Meeting: Nearly every organization has embraced video collaboration in recent years, but relatively few have optimized their meeting environments. Investing in advanced cameras, digital displays, video software and even headsets can dramatically improve the meeting experience for employees, leaders and customers. This is especially important for organizations that heavily rely on hybrid meetings, which can pose limitations for remote participants. By establishing meeting parity, where all participants have an excellent experience, organizations can help users contribute effectively to any meeting. For in-office interactions, users expect well-equipped spaces such as hotel desks, conference rooms and huddle rooms that give them access to high-quality visual and audio experiences.

Sharing and Co-Authoring: Modern collaboration platforms enable users not only to communicate effectively but also to work together in real time from wherever they happen to be. For example, screen-sharing features allow users to present content to others, which can facilitate detailed project reviews or spontaneous brainstorming sessions. Digital whiteboarding offers another avenue for team members to collaborate, providing dynamic visual experiences that enable planning and idea generation among both remote and in-office users. And collaborative document editing and co-authoring features help users to quickly and seamlessly make unique contributions to team projects, with tracked changes, comments and version histories ensuring that the best ideas are preserved and can rise to the top.

Control Access to Data: Ultimately, an optimized hybrid work experience will give employees access to the right data at the right time. For example, a select group of users could get access to a new internal enterprise application on their smartphones, but that access would be strictly controlled. The goal is to enable users to be productive and do their jobs from anywhere while also mitigating security concerns.

Reduce the Burden on IT Teams: Supporting the day-to-day operation of an organization’s hybrid work environment is not a revenue-generating task. Many IT and business executives prefer to offload maintenance responsibilities to a trusted partner. By using managed services for collaboration technology, organizations can reduce their data center footprint, streamline support and speed up services to users while accommodating different platforms and enabling one-stop management for functions such as ticketing, reporting and billing.

Harness Low-Code/No-Code Tools: Low-code and no-code development tools enable end users who may not have coding skills to become citizen developers, creating apps without needing to involve IT resources or programmers. These tools offer drag-and-drop functionality and templates for common features such as e-commerce capabilities. They can help organizations dramatically increase the speed and efficiency with which they deploy new applications.

Integrate CRM Capabilities: Many organizations are integrating their customer relationship management tools within their digital work environments. By providing employees with greater CRM capabilities, organizations can help them to be more proactive and improve customer engagement. For example, a fully integrated CRM system can alert a user in the contact center that the customer they’re interacting with recently placed an order, then provide information about the order to enable a better customer experience.