By Chris Gore, Founder of SPOR Group
A few years ago, hybrid working was meant to be the great workplace breakthrough. More flexibility, happier teams and better work-life balance. The promise was that people could work wherever they were most productive, while offices would evolve into places designed for collaboration, creativity and connection.
Yet talk to most employees today and the reality feels… clunkier than expected.
You join a meeting and within moments it becomes clear that something isn’t quite working. People in the room struggle to hear the colleague dialling in, someone is trying to figure out which cable goes where, and the conversation pauses while the technology catches up. Then the video freezes, the audio drops out, and suddenly everyone’s attention shifts from the discussion to the screen in front of them. Meanwhile the person joining remotely is left feeling like they’re watching the meeting from the outside, trying to piece together a conversation they can barely follow. Hybrid working itself isn’t the problem. The real frustration comes from the environments we’ve built around it.
Hybrid meetings are where things fall apart
Most businesses have done a reasonable job of adapting policies and expectations around hybrid work. What they haven’t always done is redesign the spaces and technology that support it.
Walk into many meeting rooms today and they’re still set up for a world where everyone is physically present. A screen at one end of the room, a camera awkwardly pointing at the table and a tangle of cables that require someone to be the unofficial “IT volunteer” every time a meeting starts.
In a fully in-person office this was inconvenient, however in a hybrid environment it’s a genuine barrier to collaboration.
The moment technology becomes difficult to use; the flow of the meeting starts to unravel. Conversations lose momentum, remote participants find it harder to engage, and what should be straightforward discussions begin to drag. By the end, people often leave with the sense that the meeting never quite worked the way it should have. When this happens across dozens of meetings every week, the frustration quickly begins to build.
The office experience has quietly become a digital one
The uncomfortable truth is that the modern workplace is now just as dependent on digital infrastructure as it is on physical space.
People often talk about hybrid working as a cultural shift, and it absolutely is. But it’s also a technological one. When half your team joins a meeting remotely, the quality of that experience depends almost entirely on the technology in the room.
When the camera fails to capture the whole conversation, remote colleagues quickly start to feel excluded. Poor audio makes it harder for people to follow what’s being said, and contributions begin to fade. Add in systems that take several minutes to connect, and meetings often start late, with the energy in the room already slipping away. None of this is particularly dramatic, but it’s incredibly damaging to the rhythm of collaboration.
Good technology should disappear into the background, as when it works properly, people forget it’s even there. The conversation flows naturally and everyone feels equally involved, whether they’re sitting at the table or joining from home.
That’s the benchmark hybrid workplaces need to aim for.
Why digital excellence is becoming a competitive advantage
There’s another dimension to this that many organisations underestimate.
The workplace is increasingly part of the brand experience.
Clients visit offices. Candidates interview in meeting rooms. Partners dial in from different countries. Every interaction is shaped by how smoothly the environment works.
If the technology fails, it doesn’t just frustrate employees. It reflects directly on the business.
We’ve all experienced those awkward moments when a meeting starts with someone apologising for the tech not working properly. It’s a small thing, but it subtly undermines confidence. In contrast, when a meeting room works seamlessly, the conversation can focus entirely on ideas, decisions and relationships.
That’s why digital excellence in the workplace is starting to look less like a technical detail and more like a competitive advantage.
Companies that get it right create environments where collaboration feels effortless. Teams spend less time troubleshooting and more time solving problems together.
Hybrid working isn’t going away
Some organisations hoped hybrid working might fade away over time. It hasn’t.
In reality, employees have grown used to flexibility and businesses have discovered the benefits of accessing talent without geographic constraints. Hybrid work is now part of the operating model for many companies.
The challenge is that most offices were never designed for it.
The original concept of the meeting room was simple: gather everyone around a table. Hybrid working has turned that idea on its head. Now every meeting space needs to support people in the room and people outside it with equal clarity and engagement.
That requires a rethink not just of office design, but of the digital layer that connects people together.
The future workplace should feel effortless
When hybrid working works well, you barely notice it.
You walk into a meeting room and the call starts instantly. Cameras automatically frame the room so remote colleagues can see everyone clearly. Audio captures every voice naturally. Documents are shared instantly. People focus on the discussion rather than the mechanics.
It sounds simple but achieving that level of digital fluency requires organisations to treat workplace technology as a core part of the employee experience rather than an afterthought.
Hybrid offices don’t feel frustrating because people don’t want to collaborate. They feel frustrating because the environments supporting that collaboration haven’t caught up with how work actually happens today.
Fix the technology, and suddenly hybrid working starts to deliver on the promise it made in the first place.
About Chris Gore
Chris Gore is a former military leader turned entrepreneur and the founder of SPOR Group, a specialist AV integration business supporting more than 1,500 meeting rooms across the UK and Europe.
He began his career in the military, where discipline, clarity of communication and accountability were non-negotiable. That experience continues to shape how he leads today. He believes leadership is rooted in ownership, taking responsibility when something falls short, improving systems that do not perform as they should, and paying attention to the frustrations that often go unheard inside large organisations.
When he founded SPOR Group, his ambition was not to build another AV integration company, but to solve a pattern he had seen repeatedly in enterprise environments: significant investment in workplace technology that did not consistently deliver when it mattered most. Meetings failed, users lost confidence, and internal teams were left managing the fallout.
SPOR was built around a different standard, one focused not only on design and installation, but on long-term performance, visibility and accountability. Under Chris’s leadership, the company has grown into a trusted partner for global enterprise clients that require reliability at scale.
Chris is particularly vocal about the realities of hybrid working. While many organisations rushed to deploy technology, he believes the more complex challenge lies in ensuring consistency and measurable performance across entire estates. His view is straightforward: workplace technology should quietly enable productivity rather than become a source of friction.
Beyond the business, Chris hosts the Future Workplace podcast and is the author of the forthcoming book Work Isn’t Working, which explores why workplace technology strategies often fail to translate into business results and what leaders can do differently.
At his core, Chris combines operational discipline with commercial pragmatism. He remains focused on one principle: that technology should support performance, and that responsibility does not end once the system goes live.
