The hybrid office: keeping your team connected wherever they work

Hybrid work stopped being an experiment some time ago. What has not caught up, in a lot of businesses, is the connectivity underneath it — which is still whatever each person happened to have at home.

That is the gap. A team can be fully equipped with laptops, licences and collaboration software, and still lose an hour a week to someone dropping out of a call because their home internet is shared with a household streaming video. The tools are business grade. The connection is not.

Where hybrid setups actually fail

Home internet is built for households, and it behaves like it. Contention in the evening, a modem in the wrong room, an upload speed a fraction of the download — none of that matters for watching television and all of it matters on a video call.

The second failure point is that there is no fallback. When a home connection goes down, the person is simply offline. In an office there is a second path; at a kitchen table there usually is not, and the response is a lost morning or a drive into the office.

Third, and least visible: staff quietly use personal services for work. Personal phones, personal hotspots, personal cloud accounts. It works until someone leaves and takes the phone number a client has been calling for three years.

The phone is the anchor, not the laptop

In a hybrid business the mobile is the one device that is present in every location. It is the number clients call, the second factor for every login, and the fallback connection when the fixed line fails.

Which makes it worth putting on a business account rather than leaving on personal plans. A business service keeps the number with the business, puts the cost in one place, and lets the connection be managed rather than assumed. It also means the data allowance is part of a shared pool instead of a personal plan someone is rationing.

A backup connection is cheaper than the outage

A pocket Wi-Fi or a mobile broadband service gives a home worker a second, independent path to the internet. It is not there to replace the fixed connection — it is there for the morning the fixed connection is not working.

The economics are usually obvious once you put a number on the alternative. One person unable to work for half a day costs more than a year of a small mobile broadband service. And because the data draws from the same shared pool as the rest of the fleet, a service that sits idle most months is not wasted spend.

The same devices earn their keep in other ways: a site visit, a client office with restrictive guest Wi-Fi, a temporary space before a fixed line is installed.

Tablets, and where they actually help

A tablet is not a laptop replacement for most roles, and treating it as one is how they end up in drawers. Where they work is the space between phone and laptop — reading and marking up documents, presenting to a client, taking notes in a meeting, running a form or a checklist in the field.

The thing that decides whether a tablet gets used is whether it has its own connection. A tablet that depends on tethering off someone’s phone gets left behind. A tablet with its own service, drawing on the same pooled data, goes where the person goes.

Managing it as one thing

The practical benefit of putting a hybrid team’s connectivity on one account is not just price, though the price is better. It is that it becomes one thing to manage. One bill, one data pool, one person to call when someone joins or leaves.

VBC Hub has been trading since 2012 and is Vodafone’s largest business channel partner in Australia. We size fleets for businesses running across offices, homes and vehicles, on 24 and 36 month terms, priced on how many connections you run rather than on a list price.

If your team is spread across more locations than your phone plan was designed for, that is worth a conversation. Tell us how the team actually works and we will come back with something built for it.