The Simply Smarter Blog

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.

After nearly two years into the global pandemic, employees have acclimated to working fully remote or in some type of hybrid environment. The recent spike in COVID-19 cases across the country – and the potential for newer, stronger variants – has led businesses to recalculate their return to office plans once again, keeping their employees' safety and health top of mind. According to the Harvard Business Review, over 90% of employers are planning to implement a hybrid schedule in 2022, showing that this work model is here to stay.

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.

According to a recent study, only 29% of surveyed employees want to be back in the office full-time, and 56% would quit or look for a new job that offers flexibility when they work.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, 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.

When you look at today’s technology like self-driving cars, robotics and artificial intelligence, it’s easy to think we’ve landed in a sci-fi film. But go ahead and pinch yourself — this is real. Yesterday’s predictions are today’s reality. As we begin 2022, those devices are busy providing services in highly connected school, work and home environments, making so much possible that it feels like the future is truly here. Join us, as we explore what the classroom, meeting room and printers of the future look like today.

As organizations rekindle onsite work, enabling a culture of collaboration by reimagining office locations to be hybrid by design is more important than ever before. For expert insight into the topic, we interviewed Amy Loomis, Research Director for IDC's worldwide Future of Work market research service in our recent whitepaper, IDC Analyst Connection: Defining a Successful Journey for Office Reentry. In this article, we summarize her main conclusions about the hybrid office phenomena and the steps that need to be taken to foster a collaborative work environment.

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.

If your average day looks anything like mine, it’s stacked full of meetings with groups of internal and external folks of a variety of sizes on countless topics. To top it off, I’m trying to manage a hybrid work schedule, and need to rely on seamless communication, whether in or out of the office. In any other organization, I couldn’t imagine the stress this could cause. However, working for Sharp, and taking advantage of our collaboration tools has helped make this easy and seamless.