Today we are excited to share a special report written by Redmondmag.com, sponsored by BlueJeans, “Achieving Interactive Agility: Work from home, the office, or anywhere with Microsoft Teams”. Read the report to get up to speed on the latest thinking on how best to get your office ready for the return of employees in a hybrid work environment when you are using Microsoft Teams.

According to the report, planning for returning to the office will call for making decisions that we had not previously considered. Organizations are already in the process of creating frameworks and decision-factors to identify critical questions that need to be asked:

a. who gets to go back to the office full-time

b. who works from home

c. who comes to the office a few times a week and so on.

This process comes from the understanding that there are crucial benefits for employee well-being and organizational productivity by implementing the hybrid work model. Employers are now tasked with finding the model of work that enables them to keep the best of both worlds. According to researchers at Redmond, “What will be required is that we develop a new “interactive agility” that enables everyone to do literally everything from wherever they are without forcing anyone to alter their daily routine to hold meetings. After all, we’ve all learned how to collaborate remotely. We’ve even found it a superior way to work for several situations.”

With this scenario, we ask ourselves, what happens when there is a meeting and participants are in the office or at home? This situation is not a new scenario for a lot of organizations. Many employers were used to remote work even before the pandemic, collaborating effectively with employees and teams in different locations and time zones. What is different now is the scale. There will be more remote employees than ever before, which leads to asking questions such as, how do we ensure equitable access to crucial interactions and meetings when many employees are remote and aren’t able to be in the office?

Microsoft Teams continues to add features that help in remote collaboration such as session management enhancements, noise reduction, breakout rooms, mobile polls, and more, and will be the medium of choice to connect a hybrid workforce for many organizations from now on. In a hybrid scenario, it is essential to ensure that employees in the office can take advantage of the office setting and meet in person while also ensuring that remote employees are connected to the conversation. It will be a missed opportunity if employees only access the meeting from their desktop and do not congregate together when they are in the office. Additionally, many offices are also equipped for precisely this scenario – with high-quality room audio/visual conferencing systems that now need to support Microsoft Teams.

According to the report, “these investments were originally made, before the pandemic, as part of a strategy to bring whole groups of employees, clients, suppliers, advisors, and other associates together across multiple locations, expanding the virtual conference room to enhance collaboration.”

BlueJeans helps organizations using Microsoft Teams in their offices continue to use these high-value investments and seamlessly connect remote employees to their colleagues in the office. BlueJeans Gateway for Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft Certified Cloud Video Interop (CVI) solution that enables meeting rooms equipped with standards-based room videoconferencing systems such as those available from Poly, Cisco, Pexip, or Lifesize to join Microsoft Teams Meetings.

Employees working from home will join the meeting, as usual, using the Microsoft Teams client running on their laptop, tablet, or other devices. Everyone in the office gathers at the designated conference room where BlueJeans Gateway has been deployed to connect them and their home-located colleagues. The conferencing monitor displays the standard matrix of windows, each containing a remote participant and all the rich online content, including audio, video, and content sharing. The remote Teams users see the roomful of colleagues and all other remote participants on their laptop or mobile device.

Read more about Interactive Agility and about the benefits of including Cloud Video Interop (CVI) in your hybrid work model in this special report from Redmondmag.com!