Cisco Looks for the Future of Office and Reality of Hybrid

It was about this time last year that some CEOs stood up, pounded their tables, and announced, “Everyone back to the office after Labor Day.”

And it’s clear what happened. In the interaction between many millions of workers in a hard-to-hire atmosphere; public opinion that held if people could work at home during the pandemic, they probably could at least part of the time now; and executives demanded compliance; hybrid work was largely the winner.

Even Wall Street, loudest in its demands for in-office, has had to deal with major resistance. A Deloitte and Workplace Intelligence survey this month of 700 full-time financial services executives with job titles of manager or equivalent and above but not CXO found that 66% would quit if required to work in the office all week. That’s a lot of talent to replace if a company had to.

The reality of what people are willing to do to keep a level of convenience and work-life balance helps explain the approach tech giant Cisco has been taking since at least April 2023, according to a company article at the time by Kevin Delaney, a former New York Times editor.

“Today, the very concept of work — how we do it, where, and with whom — is being upended,” he wrote. “And many employees will run the other way from bland, impersonal cubicles and rigid, 9-to-5 in-office workweeks. But the office experience remains highly relevant. It just needs to be reimagined for the hybrid-work revolution.”

“If we’ve learned anything during the pandemic,” said Mark Miller, Cisco’s Director of hybrid work strategy in Cisco Collaboration Sales in the article, “it’s that focused work, individual work can be done remotely. And the reality is, when people come back to the office, they come back to collaborate or socialize. They come back to be around others. And largely, that’s what’s been driving our real estate strategy here at Cisco.”

That is a different approach from the amenities landlords are offering to lure employees back to the office in a move to keep corporations leasing space, as GlobeSt.com reported in the March/April 2023 edition of the Real Estate Forum.

“People are going to come into the office for engaging more with each other, rather than going out and getting work done in their cubicle,” Jeetu Patel, Cisco’s executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration, recently told Fortune. “We have to reimagine, fundamentally, what the workspace of the future is going to look like.”

Individual teams decide on policy of working in-house or not. There’s also a strong emphasis on being in the office for specific types of activities, like meeting customers.

Cisco has already moved its Atlanta and New York City locations to have fewer offices, video in almost every room, and no designated desks for employees. There are open area collaborative spaces that small groups can use for meetings. Boardrooms are triangular so people in person can see those dialing in remotely. The company will likely expand this to most “tier one” cities.

This is easier for Cisco than many other companies because it is a major manufacturer of telecommunications and video conferencing equipment. However, the principles are the same for other companies and industries.