Nearly two-thirds of employees said they’d consider resigning if they couldn’t work remotely, a recent Cisco survey spanning 34 countries found. The report comes just months after Cisco announced a “no return to office” policy, which enabled employees and their managers to decide how and where to work. 

Prior to the pandemic, about 63% of Cisco employees had a hybrid schedule working three to five days a week from the office, Jeetu Patel, EVP of security and collaboration at Cisco, told SDxCentral in an earlier interview. Now the number is much higher, with employees showing an overwhelming preference (85%) toward hybrid work.

And this trend isn't unique to Cisco. To show how workplace culture, employee behavior, and technology interactions had changed a year and a half into the pandemic, Cisco this week published its first Hybrid Work Index report. 

The report included Cisco employee data and surveyed 39,000 CIOs, IT decision makers, and employees from companies in 34 countries. Cisco plans to update the report quarterly.

“We believe the future of work is definitively going to be hybrid, where people are going to work in mixed mode,” Patel said. As some workers started to return to the office, “what we found is the productivity levels were pretty high for people, but fatigue was also pretty high, and burnout was pretty high.”

The index also found close to half of respondents believed their company would allow them to work from anywhere over the next year.

“The big kind of levers or weapons that you have to fight the war on talent are going to be flexibility and choice,” Patel said, adding that this approach may attract more diverse talent. 

“For the first time — I think credibly — in the time that we've all been alive, can you actually say that, regardless of someone's geography, or language preference, or socio-economic level, or personality type, they should be able to participate in a global economy from wherever they are,” he said. “Over the course of the past 18 months, people have proven that it can be done.”

“It's no longer a debate that you can work remotely and work just as effectively,” he added.

The report also revealed malicious remote access attempts increased 240% during the pandemic, while the number of email threats targeting hybrid workers increased to more than 100 million in September.

“Security is going to be a very prominent piece as people think about hybrid work,” Patel said. “Before the pandemic, Cisco already planned to adopt a zero-trust architecture, or borderless access to applications from any device, anywhere. Cisco’s own zero-trust solution was rolled out in just 5 months to our employees, to 100,000 global users, and 120,000 endpoints.” 

For its customers, Cisco also offers a secure email service, which detects, blocks, and remediates threats in incoming emails based on comprehensive intelligence from Cisco's Talos team.

Cisco Secure Email integrates with its SecureX security platform for additional protection against email threats. SecureX delivers Cisco’s network, endpoint, cloud, application security products, and Talos threat intelligence, in a cloud-native package.

The shift to remote and hybrid work also drove a surge in on-the-go meetings. The number of participants using mobile devices tripled from 9% pre-pandemic to 27% now, the report found.

However, that didn't reflect the participation rate. The report found more than 61 million meetings globally used Cisco Webex each month, and on average only 48% of participants are likely to speak.