Facing Tough Issues on Hybrid WorkFacing Tough Issues on Hybrid Work

As we hit the halfway point of what was supposed to be a summer of returning to the office, the state of hybrid work remains in flux. COVID spikes and employee resistance have kept the story from being quite as tidy as many hoped it would be when the process began in earnest in early April. But IT/communications teams are pressing forward with the work that will have to be done if some form of hybrid work is to emerge from the pandemic.

It’s a good time for a mid-course check-in on communications technology and hybrid work, and that’s what Enterprise Connect is going to do on Sept. 28, when we present a digital program entitled, “Facing the Tough Issues on Hybrid Work: How Communications Technology Will Support New Ways of Working.” We’re going to touch base on some of the key issues that enterprises face as they navigate through an uncertain time — toward an uncertain future.

For example, one key element for success in the return-to-office is multivendor interoperability for video rooms. Earlier this year, enterprises were finding it challenging to get video room systems from different vendors to talk to each other, which obviously makes these setups less useful — especially if the office is being reimagined to emphasize more of these group meeting spaces.

Our two sessions on video room interoperability at Enterprise Connect Orlando, led by Jim Burton of CT-Link/BCStrategies and Jim Kelly of Recon Research, were among the best-attended at the show. In his session, Burton got representatives of Microsoft, Zoom, and Cisco to agree to address the problem. In our Sept. 28 digital event, Kelly will update the analysis he delivered last March, in which he presented Recon’s data evaluating the true level of interoperability. I’m hoping he’ll be able to report that there’s been progress on this front.

Another issue we’ll tackle in our digital sessions is E911, which continues to draw high interest across everything Enterprise Connect presents — webinars, No Jitter posts, and sessions at the Orlando event. E911 implementation is turning out to be a complex challenge, exacerbated by the uncertainty of the hybrid work situation. E911 is all about enterprise systems knowing and conveying the end user’s location to the public service infrastructure, and many workers’ day-to-day location is exactly what isn’t resolved yet in hybrid work strategies. For the Sept. 28 program, Irwin Lazar of Metrigy will share his insights on the latest developments and lessons learned.

One last session I want to highlight here isn’t about technology as such but how you deploy it successfully in the current environment. Melissa Swartz of Swartz Consulting, whose work focuses on helping enterprises implement communications technology, will give a talk on Using Change Management Strategies to Drive Hybrid Work Success. Swartz is a regular speaker at Enterprise Connect, and many of her talks focus not just on the technology but how to succeed at deploying it and getting end users to actually adopt it. Her session on Sept. 28 is sure to include lots of practical tips for how you can increase your chances of success for whatever deployments and strategies you’ll be rolling out the rest of this year.

We’ve got more sessions for the digital event, including a keynote with some really interesting findings from the Future of Work survey that Omdia Principal Analyst Adam Holtby has just completed. I’m excited to tell you more about these and the rest of the program for Sept. 28. You can see the whole program and sign up for free here. I hope to see you there.