Hybrid Workforce Ripe Market Opportunity for Video-First Collaboration

Today’s post-pandemic hybrid workforce provides opportunities for MSPs and other service providers to increase their video-first collaboration business. It also provides challenges like addressing complexity and security.

In a recent Channel Futures webinar, “Today’s Hybrid Workforce: What It Takes to Execute,” a panel of experts addressed how to strategically market, sell and support a video-first collaboration experience. Logitech sponsored the event.

Panelists included:

Arthur Germain

Arthur Germain, story strategist with Brandtelling and Channel Futures columnist, moderated the panel.

Hybrid Workforce Challenges During the Pandemic

MSPs and other service providers faced a myriad of challenges during the pandemic when they had to quickly help their customers switch to remote-work collaboration.

Kairos Communications’ Lucas Salvage

“Companies that clung to their servers and clung to their premises-based technologies really were behind the eight ball during the pandemic,” Salvage said. “And many of those have come out of that now. But I think some of those pain points are very difficult. The biggest pain point that I can tell you is that we wanted the experience to be very congruent to working in the office, trying to make that experience that you feel in the office congruent to the experience that you feel at home.”

In addition, the last mile in terms of network connectivity became an issue, Wright said.

Wave Welcome’s Vennard Wright

“A lot of people pointed out that they were not able to get online because their kids were home working, too,” he said. “And everyone’s working across the same network connection. So that was something that we had to make sure that everyone understood what the  bandwidth needs were for being able to perform your job from home. That was a really big one and it’s still an issue because a lot of people are still home. That’s a good thing for some of our ISPs, but not so much for the rest of us.”

Providing a Consistent Experience for Hybrid Workers

Also, Wave Welcome wanted to make sure it was providing a consistent experience for everyone, and some people hadn’t been trained on audio visual (AV) technologies, Wright said.

Nerds That Care’s James Rocker

“So that was something else that we had to make sure was in place,” he said. “And I would say the last, and this is still probably an issue for a lot of people, is how do you really get your company culture across? Before the pandemic, culture was as simple as putting doughnuts in the break room. But after the pandemic, it wasn’t as easy. So how do you make sure that you’re staying engaged with your team? How do you make sure you’re staying engaged with your customers? How do you make sure that your company is still a great place to work when people are in different places? Also, something that happened during the pandemic is some people decided where they were living at that time wasn’t necessarily the best place, so they moved to a completely different state.”

Many things happened as a result of the pandemic, Wright said. And many organizations are coming to grips some of them.

Scroll through our slideshow above for more from this hybrid workforce webinar.