As industries continue to navigate this modern hybrid workplace era, companies are faced with the task of bridging the gap between those working remotely and returning to the office.
A hybrid work model must be able to support flexible work styles, while also figuring out what works best for their company. Aside from that, ensuring that employees can build relationships and effectively communicate with one another, regardless of physical location, is essential in hybrid work environments.
Creating these types of applications comes with the challenge of being able to support this real-time functionality at any scale. Whether you’re creating a collaboration app from scratch or just searching to spruce up your current offering, here we’ll cover how you can create shared digital experiences with ease, in a way that works best for the hybrid work models many companies use today.
Luckily, Virtual Spaces get things going in the right direction.
Establish the best virtual office workspace approach
Some collaboration tools offer effective services, but only solve one specific need for hybrid work companies.
So, ask yourself this: how can you build a feature-rich app that will not only work for your users now, but also in the future as they continue to grow? Here are some criteria to consider when building your Virtual Space or metaverse environment:
Ease of use. Providing a simple and intuitive mechanism for employees to collaborate and share work online enables them to deliver their best work within your Virtual Space. Ultimately, this enhances the user experience, increasing time spent in-app.
Immersive features. Having access to in-app features such as chat, polls, and multi user capabilities can significantly streamline workflow—in real time and asynchronous—across an organization. This allows for further shared collaboration among users as they can quickly share notes, files, and more. On top of that, these features can be used to enhance team building activities, which fosters a great company culture in the hybrid workplace…something that many organizations have made a priority.
Security. Engage with vendors or prospects knowing that only the approved parties can access the documents being discussed. With employees constantly shifting between working from home, at a coworking space, or in the office, it’s important to have online collaboration tools with built-in security that can protect your app against phishing scams or data breaches.
Scalability. By building a highly reliable solution right from the start, you won’t need to worry about outages or delays when your users are working on a time sensitive project. Your app will have the ability to scale without concurrency limits or latency issues so teams can focus on creating their best work.
Drive virtual office workspace engagement and productivity
Effective collaboration experiences in the soon-to-be metaverse and hybrid workplaces need to mimic the same conversational aspect of in-person interactions.
Let’s dive into how you can facilitate deeper collaboration and engagement among users when building your Virtual Space.
In-app chat
Give your users the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues whether you’re on the go, in the office, or working remotely with direct chat or group messaging. This makes your hybrid work environment feel just as interactive and impactful as face-to-face meetings. Plus, you can extend your chat with customized interactive features like reactions, emojis, polls, or host Q&As to encourage employee participation.
Real-time multi user collaboration
Create virtual work spaces for shared whiteboards, dashboards, and documents that allow multiple users to collaborate simultaneously on a single project and have any changes reflected across all other connected devices immediately, in real time. Additionally, these real-time features provide transparency into what’s going on in each department, which improves workplace productivity.
Voice and video capabilities
Beyond messaging, you can go one step further with voice and video calling to create meeting rooms. This provides those in your hybrid work environment the ability to connect through the method of their choice with voice and video chat for private or group calls—boosting employee satisfaction.
Geolocation tracking
Build live location tracking to manage office entry systems, access, and capacity. Compared to traditional door locks, this creates a simplified and contactless approach that can provide peace of mind knowing that your virtual office is secure for those going into the physical office.
The future of work: how to build a hybrid workplace
As the future of work evolves towards a hybrid model, building an app that can operate reliably and at scale to deliver engaging collaboration experiences as your app grows is essential.
With our Virtual Spaces Platform, it’s easy to build in-app chat and multi user capabilities to increase engagement and innovation in the workplace. Companies like ClassDojo and Scratchpad use PubNub to build real-time collaboration features at scale for their users, allowing them to operate securely and reliably without needing to spend the time and resources maintaining these functionalities in-house.
Talk with one of our experts to learn more about how PubNub can help you create real-time collaboration experiences.
