Kim Rader Subject:
How Can We Bridge the Location Divide?
How Can We Bridge the Location Divide? [Greeting] Flexible work has quickly become the status quo. We are now uniquely familiar with the terms “Zoom,” “Teams,” and “Skype.” Each phrase conjures up a memory: from chatting with pixelated colleagues in uniform boxes to frantically muting your audio as a siren wails outside the window. Over time, “Zoom fatigue” has crept in and managers are realizing there ought to be more to the hybrid experience. The embedded “location divide” describes the varied access to technology, space, and skills between in-person and remote workers. While hybrid work can promote equity—for instance, by giving more scheduling flexibility for parents, or allowing employees with disabilities or chronic health conditions to work from home—this location divide poses significant challenges for inclusivity, communication, collaboration and company culture (think: proximity bias & workplace burnout). In fact, as many as 72% of companies plan to invest in more innovative tools that support and sustain virtual collaboration. Take our Design Strategy team, for example. Lindsay dials in from Toronto, Jing from San Francisco, Katie from New York City and Zac from Maryland. For our weekly check-ins, our dispersed team now conferences on Gather Town. In this customizable metaverse, users can create office spaces and seamlessly walk into and out of conversations. As more teams adapt to new ways of working, it is essential to employ effective tools that mimic real-life interaction, encourage flexibility and enable social connection across the location divide. Cisco’s 2022 Global Hybrid Work Index featured technologies for noise reduction, speech enhancement, automatic translation and transcription, live polling and gesture recognition as key drivers of work in the future. These automated and intelligent technologies have the potential to make virtual interactions more natural, workflows more conversational, and spaces more blended. 1