Metrigy’s MetriStar awards recognizes those providers who are both highly rated by their customers, and whose customers have achieved measurable success for their investments. The awards are based on data gathered from hundreds of IT leaders in North America, Western Europe, Southeast Asia, and Australia. Metrigy will announce the Top Providers in several areas of Workplace Collaboration technologies, including:

2023 Workplace Collaboration MetriStar Award Winners

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

Date: August 15, 2023
Time: 11:00 am ET

VIEW REPLAY

For most companies today, hybrid work has become the modus operandi. On any given day, some employees will be working from home, and others from the office––and no matter where they are, they need to be able to communicate and collaborate with ease. Theoretically, a flexible hybrid work model helps generate a positive employee experience. However, challenges persist around issues such as application performance, bandwidth constraints, voice and video quality, and technology inequity between in-office and remote workers.

To support the modern, hybrid workplace, IT leaders must:

View the full report at virsae.com.

Highly mature employee experience (EX) strategies include a mix of people, processes, and technology.

Heading into the launch of Metrigy’s second-annual research study on how companies manage employee experience and engagement, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about defining characteristics of a mature employee experience strategy. This would need to entail people, processes, and technology, of course, but what specifically?

Here are the five primary characteristics of highly mature employee experience strategies.

C-level Leadership

The employee experience directive must come from the top level of the organization. Ideally, the CEO has made employee experience optimization integral to the company’s mission—and they’ll want to measure success and see a return on their associated technology investments. Additionally, a company with a highly mature employee experience strategy will have an employee experience officer—by role and responsibility if not by exact title—to guide and innovate on employee experience.

All-inclusive

Companies with mature employee experience strategies provide all employees, including frontline workers, with access to their employee experience apps so they stay current on company news and feel engaged with the company and colleagues. This can be challenging, given that many frontline workers don’t have desks or corporate email.

Leading companies don’t merely duplicate what they provide to knowledge workers. Rather, they assess the particular needs of the frontline workers and deliver to those requirements. If encouraging rewards and recognition is a priority to stave off attrition, for example, a leading company will understand that frontline workers need to have a mobile app for that, since they’re typically deskless and have no corporate email, either.

Platform-centricity

Continue reading at workspace-connect.com.

Today, there are countless apps used to communicate across companies. IT departments are taking two approaches to organize the teams responsible for collaboration deployments.

The collaboration landscape has undergone profound changes in the last several years. Gone are the days when most employees worked together in the same physical office, using a limited set of applications. Organizations must now ensure employees can use a wide variety of tools, including messaging, video and content creation apps, to collaborate with each other as well as with partners and customers, regardless of location.

Applications are changing as well. Today, companies can purchase, from a variety of vendors, suites that combine multiple collaboration capabilities into a single user interface rather than deploy standalone applications.

At the same time, new challenges continue to arise with the need to secure and achieve compliance for an ever-growing array of apps, and AI-driven features. Enabling effective cross-company collaboration to support supply chains and other multi-company activities is another factor to consider. At the end of the day, investments in collaboration must deliver demonstrable business value in terms of productivity improvements, cost savings and opportunities to increase revenue.

These trends require a reassessment of collaboration management strategies. Many still have siloed approaches to managing collaboration applications and services. Metrigy’s “Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24” global study of 440 organizations found that just about 56% of participants had converged their collaboration teams into a single group with shared responsibility for architecture and operations of all collaboration applications.

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Hardware and meeting app vendors are rushing to deliver solutions that enable equal experiences for both remote and in-office meeting attendees.

As a growing number of companies have implemented return-to-the-office policies, meeting experiences have become disjointed. It used to be that remote attendees were at a disadvantage. They couldn’t see those in the meeting room nor could they see what was being jotted down on dry-erase whiteboards or paper. In many cases, those dialing into meetings struggled to hear conversations. And, only when the meeting leader specifically asked for their input could they contribute – if they were even still on the call.

