More than five years after Covid-19 induced a massive shift in working practices, businesses are still actively refining their hybrid work and return-to-office strategies, meaning they are required to balance employee satisfaction and retention with critical business priorities such as productivity, operational efficiency and profitability, according to research from Cisco.
Released during the Cisco Live 2025 conference, the Navigating hybrid work strategies in evolving workplaces study was based on a double-blind survey, undertaken in April 2025, of 21,513 employers and employees in full-time roles across 21 global markets in industries ranging from financial services to healthcare and manufacturing. Respondents were segmented based on the level of their promotions and pay rises into three groups: high performers, average performers and low performers.
Among the fundamental findings are that at a time when many organisational leaders are encouraging or mandating their teams to spend more time in the office, “significant” disconnects are appearing between employer expectations and employee preferences.
It also highlights the vital relationship between workplace flexibility and overall well-being, and the necessity for transparent communication around the growing number of return-to-office policies.
As it released the findings of the report, Cisco noted that compared with its inaugural global hybrid work study in 2022, Employees are ready for the future of hybrid work, are you?, there was a clear global trend towards increased in-office work, with the percentage of respondents with hybrid work arrangements decreasing from 62% in 2022 to 45% in 2025.
In addition, current work-from-office arrangements were found to be making significant improvements to well-being – in particular socially and emotionally. Cisco suggested that over time, employers have become more adept at tailoring hybrid work arrangements to better support employees’ needs.
Yet as working practices returned towards more time in the office, leaders were also seen to be facing critical challenges with communicating changes and the need to manage and balance the various expectation gaps that exist.
Engaging employees
Indeed, the data is said to reveal a significant area for improvement for leaders engaging employees in the decision-making process around hybrid working arrangements. Principally, that involves communicating these changes when they occur, and justifying the business case for them.
The study also shows that hybrid working arrangements continue to remain an effective tool in the war for talent acquisition and retention. Notably, 63% of all respondents said they would accept a pay cut for the option to work remotely more often. Nearly three-quarters of all workers reported higher productivity under their new working arrangements.
Regarding segmentation of employees, half of high performers were found to be working at companies requiring less than three days in the office per week. In addition, this group preferred remote work while also recognising the importance of collaborative office spaces.
With hybrid arrangements now a firm feature of the modern workplace, collaboration technology was seen by both employers and employees as crucial for enabling better engagement and more flexibility. Investment was already occurring in this area. The survey also revealed that less than half (49%) of employees believe their organisation provides a “seamless” workflow experience across all work locations.
The study concluded with seven calls to action: navigate varying views of the workforce; flexibility is non-negotiable and drives performance; trust must be built to optimise productivity; clear communication is key; encourage a balance of flexibility and office presence; design policies for today and the future; and future-proof workplace technology offerings.
Future-proofing workplace technology services was identified as crucial by the vast majority of employers in the survey. As many as 93% noted the intrinsic importance of collaboration tools (93%) and employees (90%), and investment in AI is widespread. However, the current reality is that only 49% of employees feel workflows are seamless across all work locations. This, said Cisco, underscored the need for better technology devices and capabilities to provide a superior and more seamless employees experience.
At the conference, Jeetu Patel, Cisco president and chief product officer of AI, argued that the company’s products were now beginning to make a difference in terms of bringing people closer and making better connections, coming from the principle of “distance zero”. “When people are on a call, we should make sure that the distance between those two people goes away, that they feel like they’re there with each other,” he said. “When you are in a [meeting] room and there are other people who you’re collaborating with who are not there, it should feel like you’re all in the same place. That’s one example of how technology is helping deliver [a superior] experience.
“But it goes back to a hierarchy of needs,” added Patel. “At the at the very core level, you need basic tools to get your work done. But if you are going to come into the office to be around other people and do creative work with your team, there are other needs that technology can solve. For example, helping you find a conference room, helping you find a desk to sit next to your coworkers. Coming back to AI adoption, I think you can just look at the tool itself, and you start thinking about the process, and you start thinking about the whole workflow, and this is where it becomes a team sport.”
Moving from team sports to Teams, Patel added that the Microsoft unified communications system would run natively on the Cisco range of Webex collaboration devices in the same way its own system would. He noted that a number of major organisations had standardised Microsoft Teams rooms and achieved standardisation on Webex devices. More significantly, the devices’ switches and cameras were augmented into the Webex portfolio to become de facto sensors on an office network, providing data about facilities and campuses, offering temperatures, air quality and occupancy so that a working environment and workplace can be more effective and managed in an easier way.
“We want to make sure that that distance zero, which is an end user-focused concept, also brings in the IT administrator,” he said. “We wanted to have one-click distance zero for the IT administrator, and we did this last year with the microphone, where [with] one click, you can just easily configure. Just plug it into a switch and it auto-configures itself. You don’t have to do anything.”
This capability has now been rolled out to video and cameras configured to provide cinematic-quality meetings to improve engagement. Explaining the rationale for the move, Patel asked why it was harder to be in a video conference for an hour than watch a movie that ran for maybe twice as long.
“Why is that? Because in a movie, your frame speeds are changing, and so it actually resets your brain … but in a video call, you’re just looking at the same angle for the full hour,” he said. “If you have a conference with multiple people, all their cameras auto-configure, and they work with each other and they give you a cinematic quality of the media. If someone is speaking, they’ll give you a close-up … and if you get zoomed out, it’s automatically going to do that.”
Headset integration
The Webex video conference ante has been upped considerably through integration with the Apple Vision Pro headset so that users can experience a spatial meeting. Cisco first revealed in February 2024 a roadmap to support the next age of collaboration, which will lean on technology partnerships with firms such as Nvidia and Apple, in the latter case realising the potential of its recently launched Vison Pro device for the Webex collaboration service.
In setup at Cisco Live, the Apple device was deployed to test use cases based on a standard Webex app – alternatively in a Microsoft Teams room mode – with a Cisco room bar Pro sound system.
From there, anything standard ends and what is experienced is not a traditional meeting room. What is delivered using the Apple device is high-resolution stereoscopic video, and a spatial studio of sorts, whereby somebody can present or show a product or process in high-resolution 3D.
Describing what was possible with the headset and the app, the Webex team said Apple was currently in an “inspirational phase”, and that the two companies were working “hand in glove” to show “the art of the possible” from a spatial configuration, spatial perspective and spatial desktop. In addition, an increasing number of Apple developers were involved in spatial technology projects such as physical training, representation of diagrams, and – as shown at Cisco Live 2025 – real 3D models of objects that could be appreciated better from being part of a virtual meeting experience.
Apart from the basic 3D capability, another key part of the visual experience regards the user interface. In the 3D session, contributors’ individual video feeds can be bought out from the traditional multiple user screen view and isolated anywhere in the 3D viewing sphere. In addition, there’s a general volumetric 3D view that can be activated to provide depth.
Again, the key is distance zero, offering experiences with much better depth, more realistic colours, and a more realistic in-person experience than with the standard Webex. As the Cisco Live team said: “You have the ability to take the distance out of ‘conferences’, and it looks and feels like you’re in there. When you see something in a flat 2D screen, their eyes aren’t really even intended to be looking at you for extended periods of time … In terms of optics, our muscles and nerves are not meant to see that. Yet sitting here looking in full 3D, we can be here for hours looking at each other and everybody in the room.”
This room is intended for a variety of use cases – including product design; engineering; education and training; healthcare; and oil and gas exploration – anything that can be improved from a true spatial experience.
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