Cisco says it’s all in on all hybrid work, and today the company announced a “no return to office” policy that lets individual employees and their managers decide how and where each staffer will work.

“We believe, definitively, the future of work will be hybrid where people will want to exercise choice,” said Jeetu Patel, EVP of security and collaboration at Cisco. This choice will include what days of the week and even hours that they work, and it may mean coming into an office every day, a couple days, or not at all.

“What’s even more consequential in this mixed mode of working, it’s that some people will live in entirely different places and still be able to participate in the global economy without having to worry about geography,” Patel added.

The move will allow Cisco — and other companies such as Dell Technologies that have committed to a remote or hybrid workforce — to save money on facility expenses and expand their talent pool. But it also comes with several key concerns, and it requires a major technology investment to ensure workers can securely connect and collaborate from anywhere.

Cisco’s current annual research and development budget is about $6 billion, Patel said, and the bulk of this investment will help support hybrid work-related technologies.

“If you think about networking technology, connectivity, security, collaboration technology, observability technology — arguably a lot of the $6 billion will be fueling hybrid work,” Patel said.

Before the pandemic, about 63% of Cisco’s 75,000-person workforce went into an office between three and five days a week. Now, about 77% have indicated that they will work out of the office between three and five days a week, Patel said.

This “mixed-mode” work will be more difficult to adjust to than having all employees either in the office or all working from home, he said. “While you are affording the flexibility, you want to make sure that no one feels left out.”

Hybrid work involves major changes to everything from technology, to leadership training, and even real estate. Physical workspaces, are example, are less likely to be dedicated to individual employees’ desk and more likely to become places for teams to collaborate, Patel said.

Additionally, “the cultural implications are pretty important,” and better for society as a whole, he said. “At some point in the future, when we look back and we think about the time prior, it will seem bizarre. Imagine a single parent who wanted to pick up their child at childcare at 2 pm. It is not fair for them to not be able to participate in the global economy just because they wanted to do that. That now goes away.”

This cultural shift means more flexibility, but it also requires training managers to ensure that all employees at a meeting, for example, feel included and on equal footing regardless of if they are in-house or participating via video conference.

To this end, Cisco developed a set of “collaboration commitments” around accountability, inclusion, and well-being, wrote Fran Katsoudas, EVP and chief people, policy, and purpose officer at Cisco, in a blog post.

“A leader commitment around well-being, for example, states, ‘I understand how my team members work and what they achieve matters more than where and when they work.’ These commitments will help set the tone for the culture we’ll need for our people and teams to succeed,” Katsoudas wrote.

Work from anywhere also introduces new security, privacy, and compliance concerns. “So making sure that you feel your intellectual property is not going to be at risk as a result of you being able to participate from anywhere, and making sure that your property is not going to be impacted negatively,” Patel said.

These concerns point to the technology investments needed, and networking and connectivity top the list. Employees need to be able to securely connect to the internet whether they are at a local Starbucks or in a remote village. This is part of the reason for Cisco’s continued push for affordable broadband access across the country.

Security also plays a vital role in hybrid work and to this end Cisco invests in zero-trust enabling technologies including user and device identity and authentication with its Duo brand, as well as virtual private networks, endpoint and email security, and threat hunting with its extended detection response (XDR) platform and Talos threat intelligence team.

And then there’s some of the newer, more innovative technologies like Cisco’s Meraki IoT devices, sensors, and smart cameras along with WedEx software that can block unwanted noise on a video conference such as a lawnmower in the background or a screaming child at home.

Sensors can track real-time occupancy rates within buildings, or even of an individual desk, and alert employees if they exceed thresholds or don’t follow social distancing guidelines.

“Even things as basic as employee safety: if you have a conference room designed for seven people, we have sensors that can detect if you are exceeding that,” Patel said, adding that then a virtual assistant can help employees find a larger room, reserve the space, and show them how to find the room on a map.

Cisco is also working on camera intelligence that can detect how many people are attending a meeting, both in person and via video, and give everyone their own video box on a WebEx call. “That levels the playing field and makes everyone feel like an equal participant,” Patel said.

All of these pieces need to work together for the hybrid work experiment to be successful, he added. “There’s not a clear demarcation line because technology will work with real estate configuration, real estate configuration will change culture, and cultural changes will impact networking and security and privacy,” Patel said. “They will be intertwined dimensions that people have to keep in mind.”