Employees across the country have quickly embraced working from home, turning on webcams and picking funky backgrounds for Microsoft Teams and Zoom meetings. This seems to be the new norm. While it may be relatively easy for some, especially those already with laptops, to convert to a remote workforce permanently, many companies and their employees are struggling to transition from office desktops and paper piles.

Often, larger organizations are better prepared to manage crises with dedicated disaster recovery sites and PCs ready to keep running in their time of need. However, no one envisioned the impact that the current pandemic would cause. One critical effect is that despite all the investment in them, disaster recovery sites have been rendered virtually useless. While many younger workers have grown up with cloud-based technology, for tenured companies there is a tendency to rely on legacy systems established behind the firewall. Now is the time to think about your business in a new way and innovate to get through this economic slowdown.

Canon Business Process Services offers a turnkey solution to support your remote workforce. The Canon Intelligent Capture and Workflow platform is cloud enabled and has given many business leaders the ability to seamlessly transition employees to working remotely with minimal impact on daily business activities. The reason is that employees are continuing, via a secure web connection, to access their work queues, forms and documents as normal from home.

Apart from the minimal disruption, there are other long-term advantages to consider when leveraging this kind of approach:

• A more flexible working environment that includes WFH, supported by company leadership, can help better contain expensive real estate fees. Solutions such as Canon’s Workplace Experience Services are designed to help organizations achieve this and many other business benefits.
• Having a cloud-based system can also allow remote resources to securely connect and assist in processing backlogs that may have occurred—due to the current pandemic or any major disruption—when the business starts to open back up.
• With schools and child care facilities closed, the ability for parents to work from home has enabled them to better cope with work/life challenges.
• Since the significant reduction of business travel, many companies may have seen a corresponding increase in employee productivity.

We have seen some companies ease into working remotely while others have struggled, even scrambled, to keep critical business processes running. Enterprises are now turning their attention to the future, asking such questions as: How long will this go on? What will the “new norm” look like for our business? When will we go back to chats during coffee and water cooler breaks, where so many of us share personal stories and ponder critical business decisions? As regions of the country start to open up again, we can all expect a reset to a normal that is unlike anything we have experienced to date. As business leaders we need to challenge ourselves, find new creative ways to service our clients and think differently to survive and thrive.