The Simply Smarter Blog

We continue to hear workers want to work from home or remotely. With WFH sticking around, it’s important that your home office includes all that you need to succeed. We even polled from our social media followers and learned that the flexibility and ability to log-on to work from anywhere is favored, especially when you have an ideal home office set-up.  Here’s what our followers expressed as their must-have items for their remote office.

Over the past few years, working from home at least a few days a week has become a regular occurrence. This way of work has shifted family dynamics, as many have turned guest rooms into offices, splurged on top-notch Wi-Fi systems, and even moved homes due to no longer having to commute to work every day. At first, your ideal home office may be as simple as a room that is secluded from traffic or lawnmower noises, but if you really think about making your workspace perfect for productivity, there are clearly other aspects that need to be considered. In my quest to put together my ideal home office, I examined all critical components, from hardworking hardware to a motivating ambiance.

In today’s continuously evolving workplace, the need for communication and collaboration is more important than ever. Digital technology is constantly reshaping the way people work. Employees are bringing tablets, laptops and smartphones into meetings as ways to share information. Additionally, many employees work on a hybrid schedule, where they are partially in the office and partially remote. One of the most impactful ways companies can create a collaborative space is by introducing an interactive whiteboard into their meeting rooms. With an interactive whiteboard in a business setting, meeting attendees can use their personal handheld devices to share their information with all participants using the interactive display, whether working in the office or remotely.

Hybrid workstyles have driven the need for secure access to the cloud for all technology used in the workplace. As a result, you are no longer tethered to your desktop, and neither are your files! Meet the new Advanced and Essentials Series workgroup multifunction printers (MFPs) from Sharp. They provide seamless and secure access to enterprise workflows from wherever you are working.

These new MFPs check all the boxes when it comes to today’s diverse workstyles.

Remember when we all gathered in a conference room for meetings? Fitting as many people as we could at the table, while others grabbed chairs and sat around the outskirts?  Feels just like yesterday, doesn’t it? Well, while meetings will always happen, the way we conduct them has changed, perhaps forever.

In recent years, business world has undergone substantial changes, with an increase in the adoption of digital technologies, flexible work environments and virtual meetings.

Let’s talk about a few things to consider when attending a virtual meeting. Read on to learn about the 5 Do’s and Don’ts of virtual meeting etiquette.

Over the past few years, remote and hybrid work setups have become the norm.  Combining remote and in-person work can benefit everyone by offering flexibility and the opportunity to tailor work environments to different tasks. While many companies are still navigating their optimal balance – such as three days in the office and two days remote – it is evident that this hybrid work model is not just a passing trend but a permanent feature in the modern work environment.

Although many of us are used to working from home, it’s important to remember that there are many differences between working in a corporate space and home office in terms of IT security. With the rate of cyber-attacks increasing by nearly 600% during the pandemic, it’s critical for organizations to have both their own devices, and those of their employees, fully secure in order to reduce the risk of an attack.

The landscape in which we work has forever changed. When companies were forced to operate remotely, many employees across the globe got a taste of what it was like to work from home full-time. Now, many organizations are choosing to operate with a hybrid workforce as a permanent solution to reduce costs and adapt to their employees' needs.

Yet, despite the benefits of a hybrid work environment, the way employees see culture and how organizations build it is evolving. With a dispersed workforce, it's essentially harder for organizations to connect with their people to create a unified cultural experience. In this blog post, we discuss five ways to build culture in a hybrid work environment to help your organization overcome challenges from a physically dispersed workforce.

Once upon a time, office workers got up and drove to the office, clocked in, and worked from 8 to 5. Then they went home, disconnected, and lived their personal lives until the next morning when they did it all over again. Then came technology – internet, smartphones, 5G. The lines blurred as workers had access to emails and network servers 24/7 – and supervisors and clients had access to them. And yet, even as the office continued to cross the line further and further into the home, standard wisdom was that employees needed to be in the office to do their jobs. Then COVID-19 came along and workers couldn’t be in the office and we entered the era of work-from-home, aka WFH.

With the rapid increase of digital transformation in the past few years, the need to support a hybrid or remote workforce is paramount. But, how do you enable employees to work efficiently with one another – sometimes nationwide or globally, connect with clients virtually, and eliminate communication barriers and productivity issues, all while working to lower IT costs?

Sounds like a lot, right? (It is), but the answer is simple – by implementing a Unified Communications solution.

Just picture this— you’re a new employee diligently working, and out of the blue, your CEO e-mails you, asking for 10 Amazon gift cards. She says it’s for an important project she’s working on and she needs the gift cards ASAP! The pressure is on and you take a break from your hectic to-do list, and begin ordering the gift cards, until you realize… the person emailing is not your boss after all, but rather, a sneaky cybercriminal. And just like that, you are the newest victim of a phishing scam. How mortifying, right? Well luckily, there are steps that can be taken in order to avoid such embarrassing catastrophes.

Remember when webinars used to be a novelty? Some organizations may have been a bit reticent to make them a part of their routine and implemented them sparingly instead of in-person meetings, while others eschewed them entirely. However, as we’ve continued to shift to a more remote world, their value and necessity as a critical communication tool for businesses has increased. Now more than ever, small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) can use webinars to highlight their solutions and expertise in a variety of subjects while also reaching and growing their current audience. Because they will likely be a part of our professional and personal lives for the foreseeable future, here are three tips to ensure you have the right content and technology so your next webinar runs smoothly.

You know him.  He’s that guy in your remote meetings that just can’t get it together. You really can’t blame him. After all, he’s not used to meeting this way. Like most of us, ever since stay-at-home orders were announced, he’s been reluctantly living the work-from-home life. The conference room is now his bedroom, the kids are his new “co-workers” and his fur baby barks at every Amazon package delivered at the front door. Bless. His. Heart.

I must confess, I’ve been “that guy” more times than I’m willing to admit. Nevertheless, it’s important to uphold basic meeting etiquette. Learning from others’ mistakes is a powerful thing, so that’s why I’m sharing some remote meeting blunders from familiar characters you’ve probably met along the way.

The shift to a work-from-home (WFH) model, thought to be merely a stopgap measure back in the spring of 2020, is starting to look more and more permanent, requiring many businesses to make long-term decisions on how best to equip home workers with the tools and hardware needed to do their jobs. Some of those decisions were easy – the procedures for ordering and provisioning additional laptops, for instance, didn’t necessarily change. But what about printing and scanning needs? A workgroup copier will probably not fit in people’s home offices, kitchens, or walk-in closets (yes, home workers with kids attending virtual school, we see you).

In the past few years, organizations have had to make many adjustments to the way people work.  We have gone from an office full of people prior to the pandemic, to people working primarily from their homes in the midst of the pandemic, and now back to an environment where most workers are physically in their offices, while others are working remotely or hybrid.  Today’s workplace is also tomorrow’s workplace – a hybrid balance of working in the office and remotely.

As employees continue to do their jobs efficiently and effectively from remote locations, some companies are beginning to view the work-from-home model as longer-term, while others have embraced a hybrid model in which employees split time between home and office. While there are many benefits to remote work for both employer and employee, there are some downsides as well – and one of those is the need to provide IT services to a remote workforce.