Cisco has announced a new features in Webex designed to address hybrid work and wellness issues that increase and promote personal well-being and build better quality connections to employees.
The feature, People Insights, comes as Cisco revamps Webex for post-pandemic work life, which includes a larger focus on the wellbeing of employees and a people-first mindset. Starting this summer, select customers will have access to these insights.
Cisco says the feature is private by design and offers insights from three points of view: personal, team and organizational.
According to Cisco, 50% of office employees think they’ll work from home at least eight days each month, and 98% of meetings are expected to include remote participants. The feature is designed to help people better manage their time and working relationships and give teams valuable insight into time is being used.
According to Cisco, this is how People Insights helps drive positive employee experiences:
Personal Insights: These insights, available only to you, surface daily trends and interactions (such as key collaborators and activities), so that you set and monitor your personal preferences. This lets you tailor your collaboration with coworkers and focus your time on what matters most. For example, how often are you accepting meetings you never attend, multi-tasking during meetings or not sharing your video? People Insights will help you decide when to decline or reschedule meetings to ensure you meet your personal work preferences and goals. It also helps you fully engage (visualizing your multitasking and video sharing habits during active meetings) so that you can be more mindful about giving others your full attention and presence.
Team Insights: These insights give each team member a view of patterns between connections, collaboration habits, and work-life integration for the entire team – while maintaining privacy. The benefit is a stronger and more inclusive work experience for all team members and enables a team to jointly adjust practices and grow relationships as a collective for the benefit of everyone. For example, you can become a good steward of your team’s wellbeing by looking at what percentage of meetings are taking place outside of your team’s preferred working hours – or you can facilitate strong working relationships by making sure you and your team are connecting with the right people and teams.
Organizational Insights: Organizational Insights give you a bird’s-eye view of your organization’s collaboration trends and patterns to help you spot silos and identify teams that may benefit from additional support or an increased focus on inclusivity. For example, if you move to a new business model or organizational design that requires new ways of collaboration, you can monitor how the model is working and take action where you see gaps.
The company is also working on a new feature that can help users read the room during a videoconference, called People Focus. The tool uses machine learning and AI to individually reframe participants spread across a meeting room. The idea is to make remote participants feel more connected by providing a close-up view of each person in the room. That is expected to be available later this year.
