The 4 Essentials of a Successful Hybrid Work Model. Tools to implement a positive digital workplace transformation.

Remote Work

How Has Remote Work Changed?

Is working from home here to stay? Probably for some. Many businesses have shied away from staying fully remote, but the vast majority (83%) agree that remote work has been a success. Going forward most organizations will likely adopt a hybrid work model with much more flexibility, if they haven’t already.

Equipping Employees For Success

Hybrid and remote teams need to stay connected and productive, maintaining communication and collaboration, while keeping the business safe from cyber threats and data loss. Cloud-based productivity apps are a good solution, enabling businesses to provide proven tools for remote teams, and control “where, when and who” connects to applications. They also make it easier to ensure secured and managed access to company data from any device, whether company issued or personal.

Key considerations for hybrid work

1. Use productivity and collaboration apps for videoconferencing, meetings and chat
2. Provide cloud storage for file access and sharing
3. Prioritize smart security practices like multi-factor authentication
4. Protect business and customer data with secured personal and company-owned devices

Process Automation

Taking a more strategic approach to remote work presents the opportunity to rethink routine processes like invoicing, accounting and records management. In the initial shift, businesses that still relied on paper documents faced an outsized challenge.

In a successful hybrid work environment, the activities of remote teams and on-site employees are seamlessly integrated. This depends on everyone continuing to have instant, secured access to information, and the ability to easily store and share it.

How well information flows through your business is key to both employee productivity and customer satisfaction. As we’ve seen, major disruptions can have a serious impact on any business. Those that are not leveraging technology to simplify and accelerate their processes can be the hardest hit.

Digitized documents and automated workflows form the foundation of the digital workplace. They enable remote teams to work efficiently, and optimize critical processes. Automating routine tasks accelerates them, frees your people to focus on more important matters like delivering a superior customer experience. In this way, tailoring your workflows to support remote teams enables your business to move forward with agility and renewed effectiveness.

Key benefits of process automation

1. Instant access to information for both on-site and remote teams
2. Accelerates routine processes and reduces errors
3. Centralized location to search, store and access documents
4. Easy to deploy and integrates with other business applications

Cloud & IT Infrastructure

The overnight move to remote work was unprecedented, forcing businesses to abruptly change the way they operate. At the time, the immediate concern was merely to stay in operation.

IT leaders did what they could to enable employees to work from home and provide some degree of business continuity. As organizations reassess their plans for a remote and hybrid workforce, the necessity of having an IT infrastructure that can endure is clear.

The goal should be simplicity and reliability. Forwardthinking organizations have accelerated the replacement of older technology and moved to cloud-based solutions to cost effectively transform their security and IT management. A phased approach to cloud migration is perfectly valid: Many businesses use a hybrid model as a bridge between on-premises and cloud environments. Moving your office suite of solutions to the cloud is a great start to modernizing your apps and infrastructure, while adding more layers of security — an integral component of remote work policies amidst an uptick in cyber threats. Whether all systems are migrated at once or gradually, businesses benefit from reduced hardware costs and less maintenance, while making the organization more resilient.

Enhancing Business Continuity

Business continuity depends on implementing a business-wide plan to ensure critical business functions continue to be carried out reliably and securely in the event of a disruption. Cloud strategy is a big part of this plan. In a successful digital workplace, critical data and applications are backed up in the cloud, and can be quickly recovered. They also stay readily accessible to remote teams no matter what.

Key benefits of a cloud-first IT infrastructure

1. No upfront capital investment
2. Supports remote work and ongoing collaboration
3. Improves security and data protection
4. Increases scalability and business agility
5. Lessens the complexity of disaster recovery
6. Reduces carbon footprint

Smart & Safe Workplace

Based on current trends and the input we continue to gather from customers, the “new world of work” is hybrid. Within this environment, it is important to build employee confidence and keep business moving at full speed by creating a smart and safe workplace — that is, a digital workplace comprised of smart, agile workspaces with advanced digital technologies that support the well-being of onsite employees and visitors.

Key benefits of a remote and hybrid work policy

• Employee productivity increased as much as 87% while working from home
• 70% of employees reported higher job satisfaction since the introduction of a work-from-home model
• 83% of employees said they would opt for a hybrid work model if given the choice

A Digital Workplace for a Hybrid Workforce

A workplace tailored to a hybrid work model supports the safety of onsite employees as well as the ongoing productivity and collaboration of a hybrid workforce with secured access to business-critical information from anywhere. Digital technologies can help by enabling businesses to:

• Automate document management and capture valuable data
• Manage and monitor who enters the building and streamline the process by automatically creating and storing screening records
• Use touchless controls and one-touch workflows that turn a multifunction printer (MFP) into an integrated communications hub

Adaptive work environments and seamlessly connected physical and digital workflows are hallmarks of a successful digital workplace transformation. Ricoh partners with businesses at every stage of this transformation to plan and strategize for their individual business needs with actionable steps to implement new technologies, and provide service and support.

Source : eBook - The 4 Essentials of a Successful Hybrid Work Model