Return to Office Toolkit

Start by measuring your organization’s headcount and understanding who will return to the office full time and who will be hybrid or staying remote.  This will help you set a baseline for inventory needs and assess the total cost of ownership of your devices and services portfolio.

To choose the right video and audio devices for individuals, consider employee workstyles and workspaces. Is the space open or private, shared or dedicated? Is the workstyle highly collaborative or individual? Is the employee a participant or leader in many meetings throughout the day? Are meetings in person, virtual, or both? What equipment do they use? In the office some may be connected to a PC and desk phone, and others may use mobile phones, hands-free corded or cordless headsets, or huddle room speakerphones. For individual devices like headsets, that an employee may use for hours every day, comfort should be considered. And those who often work remotely may need to replicate their office setup at home.

Poly Best Practice: Understand how your employees work.

For nearly 10 years Poly has been studying the evolving ways that people work.  There are six distinct workstyles that make up 97% of a typical enterprise. 

Start with the floorplans of meeting spaces, remembering that they may need to be reconfigured to meet your new needs. Leave extra space so in-room participants can choose to social distance. Also account for those who will join meetings remotely. It’s essential that every participant can see and be seen, and hear and be heard, as clearly as if they are in the room. 

Poly Best Practice: Evaluate your video conferencing options.

Evaluate your options for in-room video conferencing technology. Learn the six key areas that are critical for the new hybrid workforce.

When you have a list of video and audio solutions for your workstyles and meeting rooms, run a pilot. This helps confirm your choices and can identify things missed in your planning. It also lets you show key decision-makers (test users, IT and network security, training staff, finance, and operations) how the solutions work and overcome any concerns.

The alternative to standardization in outfitting employees with virtual meeting and collaboration equipment is allowing employees to freely choose any audio and video device. But this approach makes it difficult to track, monitor, and maintain equipment and to ensure consistent communication quality. It often results in sub-par communications that frustrate employees and are bad for business. In contrast, offering employees a standardized list of pre-approved products simplifies IT oversight, ensures clear and effective communications, and makes it easier for employees to identify an appropriate solution. 

With hybrid work, employees are more spread out than ever, which increases the importance of having a centralized way to monitor and measure device usage, adoption, and performance. and easily onboard new devices. The ability to remotely inventory audio and video equipment across locations, perform bulk updates, and troubleshoot performance issues reduces the burden on your IT team. It can also give you a window into your collaboration environments, helping you understand device and workspace usage, and providing context for employee surveys to identify opportunities for improvement.

Poly Best Practice: Consider using management software.

Management software provide visibility into product health, status, and maintenance. A solution like Poly Lens can enable remote provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting from a single pane of glass. 

• Full-time office worker
• Hybrid worker (time split between in-office and remote work each week)
• Full-time remote worker (may come to the office for important meetings a couple times a year) 

• Use a tool like the Poly Persona Survey to understand what percentage of each workstyle you have in your organization. This will make choosing the appropriate audio and video devices straightforward.
• Consider key features by workstyle and locations, such as noise-cancelling technology for on-premises employees in an open space floorplan.
• Evaluate comfort for individual devices, especially when employees may be wearing them all day.

Use a tool like the Poly Space Configurator or an interactive floorplan to help you clarify what’s needed to achieve the results you want. 

• Establish your success metrics. You can do this alone or with the help of a free 20-minute RTO consultation from Poly.
• Work with champions in your organization to develop a feedback collection process that keeps you informed of user attitudes and concerns and identifies room for improvement.

• To get the most value from your communications and collaboration investment, explore all the support your vendor provides before and after purchase.
• Take advantage of any available free services, like Poly’s RTO consultation, to fine-tune your plan before you put in in action.
• Learn the tools and software, like Poly Lens, that can ease deployment and long-term device management.
• Look for critical support offerings such as the unlimited global 24x7 technical support, advance hardware replacement, and ecosystem cloud partner support of Poly+.