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Your partner for success: the journey to hybrid working
Your partner for success: the journey to hybrid working by Marc Bory
Business never stops changing, but it is safe to say that the past year has been far from ‘business as usual’. The pandemic has not only had a significant impact on the worldwide economy, but it has obliged companies to reconsider how and where their employees should work. Many have adapted their development strategy to support hybrid working – which is rapidly coming to be considered the “new normal”.
Companies embracing this new way of working aim to achieve the best of both worlds by allowing their employees to work flexibly between a number of locations, from home to central office, to co-working spaces. The pandemic helped to showcase some of the advantages of remote work including independence, undisturbed concentration time and a reduced commute. This prompted a lot of media attention about “the end of the office as we know it.” But, the reality is that the need for a shared location hasn’t disappeared – instead, its role is being refined. Businesses still need a place to socialise, form genuine relationships with co-workers and to facilitate spontaneous, creative teamwork and innovation. Business leaders just need to take the opportunity to revitalise their office space to better support these kinds of activities.
The concept of hybrid working is not new, but the pandemic accelerated the pace of these changes. The crisis gave organisations the opportunity to throw out the rule book and consider changes that have maybe been identified already but were not on the priority action list.
Top quotes from Keypoint Intelligence on Canon’s latest awards
Meeting evolving needs
At Canon, we know that as our customers’ workspaces evolve, that so too will their requirements. So, we’re constantly innovating to make sure we can anticipate what they’ll need to achieve their goals. We’re proud of what we’re bringing to market, so it’s great to see that we’re being recognised for matching the market needs, by independent analyst firms like Keypoint Intelligence. We were recently awarded two accolades from Keypoint Intelligence, for our A4 portfolio (Line of the Year Award) and for our cloud-based solution, uniFLOW Online (Outstanding Cloud Output Management Solution).
Both A4 and uniFLOW Online are key elements of our strategy to support our customers with hybrid working. As Keypoint Intelligence says itself of our A4 portfolio , it is about supporting tomorrow’s working habits: “There are plenty of home office and small workgroup offerings included in this winning line-up – categories that have become increasingly important in the rapidly changing workplace.”
Keeping teams connected
It’s not just about strengthening our hardware offering, it’s also about solutions which act as a glue to keep teams connected. For employees, uniFLOW Online essentially provides them the tools to work effectively in a hybrid set up. The technology allows our customers to easily connect to cloud-storage destinations like Dropbox and OneDrive, or to cloud-based business applications. This means that they can easily digitise, process, store, and share documents with colleagues through the cloud, no matter where the employee is working that day.
Meanwhile, as uniFLOW is compatible with mobile, users can also send documents to print, straight from their phone if they are on the move. Features like ‘My Print Anywhere’ then lets users securely access and release print jobs from any Canon device connected across the business - perfect for employees who spend their time between different working environments. As well as enabling hybrid working, uniFLOW Online provides solutions to the challenges that it generates for the IT team, giving them better control over costs, intelligent auditing, budgeting, and reporting.
The bigger picture
We, at Canon appreciate that creating effective hybrid workspaces means more than individual devices, software or services; customers need an ecosystem of technologies and services that help them to find solutions to their evolving requirements. That’s why we work closely with our customers to analyse and understand these trends, allowing us to constantly innovate and develop the best solutions.
Through our offering, Canon’s Digital Transformation Services, we’ve developed a bespoke and scalable approach to drive forward digital transformation, which combines cloud-enabled products, software, and services. Our ability to integrate all these market leading components, make our offering unique, and allow us to provide end-to-end document management solutions that help customers adapt successfully and enable secure, sustainable, collaborative, and productive working across their future workspaces.
At Canon we are embracing the journey to hybrid working. To find out more about our strategy to support you, click here.
Or read more about our other recent recognition at the Document Manager Awards, click here.
