Suddenly Hybrid

Chapter 10Creating Presence for All

Pre‐pandemic, not a whole lot of thought was given to how effectively a remote worker could take part in a meeting. Heck, it was often considered a win if someone could even connect to a meeting at all. Suffice it to say, the bar has been dramatically raised with the exponential adoption of video collaboration platforms, which will continue to provide the underpinning for hybrid meetings going forward.

“The expectation has completely changed,” says Eric Taylor, an IT and hardware collaboration expert. “There is an expectation if you're going to meet with someone remotely, that there's going to be video. It's going to be high‐quality video and the audio will be good.”

That's a far cry from where most people were back in March 2020, when “suddenly remote” workers were pretty much left to their own devices (literally their own webcams, if they even had one) and their own bank accounts to figure out how to be “present” in meetings. “The beginning of the pandemic, the funding strategy was … whatever you can steal from your office before it closed, or figure it out on Amazon,” according to Scott Wharton, the head of Logitech's Video Collaboration Division. Over time, some companies changed their policies and started to pay to equip their remote workers with webcams, and maybe even headsets, a trend that continues to this day. Says Scott, “Now we are seeing a much more structured stipend. I think at first the stipend started small, and then it started ...