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6 Essential Guiding Principles To Transforming Your Hybrid Workplace For Print | HP: Hybrid work e-Guide
Fri May 19, 2023
A BLUEPRINT FOR PRINT TRANSFORMATION
This is your guide to making hybrid work for you.
2020 taught us all the true meaning of disruption. Everything we thought we knew about how to enable a productive workforce has changed. Plans that were based on past assumptions have had to become flexible to meet the demands of how we work today.
The challenge now is how we work must fit the world in which we work in. That is a world where the office isn’t necessarily at the heart of the organization. A world where employees don’t feel the need to be present at their desks for all to see.
In short, it’s time to reimagine work to meet the needs of everyone. With a solid plan, you’ll have the confidence to quickly adapt to the unique ways that work needs to get done now.
6 Essential Guiding Principles To Transforming Your Hybrid Workplace For Print:
1. WELCOME TO HYBRID WORK
Inspiring Opportunities For Transformation
Your workforce has shown extraordinary resilience and flexibility. They adapted fast and demonstrated that being productive doesn’t demand being in the office. Sure, the journey has had its ups and downs, but teams have emerged on the other side ready to find their feet in a new reality. The flexible working model they must now navigate is here to stay, and it is the role of organizational leaders to ensure they succeed.
To adapt fast and remain agile, you will need a strategy that blends technology, process, and culture to create a system of working that responds to change. A flexible, ever-developing system that’s fit for hybrid work because, above all, it works for the worker.
Managing Your Hybrid Workforce
The grand experiment in remote working has transformed the expectations of many workers. They want a greater say in how and where they work. You need to recalibrate your own assumptions and if that means ‘business as usual’ is a thing of the past, then you must leave it in the past. Ultimately, the goal is better collaboration, elevated productivity, and unrivalled flexibility. These are what matter in the new normal.
You need a clear hybrid work strategy that is informed by data and designed to deliver a seamless work-from-anywhere experience. An ecosystem of technologies that is simple to manage and uncompromising in its security. The drive to speed digital transformation in every part of the business has placed a great strain on management and IT leaders alike. An objective analysis based on data can help you invest in the right areas to optimize your hardware, your workflows, and your working culture.
Finding Your New Normal
Each organization will adopt its own approach to hybrid work. Why? Because every business is unique. The devices, software, services and solutions required for your employees to perform at their best will depend on your unique circumstances and vision.
The first step in planning your response is deciding what form of hybrid work you want, if indeed you want it at all. Are you looking to get everyone back in the same space?
Are you happy to have everyone working remotely? Or, as it will be for most leaders, are you searching for the perfect blend? Each scenario will pose challenging questions and demand different technology solutions. We’re here to help you ask the right questions in order to help you enhance productivity and enable your connected workforce to succeed.
‘Where I’ve always worked’ - Almost entirely in the office
‘Like every other company, we embraced remote working solutions when we had to. However, it is still when we are face to face in a secure environment that we get our best work done. Teams collaborate more effectively, access specialist equipment more easily and engage more directly with both customers and partners.’
‘Wherever I need to be’ - Mixing it up as required
‘My company is really open to agile working, so we encourage employees to determine for themselves where they need to be each day. Some days will demand they be in the office, other days they’ll be fine working from home. We are gradually integrating new digital workflows which are making it easier to be productive and collaborate effectively from anywhere.’
‘Where has the office gone?’ - Working entirely from home
‘Commuting is a thing of the past. We have gone ‘all-in’ on the cloud and transforming our workflows. Our commitment to remote working has given us vast improvements in how we work and live. Enabled by innovative, secure hardware and software solutions, the business feels more connected and resilient than ever before.’
For inspired ideas on your hybrid transformation, contact us today!
