HP’s recently published Work Relationship Index, based on a global survey of 12,000 knowledge workers, 3,600 IT decision makers, and 1,200 business leaders, reveals a universal problem: Employees have an unhealthy relationship with work. HP exec Andy Rhodes summarizes the challenges and highlights ways to foster actions that will drive improvement.

At any level of government from local to national, any department’s or administration’s success requires addressing security, compliance, and reliability needs.

The same trends that have reshaped private sector collaboration over the last several years: remote work, growing use of video conferencing, and AI, are also reshaping collaboration for the public sector. However, Metrigy’s research shows that governments at all levels; local, state, and federal; face unique challenges and requirements.

REMOTE WORK


Like most organizations, the government response to the Covid pandemic was to transition from in-office to remote work. More recently, many US government organizations have moved more aggressively to bring employees back to the office on a part or full-time basis. In February of 2023 the US House of Representatives passed the SHOW UP Act, requiring government agencies to go back to 2019 telework policies, thus ending remote work for much of the US Federal workforce. The Senate has not yet acted on this bill, but is considering its own telework reform bill, also designed to bring government workers back to the office. Back in September of this year, the Biden Administration joined the effort, advising Cabinet officials to push for remote work reduction.

These efforts are driven by a variety of factors including improving interpersonal relationships, making use of existing office space, and bringing dollars back into areas hard hit by the loss of commuters.

Some state governments, including in my home state of Virginia, have joined in on the effort to curtail remote work. Metrigy’s research data shows that nearly 59% of government agency participants in our Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 study planned to require full-time in-office work in the future, with almost 12% requiring at least part-time in-office work.

The accelerating trend in government to bring employees back to the office has significant implications for communications and collaboration strategies. Networks are likely to be strained as video utilization is at much higher levels than before the pandemic. Employees will demand high quality experiences through the availability of personal and meeting room audio and video devices. And agencies will have to enable capabilities such as digital whiteboards and multiple in-room cameras to ensure that those who are still remote are able to fully participate in meetings and collaborative sessions.

SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

A mobile and hybrid workforce makes phone location and 911 call routing challenging. Explore ways to ensure your company is doing all it can to protect employees in an emergency.

For those who manage phone systems, a key responsibility is ensuring that calls to 911 are sent to the proper answering point, and accurate caller location information is available to emergency call center operators.

That task has been complicated by three fundamental paradigm shifts in the communications and calling space:

An effective Enhanced 911 (E911) compliance strategy has two important functions:

  1. To maintain accurate phone location information, regardless of the type of endpoint and whether it is on the enterprise network or remotely connected to company-provided phone services.
  2. To ensure 911 calls are transmitted to the proper emergency call center (ECC) or public safety answering point (PSAP) based on the caller’s current location. For example, if a person with a company office in Chicago is working from home in Milwaukee, the 911 call must reach the 911 operator in Milwaukee so emergency personnel are dispatched to the right location.

Meeting these goals in an ever-changing environment requires a proactive approach. Improper location management and call routing makes an organization vulnerable to regulatory liability, civil risk and, more importantly, employee health and safety.

Steps to ensure compliance and minimize risk

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Metrigy’s MetriRank study evaluates leading UCaaS providers on a fixed set of criteria to assess which are best positioned to succeed in the long term.

October 26, 2023 – Research and advisory firm Metrigy released its UCaaS MetriRank 2023 report, identifying the Top 10 providers leading the market today and best positioned for long-term success. Microsoft has earned top ranking, based on market share, financials, market share momentum, product mix, customer sentiment, and customer business success.

“Microsoft is the undisputed leader in our first UCaaS MetriRank report, with the largest market share, strong financials, and above-average market momentum and customer sentiment ratings. Over the past three years, Microsoft with Teams has extended its market share, putting it at the top of the market and on the short list of most UCaaS evaluations,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst responsible for Metrigy’s MetriRank reports as well as market sizing and forecasting.

Metrigy 2023 UCaaS MetriRank Highlights

Metrigy defines UCaaS as a cloud-based suite of integrated communications and collaboration applications. At a minimum, UCaaS offerings must include calling to and from the public switched telephone network (PSTN). UCaaS may be sold as telephone-only services or be bundled with other UC features, including meetings and messaging. The service provider hosts all applications for call control, though customers may deploy local equipment for PSTN connectivity and remote site survivability.

The global market for UCaaS was $19.0 billion in 2022, up 8% year-over-year. Metrigy forecasts the market to grow at a 5% CAGR from 2022 to 2027, reaching $24.4 billion by 2027. The UCaaS market has been highly competitive, with providers of varying sizes, capabilities, and reach—some are global, and others are regional. However, the market has coalesced around a few large providers, with Microsoft at the top and tough to beat, forcing other UCaaS providers to figure out ways to coexist with integrated telephony and contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) solutions.

In determining companies in the UCaaS MetriRank, market share is important to overall leadership, but financial strength and customer sentiment are significant at setting providers apart in the rankings. Having the right mix of features and capabilities is critical, although most of the top-tier providers share common capabilities today.

