While 2025 marked a number of high profile return-to-office mandates, including Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Dell, 48% of the global workforce and 22% of the US workforce work remotely.1 More importantly, hybrid work remains extremely prevalent and popular, accounting for 52% of remote-capable jobs in the US2, with 83% of employees favoring this model of work.3
As we pointed out in an article published in January of 2025, remote and hybrid work are here to stay, and optimizations for these work models will help you attract top talent and achieve your business objectives. In this article, we’ll explore ways that businesses of all shapes and sizes can improve their tech stack for better productivity, performance, and security with remote and hybrid workers in 2026 and beyond.
A number of factors can determine the best investment for your remote work setup. Choosing the wrong tools cannot only lead to monetary waste and lost productivity, it can also impact buy-in when the right tools are ultimately selected. While the criteria may differ from organization to organization, here are a few of the most important considerations to build upon:
While job functions influence the collaboration needs of teams, with sales and client facing teams benefiting from more time spent working together in person, it ultimately depends on your individual team or teams. Regardless of function, some teams simply prefer real time back-and-forth, and some prefer independent, asynchronous work.
Smaller teams often work best with simple, flexible tools, while larger organizations need more robust, customizable platforms. Geographic distribution is also important to consider. Teams spread across different time zones can benefit from platforms that prioritize video calls, feature automated project management functionalities, and optimize file sharing.
Security and ease of access are often at odds when it comes to remote and hybrid work, with a recent study showing that 94% of surveyed organizations reported technical problems that affected their off-site employees and business as a whole.4 Security of course should be the priority, with encryption, two-factor authentication, industry compliance features, and recurring staff training being essentials.5 On the other hand, application response speed, integration capabilities, ease of use, and scalability also need to be factored into your selection of tools.
Before choosing tools, it’s important to map out your fundamental workflows; otherwise you can create data bottlenecks where team members cannot readily access the same information, documents, and company resources.6 A general rule of thumb is to document your high-level processes, identify existing tools used at each stage, identify the teams or employees involved in each process stage, and predict data access and software integration issues that could occur.7
While traditional methods like VPNs can offer the necessary security for modern distributed teams, these systems typically require company-approved devices, are difficult to scale, and may suffer speed reductions during peak usage. Cloud hosting provides secure, authenticated access to company resources directly through the internet, applies automated security patches, and is easy and cost effective to scale up or down with usage.
The tools that allow team members to communicate and collaborate are the backbone of any remote and hybrid work technology stack. The most important tools typically include:
Choosing the right video conferencing platform for your team can help turn potentially tedious virtual meetings into productive working sessions. Zoom is very well known, extremely reliable, and offers a number of additional productivity features, including automated summaries, built-in chat, meeting recordings, and breakout rooms. Microsoft Teams is a solid choice for Microsoft 365 users, offering quick calls with agendas, easy screen sharing, chat, and customized backgrounds. RingCentral Video offers a range of AI-enhanced features, including an AI assistant that provides in-meeting transcriptions and post-meeting summaries, screen sharing, interactive whiteboards, and high-definition video and audio.
Slack is perhaps the most well-known and popular stand-alone messaging app, offering spaces for project-based and team-based chat groups, direct messaging, tagging, and historical conversation organizations. Microsoft Teams offers a native instant messaging tool that provides many of the core features of slack, but integrates other aspects of Microsoft 365, such as Word and PowerPoint, for easier collaboration when working on shared documents. RingCentral also provides many overlapping features with Slack, but offers greater file sharing capabilities, administrative controls, and useful AI-powered features like live translation for multi-cultural teams.
Email is critical for more involved or formal communications. Integration between email, calendars, and meeting tools reduces time spent switching between apps and makes both communications and scheduling more efficient. Google Calendar and Gmail Business Email enables users to exchange emails, schedule meetings, video calls, and share agendas with a single mouse click. Microsoft’s Outlook Calendar and Teams offer a similar level of integrated functionality to 365 users.
Staying coordinated and on schedule can be very challenging for teams working in separate locations, and in particular, time zones. Project management software is a tailor-made solution, with different platforms offering advantages for different types of teams. Both Asana and Monday.com are extremely popular and offer great deal of flexibility and customization. However, many smaller companies opt for Trello, as it is less expensive and offers a more simplified “to-do” task management approach. On the other end of the spectrum, Jira is geared toward technical teams, with an agile development focus and native integration with development tools like Git.
Managing internal relationships and projects can be challenging with remote teams; managing external relationships and deliverables can be even more so. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools help teams of any composition deliver consistent customer experiences, regardless of where employees are working. HubSpot and Salesforce are typically considered gold standard choices. Both platforms offer a suite of sales, customer service, and marketing tools as well as options for automation and data analytics. Hubspot is more focused on inbound marketing and ease-of-use, whereas Salesforce provides greater customization and automation capabilities, making it preferable for many enterprise organizations. Zendesk is another popular CRM, with a focus on teams that deliver direct customer support and related services.
One of the most difficult challenges in offsite work—for both employees and employers—is establishing accountability with the right balance of oversight and trust. Surveillance-focused tools prioritize compliance and offer the greatest degree of monitoring. These tools often operate with limited disclosure to employees and employ more invasive methodologies like keystroke logging and screenshot captures. While these tools offer the greatest insight into employee productivity, they also tend to negatively impact workplace morale, and by extension, employee turnover. Privacy-first monitoring tools prioritize transparency and are geared more toward employee development. These tools are implemented with full employee awareness, and typically use aggregated team data while enabling employees to access to their own performance metrics.
Hybrid approaches can strike the balance between these two methodologies, falling into out-put based monitoring and trust-based frameworks. With the former, project goals and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are the base metrics for performance. Out-put based monitoring tools typically feature streamlined dashboards, minimally intrusive digital tracking, and facilitate periodic check-ins with management. Trust-based frameworks prioritize dialogue between management and employees, and rely on employee self-assessment. Tools for this methodology encourage more frequent check-ins and compare employee self-assessments with generalized productivity metrics.
Considering the unique needs of individual organizations and their teams, security considerations, and the overwhelming variety of tools available, optimizing a tech stack for remote and hybrid work is challenging. That said, these work models have become the norm, and getting it right can help you attract and retain top talent, achieve business goals, and be prepared if there is ever something similar to the COVID-19 pandemic in the future. If you could use support in navigating these challenges and future-proofing your tech stack for remote and hybrid work, IPC Tech is here to help. With decades of experience in business IT technologies, teams of engineers, and divisions dedicated to the cloud solutions and infrastructure, unified communications, and security, we can help you implement the best tech stack for your needs and budget.