I’m Dr Adrian Cable, VP R&D at Lifesize, and you’re watching episode 3 of my series on “advanced collaboration." Today, I'm talking about hybrid work – the changing face of the physical office.

What is “hybrid work?" How you work productively from anywhere, rather than workdays being optimized around people being in a particular place (like the office) and anything else (like WFH) being second best. Also, there's a heightened awareness and fear over future pandemics, which means that 100 people crowded into a conference room will likely be a thing of the past. So, even if and when people return to “the office," "local remote work” will probably become the norm – people connecting into video meetings and collaborations from their own cubes or offices, rather than physically going to a conference room.

Last week we explored some of the challenges that accompany hybrid work e.g. democratic vs. autocratic. This week, we’re going to dig deeper into something quite specific: the transition from “office work” in the old-pandemic world to the new world. It’s clear that moving forward we will often have multiple “physical offices” from where to work – our home office, and multiple different spaces in our workplace office – work needs to productively be portable between different spaces.

This means that a lot of activities that shared meeting spaces are great for, will need to be ‘refactored’ for the new world to support this workflow.

Let's talk about whiteboarding -- everyone’s favourite collaboration tool. 100m whiteboards were sold in 2020 – 100% growth from 2019. Lots of people are putting whiteboards in their home offices, teachers setting up home classrooms with whiteboards. Why? Phenomenal productivity and communication tool – brainstorming, teaching, project planning, presenting ideas, sales review. It's easy to use, low cost, no training requirements -- it “just works” without prior planning/structure. However, sharing is tough when working remotely.

Fortunately, there’s a better way, and that’s Kaptivo. Full disclosure: it’s a Lifesize product – but really unique and come into its own in the new normal.