During periods of forced homeworking, the business world learned some incredibly valuable lessons at an incredibly fast rate. The importance of business resilience became clearer than ever before, and we saw the true potential of flexibility for enhanced productivity and efficiency. 

But most of all, we fortified our understanding that the most important asset in any business is its people. As your organisation takes stock of these learnings and transitions to a hybrid working model, mental health and wellbeing need to be at the forefront of plans and policymaking. 

So, let’s take a look at some of the things you should be considering. 

Define the tools and technology your people need

A recent study by Ricoh Europe, surveying 500 UK office workers, revealed that people felt inadequate technology and a lack of collaborative working environments were holding back the realisation of more accommodating and agile ways of working inside their organisations.

Technology is an important element of making hybrid working possible and the key to giving employees the best digital experience to support their wellbeing and development. Without investing in technology to aid communication and collaboration, your people cannot truly excel in a hybrid working environment and achieve fulfilment through work.

Communicate regularly and openly

Nobody likes to be left in the dark, especially if they’re feeling anxious or uncertain. By being transparent and honest with the direction of your hybrid working plans – you will maintain a sense of togetherness, making sure your people feel part of the big picture. Your people should be part of the decision making process when it comes to creating a hybrid working policy. 

It’s also the role of managers to have regular one-to-one conversations with their teams when hybrid working is in place to avoid isolation and loneliness. And not only to talk about work but also to enjoy each other’s company as if they were hanging out at the office coffee machine. 

When teams are distributed across the office and remote locations, reach out to your colleagues before the emotional fatigue of remote working sets in. Put the right support in place before anyone even needs it. 

Signpost mental health and wellbeing platforms 

Recent statistics from Gartner’s global 2021 EVP Benchmarking Survey highlight that although 87% of employees have access to mental and emotional wellbeing platforms, only 23% of employees use them. When you have distributed teams working under a hybrid model, it is the responsibility of management to ensure your people know they have platforms and tools that can help them prioritise how they’re feeling and the challenges they’re facing.

You also need to provide opportunities for your people to reach out to others in the business that may be able to help them maintain their wellbeing or manage mental health concerns. At Ricoh, we have Wellbeing Champions who help everyone across the business thrive physically, mentally, financially and socially. Making sure communication lines are open and accessible is important. 

Finding the right balance

One of the biggest challenges for hybrid workers is finding the right work-life balance. A recent study by Gartner found that employees in the hybrid world are 1.27 times more likely to struggle to disconnect from work than employees in the on-site world. 

If you have decided to adopt a policy of radical flexibility and hybrid working, you need to reassure your people that managing your own time is ok. In fact, you should positively encourage them to disengage from their home desk every once in a while and get active. 

Set objectives to work towards

Targets and objectives play a major role in motivation. In the hybrid world, it’s important that these are clear and visible to all, regardless of where employees are working that day. It’s all about giving your employees focus and a sense of control even when their manager might not be there to provide guidance. 

Learn from the experts 

When it comes to mental health and wellbeing, it is important to lean on advice and guidance from the experts. Ricoh has signed the Mental Health at Work Commitment which helps us to ensure we are carrying out all the necessary actions to drive an open culture around mental health and wellbeing. 

Part of our commitment is giving our leaders the training to have open, empathetic and knowledgeable conversations about mental health. The other side of it is giving our people the tools to take control of their wellbeing, like our MyEva platform that enables employees to take control of their finances and pensions. We also have an Employee Assistance Programme, where employees can bring problems, big or small and work through them with an external sounding board and adviser. 

How can you devise a hybrid working strategy that empowers people? 

Any hybrid working approach should constantly monitor and support your people. It’s about being aware of mental health and wellbeing at work through open communication and being proactive when you identify problems and solutions.

You can discover how other organisations have approached these challenges by reading our Leading Change at Work report, researched and written in partnership with UK business leaders.  You can also read more about the benefits of hybrid working from our Head of IT and Communications Services here.

The post How to support mental health and wellbeing in the hybrid workplace appeared first on Insights - Empowering Digital Workplaces.

