Hybrid work plans should include state-of-the-art technologies for facilitating better formal and ad-hoc meeting experiences.

Balancing the experience of virtual and in-person meeting participants is a top-of-mind issue for many business leaders as they hone their hybrid work strategies and technology plans around building a collaborative work environment. Video meeting application and equipment providers are giving them lots of options.

Culled from products announced or on display at the recent Enterprise Connect 2023, here’s a look at how come providers are furthering the state of the art for hybrid, collaborative workforces.

Meeting spaces, intelligently defined – From Metrigy’s global “Employee Experience & Workplace Engagement 2022-23” research study, we know most companies already place high value on artificial intelligence (AI)-driven video meeting functions. More than half of 250 participating companies consider in-meeting voice assistance and content search to be of high value, with 48.4% indicating the same of speaker identification. These types of capabilities are great starting points, but providers are now getting even more innovative on how they use AI to improve the meeting experience.

A prime example comes from Cisco, which introduced a feature its calls “meeting zones.” This capability gives IT the ability to set virtual boundaries for in-office collaboration spaces, essentially turning them into areas for meeting with remote colleagues without distraction. The AI technology individually frames in-office meeting participants in a condensed view so that virtual attendees see only them and nothing or nobody outside the defined meeting zone. This is a bit hard to visualize but try to imagine an open office environment with a corner virtually cordoned off for team meetings.

Continue reading at workspace-connect.com.

Companies reluctant to gather behavior data from collaboration apps due to employee privacy concerns may feel justified in their caution based on recent news out of the White House, which in early May began seeking input from employees and employers about their respective experiences and usage of productivity monitoring. But it would be a mistake to conflate gathering insights from the collaboration ecosystem with using the type of productivity monitoring coming under scrutiny.

Productivity monitoring, also known as digital activity, employee, or user activity monitoring, essentially serves to track and collect an employee’s real-time actions and behavior data on company networks, connected devices, and monitored workstations. As has been much publicized, employees are calling foul on the use of such tools for what they consider to be individualized surveillance… hence the Biden administration’s investigation.

With collaboration insights, companies aim to discover how the use of collaboration apps—particularly video meeting tools and team collaboration apps—affect key business metrics, including productivity, and inform policy setting and decision making. Employee data is depersonalized, presented in aggregate for employee behavior trends analysis and correlations by team managers and business leaders. For individuals themselves, some tools will surface data-based guidance for improving their own behaviors known to hinder productivity or lead to burn-out, for example.

Viewed in aggregate, collaboration behavior data provides information such as average attendees per meeting, number of meetings per hour and per day, average and total meeting duration, meeting trends over a specified time, average and total speaking time per participant, and so on. Team managers and others can explore collaboration behavior to address any number of questions, such as:

How often are team members meeting, and are they all actively engaged throughout meetings or are most just listening in? Perhaps not all team members need to participate in every meeting, but rather can read the meeting transcript or meeting summary while devoting meeting time to other tasks.

Are employees frequently on team chat or video meetings after hours and on weekends? Well-being will take a hit with prolonged periods of extended work hours. Is a project understaffed? Are the deadlines unrealistic?

Are managers spending hour after hour in meetings, but not with their teams? This could lead to a feeling of being undervalued and unheard, hurting team relationships and company culture. It could also lead to a stall on productivity, as team members wait for guidance. Managers can learn from the positive behaviors of those with the most productive teams.

With the ability to derive these sorts of insights, interest in gathering employee behavior data as part of an employee experience strategy is high, as shown in Metrigy’s Employee Experience & Workplace Engagement: 2022-23 global study. Among the 250 participating companies, 58.3% already are using or are planning to use team collaboration data to better understand the employee experience, while 52.2% say the same of video meetings data. Two-thirds of companies share or plan to share de-personalized team member data with managers, and slightly fewer are or will do so with company leaders. Close to 54% provide or will provide a personalized view for individual use only.

Most companies report that they’ve not encountered any data privacy concerns around the use of employee experience applications, tools, or platforms, including collaboration insights. Most handle with a multipronged approach:

Leading edge companies are starting to combine the employee behavior data they glean from collaboration apps with the employee engagement data they gather through traditional mechanisms like the annual survey or quick pulse polls. Companies sitting out on tapping into collaboration insights may find themselves falling behind on understanding the big picture around employee experience.

