The COVID-19 “new normal” is comprised of many sub-realities, with a majority of employees now working from home. While the idea of working remotely was once seen in an almost idyllic light — there is now among many office workers a feeling that the arrangement is in fact not a dream come true. For employers, this means a new generation of problems, all of which call for decisive action.
Action Required
According to a new survey released by software company ServiceNow, Canadian workers want to (and believe they will need to) work from home for an extended period of time. Unfortunately, this group is not overly satisfied with the current arrangement. There are a number of issues they feel employers must solve, such as:
- One in four workers who before COVID-19 had never worked from home still do not feel well-equipped to work-from-home, months into the pandemic.
- One in three workers feel they are less productive now, working from home, than they were before the pandemic, working from the office.
- Thirty per cent of workers think their employers were not adequately prepared for the rapid transition to remote work when the pandemic hit in March.
The eternal optimist might say “one in four” or “one in three” or “30 per cent” are a minority and therefore do not pose significant problems. However, business leaders aiming for excellence as opposed to “passable” or “good enough” want to act swiftly to resolve these core problems around employee enablement, productivity, and satisfaction.
Fujitsu Is Closing this Gap
Fujitsu’s line of document scanners enables paper to become more valuable, digitizing the process for increased employee efficiency at home.
“What we have is not outright panic, but a gap between how employees have been set up to work remotely and how well they were set up pre-pandemic,” says Fujitsu’s Senior Marketing Manager, Steve Oblin. “Working-from-home will be here for the long-term. Employers interested in business continuity with the highest chance of success must dedicate sufficient time and resources to the work-from-home experience they are offering staff.”
“If processes and systems are not running at an optimal level, employee enablement and productivity will be impacted”, Oblin says. “If the employer does not address these issues, another business leader will, and that basically amounts to a surrender of a company’s competitive advantage.”
Employers have many tools at their disposal to enhance their workers’ remote working experience. Some of the more obvious ones include headsets, chat and conferencing software, and ergonomic furniture and monitors. Sometimes overlooked, however, are document scanners such as Fujitsu’s ScanSnap iX1500.
Fujitsu Empowers & Equips “New Normal” Employees for Success
The iX1500, the flagship model of Fujitsu’s respected ScanSnap series, offers remote workers a greater sense that whatever was possible in the office is just as possible at home. Among the features of this popular device include:
- Efficient scanning – Auto detection of page size, colour, blank pages, and page orientation
- Wide document acceptance – Scanning anything from plastic cards and small receipts up to Letter or Legal size documents, as well as thicker documents such as small booklets
- Scanning to Windows, Mac, iOS and Android
- Scanning to cloud services such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive
- Speedy processing – 30 double-sided pages scanned per minute, a 50-sheet Automatic Document Feeder (ADF) and optical character recognition (OCR) means less time spent waiting for tasks to complete
“For how powerful it is, the iX1500’s colour interface is remarkably easy to use, which is what you want for your remote workers,” says Oblin. This simplicity comes with the results to back it all up, with an award-winning design, 20+ languages supported and over 5 million scanners sold.
IT departments do not want to get bogged down servicing and troubleshooting so they can keep their focus on innovation. They are finding the iX1500 to be the tool of the future, with much less time spent during installation from the intuitive software and hardware integration.
Learn more about how you can integrate Fujitsu’s ScanSnap work-from-home office solution.