The full report, including all of our methodology, scoring, a deep-dive profile on each provider, and much more, is available for purchase. If you are interested in Metrigy’s UCaaS MetriRank study, please reach out to Layne Haaksma, [email protected].

Metrigy recently conducted a study of Microsoft Teams Phone users to understand how they are connecting Teams Phone to the PSTN, and the costs of various options. In this informative webinar we’ll share the benefits and limitations of Calling Plan, Direct Routing, and Operator Connect and share insights into the various costs associated with each option.

Understanding Microsoft Teams Phone PSTN Choices and Costs

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: November 28, 2023
Time: 11:00 am ET

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As much as the communications and collaboration industry touts “cloud, cloud, cloud” and businesses embrace the as-a-service model, tolling a death knell for on-premises systems would be premature, as we see in findings from our Workplace Collaboration MetriCast 2023 market size and forecast study.

In this study, 59.3% of the participating companies say they’re utilizing business phone systems. Among them, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is the most prevalent phone architecture today, and the movement in this direction is clear. However, the gap between UCaaS and other architectural choices isn’t as wide as you might expect given the mindshare cloud seems to have.

According to our WC MetriCast research, here’s how the percentages shake out: 36.9% are using UCaaS, 30.6% own and manage their own platform on their premises, and another 33.1% have dedicated hosted platforms. (These latter we define as third party-managed dedicated instances of a hosted platform.)

By company size, more than half of businesses within each of four bands—250 employees or fewer, 251 to 2,500 employees, 2,501 to 10,000 employees, and more than 10,000 employees—still have a dedicated platform, whether managed by the company itself on premises or in a third party’s dedicated hosted environment. On-premises PBX and UC solutions are most prevalent within mid-market companies (251 to 2,500 employees) and dedicated hosted has its largest use within larger enterprises (2,501 to 10,000 employees).

It’s fair to say that on-premises systems may be in use with other types. Sometimes, as is the case for nearly 32%, phone support requires the use of more than one system. Platform use might vary by division or regionally, for example, or as an interim during a transition from one type to another—say on-premises to cloud.

This sort of transition takes time, and we can anticipate many businesses continuing to own and manage on-premises platforms for the foreseeable future. And some may choose to continue forward with an on-premises architecture and not move to the cloud at all as they weigh factors such as cost, security, reliability, and customization requirements.

My colleague, Metrigy Principal Analyst Diane Myers, takes a deep dive on market sizing and spending forecast for on-premises PBX and UC systems as part of our MetriCast service. Her workplace collaboration size and forecasting series also features reports on enterprise session border controllers, IP desk phones, SIP trunking, and UCaaS. For more information, click here.

Feeling disconnected from one’s work can take a toll on workers and worker productivity. New research from Metrigy and HP spells out ways to improve the employee experience.

Here’s a sad truth about work today: Most knowledge workers feel like they’re cogs in a machine rather than valued and respected employees.

This is one of the findings technology company HP uncovered in a survey of more than 12,000 knowledge workers plus 3,600 IT decision makers and 1,200 business leaders in a dozen countries. In the study, only 25% of knowledge workers say they have a healthy relationship with work, as HP shared in its “Work Relationship Index 2023” (WRI) report issued in September.

Not feeling valued and respected can take its toll. Consider these additional findings from the HP WRI: Absent a healthy relationship with waork, employees feel less productive (34%), disconnected from their organization (38%), and disengaged from work (39%). More so, 55% of knowledge workers say an unhealthy relationship with work leads them to struggle with their self-worth and mental health, and 62% say the same of maintaining their physical well-being.

HP spells out six core components necessary to help strengthen employees’ relationship to their work. These are:

  1. Fulfillment – Employees need to be able to find purpose, meaning, and empowerment at work
  2. Leadership – Leaders must not only be empathetic, but also must be emotionally connected to their charges
  3. People-centricity – Decision makers must put people at the heart of their decisions

Continue reading at workspace-connect.com.

Even as companies deploy more collaboration tools, they aren’t keeping pace with effective governance strategies for these tools and their generated content.

The last few years have seen an explosion in both the number and type of employee and customer engagement apps deployed within the workplace. The modern communications and collaboration environment includes not just voice calls and video meetings, but also team messaging, collaborative workspaces, social engagement, virtual whiteboards, project and task management and even self-created apps for workflow and task management.

In addition, generative AI enables apps themselves to create content in the form of summaries, recommendations, action items and transcripts for live calls and meetings, as well as presentations and documents from notes and data. In the contact center, generative AI provides live coaching as well as call summaries and transcriptions.

As employees take advantage of these novel ways to engage with one another — as well as with customers and partners — collaboration security and governance must keep pace to safeguard networks against the risk of unauthorized application access and data loss.

Emerging challenges include the following:

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

The collaboration application landscape is rapidly changing. Generative AI offers the potential to improve productivity and streamline employee engagement. New apps are quickly arriving that aim to bridge the home and office employee divide. And, employee experience platforms offer new ways to share information and establish employee relationships no matter the location. In this webinar we’ll share the top five emerging collaboration applications and what IT and business leaders need to do to ensure success.

Emerging Collaboration Applications

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst, Metrigy

Date: November 14, 2023
Time: 11:00 am ET

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