2. EMPOWERING A CONNECTED WORKFORCE
Enhancing Efficiency And Productivity In Your Teams
You always aim to keep your employees productive and engaged. Now, with hybrid work mainstream, this is more than just allowing them to work from home. To foster a successful long-term hybrid work strategy, you need to have a solid understanding of what your employees are up to day to day. Only then will you be able to provide them with the tools and solutions they need to deliver at their best. So, are you confident you know how your teams get stuff done? Do you know how information is captured, shared and managed? You need to be across how work flows in the organization. Information could be turning from document to digital to data and back again thousands of times a day and the entire process needs to remain collaborative, organized and secure, every step of the way, no matter how many teams are involved.
60% of employees say they want flexibility in where and when they work1
Different Needs For Different Functions
As you shift to a flexible work model it is vital that you understand that everyone’s needs are different, so you have an opportunity to better match the technology to the required experience of the individual. Start by considering the general personas that exist across most organizations and then build from there.
77% of employees prefer a hybrid work model1
Senior Line of Business (Executives, Managers)
‘As a frequent traveler, I’m no stranger to remote work. I not only need to be productive everywhere, but I also need peace of mind that the sensitive information I often deal with stays secure. As a leader, I am also very aware of the role office culture plays in building company morale and improving employee engagement.’
Customer-Facing (Sales, Support)
‘I am on the go a lot, engaging with customers either through direct selling or by supporting the sales process. Through my customer interactions, I often deal with confidential, sensitive information specific to company clients and our business. My work is high value, so disruption directly impacts productivity and revenue.’
Department (Finance, Marketing, Legal, IT)
‘As a departmental employee, my responsibilities include working cross-functionally. I interact with stakeholders across the organization but increasingly I am finding that, unless I need specific access to systems or equipment, I can be productive from anywhere.’
Administration (Office Management, Operations Support)
‘My role involves dealing with critical processes and tasks that keep the business moving. Efficiency, accuracy and compliance are important as others are depending on me and my work, so flexible working can certainly pose challenges.’
Giving Your Teams A Seamless Work Experience
Technology has to blend into the background and be a catalyst for every day, everywhere excellence.
Technology has a massive role to play in easing your workforce’s transition to flexible working. But it won’t be easy. Rush into it too fast and costly mistakes could happen. Go too slow and the business could fall behind the competition.
As an IT professional, you have to push harder and harder to ensure information flows effortlessly across the business. Nothing should stand in the way of teams working together to get their work done. Technology has to blend into the background and be a catalyst for every day, everywhere excellence.
As you strive to deliver greater flexibility for your teams, print shouldn’t be overlooked. This is especially relevant since 73% of employees working from home are printing the same amount or even more. In fact, persistent print activity provides an opportunity to unlock productivity gains. By automating paper-based workflows and integrating them with the cloud, you’ll be one step closer to creating more efficient and resilient ways of working–making information move smoother whilst overcoming document blind-spots.
Lastly, an important word of caution. The fragmentation of the office will inevitably expose cracks in your cyber defenses. Every effort must be taken to secure your technology ecosystem, not least your endpoint devices. But secure tech can only get you so far when your workforce is routinely working from anywhere.More than ever, IT must build a ‘Culture of Security’. While IT teams are responsible for making remote work easy, they should also ensure that employees never let their guard down. This means putting the right processes and protocols in place so that staying secure is second nature.
Keeping A Watchful Eye On Well-Being
While there are many benefits to working hybrid, one of the biggest challenges is digital overload. This happens when boundaries between office and home become blurred—and longer hours get logged. Endless meetings, back-to-back Zoom calls, and hours upon hours of screen time have resulted in employees feeling fatigued and overwhelmed. Switching off is a challenge when your home is your office.
So, while enabling employees to work flexibly with the right technology solutions is great, you must push them to set boundaries. Make sure they know that always-on is not always the best answer and that the last thing you want is a dissatisfied, burnt out workforce. Set reasonable expectations, keep lines of communication open and encourage everyone to watch out for each other.
Consider the following to empower your connected workforce:
To help your workforce put their best foot forward, contact us today!
