Woe to the poor chief technology officer (CTO) in the age of COVID-19. When the world was quite abruptly thrown into a remote reality, CTOs and all their adjacent teams were tasked with a sizeable job: figure out a way to keep the company connected without anyone being physically in the same location, and do so within a secure environment with as little friction as possible. Oh, and let's throw a webcam shortage on top of that, just for kicks. Nowadays, those same people are being asked to equip their companies to connect in a more flexible way than ever before – building the infrastructure that allows for collaboration when employees have the choice to be either in the office or remote. When in this hybrid environment, the tools chosen need to enable workers no matter where they are located.
At Pearson, the world's leading learning company with 24,000 employees across 70 countries worldwide, the crux of their “return to office” plan is based on each individual and their level of comfort. If you're not comfortable coming into the office, there's no mandate to do so. “You're going to be productive where you're most comfortable. If you make sure that your employees are starting from a position of comfort and safety, you're going to get the best work out of them,” says Steve Santana, the CTO of virtual learning, one of the largest divisions at Pearson. He and his team are in charge of the technology that bridges the gap between the physical and virtual workspaces, and at the core of all their planning are the needs of those who will be using the technology. He adds, “You're going to have to figure out how to be flexible and how you're going to become a people person before you're a technologist.”
The technology sector has responded rapidly to the changes in the way we work, and the speed at which that has occurred has been mind-blowing for those who have been seeking solutions during these unprecedented times. That's something not lost by those like Steve: “The work that Microsoft and Google, Cisco, and Zoom have done on improving their product, improving the security and accessibility, has been amazing. I don't think people appreciate the speed of innovation that has been going on there. It is truly impressive. So when something goes wrong, and somebody whines about something, I tell them that you've got to consider the scale of what is going right here. You have no idea what is happening on the back end for these companies to make their networks, their data centers, and all this other kind of stuff work the way they do. So as a CTO, I appreciate that side of it tremendously.”
It's through that lens that Steve is also viewing how Pearson selects their tools to make hybrid meetings work. New products are constantly coming onto the market. However, it is important to be discerning. That shiny, new thing might be woefully outdated a short time later, or as Steve says: “There are landfills chock-full of all sorts of failed ‘turnkey’ solutions because they were a good idea for a moment in time. Pick an ecosystem, start simple, and grow organically.”
For the next part, we took those words to heart and decided to apply them to our discussion of technology to enable hybrid meetings. You won't find specific product endorsements. You won't find a list of items to order from Amazon. What you will find are some insights into what to look for when considering the products currently on the market at the time of this writing. We will focus on two key areas when it comes to making hybrid meetings work: creating presence (Chapter 10) and enabling collaboration (Chapter 11) for all attendees, regardless of location.
Technology has to serve both constituencies, the in-office and the remote employees. Focusing more on one over the other is a recipe for disaster, or, in the words of Steve Santana, “I think CTOs that are just kind of building it for one or the other are going to be ‘Suddenly Dinosaurs.’”