Many of us are looking forward to resuming our normal routines as the pandemic subsides. While most of our personal day-to-day activities may return to normal soon, it seems increasingly less likely that our work routines ever will. And for those who can adapt, that’s going to be a good thing.
Many companies have either begun or expedited their digital transformation journeys due to COVID-19. These organizations are now not only more prepared for any disaster that comes their way, but also more efficient than ever before. If you want to ensure that your business can withstand the test of time, you need to prepare for work life post-COVID-19 as well.
Here are just a few of the ways in which “resuming” our old lives will mean something a little different going forward:
1. Connectivity
Zoom parties with old high school friends and FaceTime calls with your great aunt – albeit a comedy of errors – have been mostly happy discoveries of our socially-distanced, ever-connected world.
It’s not just our social lives that benefit from this connection. For many companies, this connectivity has become the foundation of remote work. Almost overnight, corporate America faced the challenge of shifting to a fully remote business structure. And, for the most part, rose to the challenge.
With a digitally optimized workforce, many companies may never return to the brick-and-mortar system of the past. Office rent is often a business’s second greatest expense after payroll. But with technology that makes it easy to communicate and collaborate from wherever you are, physical office locations are no longer necessary.
2. The Cloud
During these months of at-home working, many businesses discovered just how central a cloud platform is to the success of their business.
With platforms like MetaStor, employees can quickly search, retrieve, route, and manage documents from anywhere, on any device. Your company can get up and running in no time on a customizable platform that provides both security and collaboration. Some key features include:
- Rapid Deployment: no installation required
- Ease of Use: an intuitive interface that requires little training
- Simple Subscription Model: unlimited users and invoiced for actual storage usage
- Disaster Recovery: continuity plans, server and location redundancy, and real-time replication
- Secure User Privileges: multiple levels of security and document-level security
- Mobile Optimization: includes MetaMobil™ for iOS and Android
If you want to prepare for the post-COVID-19 workplace, consider adopting a cloud-based solution.
3. Virtual Mailrooms
Studies have shown that COVID-19 can live on surfaces for up to three days. Managed mailroom services remove the need for physical contact with mail, decreasing your team’s risk of getting sick. Digital mailroom services also eliminate the risks of your mail getting lost or destroyed.
With a mailroom partner, companies can reroute their mail to be sorted, opened, scanned, and uploaded into the cloud. The documents are then disseminated to their recipients who can further index and organize as needed.
Not only will a virtual mailroom expedite sorting, delivery, and collaboration, it can help keep you and your documents safe in the post COVID-19 workplace too.
4. Contactless Collaboration
While aspects of our daily routines may return to normal, social distancing will likely be around for a while. Handshakes and close-quarters workspaces are now antiquated concepts and are predicted to remain so. After all, safety and hygiene will be a top concern in the coming months, and possibly years.
The small act of passing around a physical document can pose a threat to your employees. Fortunately, you can become a paper-free work environment and still transfer important pieces of information with document capture and management software. A variety of document capture programs, including OpenText Intelligent Capture and Kofax Capture, provide safety, security and cost-effective collaboration.
MetaSource can help you find the right document management program for your business, no matter the size and industry.
5. Workflow Automation & RPA
While robotic process automation (RPA) is often misunderstood, this powerful tool has assisted many companies in expediting mundane and repetitive tasks during the pandemic. As a key part of automating your workflow, RPA can:
- Replace repetitive, rules-based tasks
- Act as a software robot
- Automate manual, outdated business processes
- Act on clearly defined processes
Digital transformation may sound intimidating, but with workflow automation and RPA technologies, you can experience the freedom of remote productivity and optimize your post COVID-19 workplace.
Finding – and Capitalizing On – the Advantages
Whether it’s a pandemic or any other natural disaster, businesses need to be prepared for situations that put a barrier between work and workplaces. Before the pandemic, roughly a fifth of the population worked remotely full-time. That number has drastically increased over the past few months, and a large portion of these will likely never return to the pre-COVID workstyles they left.
From financial savings to safer work environments, there are endless benefits to the tools that allow remote work patterns. To learn more about the right solutions for your move forward, give us a call or click on the link below.