Generative AI offers incredible potential to improve productivity, operations, and security.

At Enterprise Connect 2023 this past March, generative AI was all the rage. Seemingly every vendor on the exhibit floor had a generative AI product or demonstration, and the topic permeated throughout panels and keynotes. Generative AI developments are happening fast — perhaps too fast for many. According to Ray Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns,” the rate at which generative AI changes is likely to be exponential – which further suggests that its advances may well bring changes to the collaboration world faster than IT and business leaders can process them.

Leaving aside the discussion of positives and negatives of generative AI, here are six ways that I believe that generative AI will impact workplace collaboration in the near future.

Simplifying and quickening content creation

Prior to Enterprise Connect both Google and Microsoft announced generative AI-based features to enable automated content creation, as did Notion via its Notion AI offering. These features all offer the ability to shave hours off the time required to write documents, create presentations, and analyze data. It’s hard to understate the potential of these features, or the impact they will have on knowledge worker productivity as they reduce time required to create content from hours to minutes.

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

The shift to hybrid work is putting new demands on the unified communications network infrastructure. Split tunneling and an enterprise CDN are two ways to meet those needs.

The enterprise communications and collaboration landscape continues to evolve as organizations shift from remote to hybrid work and as video becomes a critical business technology. Indeed, 81% of companies polled in Metrigy’s global “Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24” study of 440 organizations said they use video for all or most of their meetings, with 63% reporting they increased their use of video within the last year. What’s more, nearly 38% of IT leaders now view video as a business-critical technology for which downtime or poor performance cannot be tolerated.

Video isn’t just for conferencing. Most companies are increasing their use of webinars, video streaming and video sharing to improve employees’ ability to communicate and collaborate. Video is a key part of the mix as the survey found employees increasingly split their time between home and office, with almost a third working both remotely and in the office, with 25% working full time at home and 37% full time in the office. And all these changes have created new demands on unified communications (UC) network infrastructure.

Modernize UC networks

Among our research participants, 40% said they have made investments in their networks to better support hybrid work and especially video.

Here are five network modernization tips to help you support current and future UC and collaboration needs:

  1. Ensure adequate Wi-Fi, both in the office and at home. Wi-Fi problems top the list of challenges IT leaders face as they support remote employees. Wi-Fi access is also becoming an issue for in-office workers as video demands grow. Focus on Wi-Fi demand and coverage to eliminate dead spots and to ensure adequate bandwidth to meet application requirements.

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

Collaboration devices play a key role in supporting employee experience, from extracting engagement data to improving hybrid meeting parity.

With the right collaboration tools, companies can help boost productivity, while facilitating teamwork and enabling cross-departmental engagement. According to Metrigy in its “Employee Experience & Workplace Engagement: 2022-23” global research study of 250 companies, these are three top values of collaboration apps.

Equally as important to creating a positive employee experience are the devices put in place to support collaborative work. Video equipment is particularly important with video meetings being so critical today for collaboration among hybrid workforces and between employees and external parties. In Metrigy’s employee experience study, most companies identified video meeting equipment, such as webcams and desktop video devices, as important to their employee experience strategies. Professional-grade headsets and earbuds are also on the list, as are more traditional devices, like speakerphones and even desk phones.

Let’s explore how to use collaboration devices to boost employee experience.

1. Use collaboration device data to understand employee behavior

Video meeting devices, like their application counterparts, can be a great source of data that companies can use to understand employee behavior. Already nearly 41% of organizations are using or planning to use data from collaboration devices to determine employee engagement, with 43% evaluating the potential, according to Metrigy’s research. From collaboration devices, companies can gather metrics such as number of hourly and daily meetings, average number of attendees per meeting, and average and total meeting duration.

To get the most out of collaboration device data, IT should work in conjunction with other business leaders, particularly HR, in pulling together this new source of data with traditional HR-oriented data sources, such as voice-of-employee surveys, for a big-picture view on employee engagement and experience.