3. DESIGNING THE FLEXIBLE WORKPLACE
Inspiring Opportunities For Transformation
Many organizations are no longer telling people where they have to work. Teams have thrived, and this has set the stage for a longer-term shift to flexible work. Yet while working from anywhere has its advantages, many people still want the option to work in the office.
That’s why a remote work strategy must also consider how we re-engage with the office. Because accommodating flexible work will not only require a rethink of how employees work from home—but also how they experience the office.
Nurturing A Connected Culture
For all the fantastic opportunities presented by flexible working, there is also a looming threat every leader should worry about...cultural decay. The diluting of the hard-built ‘spirit’ that brings teams together, rallying to solve problems and celebrate successes.
For businesses that really embrace flexible working, the office will become like the new offsite. The energizing, collaborative hotspot that acts as a catalyst for creativity and innovation. But this won’t happen by accident. You’ll have to reimagine how physical spaces serve to bring people together with shared purpose and determination.
5 Office Models For A Flexible Future Of Work
As it was
Employees return to the office and resume a regular 9-to-5 routine. The office might be a bit more hygienic and flexible, but mostly this is the centralized office as it was before 2020.
Clubhouse
Employees visit the office when they need to collaborate and return home to do their focused work. The office serves as a social hub—the place people go to meet, socialize, and work together.
Activity-Based Working
Employees work from an office but don’t have an assigned desk. Instead, they spend their day moving between a variety of workspaces, such as meeting rooms, phone booths, hot desks, and lounges.
Hub And Spoke
Rather than traveling to a large office in the central business district, employees work from smaller satellite offices in the suburbs and neighborhoods closer to where they live. This saves them the commute to a central office while still providing the benefits of face-to-face interaction with colleagues.
Fully Virtual
Employees have the freedom to work from home or anywhere else they like. This also allows organizations to ditch expensive leases and progress towards fully remote work.
Designing For Moments Of Brilliance
With people together less frequently, it’s vital that you make the most of it. That you are deliberate in creating the little interactions where sparks of creativity burst into bonfires of innovation.
For a start, there is little point having anyone in the office if they are going to be hidden behind an office door or cubicle walls. Bringing down physical barriers instantly sets the stage for the casual conversations that can launch amazing ideas. Create loads of breakout areas for more focused sidebar discussions and to maximize the value of the time spent together.
But knocking down walls and encouraging people to hot-desk is only stage one. Besides putting in place social distancing and hygiene measures where needed, dig into the data and discuss in-depth with teams to understand how people and information move about the office. Consider the role of shared equipment like printers to foster lasting interactions - printeractions, if you will - that might just turn up into something fantastic.
Consider the following questions to get your workplace ready to flex:
To help design a future-fit workplace, contact us today!
4. WORKFLOW SOLUTIONS THAT DELIVER
Reinforcing It To Be Ready To Adapt
In a flexible work world, IT faces many challenges. There is a growing fleet of devices to maintain. Document-intensive workflows create productivity bottlenecks. Plus, limited visibility into what employees are doing, and on what device, creates potential security gaps. Thankfully, the technology which often holds the key to solving your business challenges can also make flexible working easier.
To support a flexible workforce, IT needs solutions that are easy to use, simple to manage, and enable many styles of hybrid work. This requires designing a technology strategy around connectivity, flexibility and where beneficial, automation. The question to ask then is—what are the considerations for how to transform your tech stack for hybrid working?
Providing Support Where And When It’s Needed
Whether it’s a laptop, tablet, phone, or printer, getting the right device to where it’s needed may sound simple enough. Yet challenges still arise. For instance, providing printers, monitoring print usage, scheduling service, replacing ink or toner, updating firmware and security protocols, and merging organization-wide costs can quickly become tedious for IT teams.
