Communication and collaboration software

Companies around the world are trying to find what their ideal operating model looks like in a hybrid work landscape. From tool use to meeting cadence and flex work schedules, leaders are experimenting to find how their companies and employees can best operate.

Since the pandemic began, and even before then, CIOs began to build business strategy duties into their roles, with companies looking to them as trusted allies who can accelerate growth through technology. This role was emphasized when hybrid work became the norm.

At Atlassian, innovating in the hybrid era requires ground-up collaboration across different parts of the organization, according to CIO Archana Rao.

"Open collaboration is a leadership strategy," said Rao, speaking Wednesday at Forbes CIO Next virtual event series. "It's really designed to optimize company performance by supporting collaboration across the enterprise. And we believe it only happens if you have engaged leaders, really good practices, and of course the right tools."

When leading innovation for an organization in the hybrid work era, flexibility is essential. Tools, processes and workflows must adapt to what works best for the company, and CIOs can assist with finding that sweet spot.

Saint-Gobain, a French multinational materials manufacturer, experimented with physical robots as a representation of employees who are unable to be present in a room. A screen in the front of the robot shows worker's faces.

"If you have two or three colleagues not participating, but you have 10 others in the room, it is very easy to just talk between the 10," said Ursula Soritsch-Renier, chief digital and information officer at Saint-Gobain. "With these avatars, you have a person next to you, that you can really actually point and refer to."

To thread together workers in a virtual space, Atlassian relies on its Confluence product for a virtual water cooler, Rao said. New workers post blogs.

"We really want to make sure newcomers feel connected to their peers, to their team, to the company, especially in a remote world," Rao said.

Whether it's robots or digital collaboration platforms, leaders need to address the disconnect that's brewing between workers in hybrid settings. Nearly seven in 10 hybrid workers said they "don't feel a very strong sense of connection" to their co-workers, according to a survey from Enboarder. Two-thirds of respondents also said they fear missing out on collaboration by not being physically in the office.

In-person collaboration still has a role in the hybrid era, according to Soritsch-Renier. "COVID[-19] brought us a good thing in that sense, because now it is a mixture," she said. "But sometimes these face to face connections, I still believe, are extremely important and are not really fully replaceable."

Most employers with employees who work from home use monitoring software to track their employees, according to the results of an online survey of 1,250 American employers conducted in September by business review platform Digital.com. Those surveyed had some or all employees working remotely.

Respondents frequently cited productivity as the primary reason for the surveillance, Digital.com said, and only 14% had not notified staff about monitoring activities. More than half of employers in the survey, 52%, had workers who spent one to four hours per day away from their workstations or off-task on the internet, while 27% had employees who did so for more than five hours a day.

Advertising and information technology employers were most likely to employ tracking software, and 81% of respondents said productivity increased after installing such software, Digital.com said.

Though not a viable option for all occupations, remote work is driving significant change in HR policies and practices. It is also causing shifts affecting entire industries; recent reports documented an exodus of tech workers who, thanks to flexible work options, opted to live and work outside of the Bay Area and other hotspots.

But both remote work and employee surveillance are concepts that predate the COVID-19 pandemic, even if employees may be more aware of them because of the changes of the past year and a half. Productivity is not the only reason employers might track employee activity — others have cited the use of technology for contact tracing purposes or for securing intellectual property.

Still, compliance experts in previous interviews with HR Dive cautioned employers about the patchwork of laws governing remote employee tracing as well as the additional benefits and risks associated with it, such as allowing surveillance to take the place of good leadership practices.

There's also perspective of employees: In a 2018 survey of anonymous users of technology worker platform Blind, about one-quarter of respondents said their employers went to "unreasonable lengths" to monitor employees. Other commentators note that worker tracking can clash with employee electronic privacy protections, according to CIO Dive.

Zoom is working on a hot-desking solution to allow workers to book desks and other office spaces, the company announced at its yearly conference Monday.

