March 19, 2025
If you started your career before 2020, you’re probably familiar with the pros and cons of in-person work as well as the pros and cons of working remotely. Now that pandemic fears have largely subsided, many companies are hoping that a hybrid solution will bring the best of both worlds together.
For the most part, hybrid work does exactly that. But there’s one pesky problem. While cloud communication tools can easily bring remote workers together, and conference rooms can easily bring in-person workers together, using both solutions at the same time can be messy, unproductive, and frustrating.
How Has Remote Work Challenged Communication in the Workplace?
Remote work got a rough start in 2020. It took quite a bit of time for everyone to get comfortable using the new cloud-based tools, and most of us have experienced the audio and video issues, meeting sprawl, and work/life balance issues that went along with them.
But software developers listened, and they’ve come up with a variety of features to all but eliminate most of the early pain points. And as long as everyone was remote, everyone was pretty much on the same page.
But for many workplaces, that’s now changed.
What Are the Communication Issues With Hybrid Working?
After many employees returned to the office for a few days a week, many organizations started to experience widespread communication issues. And if you try to address them by simply requiring everyone to have the same in-person days, you take away quite a bit of flexibility — a perk many workers prize.
Workplaces that want to remain hybrid and flexible have a few hurdles to overcome with their communication. Here are the most common:
- Response times vary with different work settings
- In-person meetings can sideline remote participants
- It’s hard to convey nuance and tone properly in writing
- Everyone has different preferences when it comes to devices, features, and platforms
- Information siloes can develop when in-office workers rely on in-person, spontaneous conversations, and remote employees rely exclusively on digital tools
If your workplace experienced any of these, the good news is that it’s not just you. And here’s even better news — these issues are fixable.
Strategic Solutions for Enhanced Hybrid Workplace Communication
There are ways that organizations with hybrid workplaces can bridge the communication gulfs that can appear between remote and in-person employees without taking away flexibility.
Here are the solutions we’ve seen work well.
1. Evaluate Current Communication Practices
Every organization — and every department — can have different communication needs! So don’t assume you know what your organization’s top pain points are until you assess your organization's current communication framework.
Here are a few important questions to ask:
- How are daily tasks communicated in this team/department?
- Is everyone able to access all of the communication tools we have?
- How does each team announce important information vs. have confidential conversations?
- How are remote employees currently being included in face-to-face conversations?
- Which tools do remote workers use most often?
Once you complete your evaluation, you might find out that some communication tools or features favor one group over another or that “confidential conversations” aren’t as confidential as some team members thought. Armed with what your pain points are, you can make targeted improvements.
2. Understand Individual Communication Preferences
Some people prefer face-to-face interactions. Others may prefer to express themselves in writing, where they can choose their words more carefully. And others may like the speed and informality that’s common with instant messaging.
Understanding these preferences — and why they exist — will help you create more inclusive communication strategies.
3. Optimize Digital Collaboration Tools
If you’re still using the same collaboration tools that you used a few years ago, you might want to rethink them. Quite a few organizations that we work with have a “tool sprawl” issue when it comes to communication, with an instant messaging platform, a productivity tool, voice calling, email, whiteboarding, and more as separate tools and, therefore, separate tabs.
Learning multiple communication tools can make onboarding unnecessary and difficult, and trying to find where a key file was shared can be a significant productivity drain.
Before the pandemic, most business communications experts wouldn’t have recommended a robust collaboration platform like Microsoft Teams or Webex by Cisco unless they had multiple locations and unique collaboration needs. But that’s changed. And in fact, they’ve surprised everyone in terms of the ROI they deliver.
These tools have evolved significantly in a very short amount of time and can help bridge the gap between remote and in-office teams very effectively. They give users more flexibility in how they communicate, all within the same tool and tab. Advanced capabilities like whiteboarding, transcription, and real-time translation make it easier for everyone to participate equally. In fact, one could argue that these tools make collaboration easier than if everyone were in the same room.
4. Balance Communication Timing
With hybrid workplaces, sometimes workers aren’t in the same time zone, or they may be more productive at different hours. To accommodate these differences, it’s helpful to have a thoughtful balance between synchronous and asynchronous communication.
Synchronous communication includes:
- Traditional office interactions and watercooler conversations
- Real-time video conferencing
Asynchronous communication includes:
- Project management updates
- Collaborative document sharing
Each approach offers distinct advantages. So finding the right mix helps maintain productivity while respecting different work schedules and time zones.
5. Establish Clear Communication Guidelines
Once you understand how your employees prefer to communicate and how to achieve the right balance, here are a few guidelines you could establish to reduce information siloes and make sure that collaboration is inclusive and productive while maximizing its effectiveness
- Designate specific channels for different types of communication
- Set clear expectations for video conference participation
- Establish guidelines for sharing everyone’s work location and availability
- Ensure virtual access to all meetings
- Create protocols for recording and sharing important discussions
Getting a Better Deal on Tools That Facilitate Communication in a Hybrid Workplace
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner as well as a Cisco Gold Partner, we can help our clients access insider pricing and exceptionally knowledgeable support on unified communications tools like Microsoft Teams and Webex by Cisco.
We’re happy to provide either of these solutions by themselves, but we also offer our own unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solution. That way, you can take advantage of these incredibly powerful tools without the heavy responsibilities that can accompany them.
Interested in taking a closer look at a unified communications platform or UCaaS? Read our recent blog on how to make implementation seamless.
