Enterprises are facing a unique challenge: how to make the office a magnet, not a mandate, for employees. The traditional paradigm of office work has shifted dramatically, with remote and hybrid work becoming the new norm. While many businesses are eager to bring employees back to the office, they are encountering a surprising dilemma—employees often experience better user experience when working from home, particularly when accessing key collaboration and cloud-native applications like Microsoft Teams, Webex by Cisco, ServiceNow, SAP, and more.

The Hybrid Work Conundrum

The world of work has changed. The office is no longer universally accepted as the de facto hub for collaboration, innovation, and team bonding. Employees have adapted to the flexibility and convenience of remote work, and many have grown accustomed to the user experience they have when working from home.

The heart of the challenge lies in the varying user experiences between the office and remote work settings. For many employees, the office environment can often lead to frustration due to issues like network latency, unreliable video conferencing, and sluggish cloud application performance. In contrast, the remote work environment, when well-supported, offers consistent access and performance for these critical tools.

The Need for Consistency

To overcome this challenge, businesses must ensure that the collaborative experiences employees receive in the office meet or exceed the experiences they receive at home.

Four key considerations to address this challenge:

  1. Performance Optimization: Organizations need to invest in technologies that optimize the performance of their virtual collaboration tools. For example, implementing an ECDN to ensure the delivery of high-quality video content to all your employees.
  2. Network Visibility: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” Businesses should invest in solutions that provide comprehensive visibility into network performance, enabling IT teams to identify and resolve issues promptly.
  3. Scalability: Ensure that the solutions in place can seamlessly scale to accommodate growing demands, whether that's an increase in headcount or fluctuations in network traffic in the office.
  4. Security & Compliance: In the pursuit of consistency, don't compromise on security and compliance. Protecting sensitive data and ensuring that remote work environments adhere to your security standards is paramount.

The Path Forward

Offices provide benefits that cannot be replicated in remote work environments. While the office may not be a mandate, it can be a magnet when it offers experiences that rival or exceed the comfort of remote work. By addressing the challenges of network performance, visibility, and collaboration tool optimization, enterprises can make their offices more appealing to employees. Leveling the gaps in user experience between remote and office work environments is key to fostering a balanced and productive hybrid work model.

Kollective is committed to supporting businesses on this journey. With Kollective’s Video Collaboration Optimization and Observability platform, we help organizations bring consistent visibility and performance to the hybrid world. As the workplace continues to evolve, our aim is to make sure that your office remains an attractive hub for collaboration, without sacrificing the user experience that employees value while working remotely.

The future of work is a blend of physical and virtual spaces. It's time to make the office not just a place to work, but a destination that employees genuinely look forward to visiting.