The need to support remote workers in different locations can make minor issues major and take precious time away from your employees and IT teams. Engaging a provider to supply the devices, assist with setup and onboarding, and provide software tools to monitor and maintain them can make life easier. Often, these solutions feature centralized dashboards, supplies provisioning, and customized security configurations that can help unburden IT so they can focus on critical projects whilst maintaining control.
Staying Connected Through The Cloud
The cloud empowers flexibility, opening up opportunities to reimagine the way employees work by enabling simple, connected experiences. Not only does it set IT teams free from on-premise burdens, but the cloud is also key to unlocking the potential of data and automation—from providing insights that improve workflows, to the deployment of smart technologies that build business momentum.
Not every workflow can be migrated completely to the cloud, and this is especially true for those which revolve around paper. Printers, which integrate paper-based workflows and the digital world, will remain essential for core workers as they connect and share information across the business.
Thankfully, recognized managed print services experts can help you take your digital transformation efforts to the next level. These comprehensive services integrate your print environment with cloud-based tools and workflows, deploy the underlying infrastructure—from virtual servers to storage, networking, software and solutions—and develop and test print application modules to meet business requirements, from scalability to performance and beyond.
Speeding Up Productivity With Automation
Scanning and archiving invoices were easy enough in the office yet doing these tasks remotely can be difficult. While repetitive tasks may be unavoidable, experience teaches that navigating workflows that begin on paper but end in the cloud (and vice versa) can become a recurring challenge.
Automation can help streamline paper-based workflows and document management. Apps that connect paper with digital by integrating with your existing platforms or software make printing and scanning to the cloud effortless. This makes it possible for multi-step workflows to become as easy and quick as a simple tap and swipe.
Reinforcing Your Security Strategy
64% of ITDMs reported data loss from unsecured printing practices in six months of remote working.2
The rising frequency and sophistication of cyberthreats is a cause for concern, with phishing and malware campaigns donning increasingly deceptive disguises. They’re harder to detect and making it easier for hackers to bypass your defenses. All it takes is an employee unwittingly downloading an infected file or clicking on a malicious link for them to cause damage.
Going with a BYOP (bring your own printer) approach serves up additional risks, all too reminiscent of past instances of ‘shadow IT’. Though it keeps printer management out of IT’s work queue, employees’ personal printers won’t have the proper security configurations and business policies applied for information to be shared safely.
Protection needs to be delivered on multiple levels—hardware included. Reinforce your first line of defense with robust, built-in protection of all your endpoints (PCs, phones, tablets, and printers), which can help turn the tide against waves of cyberattacks through threat containment and isolation. Modern firmware is also capable of self-healing, which drastically reduces the addressable attack surface, enables remote recovery from firmware attacks, and eases the burden on your IT teams to constantly manage and monitor every endpoint.
Make Sustainability A Priority
The ongoing shift to flexible work presents the perfect opportunity for organizations to reassess their sustainability goals. Investing in technology that enables more efficient ways of working can reduce energy and paper consumption. With more responsible workflows in place, it becomes much easier to assess and address your carbon footprint.
Infuse your hybrid work strategy with an understanding of your employees’ behaviors and preferences. Scaling down print volume is a good starting point. Having the mechanisms in place to monitor their actual print usage against work requirements and industry benchmarks can provide vital insights to optimize for cost and sustainability.
Certified carbon neutral printing can also help you achieve all the above while advancing your sustainability goals. Responsible MPS providers offer services to help offset the carbon impact of your printing through investments in sustainable development projects around the world—from fossil fuel reduction to forest conservation. Making the shift from legacy analog workflows to the cloud can further reduce your carbon emissions and resource consumption. And when printing is unavoidable, check in with your provider to see if they offer responsible disposal and recycling services to help you to close the loop.
Consider the following to assess your business workflows:
To reinvent your workflows contact a genesisONE Sales Solution Expert today!
