Be advised: helping financial services adapt to hybrid work

This week’s blog comes to us from Marc Haimsohn, Senior Director of Business Development at Vyopta. Vyopta is a Cisco Solutions Partner that specializes in monitoring, reporting, and analytics in order to increase user adoption and improve ROI for your Cisco investments and collaborations spaces.

Companies in the financial services sector – whether established names like Goldman Sachs or newer players in the tech world – have come out most in favor of returning their employees to the office as soon as possible.

That doesn’t mean the notion of hybrid work won’t apply in the fintech or banking worlds, but it does mean that there are a different set of questions and concerns to manage as workers readjust to a transformed workplace after spending a year or more working remotely. At Vyopta we’ve looked closely at the state of hybrid work, and our new ebook gives guidance for how to use data and analytics around your unified communications and collaboration assets to make the best decisions going forward.

With the delta variant of Covid-19 increasing infections dramatically all over the world, there is even more uncertainty about how enterprises and large organizations can best manage their people in the new workplace, with unified communications technology and collaboration playing more important roles amid concerns about social distancing and potential exposure to infection.

Here are some of the most important moves for financial services companies to make to adapt to the hybrid work world.

Invest in the right equipment

This applies to both on-premises hardware and individual equipment for workers, but also for remote use when workers have been approved to continue working remotely. Vyopta tracks quality issues and the sources of those problems for billions of minutes of voice and video calls and during the initial rush to remote working a large portion of poor call experiences could be traced to bad home equipment. Whether it was a faulty webcam or headset or a poor home network, those issues added up quickly and overwhelmed IT and UC teams who suddenly had to track down the causes of bad calls occurring outside their on-prem networks.

It’s important that home office technology is not neglected, because of the high likelihood of impacting a meeting experience.

On-prem networks will also need significant attention and investment going forward, especially with the expected increase in video endpoints growing in popularity for individual workstations to allow for digital meetings among coworkers who are in the office. This practice will help to reduce large gatherings and the potential for virus transmission, while still allowing brainstorming and other collaboration sessions to take place among large groups.

Keep a close eye on quality and usage

Financial industry leaders have been vocal about the need for their people to return to in-person meetings with outside partners as much as possible. This is especially the case for those trying to build new business and bring in deals during a year when long-term forecasts are looking uncertain due to the ongoing effects of various delta variant surges.

Even still, online meetings with inside teams and outside VIPs are a permanent reality of business going forward.

That makes it more important than ever to monitor the quality of voice and video calls, to keep important business meetings and inter-team work sessions happening online from getting derailed by packet loss or other factors that can degrade the experience for users. Vyopta’s single-pane view of all communications and collaboration tools makes it possible to quickly see quality trends, ID poor call experiences and cut down on the time needed to remedy those problems for good.

Usage data can present how an entire company, specific departments and teams, or location-specific groups are using various tools. If a new tool is being introduced or was widely adopted in a hurry then it is helpful to know how widely it is being used, so as to enable targeted education to increase usage and productivity or to reduce license payments for solutions that have fallen out of favor.

Improve meetings, and engagement

In the age of digital meetings it is a reality that our calendars can quickly become choked with virtual meetings, which can lead to burnout and disengagement from workers who are trying to multitask and honor their meeting commitments.

Along with common sense tactics for conducting better meetings – keeping headcount to the minimum, preview the agenda, balance out visual presentations versus talk time – it is important for managers and those in charge of meetings to track data around participant engagement. That information around overall engagement and work time on company tools can serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine when it comes to employee wellness and productivity.

While respecting individual privacy, data around engagement serves as a useful indicator for how still-remote employees are handling their work demands and if they or their larger team needs special attention. This reality – finding ways to stay involved and maintain quality connections – will lead to new thinking and challenges in the age of hybrid work, with new solutions ready to help keep business happening.

To learn more about how Cisco and Vyotpa can help you transition to hybrid work, visit our financial services site.