Set to debut later this year, the tool lets users access an interactive map of their office, picking seats or arrangements recommended by Zoom’s AI platform, said Cynthia Lee, lead product manager, during the event.

The hot-desking solution customizes workstations according to user preferences, and wipes devices clean of user data after each use. The solution will be available on Zoom Rooms and Zoom Phone devices in beta later this year.

The squabble in the software vendor market continues, with providers aiming to accommodate the hybrid workforce. The goal is to convince users to choose their products as the center of the work universe.

Zoom's upgrade responds, partly, to workplace preference. Seven in 10 workers whose employers offer flexible work policies say they intend to adopt a hybrid model, according to data from Mercer. The move is also trying to grab executive attention, as PwC found nearly half of tech leaders plan to enable tech solutions to enable effective hybrid work.

Workers start their days with email or collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, but now Zoom is attempting to push its technology to the forefront of the daily experience, according to Carrie Marshall, CEO of Talk Social to Me.

"By combining the digital and physical components of work with this new hot desking capability, Zoom is hoping to become the default starting point and hub for the workday regardless of where someone sits on any given day," said Marshall in an email.

Employees are getting tired of video conferencing tools, following 18 months of continual use. It's one of the headwinds providers will contend with as they roll out new solutions.

But "if integrated apps and the new experience aren't useful or sticky enough, this new solution might simply be used as video-enabled Zoom rooms, which isn't anything new," said Marshall. "The workforce is already fatigued with too many digital tools, so Zoom's experience needs to be compelling enough to change entrenched habits."

Hot desking isn't Zoom's first move addressing a hybrid work world. Earlier this year, Zoom rolled out several updates to its products, such as touchless capabilities in its Zoom Rooms offering, aimed at accommodating workers in-person and remotely.

Half of CIOs say a lack of collaboration between specialist teams hampers digital transformation, according to data released by Netskope.

There's a disconnect between network and security, with nearly half of professionals from both fields describing their relationship in negative terms such as "combative" or "dysfunctional," according to the report. The company surveyed 2,675 global IT professionals.

The network and security disconnect puts digital transformation projects at risk, as both teams are pursuing projects. Among the 87% of participants working on a project currently, 62% involve networking and security transformation.

Digitally transforming a business requires collaboration — not just the type of software tool, but the business practice as well.

The need to secure the organization while operating remotely heightened differences between the network and security camps, said Mike Anderson, chief digital and information officer at Netskope. But a disconnect was brewing prior to the pandemic.

"The networking team feels like they're the boots on the ground doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to a lot of the security stack," said Anderson. When CISOs report outside of the CIO, that can lead to further estrangement if "completely different sets of priorities" are set at the higher level.

Fragmented IT and security outfits could be less effective at protecting the organizations, as cybersecurity is a team effort. Yet 37% of global IT professionals say "the security and networking teams don’t really work together much," according to the report.

"It can sometimes feel like the two groups have competing priorities," said Giordon Gill, IT director at Eagle Hill Consulting, in an email. While IT teams focus on customer service and closing help desk tickets, workers from the security unit "are more focused on how changes to the environment, new applications, and new services impact the organization's cybersecurity posture."

In the event of a critical event such as a cyberattack or breach, companies need to assign an overarching crisis management team in order to coordinate all the work streams, Jerry Bessette, senior vice president and lead of Booz Allen Hamilton's Cyber Incident Response Program, previously told CIO Dive.

Addressing the disconnect between the units starts by giving them common problems to tackle.

The companies that succeeded at pivoting to remote work, and managing the associated IT and cybersecurity challenges were the companies that said "forget about the organizational chart: Let's get a cross-functional team together and focus on solving the problem," said Anderson.

The report laid out three practical courses of action to tackle the security-network disconnect:

• Enable DevOps: The methodologies of DevOps — as well as DevSecOps — carry over well to enable network-security collaboration. 

• Blending operation centers: The concept of a security and network operations center (SNOC) combines the security and network hubs to strengthen a company's ability to respond. 