5. PRINT WHERE IT MAKES SENSE
It’s Time To Rethink Print For A Hybrid Future
The role of print in your business endures for several reasons. Print provides hard-copy documentation that may be necessary for compliance or formal business agreements. Printing also encourages deeper analyses by giving teams the ability to easily read, mark-up and share physical documents. The fact is the printed page provides longevity and an emotional connection that cannot be replaced by a screen. Printed materials have the ability to spark conversations through sharing, and are a helpful platform to inspire creativity through brainstorming.
In the US alone, 48% of remote workers own a home printer and are using it for work. Within this group, 42% said it was because work required it, while 38% shared that they found it easier to take notes on printouts3.
Diving deeper, paper itself isn’t what matters. Rather, it’s the information, and the effective processing and sharing of information, which counts. Therefore, print is still a major driver of both workflow and workplace culture.
It’s also why, in highly regulated industries, including law, finance and accounting, printed documents are still part of key, functional micro workflows. And it’s not just them, either—the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industries, collectively, represent 13% of all employees who need a printer when working from home4. Since employees in these industries don’t have the space for bulky blueprint printers in their homes, this has led to a steadily rising demand for print service providers.
The Way Forward Is Less About Going Paperless And More About Transforming The Role Of Print In Your Organization.
Increasingly, the need to print extends beyond the confines of home as their work takes them to the most isolated corners of the world—where internet connections can range from unreliable to being practically non-existent. When this happens, blueprints and technical documents are hard to replace.
Deep-rooted preferences, regulatory and compliance requirements, and geographical limitations mean that print still plays a role in sharing information across your organization—this encompasses everything from Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and policies to employment offers and handbooks, and from comprehensive business proposals to contract approvals.
Recognizing these nuances is important. Statistically, there’s a good chance that your teams are still reliant on paper in one form or another. Over 70% of organizations say there is still a dependency on manual and paper-based processes5. When you consider how to achieve the desired productivity gains, the way forward is less about going paperless and more about transforming the role of print in your organization.
Despite the many ways it contributes to the workforce, there’s a good chance that printing gets lost in the shuffle when planning and designing hybrid strategies. The importance of print is not evenly weighted for all employees, especially where the necessity is concentrated in specific departments and workflows. IT teams have their hands full with security and improving work-from-home manageability.
73% of IT Decision Makers expect home printing to increase over the next 12 months.2
But the good news is, it’s never too late to think about what you can do to help those who want or need to print—especially when it coincides with employees’ demands for more flexibility in how, when, and where they work. Print provides this much needed flexibility in being able to transform information across formats depending on the desired state—whether it’s on a page for reading or scanned into a cloud repository to connect workflows and spark virtual collaboration across teams.
Though IT teams need to provide devices and solutions that offer printing from wherever and whenever it’s needed, be mindful that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Yet the benefits of integrating print with your cloud-enabled workflows cannot be understated. When smooth and secure flow of information between your teams happens, collaboration and productivity will be a natural result.
Hybrid work has sped up digitization and recalibrated many workflows for good, including those that revolve around paper. It’s also a good time to rethink the role of print within your organization and the value it brings to your workers. Understanding how it facilitates efficiency, organization, and transmission of information can inform your strategic print transformation, create more resilient workflows, and ultimately help you better meet the needs of your workforce.
Good Information, Bad Information
While reducing print from your organization—and shrinking its carbon impact—is a good idea, it could lead to complications regarding essential workflows or ingrained workforce norms. It’s important to classify the role of documents to determine if they are ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and then manage the transformation accordingly.
Good information is a measurable part of the work ecosystem and isn’t trapped in a rigid format. It moves securely along workflows, helps elevate understanding, and encourages collaboration.
Bad information is invisible in the business. It reduces control and visibility, is unsecure, and isn’t digitally integrated. This unmanaged printing can lead to higher security risks and reduce workforce productivity.
Consider the following to uncover the role of print in your organization:
Contact your genesisONE Sales Solution Expert to set up a hybrid print solution today!