Your IT infrastructure is the foundation of your business, covering your datacentres, communication networks, IT security and applications. It holds your digital capabilities, your ability to innovate and your overall business strategy. 

The value of getting it right is simple: if your infrastructure cannot cope with high volumes of customers or regularly harms the productivity of your people, you could be losing money. It also has the potential to damage business growth and your competitive edge. 

Cloud-first might be the trend you’ve heard of, but it might not be the best route for your business. Cost, security, and compliance will impact where you can store your data. In fact, the IDC forecasts that by the end of 2022, over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs¹. 

With the help of a strategic partner, you need to examine every aspect of your infrastructure and ascertain the best approach on a case by case basis. 

Here are 4 key considerations for business leaders who want to modernise their IT infrastructure. By keeping these in mind, you can create an infrastructure strategy that meets your current needs and accommodates business growth and transformation well into the future. 

1. Engage your key stakeholders

IT infrastructure is not just a problem for IT to solve. It is a challenge for your entire organisation. Most cloud initiatives fail due to poor communication and misunderstood goals; it is important to have a clear strategy with complete alignment up, down and across your entire organisation. 

Getting the right people in the room to begin the conversation will ensure any outcome meets the 360° needs of the business. The common stakeholders will be the people in your business who want to run processes better, faster and more efficiently. And the decision-makers with the budgeting and buying power. 

2. Determine business drivers

Your key drivers will be unique to your organisation. They could be competition and market challenges, shifting customer dynamics or business growth plans. While it’s important to understand how you will use new technology today, it is critical to take the future into account and build a plan that anticipates growth or new business models. 

We’re seeing many organisations who want to rethink their infrastructure to accelerate hybrid working and make operational process improvements. More internal drivers could be a lack of cost control and data visibility or concerns over data privacy. 

Once you have prioritised your list of drivers, you need to map them against your global business objectives to make sure you’re aligned with your ambitions. Input at this stage from a strategic partner will give you the insights to assist your decision making.

3. Assess current system

To understand what you need to fix, you need to understand what’s potentially broken. Collecting end-user accounts is important, listen out for users who are experiencing downtime and systems running badly or slowly. Gather feedback on how easy it is for your people to remote work, access important files or carry out critical workflows.

Explore how stakeholders would like to run processes more efficiently, or make better use of data through reporting and forecasting. These conversations will reveal where your system and service are lacking. Talk to your customers and analyse sentiment. It is important to note if you’re losing sales due to malfunctioning user features or fractured communication. A strategic partner can help with this important feedback process. 

Your IT leader should also be able to share any data on cyber breaches and data loss, that will demonstrate where urgent attention is needed. Whether breaches happen due to misconfiguration, poor setup, end-users adding non-approved apps or sharing data with third parties, having infrastructure that can alert and restrict delivers resilience, peace of mind and security.

4. Define what success would look like

Defining how you will measure success can help you focus your efforts and ensure KPIs are integral to your strategy. KPIs shouldn’t be an afterthought once a project has been completed. Aim to measure KPIs in line with your business objectives like sales growth, revenue and productivity. Numbers like website visits and projects completed can be vanity metrics.

Ricoh Cloud & Infrastructure Services 

As a strategic Cloud & Infrastructure partner, Ricoh can work with you to help you define the right approach between on-premises, private cloud and public cloud. We can also help you identify any networking implications that need to be considered. We work closely with your team to understand your business and IT strategy, your existing infrastructure and your operational goals. 

Working end-to-end, we discover, implement, manage and advance your entire IT infrastructure, enabling a global experience with local delivery. Meaning you can access extensive technical expertise without having to hire additional internal resources, providing total cover to meet your needs today and in the future. Discover more about our solutions.

If you’re serious about growth and digital transformation speak to one of our experts today about modernising your infrastructure. Contact our team to find out more.

1. https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/top-10-hybrid-cloud-trends-in-2021

The post How to build a modern IT infrastructure strategy appeared first on Insights - Empowering Digital Workplaces.

