Owl Labs says UK employees are still losing time to meeting-room friction despite a fresh wave of investment in AI tools, support teams, and collaboration hardware. Its latest State of Hybrid Work report found that 89% of workers now rank good technology as important, placing it just behind compensation at 92% and a supportive manager at 91%.
That expectation is being shaped by daily experience. Owl Labs found that 74% of UK workers face challenges in hybrid meetings, with 79% saying they lose time to technical difficulties, 78% reporting audio echo or distortion, and 74% saying they miss visual cues. Workers also said they spend an average of 6.5 minutes per meeting simply getting sessions set up.
The findings suggest the issue is not access to technology alone, but how reliably it works under pressure. Large organisations reported the strongest expectation for effective workplace tools, with 93% of employees rating them as important, compared with 88% in medium-sized organisations and 84% in small businesses. Younger employees were also more demanding, with 54% of Gen Z and Millennial workers calling good technology “very important”, compared with 35% of Gen X and Boomers.
Meeting frustration is cutting across working models too. According to the report, 82% of Gen Z workers and 79% of Millennials said they lose time to technical issues, while full-time office workers reported more disruption than hybrid employees. At the same time, flexibility remains a major retention issue: 74% of UK employees said they would prefer a hybrid model, and 93% said they would take some form of action if remote or hybrid work was removed.
Against that backdrop, organisations are continuing to modernise. Owl Labs said 69% of workers identified encouragement to use AI as the main organisational change they had seen, while 75% said their employer actively encourages the use of AI tools. The company also found that 87% of employees have already used or experimented with AI at work, and that 84% said their employer made changes to the office in 2025, including new AI tools, more IT support, and upgraded meeting-room audio or video equipment.
Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, said: “Technology has moved from a support function to core hybrid infrastructure. When meeting technology fails, it doesn’t just cause mild annoyance, it undermines wellbeing and derails collaboration. Employers and employees alike can’t afford for their most important interactions to be held together by last-minute workarounds.”
The report points to a workplace still in transition. Employers are investing, employees are experimenting with AI, and office infrastructure is being refreshed. Yet the persistence of setup delays, distorted audio, and fragmented meeting experiences suggests that workplace technology is now being judged less on novelty and more on whether it removes friction from everyday collaboration.
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