Cisco: Workers like the hybrid model, but crave better offices

Workers around the world are broadly positive about the idea of returning to the office, at least part-time, but CIOs should know that many are also skeptical about the suitability of in-office technology to sustain productivity.

According to a new survey of about 14,000 workers and 3,800 employers released today by Cisco, 72% of employees said that they responded “positively” to employers who mandated at least a partial return to office work, while a minority of employers said that they’d lost workers due to such mandates.

Globally, roughly half of employers (48%) said that they had imposed a “partial” return-to-office mandate, compared to 32% who said they had required a full return, and 20% with no in-office-working mandate at all. The numbers shifted slightly on a regional basis, with Europe the most positive toward the idea of remote work — just 27% of employers there had imposed full return-to-office mandates, with a correspondingly higher proportion of partial polices seen. The Americas were the most focused on bringing employees back to the office, with 35% requiring full-time attendance, and just 18% imposing no mandate.

Those numbers do not necessarily reflect employee preferences. In the Americas, for instance, 25% of respondents said that they preferred working from home, noticeably above APAC at 17% and Europe at 18%. Hybrid working models, however, were roughly equal in popularity across the three regions studied, with 32% in the Americas preferring them, along with 35% in APAC and 31% in Europe.

Workplace disconnect

Regardless of specific attitudes toward attendance policies, the recognition that offices are ill-equipped to handle the advent of new technologies and the changing needs of modern workers is widespread, Cisco’s numbers suggest.

Only 47% of employees surveyed said their work environments are suitably equipped for hybrid work. Most office space is set up for employees to work individually, just as they can at home, and not set up for meetings or group work, Cisco found. But even where meeting rooms did exist, they often did little for productivity. One of the biggest causes of this was a lack of audio and video endpoints for conferencing software, identified as a stumbling block by 41% of employers in the Americas, 52% in Asia-Pacific, and 42% in Europe.

Fully 81% of employers said that their companies had either recently renovated workspaces or were in the process of doing so, though, with nearly all citing both technology and employee expectations as key drivers for that process.

Technology and infrastructure were the most common aspects to address for office redesigns, with slightly less than two-thirds of both employers (65%) and employees (63%) rating it among their top priorities.

“Making the office a magnet means creating experiences that employees value,” said Jeetu Patel, Cisco executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration in a statement. “To achieve this, organizations must embed hybrid work solutions, infused with AI, into office spaces to foster collaborative experiences for everyone.”