Have the experiences from the pandemic changed the way you think about the role of communications in your company? Were communications methods taken for granted before? Were they considered strategic? Were they a board-level topic? Are they now?

No doubt there are volumes of books forthcoming discussing the pandemic’s impact on business (among other topics) and all of the lessons learned. Among those lessons learned will be the importance of communications and how it untethered workers from a desk while maintaining—and often improving—productivity.

Currently, there are numerous articles, discussions and opinions about the future of work, whether or not employees want to go back to the office and which technology is most effective at empowering workers to remain productive. That plethora of information is making it difficult to get a clear picture of what companies are actually planning. So, to clear the fog of confusion, we asked companies in the UK and US about their plans for supporting remote work to get first-hand insight1.

Stat: 82% of companies are planning to offer a hybrid work model

Overall, most companies are cautiously optimistic about the future, but also aligned that the way of working will not go back to what it was. On that point, they were very clear. Eighty-two percent indicated they’re planning to offer a hybrid work model.

That’s a dramatic outcome as only 7% had some form of working from home program pre-pandemic, either hybrid or 100% in office / 100% remote.

This massive shift is being made possible by cloud communications. Although moving communications to the cloud was underway prior to the pandemic, that trend received a big boost with companies spending $195B between March and May of 2020 to enable remote working, according to Forrester research. That’s $15B a week, but of course, not just on communications. According to Gartner, it fueled a 5X acceleration of digital transformations and supported a 40% increase in digital engagement.

Those numbers are staggering. The scale of what just happened is, of course, unprecedented.

If you’re reading this blog from the backyard or dining room table, now home office, your answer was most likely “yes” to the question at the beginning. Turns out most companies are now thinking differently about the role of communications in their company.

In our world of trust-but-verify, we felt it was necessary to ask more questions. For example, is there a difference in plans to support a hybrid work model by company size? Interestingly, the results are about the same regardless of the number of employees in a company. There is some difference between companies with 499 or fewer employees vs those with 500 - 999, but overall, not a strong indication that company size will drive different behaviors towards a hybrid work model.

Graph: Planning a hybrid work environment by number of employees
Graph: Plans to offer a hybrid work environment by country

How about by region? This one may surprise you. There is a small difference in plans between US and UK companies with more UK companies planning to return to working in-person. The 6-point difference shows up directly in more UK companies expecting to go back to working in-person. Interestingly, none of the UK companies had a hybrid work model in place pre-pandemic.

Maybe there’s a difference based on industry. To make the analysis comprehensible without losing insight, as well as to ensure the groups were large enough to provide statistically significant comparisons, we grouped industries according to similar types.

Turns out, the group including Healthcare/Medical, Education,  Government/Military, Agriculture/Forestry/Fishing, Utilities, and Non-Profits shows a significantly lower number of organizations planning to offer a hybrid work model. That makes complete sense, as even with the current technology, these industries conduct a significant portion of their work in a way that requires in-person interaction. A shout-out to these frontline workers—thank you! That’s the only group with a meaningful difference from the other groups. All the other industries are amazingly similar.

Graph: Plans to offer a hybrid work environment by industry

Based on this research and its 95% confidence interval, we can cut through the clutter and conclude that with some small variation due to company size and country and more significant difference for a specific group of industries, about 80% of US and UK companies and organizations are driving towards offering a hybrid work model.

Graph: Business reasons driving decision for communications platform

With companies moving to a more permanent form of hybrid working model, communications now need to step up and meet a new mandate—support company-wide collaboration for employees to work from anywhere. This goal of enhancing the employee experience also came through loud and clear in the research. It was the number one reason why companies are investing in communications platforms—where all communications channels, including contact center, are integrated into one platform. Essentially, employee experience is now on par with customer experience in terms of company priorities.

It’s smart, as this approach empowers employees with the tools they need to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

The key, once again, is having the right communications technology in place. But companies often have many point communications solutions—sometimes a mix of on-premise and cloud—that are creating barriers to achieving company-wide collaboration.

Breakdown: Front, middle and back office workers

Many companies often have different systems being used for external support organizations vs their internal support teams, such as IT Help Desk and HR Benefits teams, who may not need the robust analytics and management of a support team, but do need more advanced routing and queuing that isn’t typically offered by traditional business phone solutions.

Thinking about company-wide collaboration, today, inside sales teams need to be able to collaborate with a product management or engineering team but also need some of the more advanced quality management and speech analytics capabilities historically reserved for dedicated customer support agents. Is everyone on the same chat app as a starting point? Can each team member, regardless of function, see the current status of each person in the company and instantly initiate a video meeting to quickly work through a challenging topic?

Enabling each member of the back office, middle office and front office teams to easily collaborate with each other is critical to delivering company-wide collaboration that ultimately enhances the employee experience to a level where everyone is empowered to be productive and effective no matter where they are working from.

What’s the impact of getting communications wrong?

Others have recently done this research. It’s startling. Over the last year, all of us have been educated on what’s possible regarding technology and the speed in which it can be deployed. We now have much higher expectations of the tools available to help us get the job done. For example, Forrester’s recent Future Of Work Survey found only 52% of US employees agree that their company has the technology resources to allow people to work from home as necessary. Workfront’s State of Work 2021 study discovered that 49% of workers say they’re likely to leave their current job if they’re unhappy or frustrated with workplace tech. Not to pile on, but this one is also very interesting: Microsoft’s recent study surveying 30,000 people in 31 countries found that 40% are considering leaving their employer this year.

Stat: 49% of workers say they're likely to leave their current job if they're unhappy or frustrated with workplace tech

The impact is that the workforce wants to work where they have the tools to be effective and productive. Half feel so strongly about it that they are willing to leave their roles if they don’t have the right tech. Having the right communications is a core component to ensuring employees have the appropriate workplace tech.

Ok, so it’s clear now:

  1. Hybrid will be a prevalent work model going forward.
  2. Employees have higher expectations for the tech available to them to be effective.
  3. Communications are a core part of that tech.
  4. Companies are investing in communications platforms to deliver that part of the tech.

Here’s a few points to consider when evaluating communications platforms. First, every vendor is going to tell you they have a platform. Ask these 5 questions to filter out those that actually do:

  1. Do they provide a platform SLA?
  2. Is it one roadmap for all their applications and services?
  3. Is it one security model for all of their applications and services?
  4. Is it one administration experience?
  5. Is it one deal structure and contract regardless of which services you are subscribing to?

Five yeses means they provide a communications platform. Take a look at 8x8 X Series. It provides 5 yeses and proven technology as the only 9-time UCaaS Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader also in the Gartner Contact Center Magic Quadrant. It takes a real platform to pull that off.

There are a lot of stats and studies in this discussion. If you have any questions or would like further information about our research, drop me a note at russ.chadinha@8x8.com.

  1. Primary research conducted with 400 decision makers for communications technology in companies with 50 or more employees in the US and UK in March 2021.