The latest UK guidelines to “Work from home if possible” will put even more pressure on businesses to add functionality for remote working.
It comes just as we moved from the react phase of the pandemic to the recovery phase with people returning to their offices and businesses starting to work towards normal operations. Now once again, we must consider what another potential six months of remote working will mean.
The trend of remote working is changing. According to a recent YouGov survey, 45% of workers expect to work more flexibly after lockdown is lifted, with a minimum of 33% expecting to work from home at least three days each week.
This data seems to be validated by our analytics here at Xenith - office printing is down by over 75% as of mid-September, and enquiries about our remote working solutions are up by 327%.
It seems that office MFDs and printers are collecting dust and not adding value right now, and many high-volume devices might no longer be an integral part of the office environment - simply because there is an appetite to work more remotely and digitally than ever before.
The location shift from office to more remote working was already changing but has been accelerated due to the pandemic. For example, Xenith had already started the transition towards providing Intelligent Workplace Services, focused on helping transform the way you work, and facilitating a work from any location approach, but we've now redefined our services further to meet the new demand.
However, this sudden paradigm shift in working habits comes with its issues. Our research has found:
- Much of the IT spend has been tied up in contracts that are no longer needed to the extent they previously were - like office printing.
- Cybercrime has increased by 92%, much of it due to unsecured home Wi-Fi and endpoints.
- There is a huge squeeze on capital expenditure due to the current economic climate, limiting your ability to onboard new technology for remote working.
- There’s uncertainty about the future - will the technology you need today, be the same as what you need six to twelve months from today? What about 2 years down the line?
Here at Xenith, as a managed service provider of print, computing devices, remote working and automation technologies, we have a few ideas on how you can transfer your current expenditure from now redundant office equipment contracts to the need of the hour.
Let us start with printing. If your printing has, like many of our clients, dropped by 75% (and probably more), your print devices are not currently adding value. Even if printing in your office was prevalent, there is a strong chance it will never go back to pre-Covid levels.
Realistically, this means in the short-medium term, you might have a lot of office based MFDs not being used but still costing you money. Long term, these needs are likely to reduce as we will all have to find alternate ways to get work done. So how can we help change that spend into services that you do need right now?
Did you know one of your office MFDs could be costing the same as 10-15 secure business laptops?
Laptops - the essential requirement for portability and flexibility, allowing employees to work from any location without disruption. But the bigger positive is that laptops ensure an extra element of business continuity.
Even if your plan is for the whole workforce to come back to the office, what happens if the country goes back into lockdown forcing people to work from home? (It's beginning to look more and more likely) Or post pandemic, what happens if the office has to be evacuated for some reason? With a laptop, employees can just pick it up, put it in their bag and be on their way!
Additionally, with services like Xenith’s HP Device-as-a-Service, you get the right devices at the right time, fully managed! Plus, you no longer have to worry about unsecured home networks as the laptops provided come with a range of proactive security measures including Ai powered real-time threat detection, self-healing BIOS and hardware-enforced secure browsing that isolates web content in a virtual machine.
The service offers a comprehensive computing solution that includes devices and accessories that are right for the job paired with support, predictive analytics and partnering with us to provide proactive management services.
These proactive measures make it very easy for the IT team to monitor and resolve any potential issues proactively rather than reactively. Remote working means that gone are the days when your device had a problem you would just take it into the local office or downstairs to the IT team so they could resolve it. Especially with staff now often working far from the office they used to attend. See our article, featured in the Sunday Times, explaining how we can help.
Xenith’s HP DaaS is more than a proactive management solution for your devices, but also allows you to flexibly finance the laptops and accessories to provide the perfect setup for your remote workers. In most cases, that means we can transfer the financed spend you have on your print/MFD fleet to DaaS, so you don’t have to outlay more capital to get the right equipment to your remote workers. Turn dust-collecting office devices into secure, productive, and proactively managed remote worker setups.
If this sounds like something you’re interested in, we want to support you by helping you find a way to swap out un-needed equipment with devices and automation that you can use right now to keep the team productive and secure.
Book in a chat with our Sales team to brainstorm ways to transfer unutilised spend. Xenith will provide two free days of consulting with one of our business analysts to calculate the ROI. We will also download the proactive management tools so our DaaS specialists can validate the financial, security and time benefits of the solution to build a solid business case. Even if you then never use our services, you will get a lot of ideas on what is possible given your current situation.
As a managed service provider of print, computing devices, remote working solutions and automation technology, we are uniquely positioned to be able to help you “Transform the Way You Work” so it adds value to the business, your clients and your employees regardless of the location where work is done. Get your organisation ready for the future.