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 oldpandemic 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.