Hybrid working IT support that makes it actually work
Most organisations did not choose hybrid working. They arrived at it and kept the arrangements they made in a hurry.
Logic Networks helps organisations across London and the rest of the UK turn those arrangements into something deliberate: people able to do their whole job from an office, from home or from a client’s site, with the same access and the same protection in each.
The technology for this is not exotic. It is the same accounts, devices, files and meeting tools you already have, set up so that location stops being a factor.
What usually needs fixing is not a product but a set of decisions that were postponed: where files live, which devices are allowed, and what a meeting looks like when half the room is remote.
Hybrid working fails in the meeting room, not in the technology.
If the people at home cannot hear the room, they stop contributing, and within a few months the important conversations have quietly moved back to the office.
- The same access from every place somebody works
- One place for files, and one rule about which
- Meeting rooms where remote people can be heard
- Devices protected wherever they are
What is included
Six pieces of work, and the meeting rooms are the one people forget.
You will not need all six. The review at the start says which two or three would make the largest difference for your organisation.
Working from anywhere
The same job, in any location.
Everything a person needs reachable from wherever they are, without a different method for each location.
Where an application has to run on Windows and cannot move, we publish it so it is reached the same way from home as from a desk. That removes the usual answer of asking somebody to come in for one task.
Files in one place
Nobody asks which version is current.
A single structure for documents, with permissions by role, a rule about external sharing and a decision about what happens to a leaver’s files.
The version problem is not caused by technology. It is caused by three acceptable places to save a file and no agreement about which. We set the structure and write the rule in one sentence.
Meetings and meeting rooms
Remote people who can be heard.
Meeting rooms fitted so that a person at home hears the room and the room hears them, with a camera that shows who is speaking and a display that does not need a cable hunt.
We size this to the room. A four person room needs a good microphone and nothing else. A board room needs more, and the difference between them is usually where budgets are wasted.
Collaboration that stays tidy
A structure that matches how you work.
Teams and channels arranged to match your organisation rather than growing one project at a time, with an agreement about who can create a new one.
We also review the guests. Most organisations are still sharing space with people from projects that ended years ago, which is both untidy and a risk.
Devices for people who move
Protected at the kitchen table.
Machines specified for carrying rather than for a desk, encrypted, managed and able to be wiped if lost.
We also advise on what to provide for a home desk. A monitor, a keyboard and a headset cost less than the productivity lost to a laptop screen on a dining table, and staff notice that you thought about it.
Protection that does not depend on the office
Security that travels with the person.
Sign in protected by a second check, rules about which devices and which places can reach your data, and filtering that applies whether somebody is on your network or on a train.
The old model protected a building. Once the work has left the building, the protection has to follow the person and the device instead.
How it works
Three ways in, and the review is the one worth doing first.
This work is unusual in that the useful part is often a decision rather than a purchase. A review that produces four written decisions can change more than a room full of equipment.
Tell us what is frustrating people at the moment and we will say which of the three applies.
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A review of how you work now
We talk to a few people in different roles, look at the environment and come back with what we would change and in what order. Often mostly decisions, not spending.
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A defined project
Fitting the meeting rooms, restructuring the files, or publishing the one application everybody needs. Scoped and finished.
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Kept in order
The whole arrangement maintained as part of managed IT, with reviews as the team changes.
Who it is for
This work suits organisations that have settled into hybrid working and can now see which parts of it are not working, rather than organisations still deciding whether to allow it.
It is also for anybody being asked to reduce office space, because a smaller office only works if the technology stops assuming everybody is in it.
- Businesses reducing office space or moving to shared desks
- Charities and non profits with staff spread across services and sites
- Education organisations where staff work across home and campus
- Teams where the remote people have quietly stopped speaking in meetings
- Organisations recruiting outside their own city
- Anyone whose files exist in three places with no agreed rule
What we need from you
Three things, and two of them are decisions rather than access.
This is the service where the organisation has to do the most thinking. We can build almost anything; what we cannot do is decide how you want to work.
A view on how you want to work
Days in the office, or complete freedom. Shared desks, or your own. It does not have to be a policy document, but it has to be a view.
A decision on personal devices
Whether staff may use their own laptops and phones for work, and on what terms. Answering it is what lets us protect the right things.
Access to a few real users
Half an hour each with three or four people in different roles. What they tell us is usually different from what the management team expects, and more useful.
