Designing telephony
for a half-in,
half-out team.
The biggest change to business phones in the last five years isn't the technology, it's the geography. Half the team is in the office; half are at home; some move daily. Here are the patterns we use to make telephony work for that.
A phone system that worked for a 60-person office in 2018 doesn't work for a 60-person team split across three home setups, a co-working space and a downsized HQ. Most of what we redesign in 2026 is telephony that's technically fine but was scoped for a world that no longer exists.
The good news: cloud-native SIP makes this much easier than it used to be. The trick is making deliberate choices rather than inheriting the old shape.
The three patterns we use
Most hybrid small businesses end up at one of three telephony shapes. Picking the right one early matters; retrofitting it costs more than getting it right.
Pattern A: Softphone-only
The simplest. Everyone uses a softphone (a phone app) on their computer or phone. No deskphones, no comms cabinet, no hardware. Calls land wherever the user's logged in.
Right when: small team (under 30), service-led not call-centre, decent home broadband, no shared reception desk.
Wrong when: you have a reception desk that needs a real phone; you have a dense call centre where headset hygiene matters; broadband at home is consumer-grade and call quality drops in evenings.
Pattern B: Hybrid (deskphone + softphone)
Reception and busy roles get deskphones in the office; everyone else uses softphones. Same extension rings both. Most common pattern we deploy.
Right when: moderate size (30–150), office still meaningful, some roles really do need a deskphone (reception, sales floor, exec PAs).
Wrong when: nobody comes into the office; the deskphones go unused; you're paying for hardware you don't need.
Pattern C: Teams a custom Teams phone connection
Calls land inside the Microsoft Teams app. No separate softphone; the Teams client is the phone. Backed by a SIP network for the trunks.
Right when: your team lives in Teams already; you want one app for chat, video and calls; you'd rather not maintain a second piece of software.
Wrong when: you're not on Microsoft 365; your team uses Slack/Google Workspace; you need contact-centre features Teams doesn't do well (complex IVR, wallboards, advanced reporting). Plenty of contact centres make it work anyway.
If your team is 80%+ in Teams already, default to a custom Teams phone connection. Otherwise, Pattern B is the safest bet.
a custom Teams phone connection costs about the same as Microsoft's own calling plans, but adds proper phone-system features (queues, menus, recording, reports) and is far more flexible.
The call-quality question
The number-one fear when moving off the old phone system to softphones is "what about call quality?" Reasonable concern; the answer depends on three things.
1. The home broadband
SIP calls need about 100kbps each way. Almost any UK broadband can carry one call comfortably. The problem is contention: a 5pm video meeting alongside two kids streaming Netflix can saturate a 30Mbps line's upload pipe and degrade call quality.
Fixes: prioritise SIP traffic at the home router (most consumer routers don't do this); upgrade to FTTP if the user genuinely needs it; switch to mobile when broadband is suspect (a single 5G call eats ~120kbps; trivial).
2. The codec choice
Modern SIP networks default to a wide-band codec (Opus or G.722). These give "better than phone" quality on a good line — calls sound clearer than the old PSTN. On a bad line they degrade gracefully to narrowband.
What you want to avoid: G.729 (compressed narrowband) on a fibre line. Defaults are usually right; check during commissioning.
3. The headset
Honestly the biggest variable, and the cheapest fix. A £50 wired headset (Plantronics, Jabra) is night-and-day better than a computer's built-in mic. Buy good headsets. Refresh them every 3 years. Field-sales staff need Bluetooth, everyone else wired.
The home broadband is almost never the call-quality problem people think it is. It's the computer mic, the cheap Bluetooth headset, or the home router's WiFi.
Making the same number ring everywhere
The hybrid-work magic — and the bit that genuinely needs proper configuration — is making one extension ring sensibly across deskphone, softphone, mobile.
Simultaneous ring
Old answer: simultaneous ring. The extension rings every registered device at once. Loud, but works.
Problem: awful if the user is on a train and their deskphone, computer, mobile and Teams app all ring simultaneously to whoever's on the other end.
Sequential ring (better)
Ring the softphone first for 8 seconds; if no answer, ring the deskphone for 8 seconds; if no answer, ring the mobile. Falls through gracefully. Quieter for the caller.
Presence-aware routing (best, harder)
If we know the user is in a Teams meeting, don't ring their softphone — go straight to voicemail or another team member. If they've set their status to "away", ring mobile only. Requires presence integration between the phone system and Teams; well-supported on modern platforms.
The compliance bit
Two specific compliance items that come up with hybrid telephony:
Call recording at home
If your business records calls — for FCA, quality monitoring, training — those recordings need to capture home-based softphone calls too. Modern cloud platforms do this transparently; the recording happens at the network, not the device. Verify it during commissioning; don't assume.
Privacy / personal mobile use
If staff use personal mobiles for work, you've got a privacy tangle: the company can't MDM a personal device fully, and the user's personal contacts shouldn't be company-readable. The cleanest answer is a softphone app on the personal device (which keeps work calls in a separate app) rather than letting the personal SIM be the work number.
Getting it actually deployed
The deployment for a hybrid telephony rebuild is usually shorter than people expect — 3–6 weeks for a 50-person team. The order we'd run it:
- Discovery: who needs what device, what call flows exist today, what's sacred and what isn't
- Design: pick a pattern (A/B/C), write the new call flows, hardware list
- Pilot: 5–10 people on the new system for a fortnight while the old one still runs
- Train + cutover: 60-minute training session per role, then port the numbers over a weekend
- Tune: two weeks of "this hunt group isn't routing right" tweaks based on real usage
If you take one thing
Don't design for the old shape and then add hybrid as an afterthought. Sit down and ask: "in 2026, where do my people work, what device do they reach for first, and what does the customer experience need to be when they ring us?"
Then build to that. The technology is more capable than most small businesses realise; the limit is design, not capability.
Hybrid-shaped
phone system.
A cloud phone system that rings the right device, wherever your team is. Designed properly, not just "softphones on top of an old phone system".