Majority of Professionals Confident About Business Revival Despite Covid-19 Crisis: Cisco

A Cisco survey of IT and business professionals globally has revealed that 74 per cent of them think their businesses would emerge stronger, despite the challenges of the current business environment. While 82 per cent mentioned the need for greater IT support, 77 per cent were worried about maintaining customer service levels and satisfaction and another 76% feared a disruption of workflow and processes.

According to Aruna Ravichandran, VP of Marketing, Cisco Collaboration, the dramatic shift in the percentage of employees working from home created unexpected challenges. "We're finding that best practices emerged to empower employees: 67 per cent have implemented social video conferencing ‘meetups' to compensate for lack of face-to-face social interaction, and 54 per cent have implemented social chat channels," Ravichandran said in a blog post this week.

The organizations that have fared best this year are typically farther along with their workplace transformation and embrace this future of work. "Having the right IT architectures allowed them to scale fast and respond quickly to meet ever-changing opportunities and challenges," she added. Organisations are also putting employees first. Nearly 9 out of 10 managers who responded to the survey said that they had to increase emphasis on employee well-being and work-life balance as a result of the pandemic.

Additionally, 53 per cent of respondents said that trusting and empowering employees will be maintained over the long-term. "In the future, we'll see trust continue as a hallmark of the future of work: just over 60 per cent of employers think more employees will be offered flexible/remote working arrangements," said Ravichandran. Nearly 49 per cent said that enabling flexible working hours will?be maintained over the long-term. From 1:1 meetings and group brainstorming to real-time creative iterations and document sharing, Cisco Webex has built-in, end-to-end security that inspires trust.

Due to the unprecedented shift to remote work, leading enterprise video conferencing solution Cisco Webex supported half a billion meeting participants who generated 25 billion meeting minutes in the month of April. "I believe collaboration technology is critical as we move into the next iteration of work. Together with modernised IT architectures, Cisco Webex has proven it's worth many times over and stands ready to meet new challenges and changing work habits," said Ravichandran.