What we usually find in the review
These come up in almost every organisation that moved to hybrid working quickly, which is to say in almost every organisation.
- Files in three places, with each department having chosen a different one
- One application that still requires somebody to be in the office
- Meeting rooms where remote participants cannot hear the far side of the table
- Personal devices holding company mail with nothing applied to them
- A virtual private network kept alive only for one legacy system
- Printing that works in the office and nowhere else
- Guests in Teams from projects that finished years ago
- New starters taking a week to find where anything is kept
Our steps for working together
This work is done in a different order from most technology projects, because the decisions have to come before the building.
- Talk to real users A few people in different roles, asked what they cannot do from home and what they dread. This is where the actual list comes from.
- Agree the decisions Where files live, whether personal devices are allowed, what a meeting looks like and what is expected of people in each location. Written in plain words.
- Fix the one blocker Nearly every organisation has a single thing that forces people into the office. Removing it changes more than everything else combined.
- Tidy the files One structure, permissions by role, and the old places closed rather than left open alongside the new one.
- Fit the rooms Starting with the room used for the meetings that matter, not with all of them.
- Tell people One page on where things are and how meetings now work. Without this the old habits simply continue.
- Review after a term Because the first arrangement is never quite right, and the second one usually is.
How we set priorities
Anything that forces a person to travel to do their job comes first, because it costs the organisation a day each time. Then anything that wastes time every week, such as hunting for the current version of a document. Then the rooms. Equipment for its own sake comes last.
Making hybrid meetings work
- One person, one camera When everybody in the room joins from their own laptop with microphones muted, remote people can see who is speaking.
- A microphone that reaches the far end A laptop microphone on a six person table does not. This is the cheapest useful purchase in the whole page.
- Somebody chairs for the remote people Asked explicitly for their view, rather than left to interrupt.
- Notes in the meeting, not after it So the decision exists in writing for the people who could not lean over and ask.
- The same invitation for everybody A meeting with no joining link is a meeting the remote people were not really invited to.
The one blocker, and how to find it
In almost every organisation there is a single reason people still have to be in the building. Finding it is worth more than any other part of this work, because until it is removed nothing else about hybrid working is really true.
It is usually one of a small number of things. An application that only runs on a machine in the office. A printer that cannot be reached from outside. A filing cabinet that has never been scanned. A process that requires a wet signature. Or one person whose knowledge exists only in conversation.
The way to find it is not to ask the management team, because they will name the technology. Ask the three people who travel in most often what they came in to do. The answers overlap, and the overlap is the blocker.
Removing it is often cheaper than expected. Publishing one application, buying one scanner, or writing down one process is frequently the whole job. The expensive version is the one where an organisation buys meeting room equipment for four rooms and leaves the blocker in place, so people keep travelling anyway.
What we will not claim
No arrangement makes remote and in person participation identical. What a good one does is remove the practical penalties, so that working from home is not quietly worse for the person’s career. The rest is management, not technology, and we will say so when that is where the problem sits.
What good looks like
Nobody travels to the office for one task. Everybody knows where a document goes. The person at home speaks as often as the people in the room. A new starter is productive in their first week from either location. And the organisation can reduce its office space without anybody’s work getting harder.
Related services
Modern workplace is mostly an arrangement of the other services rather than a separate product. That is why it is usually cheaper than organisations expect.
Where a piece is already in place, we build on it rather than starting again.
- Microsoft 365 for files, Teams and the accounts behind them
- Devices and endpoints for the machines people carry
- Cloud and Azure for the application that still runs on a server
- Cybersecurity for protection that follows the person
- Networks and infrastructure for the office the team still comes into
Articles and news on the modern workplace
Notes on hybrid working, files and meetings, written for organisations that already work this way.
The first hour after a suspected email compromise
What to do, in order, when you think somebody has got into a mailbox. Written to be followed by whoever is in the office at the time.
Read the articleThe five security controls worth putting in place first
Security spending often starts at the wrong end. These five controls remove the largest share of everyday risk and cost the least.
Read the articleTurning on multi factor authentication without stopping work
The single change that prevents most account takeovers, and how to introduce it across a team of thirty people in a fortnight.
Read the articleTalk to us about your workplace
Tell us what people cannot do from home and what they complain about most. We will review it and come back with the decisions we would make and the two or three changes worth paying for.
No obligation, and no sales call unless you ask for one.