Bridging the gap to the new hybrid workspace

This article as been posted by Alexandre Champagne, President at SBK Telecom

Hybrid workspace

More and more organisations are now well advanced in defining the new reality of a potential post-pandemic return to the office. What will this office look like now that more and more employers are integrating people working from remote locations and on-premise staff?

The ability to work from wherever we want is what has gotten many organisations through this pandemic and we are not even through it yet !

The term “hybrid workspace” is now a common factor into this new definition of this place we used to call “the office”.  Past decades have dictated how a business should be run and COVID-19 just turned this model upside down in the blink of an eye. We have changed the way we interact and “the office” had to adapt to this new way of collaborating: and the changes are drastic.

Many more modern organisation had already transitioned from the cubicle and corner office model to a more open and flexible environment. That included unassigned desks and multifunction rooms that can be used for various purposed and the ability to use facilities depending on the tasks to be completed or nature of the projects to be carried out. 

The notion of “hybrid” takes our workspace to a new level with not only a very flexible floorplan but it now needs to accommodate the remote team. It is not static: it breathes and stretches depending on various individual preferences of your fellow team members.

Let’s take a step back here and identify what this new “elastic” workforce team looks like.

Teleworking

Employees who are 100% remote, or who come into the office for certain periods of time depending on various factors. Not only does this allow staff members to spend less time commuting, but it can also stretch the boundaries previously enforce by your recruiting team in their hiring process. 

Global team and expatriate workers

With the introduction of new collaboration tools and technologies, teams are no longer attached to a physical geographical location or need to be in a location with an assigned physical office. This opens a new world of possibilities in times where workforce shortage is a definite reality. 

Technology has helped many organizations survive this pandemic and those same technologies are now the foundation of this new Hybrid workspace. 

Unified Cloud Collaboration

As a cloud based platform UCaaS allows secure collaboration from anywhere and using any device depending on the required media.

Chat, voice and video are now the most important requirement that make many organisation massively migrate to UCAAS cloud providers.

Standard desk phone, dedicated software phone, mobile device or voice fully integration with your collaboration tools, we are no longer in a BYOD (Bring your own device) era but it’s now technology that has invited itself onto all possible platforms.  Those cloud service providers now allow you to scale very quickly and adapt to seasonal aspect of any businesses. 

Contact Center as a service (CCaaS)

What required significant investments in that past, especially when dealing with multiple locations, can now be enabled across those same multifunction devices and with substantial cost savings.

 Imagine being able to:

• Serve your customers across multiple channels and get consolidated KPI’s withing a single solution.
• Scale your team as quickly as you want without any investment I

That’s what CCaaS does and does very well. 

Cloud based workloads

No longer are we investing large amount of capital in “bare metal” servers. We are not only talking about transferring your workloads to dedicated data centers but moving them to the cloud and provide them the elasticity that they need to evolve with your business. Databases, applications, storage can now be replicated across various geographical areas for performance or redundancy. 

And to sum it up, all those As a Service solution are now integrating API’s (Application Programming Interface) to make sure that all your tools can integrate seamlessly with each other and create tremendous value to your users.

Best of breeds connected with API’s that is what our technology future looks like, and we have barely scratched the surface of what this new as a service cloud-based era as to offer. 

"I am personally very excited to see what this new era of Hybrid workspace and collaboration has to offer. If I can think of one positive outcome of this pandemic, it would be that it allowed us to be receptive to innovating work methods and elevated remote collaboration to levels we had never thought of."

Alexandre Champagne, President at SBK Telecom