Hybrid Working Experience

Overview

The Hybrid Working Experience Pack enables you to manage the experience of your hybrid workforce. As employees are increasingly working both in and out of the office, it is essential that their digital experience is not affected whilst away from the office.

This pack has an innovative scoring system that allows you to identify employees' workstyles as full-office, hybrid, or full-remote during the course of a week or even a day. This capability allows you to then compare multiple technical measurements against these workstyles to identify areas of concern for your support teams to investigate. These measurements include:

MS Teams status and usage
Logon and boot timings
Network response and connection statistics
Wi-Fi signal strength
Device stability (crash/freeze, high CPU or memory load, etc)

While technical data is vital, the picture is not complete without human sentiment, which may reveal important topics that must be focused on as a priority. Sentiment campaigns are included with this pack, not only for IT Topics, such as Service Outage and IT Satisfaction but also HR-centric campaigns such as Employee Well-being.

The pack has a number of dashboards, categories, metrics, and campaigns but note that these are an out-of-the-box configuration and customers are absolutely free to configure the pack as they wish, details of how to do this are in this article.

Pre-Requisites

The Hybrid Working Experience pack refers to Digital Experience Scores in some of its dashboards, therefore the Digital Experience Score pack should be installed before installing the Hybrid Working Experience pack. This pack is macOS enabled so if you want to target macOS machines you must ensure that the Digital Experience Score for macOS pack and macOS Content Pack have been installed as they are needed for macOS compatibility.

Dashboards

Summary

This is a collection of the key widgets from other dashboards in this pack.

The Digital Experience Score and trend for full-office, hybrid, and full-remote workstyles are shown, together with a similar workstyle breakdown for employees reporting low sentiment feedback.
Bar charts for each workstyle display any differences in Digital Experience components, followed by similar bar charts showing key technical measures, such as Teams connectivity and responsiveness, browser response time, and logon and boot timings. Any significant differences in these values for a particular workstyle should be investigated.
The final sections contain KPIs and trends for employee workstyle, devices seen in the office in the last day, and a hybrid and remote workers satisfaction score.

Employee Sentiment

KPIs show the overall satisfaction score of employees, with a breakdown by worker type. Changes to the satisfaction score are shown over time. Bar charts provide more information on satisfaction survey responses and key remote worker issues. A summary of the readiness campaign is also shown.

Connectivity

This dashboard gives insights into the network connectivity of your employees. The first section shows how much of your workforce is connected remotely, or directly from the office, with KPIs for bad network response times and poor successful network connection ratios. When connected remotely it is important that remote users have a similar experience to office-based workers so large differences in these numbers should be investigated.
A section on remote employee Wi-Fi status follows. KPIs show the number of remote devices with poor Wi-Fi strength, separated by 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz frequencies. Employees who are too far from their home router could experience problems running on the 5Ghz frequency. On the other hand, the 2.4Ghz band has fewer channels and is prone to interference from other devices on the network.
Finally, sections on network stability and the most popular domains are included, both broken down by worker type.

Collaboration

This dashboard summarizes the entire collaboration tools experience. This includes office, remote, and hybrid workers because it is critical that all users have a good experience if collaboration is going to succeed.

We start off with the Digital Employee Experience of collaboration tool users with KPIs and a timeline graph. Large differences between worker types should be investigated. A Collaboration Digital Experience breakdown shows the separate components of the score to highlight any granular differences between worker types.

A deployment section shows the number and ratio of devices that are not running Microsoft Teams and Zoom, with version dispersion tables for both applications.
The last section covers heavy Teams usage in the office, showing:

The total number of employees who worked in the office in the last day
How many of those were hybrid workers
How many of those hybrid workers spent over 7 hours on Teams whilst in the office

This last measure could be interesting. For some organizations, with many employees working from home, the office has become somewhere to meet and collaborate with colleagues in person. If employees are found to be spending a lot of their time on Teams whilst in the office, then there could be an opportunity for them to work in a more flexible fashion.

Application Stability

This dashboard contains multiple tables showing those applications most affected by the following issues: network traffic, network response time, application crash, and application freeze.

System usage and stability

This dashboard concentrates on the differences between worker types from an operating system perspective.
A table shows the Digital Experience Score for full-office, hybrid, and full-remote workers, listed by their operating system. Further tables show the incidence of stability errors on your Windows and macOS devices, such as high CPU or memory usage, slow boot or logon time, and finally bluescreens or hard resets.

Compliance

This dashboard looks at remotely connected devices only to provide information on how your current remote landscape is configured from a compliance perspective. The status of AV, Firewall, Bitlocker, and FileVault protection is shown, followed by version dispersion tables for VPN clients and OS builds.
Finally, users with passwords soon to expire, devices with UAC disabled, and devices with certificate issues are shown.

Readiness

The readiness dashboard looks at all (not just remote) devices to help IT understand whether they are ready for use as a remote work device. Device readiness requires the presence of a collaboration tool, firewall, and VPN components. The first section contains KPIs for devices that are, and are not, ready. Changes over time are displayed on a timeline.
Summary tables list the individual components that are missing from non-ready devices, and whether there is a valid certificate for remote access, and whether the device is Bitlocker enabled.

Score

In order to measure hybrid work, an innovative scoring system has been devised for this pack.

The main score file is “Hybrid Working”. This contains the principal composite score “Hybrid Worker Type” which uses a history score file to record employees’ working location over the course of a week, identifying full office, remote and hybrid worker types. It also contains a secondary composite score, “Hybrid Working Day” which is able to identify hybrid working within a single working day.

