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

Welcome to the exciting new world of hybrid work.

“Somewhere near 60% of the workforce are opting for the hybrid option,” said Gartner analyst Suzanne Adnams, “meaning their ideal is to work from home and come 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, I’d pay for a socially distant steak dinner.

What’s not so clear? Where you go once you get to the office. That 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 now further apart.

• Hot desking: The horribly named trend where employees don’t have a dedicated desk. Also called hoteling, flexing, or desk swapping, this is becoming the leading hybrid option for one important reason: there is no point in having 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. So instead of desks, there are usually group meetings, with a privacy telephone booth here and there. Businesses, including Dropbox, have committed to this route.

I certainly cannot tell you in detail what will happen in your business, but I can say that this hybrid life will make you even more dependent on your technical tools. The technology that allows us to work anywhere (laptops and smartphones, video calling, Slack) is also the technology that makes this so cluttered.

Are your colleagues in the office whiteboarding but are you stuck in a small Zoom box at home? You survive the commute to the office, but discover you’ve left your USB-C dongle on the kitchen table. Hey, Bob from Accounting, stop yelling on your video call. This is not your basement!

But I have hope. Not only did we prove our technical resilience when we embarked on the Great Work-From-Home Experiment a year ago, but the makers of our most dependent products are watching and adapting for this next phase. Here are some of the biggest hybrid challenges and some possible solutions.

I’m back to the good old commute, but my warm desk has nothing, not even a coffee stain.

There are no two ways, you need a bigger bag. And for the record, anyone who tells you that a backpack is only for high school students is simply wrong.

When you get to your building (assuming you remember where it is) you may need to bring out your phone. Your employer may need Covid-era medical check-ins and other precautions, but it may also give you the option to book your workspace through systems like Salesforce’s Robin or Work.com.

Congratulations, you’ve reached ‘your’ desk. I can’t guess what technology will be available when you get there, but expect it to be pretty bare, especially if you have BYOL (you know, bring your own laptop).

In Salesforce‘s

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

At the very least, Salesforce employees will be able to keep other belongings in lockers and easily get other technical peripherals – mice, keyboards, headsets, chargers – from tech vending machines around the offices. You don’t pay. Just swipe your employee badge, hit the button for your item and take it from the bottom drawer.

If your office’s vending machines are only handing out old Doritos, you can request things through your IT department. Either way, you’ll likely be dragging your favorite gear back and forth. Sure, more expensive items you don’t have two of – tablets, microphones, noise-canceling headphones – will be in your bag.

For the smaller things – batteries, charging cables, a mouse and the various adapters to connect drives, memory cards and cables to your laptop – you need a dongle bag. Don’t have one yet? Oh, you have to. The one I just got, the InCase nylon accessory organizer, has mesh pockets and straps for organizing various cords and adapters. It lists for $ 50, but I got it for $ 15.

I am in the office with a few colleagues. Other colleagues are at home.

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

“It’s hard to imagine entering an office now and all those small enclosed spaces that might have had a phone in them weren’t suitable for video,” Logitech Chief Executive Bracken Darrell told me, adding that he expects from some companies that they have webcams at hot-desk stations as well.

Executives who work on collaboration platforms at Microsoft

Google, Slack and Zoom said it is a major need for employees at home and at work to feel on an equal footing when making calls and working together. Here are initiatives they have launched:

Microsoft Teams: A system called Teams Rooms connects conference rooms with external users who want to join. Speech recognition in new compatible speakers can identify who is talking in a room, and the person’s name will appear on the screen. Don’t be ashamed to call in at home either: a new presentation mode removes the background from your video and places you in front of the presentation, or places the presentation in a frame over your shoulder in “reporter mode”.

Google Workspace: Google also powers speakers and cameras for the office, but when people leave the house, they will also use their phones more for video calls. An update to the Google Meet phone app will help people see better on video. An upcoming update to Google Docs, Sheets and Slides will include the ability to superimpose voice and video chats as people collaborate on documents.

Clearance: An audio room feature is coming so users can quickly join a conference call. Think Clubhouse for quick meetings. The company, which wanted to buy Salesforce, is also adding a feature for sharing pre-recorded video messages. This can help a manager send an announcement to everyone, whether they are in the office or at home.

Zoom: The pandemic breakout star has her own conference room service called, say with me, Zoom Rooms. The company’s Zoom Rooms Controller app for iOS and Android allows people in the conference room to control meetings from their phones – no need to touch the room’s dingy shared keyboard or control panel.

A bigger challenge: what if the in-person meeting contains physical things, such as a whiteboard? How do the people at home keep up and contribute?

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

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

The upside to all of this is that it won’t be as bad to be stuck at home as it once was. You’re already fine-tuning your setup, and some companies even plan to continue subsidizing employees’ home office needs. And now that you’ve gotten used to communicating your schedule and deadlines too much? You just keep doing that, wherever you are.

Google has added a number of features to its calendar to help, including what it calls “ segmentable working hours. ” You can make it clear to colleagues at which location you work or whether you do something else, such as sports or commuting. Slack is also looking into adding more status options to indicate your whereabouts.

This return to the office may have a slick name – hybrid work – but make no mistake, it’s just as hybrid as Frankenstein’s monster. Remember, we went through a pretty disastrous change of work a year ago, and we will do it again. Don’t forget the dog.

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Write to Joanna Stern at [email protected]