safety.

When looking for progress, sometimes a revolution is needed, rather than evolution, and this is why we are so excited to see Chrome OS offer a fully integrated solution for call centers. Chrome OS has unique advantages that are particularly suitable for a distributed workforce including built-in security, automatic updating, easy onboarding, and a familiar interface. Combine that with easy IT deprovisioning and redistribution to new staff, and you have a winner that establishes and drives a cloud-first way of working.

However, some things don’t change in customer experience, and that’s where Poly comes in. Our knowledge of delivering an enterprise experience at the edge, combined with our comprehensive portfolio, fit for purpose and fully certified as part of the Works with Chomebook program, means Poly looks forward to maintaining our thought and market  leadership on this new innovation frontier.

For more information on Poly’s solutions for call centers visit Poly.com