Did you know …….?
Workers are adapting to the hybrid office model.
A lot of changes have happened in one year, and one of them is the flourishing of remote and work-from-home workforces. Prior to 2020, at least 5% of full-time employees with office jobs worked from home on a regular basis. That figure shot up to more than 80% during the pandemic and is expected to settle into the 20%-30% range as the vaccinated population increases and companies bring their employees back into the office. By some estimates, 70% of the workforce will be telecommuting at least five to eight days per month by 2025.
It is necessary to accept that the office environment will not return to the pre-2020 “normal” mode. The hybrid office is here to stay. Some studies reveal that nearly 60% of workers would not return to a job that did not offer the ability to work from home. In addition, there are other elements that will add to this trend. As the return to normality facilitated by the vaccination of the population progresses, the resulting traffic jams will return to the streets and highways of the big cities. At the same time, there is an increase in traffic restrictions for reasons of environmental sustainability, which has been more marked in Europe, but has been strongly observed by the Biden administration in the United States. There are therefore plenty of arguments for optimizing work by combining on-site and teleworking.
The hybrid workplace encompasses traditional corporate buildings and campuses. It now also encompasses employees’ homes and other remote locations. In fact, some traditional European vacation spots, such as the Canary Islands (Spain), are being touted as ideal locations for teleworkers. Teleworking generates new business opportunities across broad sectors of the economy.
This hybrid work model presents an interesting challenge for resource allocation and reallocation. The teleworker of the coming years requires the necessary resources to be available regardless of the location from which he or she performs his or her work. Corporate and SMB customers have relied on resellers for office-based solutions and are now looking to those same resellers to help them support their employees wherever they work from. In a recent Market Trends Survey webinar, 76% of resellers reported that, over the past year, customers have asked them for printer and copier packages for home-based employees.
Some resellers have addressed this issue, with solutions for managing work-at-home printing equipment that address the needs of their corporate customers’ remote employees (consumables replenishment) and, over time, no doubt more independent resellers will actively market their hybrid office solutions just as they have done with vertical market solutions.
Service models will need to be adapted to provide teleworking solutions, in places that have not traditionally been the reseller space.
(Source: The Imaging Channel, Nubeprint)