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Getting Hybrid Work “just right”

The concept of “hybrid work” is getting a lot of attention as more companies are trying to determine the right mix of remote and in-office presence for their employees. This challenge is also highlighting a lack of understanding on the best ways to support a hybrid workforce to achieve improvements in productivity and office space optimization.

We have learned a lot at Cisco from our 15+ years of experience in creating the best experience for employees to get work done instead of worrying about where the work gets done. Creating this employee experience took much more than stitching together a collection of technology products, vendors, and commercial support models. Instead, we focused on delivering the hybrid work experience as a business outcome. By taking this holistic approach, we have seen some impressive results that are flowing through to our bottom line:

  • Helping us to be rated #1 Best Place to Work for multiple years, and with less than half of the average industry attrition.
  • Enabling our Real Estate teams to invest in higher quality, more modern and sustainable work environments with 30-50% less space, and with better employee experiences.
  • Scaling of IT processes, infrastructure, and applications to support secure hybrid work for tens of thousands of employees worldwide.

Re-imagining the employee experience

One of the major obstacles we had to overcome was making hybrid work easy for non-technical employees without much IT expertise. After all, hybrid work should not require your employees to be their own IT manager.

To get employees productive quickly, we pre-install our hybrid work software package on employee laptops. Webex is the best platform for collaboration. Secure Endpoint, Duo, Meraki Systems Manager, and Umbrella provide world-class security that frustrates attackers, not users. And ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent enables remote troubleshooting, so employees do not need to go into the office for IT help.

We also added our Meraki networking for fast, secure home office wireless. To ensure that remote workers can fully engage with anyone in the office, we include a Cisco 4K video camera and headphones with a large video monitor. Combined with Webex, this solution provides outstanding video and audio quality.

The best part is the employee experience. The employee just turns on the laptop and is automatically connected. Simple. No technical experience needed.

What’s new?

Our business outcome approach to hybrid work has been hugely popular with Cisco employees. We want to make our experience YOUR experience. I’m thrilled to announce the availability several new offers with special pricing that make it easier to design, purchase, and implement hybrid work for your own organization. These new offers include:

  1. Detailed design guides for Work from Office renovations.
  2. Cisco Validated Framework documentation for IT managers to deploy Work from Office.
  3. New commercial construct –
    • Hybrid Work Software Offer — Powered by Enterprise Agreement 3.0, this is the best value in the industry for hybrid work across collaboration, security, digital experience monitoring, and mobile device management.
    • Hybrid Work Home Offer – Our work-from-home expertise for delivering collaboration with different devices and networking at special pricing.
    • Hybrid Work Office Offer – Helping companies build sustainable spaces that are optimized for hybrid work.

Ready to learn more?

You can learn more about how Cisco can help you empower your team at home, in the office, or anywhere on cisco.com/go/hybridwork.

 

If you are attending Cisco Live EMEA 2023 in person, please join us at my Innovation Talk:

“Hybrid Work Offers – Here and Now” (INTGEN-1255)

Thursday, Feb 9  |  1:00 PM – 1:30 PM CET  |  World of Solutions – Innovation Theater

 



Authors

Luke Dobrzynski

VP, Strategic Planning & Future of Work

Cisco Strategic Execution Office