The Simply Smarter Blog

Sluss + Padgett LLC, a growing commercial HVAC general contractor in Norcross, GA employs a national workforce of over 100 employees. After modernizing its operations with a hybrid model, the company required upgrades to three conference rooms and its training room as well as a solution to foster camaraderie among its on-site workforce.

Elyse Dinome, Sharp product specialist, demonstrates the new and improved mobile experience on our Synappx Go collaboration software. In this demo, Elyse reviews the ease of starting an in-person meeting from your phone, sharing and collaborating on cloud documents, and more! 

Within our Tecra®, Portégé® and Satellite Pro™ product families, we offer a wide-ranging portfolio of laptops from entry-level to premium and traditional clamshell to multifunction convertibles.

With upwards of 85 offices located throughout the southeast, a leading dental service organization needed a solution to better engage staff at all their different offices at once. Each office had meetings but did not have a way to easily collaborate with other offices and rarely used the essential employee intranet.  By installing Sharp's NEC displays, with the soundbar and cameras, all offices are now able to have daily morning meetings with each office to talk about the cases coming in for that day. 

Elyse DiNome, Product Management Specialist at Sharp, demonstrates how to easily start, run and end meetings securely using the Synappx Collaboration Hub Experience application.  Watch the demo to learn more, or visit business.sharpusa.com/Synappx-Collaboration-Hub.

Combine Ultra High Definition (UHD) 4K pixel resolution and an intuitive ‘Pen-on-Paper’ writing experience with Sharp’s PrecisionTouch technology, and experience high-contrast, visual clarity parred with an accurate touch that’s fast, smooth, and responsive.

Now that Sam is in the office three out of five days of the week, he needs a way to hold productive meetings with team mates who are both working in and out of the office. The Synappx collaboration hub experience allows him to easily start, share and end a meeting using just his mobile phone.

People can work from anywhere. Hybrid work is here to stay, and workers need technology they can take with them. Now part of Sharp, Dynabook laptop computers are cutting-edge mobile solutions that help professionals excel where, when, and how they want. View the video to learn more, or visit business.sharpusa.com/Dynabook.

In today’s hybrid workplace, keeping your organization connected, productive and secure can be a daunting task. It requires the right technology plan and the right partner. At Sharp, we offer a suite of collaboration, print, productivity and security solutions for today’s complex work environments. 

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.

We are nearly two years into this global pandemic and there are several things that have changed the business world forever, including the use of digital technologies, flexible working 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.

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.

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.

A new paradigm of remote and hybrid work is rapidly replacing the traditional standard of a five-day in-office work week. Gartner sees working from home as a “cornerstone of the post-pandemic future of work” and projects that nearly one in five employees will work remotely after the pandemic concludes. Additionally, the 2021 State of IT report from Spiceworks Ziff Davis says the Covid-19 pandemic has been “a catalyst for business transformation,” with 76% of businesses planning long-term IT changes.

With the rapid increase of this digital transformation, 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.

Dynabook laptops are designed, engineered and manufactured in-house, are rigorously tested for long-term durability, and are backed by industry-leading warranty options.

Many in the AV industry might be familiar with the innovative work and reporting of Gary Kayye, founder of rAVe pubs and Teaching Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC). Pre-pandemic, you probably saw Gary and his dedicated rAVe crew conducting camera interviews at major industry trade shows such as InfoComm and the Digital Signage Expo. With his first-hand experience in academia, we thought it would be compelling to get the inside scoop from Gary on how AV is shaping the future of education and learning. 

In this new world of work, 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 in the new normal, back to an environment where some people are physically in their offices, while others are working remotely.  Today’s workplace is also tomorrow’s workplace – a hybrid balance of working in the office and remotely.

There has been a tech renaissance this past year as many businesses have found that their operations have needed to change. If you had asked business leaders if they planned to let their employees work from home full or part time a year ago, many would have disagreed that this could be the best route for an efficient working environment. Yet, here we are -- nearly a year into the pandemic and office complexes sit empty while home offices buzz with online collaboration. Employees sleep later, yet get to work earlier, and energy once wasted fighting traffic now moves important projects forward.