The Simply Smarter Blog

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.

Could you have ever imagined being told one year ago that you would be transitioning fully to remote work, turning your home sanctuary into a lively office space? While some people have returned to their physical offices now, our uptake of working from home (WFH) increased drastically over the past year. For many, this has meant balancing childcare and their day job (and, in some cases, welcoming kids onto Zoom meetings), while quickly learning new technologies to support WFH infrastructures. The upcoming anniversary of the one-year mark of the pandemic makes for a fitting time to reflect back on all that’s changed about how we work, and how businesses can better anticipate and address employee needs, which can vary across the generational spectrum, for the future of work. We covered these topics and more in our recent webinar with Microsoft and industry experts on the future of work. Here are a few key learnings from the discussion.

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.

Most "office workers"  work to communicate and collaborate with information - with our peers, with our partners and with our customers. Organizations that do this effectively make better, faster decisions and have a shared understanding of the business environment. And, they tend to “win” in the market. In this Simply Smarter blog, Sharp's VP of Marketing Bob Madaio talks about the challenges to communicate and collaborate in the modern work environment and how organizations can leverage technology to overcome those challenges.

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.