Techaisle Blog

Poised for liftoff for some time, the remote work revolution was set to shift into overdrive. However, hybrid work is challenging the SMBs. By the end of 2023, 32% of employees within the SMB and midmarket firms expect to have hybrid work arrangements, down from 58% in 2021 and similar to 29% (pre-pandemic levels) in 2019. Over 40% of SMBs and Upper midmarket firms are experiencing significant challenges impacting remote employees’ productivity. In addition, 39% of SMBs and 41% of upper midmarket firms have critical security concerns relative to remote and hybrid work. Furthermore, 43% of businesses cannot adequately support remote employees, and 39% cannot provide consistent technology experience for remote and on-site employees. Finally, 41% of SMBs and upper midmarket firms have not overcome organizational challenges in managing remote employees. Techaisle data shows that senior management is spending 3X more time maintaining company culture through the hybrid organization, 2.5X more time in employee empathy, and 2X more time in supervision and management. 

As a result, 62% of SMBs and 68% of upper midmarket firms plan to return all employees to the office in 2023. However, bringing the employees back to the office is also of concern to the executive management. As a result, 37% of SMBs are prioritizing office space planning, and 32% are identifying wayfinding technologies. In addition, 41% of upper midmarket firms are investigating ID management, and 40% are investing in smart meeting rooms.

The industry is abuzz with hybrid work discussions, home office, safe return to the office, shared space, meeting room, and hot desk. Although most agree that hybrid work is here to stay, many cannot ascertain the trend's longevity because forecasts tend to be very wrong in volatile times: the companies that issue them revise them frequently. Forecasts extrapolate from current conditions – an approach that works well when current conditions vary from previous periods only incrementally, which doesn't work when the present is changing in ways that don't follow clear, recent patterns. To understand the hybrid work trend, Techaisle surveyed 2096 US SMBs and midmarket firms with employee sizes from 1 to 5000. The results are fascinating.

58% of employees within the US SMB and midmarket firms expect to work from home at least till the end of 2021, in sharp contrast to pre-pandemic in 2019 when 29% of small business (1-99) employees, 9% of employees within midmarket firms (100-999), and 7% within upper-midmarket firms (1000-4999), who worked from home. However, the work from home trend may not play out in the longer term. Encouraged by the increasing rate of vaccinations and economic recovery, 61% to 67% of firms plan to bring back all employees to the office by early 2022. Only 22% are planning for a phased or staggered approach to re-opening offices as soon as it is safe to do so. Higher employee size businesses are likely to be more aggressive in their re-opening plans than the smaller businesses. 11% of firms will most likely permanently adopt an approach allowing some of their employees to work from home indefinitely.

Overall, 97% of mainstream businesses (1 to 5000 employees) feel unprepared to having a long-term remote and hybrid workforce work environment. Between 17% and 44% of small businesses to upper midmarket firms' IT staff is challenged in identifying and deploying hybrid workplace solutions.

As the world turned to Zoom, I switched to Webex. I have been using Webex for the last ten months. I have experienced nothing but delight with the Webex collaboration application suite, including Webex Teams, Webex Desk Pro, and Cisco Webex headset.

I first met the founders of Webex in 2001, one year after its IPO and six years before its acquisition by Cisco. As quickly as Webex became the default web-conferencing software offering, its popularity started eroding with an onslaught of solutions, especially Go-to-meeting and Skype. In the intervening years, Microsoft Teams took off, primarily because of its integration with M365, further pushing Webex into the background. However, years spanning 2019-2020 has been an inflection point for Webex. After yielding the everyday video conferencing lexicon to Zoom, Cisco Webex has just begun its steep rise in its innovation curve and has no intention of pausing and letting the curve slope down into the trough of disillusionment. The triumvirate leaders - Jeetu Patel (Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration), Javed Khan (Senior Vice President and General Manager of Cisco Collaboration), and Aruna Ravichandran (CMO & VP, Cisco Webex Collaboration) - are on a mission to deliver collaboration experiences that are 10X better than in-person. Perhaps naively, I have yet to understand its enormity. Still, so far, new releases and enhancements are continuing to blend physical and virtual workspaces to deliver similar immersive and authentic experiences: the latest being gesture-recognition, white-boarding, and the pending integration of Slido for polling. The next steps in delivering similar experiences are ad-hoc conversations and serendipitous interactions. Since September, Cisco Webex has released 400 enhancements with AI and security as the Cisco collaboration strategy foundations. IMImobile acquisition will enable Cisco to incorporate expanded digital channels and flow builder capabilities for contact center and customer engagement.

The future of work has become very complex. Collaboration is more important in complex, interconnected digital transformation work environments. 58% of SMB and midmarket employees (1 to 5000 employee size firms) expect to continue to work from home post-pandemic. As a result, mobility, cloud, and collaboration are important trends in today's market, and they are tightly interconnected. This interconnection empowers collaboration. Collaboration is most potent when connected, intuitive and pervasive, so deeply ingrained in the employee's infrastructure fabric that its use is a natural extension of their work environment. At the heart of Cisco's collaboration strategy is its collaboration application suite bookended by its platform, devices, and specialized experiences. The vertical integration from platform to devices promises to be a one-stop collaboration shop for mainstream businesses.

Collaboration represents a significant investment for most mainstream businesses, and collaboration platforms become a central, everyday resource touching all users within an organization. Collaboration is pervasive and critical to SMBs (1-5000 employees). Our most recent SMB survey looked at collaboration as a discrete category and found that it is the second-most prominent SMB solution area, behind cloud and security. There is a wide-ranging trend towards seeing collaboration as part of the fabric of business activity, rather than merely a means of enabling connections between discrete tasks. It is a core component for digital transformation, and innovative businesses embed it in their organizational DNA. Collaboration is a top IT priority for 96% of SMBs, 79% of innovative SMBs are using collaboration organization-wide, and 74% of digitally transformed leaders are using collaboration solutions. Therefore, it is natural for these businesses to invest in agile, adaptive, transformative, magical, and empowering collaboration solutions. Cisco is getting there. Perhaps, this is what Cisco leaders mean by delivering experiences that are 10X better than in-person.