6. HYBRID PRINTING MADE EASY
Make Print A Seamless Part Of Your Flexible Work World
No matter where your employees are working, you need to deliver a seamless printing and scanning experience. It’s important to make it as simple as possible for employees to set up their office printers in any location, receive supplies replenishment, and print on the go. Anything less could hinder productivity and collaboration.
Your print environment needs to be cloud-ready to move with other technologies. It also means that IT teams must be able to manage your organization’s printers from a central platform for visibility and support.
Deliver the print experience your employees want with genesisONE Managed Print Services (MPS). It enables users to print and digitize information from virtually anywhere on any device without compromising the security of your organization. Being highly configurable, genesisONE MPS seamlessly integrates into your developing vision for the cloud. Supported by insights from your business and organizational objectives, genesisONE MPS matches the services and software to help you minimize routine management time and empower work-from-anywhere.
genesisONE MPS also eases the burden on your IT team by providing remote workers with the devices that are right for them, delivering supplies on an automatic, just-in-time basis, and managing your entire fleet of remote and onsite devices.
HP Flexworker
HP’s Flexworker Service makes managing remote printers as easy as if they were in the office, so your workforce can do their best when working from home. At-home workers receive the print functionality they need with a select portfolio of cloud-connected HP OfficeJet, LaserJet Pro, and LaserJet Enterprise 400 devices. Logistical support includes printer provisioning, delivery, and automatic supplies replenishment.
Compact, Business-Class Printers
Help employees make the most of their home workspaces with the HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 series. The world’s smallest enterprise printer6 performs on par with the full-size MFP in your office, seamlessly integrating with SharePoint®, Dropbox™ and Google Drive™ to connect paper and digital workflows and helps to conserve energy, paper and workspace as well.
HP Workpath Apps
Streamline and automate document-intensive workflows with HP Workpath Apps*. They help avoid manual, error-prone processes by connecting printing and scanning functions to cloud and SaaS platforms, such as OneDrive, DocuSign, Dropbox and more.
HP Wolf Security
Hybrid work has created more targets for increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks. As more people use cloud services to work outside the office, IT needs help from credentialed cybersecurity specialists who will be vigilant on their behalf. HP Wolf Enterprise Security fiercely defends your network and reputation with layer after layer of hardened security atop the world’s most secure printers7—thwarting and automatically recovering from attacks without burdening busy IT teams.
Print Sustainability Assessment Service
3% resource efficiency improvement11
12% decrease in ecosystem impacts11
genesisONE MPS with HP is the planet’s most comprehensive carbon neutral Managed Print Service9, a certification that covers the lifecycle emissions of everything from HP printers and original HP supplies, to paper because of raw material extraction, manufacturing, transportation, use and end of service.
Reduce The Carbon Impact Of Your Printing
As one of the 100 most sustainable corporations in the world10 and provider of the planet’s most comprehensive certified carbon neutral Managed Print Service9, HP’s innovative solutions and services help our partners build sustainability into the core of their business.
Contact a genesisONE Sales Solution Expert to make print a seamless part of your flexible work world today!
If one thing is certain, it’s that flexible work is here to stay. Giving your workforce a hybrid-ready foundation won’t be easy in the short term. Yet taking the measured steps necessary to ensure your digital transformation efforts lead to employees continuing to work and collaborate will be worthwhile.
Ultimately, it’s not a race because there is no finish line, only an endless beginning. And there’s no better time to begin your transformation to flexible working than today.
Questions To Guide Your Hybrid Journey
Welcome to hybrid work
Empowering a connected workforce
Designing the flexible workplace
Workflow solutions that deliver
Print where it makes sense
Ready to talk about your hybrid workplace print strategy, contact us today to get started!
References:
* Not available on HP LaserJet Enterprise 400 series printers, not out-of-box ready on 500/600 series printers—must purchase and install memory and do an update to enable WP in 500/600 series products shipping today