The Tables Have Turned

Fast-forward to today and that paradigm has been turned on its head. Now, it’s the in-room meeting attendees who often find themselves at a disadvantage. When sitting at a table with a traditional front-of-room video system, in-room attendees often can’t see chats and shared content, contribute to virtual whiteboard sessions, virtually raise their hand to indicate that they have a question, or easily participate in polls. If those in the meeting room are less able to participate in meetings, then why even come into the office at all?

But even those who attend remotely still have struggles seeing and hearing people in the room, especially if furniture configurations result in some participants not easily being visible to the front-of-room camera.

Hardware-based Meeting Innovation

In recent weeks vendors, both hardware and meeting apps, have accelerated their efforts to solve these challenges by delivering solutions that provide for equitable meetings; the idea that all participants, regardless of location, should have the same ability to see one another and to collaborate on shared platforms.

On the hardware front, recent examples include:

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

The worlds of employee experience and enterprise communications and collaboration are converging, an inevitable trend accelerated by the quick rise of the hybrid workplace over recent years. The more digital the workplace becomes, the greater the need for companies to bring the two together, especially if they’re grappling with a loss of community and culture–– the top pain point of today’s hybrid workplace, identified as such by nearly 41% of the 440 organizations that participated in Metrigy’s Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 research study.

Among other examples, this is the basic understanding that propelled Microsoft to launch its employee experience platform, Viva, back in 2021. And it’s what led to Zoom’s longtime stake in and, ultimately, its acquisition of employee experience platform provider, Workvivo, this quarter (read a MetriNote on the latter).

Employee experience platforms designed to serve a digital workforce can support many functions, but communications and engagement are often at their core. That is, they provide a digital home that employees come to read about and share reactions to company news and information as well as to engage with each other in social media-style communities of shared interests. The goal, circling back to that above-mentioned cultural pain point, is to make sure employees feel emotionally connected to the company and with each other. Although more productivity-oriented than employee experience platforms, communications and collaboration applications can serve a similar purpose in forging a sense of connectivity and cultural awareness among people who often no longer work together but virtually.

When viewing them in tandem, a company gains the ability to assess the impact of engagement- and productivity-driven communications and collaboration together. Bringing together engagement data from the one side with behavioral data from the other side will give companies a much fuller view of employee experience than possible when looking at it with just one set of measures. It opens a pathway, too, between HR, IT, and internal communications, which too often work in silo around employee experience deliverables.

Gidi Pridor, CMO at Workvivo who I spoke with for our latest MetriSight episode (tune in here), sees convergence of employee experience and communications/collaboration as an evolution that’s already seen a move away from the traditional employee intranet to a platform that brings together engagement, communications, employee listening, and knowledge management. What’s coming, he proposes, is a digital workplace platform that acts as “the center of gravity for everything.” That is, a single environment where communications, be is synchronous or asynchronous, gets managed.

Architecturally, how that digital workplace environment is constructed remains to be seen, as Pridor says. Perhaps it is truly a single platform or maybe it’s a tightly integrated collection of platforms. I can’t help but to think of a similar convergence of capabilities such as document collaboration, project management, knowledge management, and team chat we’ve seen in workplace hubs from companies such as Clickup and Notion. Why not bring all of this and an integrated employee experience-collaboration platform all together?

In April, Zoom announced the acquisition of Workvivo, an employee engagement and communications app provider. Today we touch base with Gidi Pridor, Workvivo CMO, on how the Zoom-Workvivo relationship came about and what Workvivo brings to Zoom, and vice versa.

 

Intradiem focuses on automating functions that boost productivity and experience of customer service teams. The company also guarantees its customers will save money with its technology, and provides a dashboard to track actual savings in real-time. CEO Matt McConnell started this innovative company one year out of undergrad in 1995, and continues to run the company–putting employees first in large part because happy employees result in happy customers. Hear what Matt has to say about the CX market and how his company is helping the agent experience.