Why Businesses must Adapt and Change

Why Businesses must Adapt and Change

When the Government instructed us to work from home the numbers doing so doubled overnight, but was your business ready?

What might once have been considered alien to both organisations and employees alike has now become the norm, with up to 80% of businesses planning to extend home working arrangements beyond the current health crisis.

In an enforced response to Coronavirus, millions of people who previously had only ever known the daily commute to the office, are now aware that they can do their job just as efficiently from home.

This has both saved the daily grind and introduced a flexibility to their lives that they could only have previously dreamt of – a move to that once seemingly mythical phenomenon, a better work/life balance.

It is however acknowledged that working from home is not to everyone’s taste, with many experiencing a feeling of isolation from colleagues.

Whilst some contact can be maintained through platforms such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom, these cannot deliver the working processes and access to information that working from an office has traditionally brought.

The challenge facing business over the coming months and years will be to balance the obvious benefits experienced during the lockdown without destabilising the organisation, it’s employees and profitability.

Clearly it would be folly to attempt to dismantle the traditional office overnight as this would be both costly and potentially damaging.

The potential to increase employee morale and productivity, allied to a substantial reduction in office space and cost cannot however be ignored.

Over recent years, many businesses have begun to move the traditional office environment to a more diverse way of working and there is every sign that this will continue apace.

The so-called hybrid office which offers the flexibility and undoubted benefits of remote working with those generated by the bricks and mortar office seems by many to be the way forward.

Document Management Systems if properly considered and implemented allow employees to access accurately and securely all of their key information and processes, be they in the office or working remotely.

Information can be retrieved and referenced by virtue of its content as opposed to its location and complex workflows triggered by the press of a button.

Whilst the traditional office and the undoubted social/economic benefits it brings is likely to remain with us for many years to come, probably much smaller, perhaps more of a hub in form, it must now surely be under pinned by technology to ensure that future circumstances beyond our control do not leave us flat footed again.

Covid 19 has given us the biggest warning in a century, can we really afford to ignore it?