We don’t know exactly what the ‘workplace of the future’ will look like. However, the current state of modern technology can give us a good general idea. It’s hardly surprising that more and more businesses are tearing down their traditional office walls in favor of open offices, teleworking and cloud platforms. Is your SME embracing the future?
The new way of working, flexible working, maintaining work-life balance: these themes continue to make headlines. Jobseekers, employers and employees are giving more thought than ever how they can work smarter, more flexibly and more efficiently. How can your SME foster a workplace that supports these goals?
Facilitate mobile working
Work shouldn’t be a place you’re obligated to go to. You should be able to work wherever and whenever you want
This quote from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says it all. Facilitating mobile work offers advantages for employers as well as employees.
The advantages for employees:
- You can work when and wherever you want: at the office, at home, at your customer’s place of business, at a project site, in a coffee shop or in an airport lounge, for example
- More interaction: you will see questions from colleagues or customers come in much sooner
- Smarter collaboration: it’s easier to share and edit documents (see below)
- Higher productivity: employees preferring to work at home uninterruptedly will only need to visit the office for meetings with their teams or customers
- Time gains: no need to commute day in and day out
The advantages for employers:
- More space: more people working mobile means having to make less space available
- More job applicants: many job applicants consider a flexible (read: mobile) workplace an attractive extralegal benefit
- Greater reach: if physical presence in the office is no longer a must, you can offer jobs to talented individuals from all corners of the globe
Opt for the convenience of the cloud
An increasing number of businesses are opting for the convenience of a cloud environment for practical, security-related and financial reasons. In concrete terms, this means that your familiar IT environment will migrate to its own, secure section of an external data center.
All you need is an internet connection to access your IT environment, from anywhere and at any time. In a nutshell: the cloud is synonymous with the mobile office.
A cloud package bundles diverse of solutions and offers the following advantages:
- More efficient collaboration: a cloud package contains familiar applications for processing text and images, email clients, calendars, planning and chat applications
- Easy to manage: you can add users, applications and systems to your cloud environment as you see fit. A single dashboard displays an overview of the status of your hardware. That way, you can rest assured that you have the most recent updates and intelligent antivirus software
- Safety first: in addition to conventional spam filters and antivirus software, a cloud solution also offers intelligent security that guards against cyber attacks and suspicious online behavior
- Convenience: say goodbye to dozens of logins and passwords. You will need only one login and password combo from now on
- Flexible storage capacity: you can ask your cloud provider to adapt your storage capacity entirely to your needs. Thanks to automatic synchronization, you can keep your data at your fingertips 24/7, wherever you are – even without an internet connection
Want to make your workplace future-proof?
Have a look at our cloud solutions for SMEs here. Do you have questions or need more information? Get in touch with our experts.
