The workplace has more meaning than we gave it credit for.

For employees, it's not just a place to work. The workplace is an environment to be productive, collaborate in person, build relationships, socialize with coworkers, make friends, and entertain clients and guests.

For businesses, the workplace can drive knowledge sharing, improved collaboration, wild creativity, breakthrough innovation, and outsized results. It also creates team and company culture, which is hard to replicate virtually, and will be a reason why companies that bring people together will be more successful than companies that are fully remote.

Work-from-home (WFH) does have its benefits. It provides a better work-life balance for employees and can save big on real-estate costs for businesses. But the long-term impacts that WFH could have are daunting: loss of connection, weakened company culture, frayed social fabric. That’s why the future of work is hybrid.

Now's the time to reinvent the workplace for hybrid work

How do you reinvent the workplace for a hybrid workforce? With technology. The pandemic forced businesses to do this to meet the needs of a WFH workforce by investing in Zoom, Slack, and the like. Now, with the vaccine roll-out underway, smart workplace leaders are preparing the physical workplace for the future of flexible work by evaluating the systems that once helped manage it. They're replacing dated, ineffective, and disconnected technologies with a platform of connected tools that will enable hybrid work.

One solution can't do it all. Especially not when there's heightened importance on health, safety, and security in the workplace. That’s why workplace leaders are taking advantage of this time to modernize their entire workplace tech stack. A key piece of this: integrating the different technologies and systems that they rely on so they can operate out of one platform. They know that integrations must work together to enable productivity, security, safety, and compliance.

Envoy's platform is bringing technology partners together to get people back to the workplace faster and safer

Envoy has had a unique opportunity to witness this change. Customers are relying on new products, like Envoy Protect, to facilitate more than five million safe employee sign-ins. They are preparing for the future by investing in technology that will enable the shift to hybrid work, like Envoy Desks. But again, one solution can't do it all. To successfully make the shift to hybrid work, companies will need all the different products in the workplace to work together.

With more partners than any other workplace platform, in new categories like door access and thermal cameras, companies can connect Envoy with over 65 out-of-the-box integrations. Since the pandemic began, Envoy has seen record demand, nearly 200% growth, from customers wanting to integrate with new tools. And the developer team has seen 300% growth in demand from technology partners wanting to help companies make returning to work safer and easier through seamless integrations.

To make it easier for third party developers to build on Envoy and shape the workplace of the future, Envoy has launched a developer platform. The Envoy platform enables developers to build new technologies and innovations for hybrid workplaces.

The future of work, even in the near term, is going to be brighter

The pandemic disrupted our lives last year. Most companies sent their employees to work from home. We realized that, while we can be productive from home, there's intrinsic value in the human experience of being together. There's value in the workplace.

Now, hybrid work is here. It will bring teams together again. It will allow employees to be intentional about where they work. They will get to choose when they want to enjoy the office and where they get our best work done.

Whether your employees are working from home, HQ, or a remote location, they will have more flexibility than ever before to do their best work. Companies will need a connected workplace platform to make the workplace better than ever.

Learn more about Envoy's workplace platform and the integrations that help companies get back to work faster and safer.