The way professionals work is rapidly changing. With hybrid work arrangements becoming the norm for many, professionals need the right tools in order to stay connected, flexible, and engaged in their hybrid teams. They need to be able to block out the clutter of a noisy world, while still providing an immersive and inclusive collaboration experience for all their colleagues. Here’s how we engineer our professional devices for exactly this purpose.
Delivering exceptional call quality
To communicate effectively when hybrid working, we need to be able to hear and be heard: this is the bare minimum for inclusive collaboration that delivers results. In conference calls, video meetings, or interviews, it is critical that the people we’re speaking to can hear what we’re saying in the most natural way possible. In a world where so many of our teams are now distributed across locations – where we may never have even met our colleagues in person – this is even more true.
Professional devices house advanced hardware to deliver clearer sound quality: a boom arm to help isolate your voice and up to 10 different microphones to enable your device to distinguish between your voice and disruptive background noise. And with products that meet the Premium Microphones for Open Office standard, such as the Jabra Evolve2 85, you can be sure that your headset’s microphones will suppress surrounding noise, office talk, and more specifically, other human voices, in your vicinity. All these features together ensure that your call experience is natural and crystal clear.
Protecting your hearing
We’re lucky to be under the same roof as GN Hearing, one of the world’s leading hearing aid producers. Because of this, we have in-house knowledge on how best to protect our users’ hearing. Jabra professional devices are engineered with numerous features to protect your hearing and boost your well-being. Jabra PeakStop™ eliminates potentially harmful decibel spikes, so you never have to worry about dangerous surprise sounds, while Jabra SafeTone™, offers enhanced audio protection that ensures a safe listening level and meets the EU and US (Noise At Work) safety requirements.
Keeping you focused
Speaking of decibel spikes, work is a lot easier when you’re not distracted by other things going on around you. But noise is one of the most common distractions faced by knowledge workers. Whether it’s the copier, your upstairs neighbors, or that buzzing florescent light above your desk, studies show that noise has a negative effect on your productivity. To help keep you focused wherever you are working, many professional audio devices are equipped with great noise cancellation (such as Active Noise Cancellation, or ANC) to block out these unwanted disturbances, allowing you to simply get your work done. Similarly, busylight-enabled headsets signal to colleagues (or even your family members at home) that you are engaged in a task that requires distraction-free focus, even in the most bustling open-office environments.
Keeping you connected
Despite the rise in UC platforms, we often use our phones for work calls, as they’re yet one more tool enabling maximum flexibility in hybrid work. So, with all the great call quality that professional headsets deliver, shouldn’t we want to use them for phone calls as well? Thanks to advancements in Bluetooth technology, professional headsets have the ability to connect to two devices at once, meaning you can answer calls on both your computer and phone at the touch of a button (or with some Jabra Evolve2 headsets, the flip of a boom arm). That also means if you’re listening to music on your phone to concentrate, you won’t miss an incoming call on your laptop. Finally, professional devices also optimize the connectivity experience by delivering seamless multi-connectivity across a wide range of device brands and operating systems.
Providing a certified experience
UC platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet have enabled our remote and hybrid working setups, keeping us connected with our teams no matter where they are. But even after more than a year of remote working, tech issues at the kick-off of a call are still a familiar issue for many.
We spoke with Sandhya Rao, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft Teams, to learn more about how device certifications can limit these issues and enhance the professional experience: “From an end-user standpoint, you’re always going to get the best audio or video experience when you’re using a certified device. The reason for that is that these devices go through rigorous testing, both in our partner labs, as well as in ours. We have very strict guidelines when it comes to how our audio and video capabilities need to perform. We ensure that all of this testing is done before any device is certified.”
At Jabra, we engineer all our firmware from the ground up and work closely with our alliance partners to meet these stringent certification measures, ensuring our products work seamlessly with whatever meeting platform a company chooses to meet with.