There are five score files in total associated with this task:

Hybrid Work – the main score file
Hybrid Working_History – contains hybrid working history for each day of the week
Hybrid Working_AM
Hybrid Working_Lunch
Hybrid Working_PM – these three scores are used to calculate the “Hybrid Working Day” score

For these score files to work successfully, the device category “Remote Worker vs Office Worker Device” should be correctly configured. This is covered in this doc here, but to summarize: the category is configured with all IP address ranges used by office-based employees, and all other IP addresses are categorized as “remote”.

Categories

Device category "Remote Worker vs Office Worker Device"

This category is used by multiple library packs. Please go to its dedicated configuration page for more information about it.

Device category "Remote Worker Readiness"

This category should be configured to describe the types of devices that remote workers will be using, using whatever criteria you wish. During the execution of the pack, in the readiness assessment dashboards, these criteria are used so that only the readiness of devices that match the criteria are reported. For example, should you just use laptops for remote workers, then the "Remote Worker Devices Type" tag within the category can be set to just laptop. Likewise, if you are using Desktops and Laptops in the office, then "Office Worker Devices Type" can be set to Laptop or Desktop. It is entirely possible to have more than one entry for each tag should you use laptops, desktops, virtual desktops, or other configurations for your workforce.

Package categories "Firewall / AV / Other Packages" and "VPN Packages"

These categories define the packages that you wish to look for in the pack. The packages should be present on a device before it is considered compliant and ready for remote working. It is entirely possible to customize these entries to match the requirements of your organization, the default values hold commonly used applications.

Executable categories "Firewall / AV / Other Executables" and "VPN Executables"

These categories hold the equivalent executables for the earlier package-based categories. This is needed because although we can look for installations with categories; if we wish to list version dispersions and so forth, we need to go to the executable level. Once again, full customization is possible, change the entries as you wish to match any particular executables you wish to track.

Package category "Collaboration packages"

This category defines the collaboration tool packages that you wish to look for in the pack. The packages should be present on a device before it is considered compliant and ready for remote working. It is entirely possible to customize these entries to match the requirements of your organization, the default values hold commonly used applications.

Executable category "Collaboration executables"

This category holds the equivalent collaboration tool executables for the collaboration tool package-based category. This is needed because although we can look for installations with categories; if we wish to list version dispersions and so forth, we need to go to the executable level. Once again, full customization is possible, change the entries as you wish to match any particular executables you wish to track.

Destination category "Update Servers"

The “System usage and stability” dashboard has indicators as to whether devices have received traffic from update servers so that any change in Digital Experience soon after updates are received can be tracked.

To support this, the "Update Servers" category has been created, which should be populated with the names of your update servers, normally SCCM Distribution Points within your environment.

Campaigns

The pack also contains five Campaigns, which can be used as wished.

Satisfaction Campaign

This Campaign is intended for continuous feedback on the Remote Working experience. Examine the Campaign details in terms of the title and description amending as wished. When ready, publish the Campaign. It is targeted at the Investigation "Remote Worker Experience - Users working from home" so when published this Investigation will be evaluated and continue to be so every 10 minutes following. The Campaign is configured so that recipients will get the Campaign once every month.

Information Campaign

This Campaign is intended to update remote workers (or any targeted users) with informational updates of any sort. This could be a news update regarding a hot topic within the company, a reminder on some best practices, it really is anything you wish to put into it. When ready, publish the Campaign. It is targeted at the Investigation "Remote Worker Experience - Safety measures audience" so when published this Investigation will be evaluated and continue to be so every 10 minutes following.

Service Outage

This campaign is particularly aimed at quickly informing people of service outages or degradations. When connected remotely it can be frustrating if services go offline, so this campaign allows the quick delivery of service status messages. The pack includes a campaign targeted for Microsoft Teams. However, this can be modified to cover any service name.

Well-being Campaign

This Campaign is aimed at the well-being of employees from a non-IT perspective. While working remotely it is important not just to track the technical side of the employee experience but also their overall happiness and satisfaction with their remote working experience. The campaign is targeted at Remote Workers by default.

Get Wi-Fi Signal Strength

This Campaign is launched when the Remote Action "Get Wifi Signal Strength" is launched against a remote device. The Wi-Fi network at the remote destination is measured and should it be below a certain threshold (one of the input parameters) then it will launch this campaign, which is self-help for the user. We encourage you to modify the campaign with any self-help tips that you would like to bring in for your Organization. The campaign also asks the user whether the tips were useful so it brings an understanding as to whether the tips being offered are of use.

Configuration

The pack requires some level of configuration so that it can correctly identify remote workers. Please refer to the category section for more information.

Metric modification

The metrics to track software installation and uninstallation use a particular mechanism. Within the Readiness assessment branch of the metrics, you will see that the criteria are looking for the presence of either a single package or multiple packages. If it's a single package, you can simply change the package name in the relevant category and the metric will look for the new name. if you wish to add more criteria, for example, say you wish to look for the presence of five packages, the key is to add the additional criteria using the existing logic of "Package...<Category>...is...<Item>" but note that in the "and" section further down, the total number of packages you are looking for should be incremented: if you are looking for five packages, this should be updated to five and so on.

Customers are actively encouraged to tune the metrics testing if the certificate pair is valid. For example, removing the Private certificate check if that is not relevant to their setup.

This ultimately means full flexibility: for any of the categories in the pack you can have as many packages or executables you want and you can amend the metric criteria accordingly if you wish to search for more packages or executables being present before considering the device compliant.

Change Log

V1.0.0.0 - Initial Release