Workplace Collaboration

Companies today face a growing threat of off-channel communications that puts data, and business operations at risk. Regulated industries require a proactive approach to minimize risk of legal action resulting from employee use of unapproved applications and from lack of compliance. Non-regulated organizations must also ensure communications security while enabling employees to safely collaborate with each other, with customers, and with business partners across a range of ever-increasing modalities.

This Metrigy Issue Paper provides guidance for developing compliance and data protection strategies for both regulated and non-regulated organizations, and provides practical guidance for how business, security, compliance, and IT leaders can both minimize risk and fully realize the business value of their communications and collaboration investments.

Download this issue paper at globalrelay.com.

As more employees begin to trickle back to the office, it’s time for companies to reassess their workspace and meeting room strategies to serve both in-office and remote workers.

Hybrid work is in a state of flux. Almost 60% of organizations are now requiring some in-office presence, according to Metrigy’s “Employee Engagement Optimization: 2025” study of 440 organizations. Another 20.5% of organizations allow employees to choose if and when to come into the office. Just 42.3% anticipate keeping their policy as is in 2026, while 56.5% anticipate changes — either requiring more in-office time or providing employees with more choices about where they want to work.

As a result, business, facilities and IT leaders must engineer a return to office (RTO) workspace that features meeting spaces that properly support collaboration, regardless of whether the employee is in the office or working remotely. This goal is even more important for companies with fixed RTO policies.

Meeting spaces must reflect an attractive and frictionless environment that enables workers to collaborate more effectively than if they worked remotely — thus “earning the commute.” Moreover, workspaces must be flexible enough to support a variety of meeting scenarios, not just today, but for the future as well.

The evolving office space

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Companies find it challenging to comply with 911 regulations. Learn how you can minimize risk and ensure your workforce remains safe.

Ensuring 911 calls are routed to the proper emergency call center with accurate caller location is a challenge that has grown more complex as companies manage both cloud communications and a hybrid workforce.

One thing hasn’t changed: Companies still must comply with federal regulations, such as Kari’s Law and RAY BAUM’s Act, as well as current and emerging state and local regulations like Alyssa’s Law. And they must adapt to Next Generation 911 (NG911), which has moved from concept to reality.

Let’s examine what you can do to navigate a 911 hybrid work environment, ensure compliance and prepare for NG911

Editor’s note: This tip provides no legal guidance. We recommend those responsible for 911 location and call routing management consult with appropriate legal counsel to determine their organization’s risk and potential liability.

Understanding 911 compliance requirements

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Agentic AI will transform activities ranging from data search to activity management.

There has certainly been a lot of discussion around agentic AI over the last few years. While actual adoption is still low, Metrigy’s AI for Business Success: 2025-26 global study of more than 1,100 companies found adoption is already correlating with business success.

4% of participants say that agentic AI is leading to increases in revenue
4% say it it is reducing operating costs
2% say that it has improved employee productivity

Defining Agentic AI

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

Business, telecom, IT, and contact center leaders often struggle with the role of Microsoft Teams in the contact center, its applicability, and how best to integrate Teams with dedicated contact center platforms and PSTN access strategies. In this webinar we’ll share Metrigy’s latest research on successful approaches for evaluating use cases and implementing integration. Topics include:

Use cases for Teams for inbound call management
Required analytics and management capabilities
Options for Teams-Contact Center platform integration
The emergence of the Unified integration model and Teams Phone Extensibility
How to unify PSTN access
How to build the right organization for Teams and contact center management

Webinar – WC Expert Insights Series 1 – Microsoft Teams Phone and the Contact Center: What do Enterprises Need to Know?

Presented by: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Gidi Adlersberg, Voca CIC Business Line Manager, AudioCodes

On-Demand

View Replay

Before organizations migrate their existing phone systems into Microsoft Teams, they need to select the right telephony architecture that fits their business needs.

Microsoft Teams Phone is an add-on to Teams that provides a fully capable business phone system with the ability to make internal calls, as well as calls to and from the PSTN, or public switched telephone network. IT leaders looking to squeeze more out of their Teams investments can consider a Teams Phone integration with their existing telephony system.

Let’s learn more about Microsoft Teams Phone and walk through a checklist of deployment tasks and options that must be considered before a migration.

Why integrate Teams with your phone system?

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Teams Phone can handle lightweight use cases, while integrating with dedicated contact center platforms.

As Microsoft has continued to expand Teams Phone features, companies are often using it to manage inbound calls, in effect utilizing Teams Phone as a lightweight call center. At the same time, many organizations are looking to leverage the benefits of integrating their calling and contact center infrastructure so agents can better communicate and collaborate with back-office employees and to streamline PSTN access management.

With this in mind, Metrigy recently conducted a study of nearly 200 organizations currently using Teams to examine three things:

use cases for Teams Phone for inbound call management
approaches for integrating Teams into third-party contact centers
and how companies handle PSTN access management.

We identified different approaches based on participants’ realized benefits of using Teams in terms of cost savings, productivity improvements, and revenue gain to determine which strategies best correlated with success. Within our data set, almost 32% of respondents were currently using Teams Phone, with another 25% planning to deploy it this year. More than 91% of respondents had a dedicated contact center.

Is Teams Phone Good Enough for Inbound Call Management?

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Key among requirements is ensuring that meeting spaces are built with flexibility in mind.

As the public debate over return-to-office (RTO) policies continues, many company strategies remain in a state of constant flux. Some business leaders, operating on the belief that innovation and culture are best served by in-person proximity, are mandating a return. Yet, our latest research shows that getting RTO right isn’t about mandates; it’s about aligning policy with business needs.

At the recent InfoComm conference in Orlando, FL, I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion featuring leaders from Cisco, HP, Q-SYS, and Zoom where we discussed how to get return to office right, focusing on what IT, business, and AV leaders need to understand to ensure that they are building a meeting space that is a magnet for employees and that provides a superior collaboration experience compared to remote meetings.

We noted that companies are primarily calling employees back to improve informal collaboration and foster a better company culture. But equipping employees with meeting spaces that aren’t optimized for equity for both in-office and remote employees is a recipe for disaster. Key among requirements is ensuring that meeting spaces are built with flexibility in mind.

Continue reading at nojitter.com.

Lower turnover and improved employee satisfaction are two benefits from the use of workforce engagement tools, according to Metrigy’s latest research.

Many contact center agents come, and then they go. It’s the nature of the role, especially for staff positions —job satisfaction is elusive and the work experience not to agents’ liking. For their supervisors, what all this turnover means is having to deal with an unending cycle of hiring, onboarding, and offboarding.

Workforce engagement management (WEM) can help ease the burden, elevating the agent experience such that job satisfaction improves and turnover rates shrink. Metrigy’s recently published Workplace Engagement Management: 2025-26 research study with 316 companies shows this to be the case.

In the study, three quarters of respondents agreed that the agent experience at their companies got better with the use of WEM solutions. Additionally, those measuring WEM’s impact on their agent metrics attribute improvements in both employee satisfaction and turnover to its use. Following WEM adoption, employee satisfaction rose 18.4% on average, and turnover dropped by 4.7 percentage points, from 19.2% to 14.5%, our data shows.

Continue reading at nojitter.com.