From telework to hybrid: the technology you need to connect home and office

Hope your magical Mary Poppins, go-back-to-the-office bag is ready. Let’s see, you need your laptop, your laptop’s power adapter, your headphones, your headphones’ power adapter, your ring light, the power adapter of your ring light …

Oh, and you thought it was just a one-time suit? It’s cute. Prepare to do this two to three times a week, splitting the time between your home office and your office for the next, well, forever.

Welcome to the exciting new world of hybrid work.

“Somewhere around 60% of staff choose the hybrid option,” said Gartner analyst Suzanne Adnams, “which means they are ideal for working from home and coming to the office three days a week.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard ‘two to three days in the office’ while reporting this column, a socially distant steak meal would have been on me.

What is not so clear? Where to go as soon as you get to the office. It depends on your employer. Here are three possible options:

• Same old desk: Business as usual. You still get your own desk, but maybe your chair and your colleague’s chair are further apart.

• Warm desk: The terribly named trend where employees do not have a fixed desk. It also becomes around hotels, bending or changing desks, the most important hybrid option, for the main reason: it does not make sense to have one desk per person if people only come in a few times a week.

• No desk: The office is not for solo work, but for collaboration. Instead of desks, there are mostly group meeting areas, with a privacy phone booth here and there. Businesses, including Dropbox, have committed themselves to this route.

A mockup of Salesforce’s future hot desks.


Photo:

Sales team

I can certainly not tell you in detail what is going to happen to your business, but I can say that this hybrid life will make you even more dependent on your technological tools. The technology that enables us to work from anywhere (laptops and smartphones, video calls, Slack), is also the technology that makes it so confusing.

Your colleagues are whiteboarding at the office, but are you sitting in a small Zoom box at home? You survive the commute to the office, only to find that you have left your USB-C dongle on the kitchen table. Hello, Bob from accounting, stop screaming during your video call. This is not your basement!

But I have hope. Not only did we prove our technological resilience when we launched the Great Work-From-Home experiment a year ago, but the manufacturers of our most dependent products are paying attention and adapting for this next phase. Here are some of the biggest hybrid challenges and some potential solutions.

I’m back to the good old commute, but at my hot desk I have nothing, not even a coffee mug.

There are no two ways about it; you need a bigger bag. And for the record: anyone who tells you a backpack is only for middle-class students is just wrong.

With the Robin app, you can book your desk space before going to the office.


Photo:

Robin powered

If you go to your building (assuming you remember where it is), you may need to unplug your phone. Your employer may need Covid-era health examinations and other precautions, but it may also give you the opportunity to discuss your workspace through systems such as Robin or Salesforce’s Work.com.

Congratulations, you have reached your “desk”. I can not guess the technology that will be available when you get there, but expect it to be fairly bare, especially if you have BYOL (you know, bring your own laptop).

In Salesforcesay

redesigned spaces, for example, employees only get a desk and two monitors next to each other, Jo-ann Olsovsky, the company’s chief information officer, told me.

Salesforce has sales machines with technical peripherals that you need. Delete your employee ID and you will get what you need for free.


Photo:

Sales team

At the very least, Salesforce employees will be able to keep other belongings in closets and easily get other technological peripherals – mice, keyboards, headers, chargers – from technological vending machines around the offices. You do not pay. Just swipe your worker badge, press the button for your item and grab it from the bottom tray.

If your office vending machine only hands out old Doritos, you can request them through your IT department. Regardless, you will probably drag your favorite equipment back and forth. There are definitely more expensive equipment that you do not own two – tablets, microphones, sound-canceling headphones – in your suitcase.

For the smaller stuff – battery packs, charging cords, a mouse and various adapters to connect chips, memory cards and cables to your laptop – you need a dongle bag. Don’t have one yet? Oh, you must. The one I just got, the InCase nylon accessory organizer, has mesh compartments and straps to organize different ropes and adapters. It contains a list of $ 50, but I got it for $ 15.

Everyone needs a dongle bag now. This one from InCase can even fit your mouse and AirPods.


Photo:

Joanna Stern / The Wall Street Journal

I’m in the office with some colleagues. Other colleagues are at home.

If you think going back to office then means the end of video calls, I have bad news for you. Expect that most meetings will have a video component in the future and that there will be even more cameras in the office – and not just in the conference rooms.

“It’s hard to imagine you going into an office now and all the small enclosed spaces that may have had a phone in were not video activated,” Logackenech CEO Bracken Darrell told told me and added that he expects some companies to install webcams hot. desk stations too.

Managers working on collaboration platforms at Microsoft,

Google, Slack and Zoom said an important need is for employees to feel at home and at work on an equal footing during calls and collaboration. Here’s an initiative they launched:

Microsoft team: A system called Teams Rooms connects conference rooms with remote users who want to participate. Speech recognition in new compatible speakers can identify who is speaking in a room and the person’s name will appear on the screen. You will also not be embarrassed to switch on from home: A new presenter mode removes the background of your video and places you before the presentation, or places the presentation in a box over your shoulder in ‘reporter mode’.

In Microsoft’s vision for the future of conference rooms, some people are physically in space and others appear as video avatars.


Photo:

Microsoft

Google Workspace: Google also provides speakers and cameras for the office, but when people leave home, they will also use their phones more for video calls. An update to the Google Meet mobile app will allow people to see more on video. An upcoming update to Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides will include the ability to cover voice and video chats while people work together on documents.

Google will soon have a video call with someone inside a document.


Photo:

Google

Slap: A sound room feature is coming up so users can quickly jump on a conference call. Think of clubhouse, but for quick meetings. The company, which Salesforce agreed to buy, also adds a feature for sharing pre-recorded video messages. It can help a manager send an announcement to everyone, whether they are in the office or at home.

Zoom: The outbreak of the pandemic has its own conference room service, it says with me, Zoom Rooms. With the company’s Zoom Rooms Controller app for iOS and Android, people in the conference room can control meetings from their phones – no need to touch the dirty shared keyboard or room control panel.

A bigger challenge: what if the personal meeting contains physical things like a whiteboard? How do the people at home keep up and contribute?

Google and Microsoft tried to make it easier. Microsoft makes the Surface Hub – a giant Windows tablet for offices that connects the Microsoft Whiteboard app to the cloud. Those who have a Microsoft Teams call can view and add the digital whiteboard. Same idea with Google’s Jamboard. People in the office can scratch on the giant screen and those in a Google Meet video call can see and add to it. Zoom works with third-party hardware manufacturers to integrate whiteboarding.

I work from home today – how do I share it with the world?

The benefit of it all being stuck at home will not be as bad as it used to be. You are already working on your essay, and some companies even plan to continue to subsidize the needs of employees at home. And now that you’ve gotten used to the hustle and bustle of your schedule and deadlines? You keep doing it, wherever you are.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

How do you expect your return to work to be? How would you prepare for a hybrid situation? Join the conversation below.

Google has added some features to its calendar to help, including what it calls ‘segmentable business hours’. You can make it clear to colleagues from what place you work, or if you do something else, such as exercising or commuting. Slack is also exploring the addition of more status options to indicate where you are.

This return to the office may have a smooth name – hybrid work – but make no mistake, it’s as hybrid as Frankenstein’s monster. Just remember, a year ago we underwent a pretty big change, and we will do it again. Just do not forget about the dog.

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Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]

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