Why Office Collaboration Must Match Home

Employees expect the same Microsoft Teams quality in the office as they get at home

RTO mandates are rising again across industries, with some employers requiring three to five in-office days and others mandating full-time presence [Washington Post, Sep 11, 2025] [Business Insider, Sep 11, 2025] [Reuters, Sep 11, 2025].

At the same time, Microsoft Teams is more central than ever, serving ~320M users worldwide [Business of Apps, Mar 24, 2025] and powering 1M+ Teams Rooms [Microsoft Tech Community, Jun 13, 2024].

If collaboration in the office feels less reliable than it does at home, employees will notice—and RTO enthusiasm will fade.

The invisible gap: issues no one reports

Most enterprises still measure collaboration health by counting helpdesk tickets. But multiple DEX studies show 40–45% of issues go unreported [Lakeside via PR Newswire, Jan 31, 2023] [Nexthink blog, Mar 2, 2023].

This means IT leaders can be blind to chronic pain points: a meeting room that drops calls at peak hours, video stutter in certain locations, or audio quality dips that frustrate VIP users. If no one reports it, it still damages the employee experience.

That’s why proactive Collaboration Observability for Teams—not reactive ticketing—has become the new baseline.

Real-world proof

• Office experience check: One global financial services firm invested heavily in making its offices attractive for employees returning on mandated RTO days. But investment in office design alone wasn’t enough — they needed to be sure the in-office Microsoft Teams experience matched what employees were used to at home. By using Collaboration Observability for Teams, IT leaders gained the confidence that office-based collaboration would perform reliably, avoiding a wave of frustration and disengagement.

• Regional blind spot: A global manufacturer deployed Collaboration Observability for Teams and within just three days uncovered a significant quality issue in one of its most strategic regions: India. The discovery led to the formation of a cross-functional taskforce that quickly addressed the problem. Without visibility into regional performance, the issue could have persisted unnoticed, damaging employee trust and productivity at scale.

What “good” looks like in the office

The leading indicators of collaboration health go beyond uptime. Enterprises serious about RTO should track:

• Room utilization – usage patterns to justify investment and ROI

• Hardware health – status of devices and displays

• Network quality – latency, jitter, and packet loss across sites

• Failure rates – measure reliability and performance of events and meetings

• MTTD/MTTR – how quickly issues are detected and resolved

Don’t forget live: Town Halls need an eCDN

Microsoft Town Hall has replaced Live Events as the platform for large-scale internal broadcasts [Microsoft Tech Community, Jun 13, 2024]. Microsoft explicitly recommends enterprise content delivery networks (eCDN) to protect the network when thousands of employees stream at once [Microsoft Docs – eCDN overview, Mar 28, 2025] [Microsoft Docs – Plan Town Halls, Jun 26, 2025].

Whether you use Microsoft eCDN or a certified partner, the goal is the same: deliver flawless video while avoiding bandwidth spikes [Microsoft Docs – eCDN overview, Mar 28, 2025].

Kollective ECDN ensures your CEO broadcasts and global Town Halls run smoothly across the most complex networks—while Collaboration Observability for Teams shows you exactly where performance is slipping.

How Kollective helps