• Prioritize business-critical metrics: Leadership needs to know how networking and security are working together. Metrics such as mean time between failures (MTBF) or customer satisfaction can help.

"As the person who oversees IT and security, I see how both working together improves the client experience," said Gill.

A joint approach also helps accelerate transformation projects, since context switching can hamper a team's ability to address their priorities. By combining efforts, companies can also lower the need to hand off tasks from one team to the other.

"The more things get stuck in queues between teams, the slower you can move," said Anderson.

Context-switching while hopping back and forth between digital tools hampers productivity for 45% of workers, according to a report from software company Qatalog. The study, conducted in partnership with the Ellis Idea Lab at Cornell University, surveyed 1,000 workers.

For 44% of workers, siloed digital tools are making it hard to gauge whether work is being duplicated. Nearly half said the inability to track work led to mistakes on the job.

Workers report spending nearly one hour a day looking for information between collaboration, storage and messaging apps, and half of workers fear information will get lost in the shuffle.

Flexibility will mark the next phase of remote work. It's likely the changes will bring more, not less, complexity as organizations rely on technology solutions to stay operative, whether employees are at home or in the office.

Most workers want the nimbleness of hybrid work to stay, but seven in 10 employees say there's currently room for improvement in the way technology is helping them execute on work tasks, according to Qatalog data. Given the abundance of digital tools, U.S. employees switch between 13 applications 30 times per day on average, according to Asana's Anatomy of Work Index 2021 report.

Tool providers are beginning to respond to employee burnout and messaging overload with tweaks to their platforms.

"The major players in collaboration are moving to reduce context-switching and app-switching so employees can better focus on what they're doing," said Wayne Kurtzman, research director, social and collaboration at IDC.

Google announced Monday updates to the Rooms experience within Google Chat aimed at centralizing "people, topics and projects" within Google Workspace, according to an announcement. Microsoft also released a new Whiteboard capability within teams to allow for synchronous collaboration between users earlier this week.

Companies entrusted the CIO and the IT organization with supporting productivity. With so much company knowledge stored on tech platforms, it's up to the technologists to ensure that companies can keep operating efficiently, and are able to derive value instead of disruption from the technologies they lean on.

Windows 11, the successor to the Windows 10 operating system, will be available to users as soon as the 2021 holiday season, Microsoft announced. Windows 11 will begin rolling out as a free upgrade to eligible PCs starting Oct. 5. The company previously said it expected to make the operating system available "this holiday season."

PCs running the upgraded software will also be available for purchase on Oct. 5.

The new operating system, the first full new version of a Microsoft operating system since the 2015 launch of Windows 10, includes a set of features designed to curb context-switching and facilitate collaboration in the hybrid work world, a theme Microsoft executives repeatedly struck throughout presentations. 

"Windows 11 is the operating system for hybrid work," said Wangui McKelvey, general manager, Microsoft 365, in a press briefing. "We have worked hard to deliver new, familiar, flexible experiences that work the way you work." 

Windows 11's play on hybrid work and enterprise productivity are evident with the inclusion of new tools called Snap Layouts, Snap Groups and Desktops. The trio of features allow users to group specific applications and windows together, organizing and customizing workspaces according to specific tasks and intents.

The updated OS from Microsoft comes at a time when ChromeOS and MacOS are seeing enterprise adoption rise. With Windows 11, Microsoft aims to address the challenges of hybrid work and set up the next chapter in its history as a central tenet of the enterprise tech stack.

The taskbar of the new operating systems integrates a Chat window from Microsoft Teams, and adds new capabilities, which includes muting or unmuting the mic, and sharing the desktop or a single application from the desktop taskbar. The chat tool's central location "should improve distributed work," said J.P. Gownder, VP and principal analyst at Forrester.

"This innovation is well timed for the COVID[-19] world, which has (re)established the centrality of the PC to the future of work and to digital life," said Gownder in an email. "Whether these features pop for employees remains to be seen, but they're directionally aligned to the new world of hybrid work."

