Today, the office is no longer an office.
It’s a home study, a kitchen table, the back seat of a commuting car, or a rental property in some faraway destination. The office now sees employees at home or in transit engaging with a team sitting in a conference room thousands of miles away. Today, the office is anywhere a person decides to work, and yet most of us still rely on the technology we used before the pandemic.
That isn’t going to cut it.
According to a recent industry report drawing on interviews with 100 executives around the world, nine out of ten businesses will be combining on-site and remote work going forward, yet companies still struggle with how to keep employees in both places connected. “Despite the embrace of a hybrid model…most organizations have only begun to think through and articulate the specifics of how to carry out a more permanent mix of remote and on-site working,” the report states. “Many of their employees are feeling anxious as a result.”
Going forward, companies need tools that make collaborating from anywhere a seamless experience, and one company is leading the way: Logitech. The technology company, which most people know for producing keyboards and computer mice, is now the market leader in videoconferencing technology. “One out of every two conference rooms worldwide has a Logitech conference room system,” says Scott Wharton, Vice President and General Manager of Video Collaboration at Logitech. Today, at the dawn of a new era of hybrid work, the company is going even further, launching new intuitive tools to make the remote experience a totally fluid one—no matter where a person is working from—with a suite of devices and solutions for every scenario.
For example, Siemens uses Logitech to connect its workers internationally. “Siemens is building complex systems for sustainable cities, and wanted a way to bring together top minds without flying around the world,” Wharton says. “Working through the pandemic, the company designed and supported the building of more sustainable cities: metro areas in which personal devices, cars, and the surrounding buildings all communicate to offer insight into municipal strategies and efficiencies. To successfully undertake the largest energy research project in Europe, the Siemens team didn’t need to simply connect—they needed to harness the creativity and critical thinking required to reimagine what smart cities could look like. Brainstorming was a must.”
The New Office Brainstorm
When videoconferencing technology appeared in offices more than two decades ago, hybrid brainstorm sessions were for the most part a one-way conversation. This remained true over the past few years as the world shifted to virtual collaboration tools. Even in recent months, as coworkers have resumed feeding off one another’s energy in person—the creativity level rising with every empty coffee cup and pizza box—those trying to keep up remotely have largely been left behind, a casualty of clunky outmoded tech. Remote workers are often forced to squint to decipher text on a whiteboard, and when the in-office camera is moved closer, videoconferences are essentially reduced to audio calls. “Office collaboration for remote workers has always been a problem,” Wharton says. “If one person was remote, they were never really part of the conversation and missed out on all the side interaction, not to mention the sense of just being there. So we’re focused on making meetings more equitable, ensuring everyone is on the same playing field no matter where they are.”
In a hybrid world, brainstorming sessions must seamlessly integrate on-site and remote workers, and one piece of technology is solving this problem in a groundbreaking way: Logitech Scribe. Scribe is an AI-powered web camera that can be affixed above a whiteboard to share in-office brainstorming sessions with those viewing them remotely— and with unparalleled clarity. The camera delivers a transparency effect, enabling remote workers to “see through” the presenter for an unobstructed view of the whiteboard, while on-site employees are able to see remote colleagues clearly.
Best of all, Scribe works with a simple click of a button and connects with all the leading videoconferencing services, enhancing collaboration without the need for company-wide upgrades. Scribe was a favorite of the team behind the Governors Ball, one of the largest music festivals in New York City. The technology enabled remote collaboration for a tight-knit group spread across four states, whose members were working on an ambitious project for the festival’s tenth anniversary: building a 360-degree layout that ensured sound wouldn’t bleed between stages. The result was a mind-blowing experience for a city emerging from the pandemic.
A Better Work-From-Home Hub
Innovations in workplace technology don’t end with the conference room.
As the past two years have proved, working from home is here to stay, even if it’s only part-time. But for many people, the home-office experience is subpar: often a laptop in the kitchen or on the living room coffee table, with kids and cats and other distractions aplenty—not ideal for productivity.
For Logitech, this challenge presented a new opportunity. When the pandemic struck, the company looked at its home-office technology and discovered two things. First, the company’s office cameras were already pretty good, so the logical next step to “design a better webcam” wasn’t the first big problem to address. Second, what at-home employees really needed was some way to rein in the tangle of cables from the peripherals scattered across their workspaces. (And now, shuttling back and forth between home and office means that connecting and disconnecting everything is sometimes a daily frustration.)
So the company created Logi Dock, an all-in-one docking station and speakerphone to bring order to the home office while enhancing collaboration. The office hub connects and charges up to five USB peripherals and two monitors, replacing power cords and chargers to clear work areas. Also, it has a speakerphone with six microphones that capture the user’s voice clearly while using AI to block unwanted noise like lawnmowers and barking dogs. And for back-to-back video meetings, Logi Dock enables remote workers to jump from conference to conference with the click of a button.
“It’s a speakerphone, a dock, a hub, and also a music player, so you can listen to tunes when you’re not in a meeting,” Wharton says. “Ultimately, it’s technology that both simplifies and upgrades people’s work experience at home.”
Innovating from Anywhere
As with Siemens and Governors Ball, innovative tools now enable employees at the world’s largest companies to work from anywhere. And although the sophistication of those tools has increased, the technical expertise of their users doesn’t have to change. In the two examples cited above, Logitech seamlessly united workers across the globe by using products like Logitech Sync, device-management software that enables IT departments to have real-time insights in order to fix issues proactively, so creativity never stops. The same ease-of-use philosophy drives the design of all Logitech workplace technology, and its cameras in particular.
“In today’s offices, you want a specialized camera that can do different things,” Wharton says. “Our AI cameras recognize the human body and automatically zoom in where needed, while our RightSight technology can pick out the active speaker and put them in a separate window, bringing everybody together without anyone having to do anything tech-wise.”
Ultimately, will the remote experience ever be as good as being in the room? Logitech is aiming even higher than that.
“The analogy we use is sporting events,” Wharton says. “At a football game, for instance, there isn’t one camera that stays stationary. Instead, there are multiple cameras that move around while offering data, so you’ve always got the best angle and the latest statistics. Because of that, some might say watching the big game at home is the better experience. And that’s what we’re applying to offices for the future of hybrid work: smart technology that eventually makes the remote meeting experience even better than being in the room.”
For more information about how Logitech is enabling the future of collaboration, click here .
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Logitech.