Doing so, for example, enables companies to gain insight by correlating time spent in meetings with key business metrics. Is team productivity dropping as time spent in meetings per day increases? If productivity improvements are a key metric, then this could be problematic. On the other hand, a drop in average meeting time could signal a decrease in engagement, and that may be undesirable. Being able to see these relationships can guide decision-making.

So, don’t just collect the data — take action on it. This may seem somewhat of a no-brainer, but Metrigy research consistently shows many companies stop short on data usage. Some only collect data, while others analyze collected data, but fewer collect, analyze and take action. In the above cases, knowing there’s a potential issue isn’t enough. To address a drop in productivity, for example, companies can set policies on meeting duration, mandate breaks between meetings or institute no-meeting days.

Continue reading at techtarget.com.

The basic gist of federally mandated compliance orders should be easy to understand at this point: In regulated industries, companies must collect, store, and be able to retrieve employee communications for set periods of time. The rules don’t change for new types of communications, yet companies continue to get caught up in regulatory crackdowns around failure to comply for services like business messaging.

Metrigy’s global Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 research study with 440 companies gives us a glimpse as to why companies are failing at compliance––as well as at security in general. In the study, available for client access here, only 37% of companies to date have a proactive collaboration security plan in place. Based on our study data, by year’s end we can expect to see the percentage surpass the halfway mark, with nearly 19% planning to implement a proactive security strategy in 2023. While that’s a positive increase, the end result still leaves far too many companies walking the line on collaboration security strategy.

Perhaps there’s something to be learned from the companies that are having the greatest success with workplace collaboration, as measured by cost savings, revenue gain, and productivity improvements. At 42.2%, a greater percentage of the success group has a proactive security strategy in place than participants overall. Compliance management is one of several security strategic components that correlates to success, at least somewhat: 55.6% of the success group vs. 53.1% of the non-success group.

Those companies that haven’t implemented compliance management may be among the 19.4% that have disabled collaboration features for security reasons, or the 17.8% that are considering doing so. What’s on the no-no list? Guest accounts is tops, for 47.9%, followed by virtual whiteboards (43.8%), team collaboration (29.2%), in-meeting chat (27.1%), and meeting transcription/recording (20.8%).

A better approach would be to adopt a third-party security management platform for greater control over the collaboration landscape. These platforms centralize policy management and enforcement, as well as threat detection and mitigation, typically across multiple collaboration apps and platforms. Use or planned use of a third-party security management platform has met with success for our workplace collaboration study group. In the study, 30.6% of the success group is already using a third-party security management platform, compared to 25.9% of companies overall. Likewise, 66% of the success group is planning or evaluating adoption, vs. 55.5% of all companies.

Among the primary drivers is policy enforcement, which could help companies assure employees aren’t acting outside of compliance bounds. Coupling collaboration security strategy with strong security management technology is a good start. The last step? Ensuring employees understand the rules, and the consequences for circumventing them.

 

Metrigy’s analyst team was onsite for Enterprise Connect 23 in Orlando. In this week’s episode, they share their takes on the hottest news and trends coming out of the event.

The ChatGPT chatbot promises to change enterprise communications, both internally and with customers.

Seemingly overnight, with OpenAI’s December 2022 release of the ChatGPT chatbot, the promise of artificial intelligence (AI) has gone from niche to mainstream use. Any enterprise leaders who haven’t taken notice need to –– this will be a transformational technology for businesses.

As I explained in a research brief, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) trained on conversational text to generate human-like responses to any question imaginable in a matter of seconds and ask follow-up questions as needed. These answers can be long, like a detailed business proposal, or short, like an email. In releasing a free version of ChatGPT, OpenAI opened the doors for widespread experimentation using this powerful technology, known as generative AI.

LLMs are not the exclusive province of OpenAI, but the organization gets credit for bringing awareness to the masses. Earlier this month OpenAI released the fourth iteration of its general LLM, GPT-4, with the claim that internal evaluations have shown it to be “82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5.”

For enterprises, the real transformative power of generative AI comes when these models can be trained using internal business data. In theory, enabling employees to use generative AI in their workstreams will lead to big boosts in productivity while also positively impacting employee experience. This theory posits that generative AI will take away the drudge work, leaving them time to focus on more fulfilling creative or business-generating tasks, for example.