Microsoft's enterprise foothold

Microsoft is king when it comes to new computer shipments, according to Gartner data. Over 250 million PCs running Windows software shipped in 2020, compared to 22 million computers running MacOS. 

But in the enterprise sector, Mac prevalence gained ground last year, increasing from 17% in 2019 to 23% in 2020 among companies with 1,000 employees or more.

Following the hardware woes of 2020, many companies are "caught in between this universe where they've got these traditional applications, but at the same time there's a push to modernizing the experience, and investing in newer devices that run newer flavors of their operating system," said Nick McQuire, chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight. "That's the environment that Windows 11 is coming into."

With the new operating system, Microsoft also aims to maximize the usability of its existing collaboration and productivity tools.

But Windows 11 is an iterative release which pinpoints "where Windows needs greater ambition rather than introducing the sweeping changes seen with its predecessor," said Geoff Blaber, CEO at CCS Insight.

"Microsoft is making adjustments to areas that have potential to move the needle on user experience, engagement and the ever-expanding reach of Office 365 apps," said Blaber in an email. 

Microsoft is also aiming to respond to users who have struggled to efficiently manage the set of tools they've used to operate under a hybrid model. Users are citing lost productivity due to time spent switching in between apps to get through their work days. A breakdown in collaboration among teams is also hurting transformation efforts. 

"Ultimately, Windows 11 will need to spend some time in the wild with users before establishing its true purpose and identity," said Gownder. But the slate of new features and revamped user interfaces and features give Windows 11 a chance to stand out.

"The proof will only be seen in the months after its release, as judged by users," Gownder said. 

Aside from the usability updates, Microsoft must also prove there are performance and security upsides to updating systems to Windows 11, said Dan Wilson, senior research director at Gartner.

"Enterprises are less interested in major innovation or cosmetic changes that are always difficult to deploy and support," Wilson said. "Most are struggling to keep Windows patched and updated to reduce cyber risk. Enterprise IT teams are asking for improved performance, stability, security and simplified administration."

Collaboration tool use in the enterprise has grown 44% since 2019, according to Gartner data. The firm consulted 10,080 full-time employees at companies with 100 workers or more.

Just one-third of enterprise meetings took place in-person in 2021, down from 63% in 2019, driven in part by stay-at-home orders and the rise of collaboration tools. In the next three years, just one-quarter of enterprise meetings will take place in-person, Gartner predicts.

Use of real-time mobile messaging tools and storage and sharing solutions also rose in the past three years, while adoption of training and personal development tools remained unchanged.

Collaboration tool use is now the norm for most enterprises. Beyond chat applications, integrations and features have added complexity to the platforms and ingrained them into company systems. 

For technology executives, increased adoption moved collaboration solutions to a more central location in the tech stack. Longer term, the technology will demand more coordination with the rest of IT management.

"As these applications become more interwoven and interoperable, there's going to be, at the very least, the need for some kind of cross-functional team to help ensure that governance and administration is done in concert with other parts of the business," said Christopher Trueman, principal research analyst at Gartner.

Enterprise tool choice can influence operations. From security to transformation, a company's ability to collaborate impacts performance.    

The fact that applications such as collaboration or email are mostly cloud-based has shifted the way those applications are managed, according to Naveen Chhabra, senior analyst at Forrester. 

"It doesn't mean [companies] don't need to manage those applications," Chhabra told CIO Dive in July. "It's just that how they were managing it earlier has changed" to a more self-sustained, automation-driven way of working.

But given the need for additional IT support, some vendors have begun training admins focused on managing their platform. Slack, for example, started a certification program in July 2020 and has so far certified more than 500 Slack administrators.  

If organizations adhere to the model of having platform-specific IT specialists, in the future, those types of professionals "will be working a lot closer with their colleagues who are in charge of other services than they were in the past," said Trueman.