Hybrid working is here to stay. That was the clear message from the Zoom Leaders Connect event, despite recurring headline stories of corporate leaders mandating staff return to the office full time.

Zoom itself announced its own RTO policy during the summer months, requiring staff who live within 50 miles of a Zoom office to work in-person two days a week.

When considering its role in helping other business and HR leaders to define their own policies, Graeme Geddes, chief sales and growth officer at Zoom, reiterates to UNLEASH that the strategy is aimed at “embracing hybrid the same way that our customers are.”

The other piece, he explains, is for CEOs to retain company culture within a hybrid or primarily remote model, maintaining the sense of purpose and belonging among employees regardless of where they are working or how.

With this dilemma being “top of mind for CEOs”, Geddes highlights the recent acquisition of employee engagement system Workvivo into the wider Zoom platform as a way for the organization to address the issue.

We’ve seen a lot of recognition of that part of the portfolio with customers that are trying to embrace hybrid, both from a best practice perspective and a technology perspective.”

Hashim adds that CEOs themselves, in conjunction with HR leaders, are driving the introduction and use of employee engagement technology, not just those in HR functions, highlighting the recent implementation of Workvivo by Virgin Group across its 40 companies as an example.

A significant factor here is the correlation between employee experience and the customer experience, explained by IDC research manager Oru Mohiuddin, as a key consideration for 2024 given that the first factor will heavily impact the second.

“You cannot have happy customers without happy agents,” she told delegates, recommending that providing the right technology-based tools, gamifying the work/reward model and a focus on wellbeing through better work/life balance are core pillars in an improved employee experience.

“It’s very important that you focus on your agents, because the new genre of [customer] contact centers require the best talent. They require agents who can think on their feet, who are highly engaged and motivated and who take ownership.

To be able to attract and retain talent such as these, those that are going to be best of breed or the best talent, you need to ensure that you are creating the right environment for them.”

The heart of organizations is changing

Announcing the acquisition of Workvivo in April, Zoom claimed that the integration will “offer new ways to keep employees informed, engaged, and connected”, while Geddes highlights the platform as “the digital heartbeat of a company.”

Speaking to UNLEASH, Workvivo chief executive and co-founder John Goulding, explains that the shift to hybrid is far more impactful on ‘frontline’ workers – those not based in an office full-time, which currently comprise 80% of the global workforce – are the “backbone of organizations.”

“The office was the heart of the organization in shaping culture and staying connected. Now, with that move to either hybrid of remote, the heart becomes a digital identity.”

Goulding says that he believes organizations are “past the tipping point” when it comes to hybrid and that while many are still figuring out what that means in practice, there is a “once in a generation opportunity” to connect frontline staff with company culture, something that they may have historically been absent from, particularly in a digital sense.

Engagement platforms will help centralize and democratize this experience, according to Workvivo’s head of marketing, Gideon Pridor, who reiterated that employee experience will be one of the “most critical investments that executives need to be thinking about going into 2024.”

“The highest business loss category in the world is business loss associated with lack of engagement,” he said. “Bottom line; nothing yields higher ROI than employee engagement.”

When considering what will be top of mind in 2024, Goulding highlights Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960: “He talked about Theory X and Theory Y, and what motivates people. Those things still hold true,” he told UNELASH.

“Whether people are working remotely or not, they still want purpose. They’re still wanting to feel connected to what the organization is trying to achieve, and they want to feel that connection with the values in the organization.”