For years, people have feared the looming threat of automation, arguing it is likely to replace jobs rather than create them. But the tide is turning. Technology like AI has been normalised; nowadays, we all rely on digital devices inside and outside of work. Even more so with the arrival of hybrid working. 

The future of work is about challenging outdated practices. Your people don’t want to be mired in repetitive processes anymore, they are digital natives aware of the positive impact technology can bring.  

So, if you haven’t looked into how automation could enhance your critical operations, improve employee engagement and accelerate business growth, now is the time. In this article, I’ll share how you can start that journey in right way, and optimise the value of process automation. 

What is business process automation? 

Business process automation uses software to automate multi-step business transactions like accounts payable or employee onboarding. We call it automation because the software is programmed to mimic repetitive steps humans take and intelligently process data from multiple digital and paper-based sources.

Which processes are ideal for business process automation? 

Labour intensive document management tasks provide the perfect environment for automation. It doesn’t matter what the process is called or how sector specific you think it is, a process that will benefit from automation has a few familiar hallmarks. 

Watch out for the processes that typically involve multiple email threads, documents and approvals. Where even a minor human error has the potential to cause a cascade of inefficiency, bottlenecks, and missed deadlines. The tasks which must be done correctly, every time, or you risk losing a customer, damaging your reputation, infringing compliance laws or obscuring your ability to forecast finances effectively. 

Automation transforms outcomes for processes that rely on reams of paper-based documents and large volumes of data that has to be captured, collated and called upon frequently by your team. Maybe you’re always hearing complaints from staff about the antiquity and speed of your current system – these are the processes that should be identified, dissected and automated using specialist software. They hold the key to unlocking hidden value. 

The benefits of business process automation 

60% of employees spend more time searching for files than replying to emails²

By putting automation in place, you empower your people to organise, secure, capture, digitise, tag and approve documents with ease, limiting human error, saving time and reducing cost. Providing a more intuitive and straightforward experience, can also help you retain and nurture high-value employees who prioritise efficient working methods. 

Enhance accuracy and reporting facilities 

For business leaders, automating critical processes enhances decision-making capability by providing accuracy, faster responses and real-time reporting. Putting your business in a more agile position and giving you the resilience and visibility to make changes if necessary. Having the ability to run critical operations quicker and with more control, also makes it easier to grow your business. And if you’re switching from paper to digital in multiple areas, you stand to improve your sustainability numbers too. 

53% of employees experience delays waiting for information to be updated across multiple systems from multiple departments³

By using automation software, you will also be able to offer immediate and self-service access to the information your customers need. Likewise, your people can access intelligence on their customers quicker and easier through cloud storage, enabling them to provide tailored customer service. 

How to approach automation? 

Once you have identified which processes are suitable for automation, you need to have the right mindset to move forward. There are a few fundamental rules of automation to remember:

• You can’t automate until you have mapped how your process works and where the data is captured. If the process doesn’t work or is incomplete, your automation won’t work. 
• Process automation isn’t about one piece of technology. There’s no single technology that delivers universal benefits, and it takes a combination of solutions and a layered strategy to deliver results. 
• You don’t need to transform entire processes from day one. In many cases, automating one essential step can unlock immense value. 

Choose Ricoh for Business Process Management 

Bringing a specialist partner on board to fast-track business process automation will ensure you implement solutions that truly solve the challenges you and your workforce face. With an objective vantage point, we start by getting to know the needs of your business, your processes and your people. Then, by working closely with your teams, we design digital workflows that apply process automation – making your business more intelligent, your employees more satisfied, and your customers happier. 

Discover more about our solutions. We can help you with bespoke process automation services and single software applications like DocuWare, which can automate all document management from accounts payable and order fulfilment to inbound mail. 

Ricoh’s experience in traditional working practices positions us well to bridge the gap between the old world and the new world. Our leading principle of powering fulfilment through work also means our people are passionate about enhancing workplace experiences. Contact our team to find out more.

1. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/news/articles/most-workers-feel-automation-has-made-work-life-better#gref

2. https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/business-strategy/business-automation-statistics.shtml

3. https://westx.ca/transform-your-business-into-a-digital-workplace/

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