The Home Office Upgrade: “Good Enough” isn’t the same as “Good” in the Modern Workplace

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: Working from home has been a challenge. There were certainly some issues in 2020 when I transitioned to the home office, such as the absence of said home office. I worked from a dining room table, using an uncomfortable chair, at a workspace without the same space and power outlets I was used to. Gone was my two monitor set up, never ending coffee in the break room, and easy access to my peers.

We all know how the rest of this story goes. Balancing a crying toddler when daycares were closed made working from home insane. The loss of small talk and camaraderie in the office was difficult, even for an introvert like me. It was a “good enough” set up, though certainly not for the long run. But, I made it work because I had a good team on the home front.

However, I am a home office believer now after a recent move. Why is that, after years of loathing working from home and missing the interactions of good teammates in the office, I am all in on working from home? I’ve upgraded from a makeshift “work from where there is space” set up to an honest to goodness office, away from the chaos of a home with a chatty dog and a very active toddler. It’s amazing how much better the workspace is when the dining room table is exactly that instead of a barely acceptable replacement for a desk.

...the right time to embrace these changes, as part of a Digital Transformation strategy, is now. In fact, the need for those transformations has been here for some time.

When I think about how much moving to a real office set up has made me more productive, I can’t imagine I’m the only one. I could have never guessed prior to 2020 how high on the priority list a home office would be for a new home. My “new normal” meant that the definition of “good enough” was very different. I mean, who knew how liberating a wireless headset would be compared to my wired iPhone earbuds tangled over my keyboard during video calls?

Much like my story above, the way work is done is also changing as more and more people never return to an office. How many people that had never used Zoom prior to 2020 now feel like they couldn’t live without it? How many of your work outfits changed from button downs and khakis to jeans and a t-shirt? Maybe you invested heavily in athleisure attire and kept your quarantine beard. Times have changed. The definition of "good enough" for remote work has changed.

More importantly, the idea of “Digital Transformation”, which has only accelerated during COVID, is pushing organizations to think beyond what’s always worked to finding every possible way to be more efficient and to stretch every dollar. As people like me upgraded to real home offices and found ways to stay connected to our workplaces, the right time to embrace these changes, as part of a Digital Transformation strategy, is now. In fact, the need for those transformations has been here for some time.

Gone are the days of walking over to your AP department to ask about the status of an invoice, unless you feel like driving to your colleague’s house or firing off a ton of emails. You can’t walk those same invoices around the office for approvals or reviews. New hires can’t simply wander around the hallways to find the right person to set up their phone or make sure their log in information works. What was once “good enough” as a manual, paper based, analog process simply isn’t as effective anymore.

Even as offices start to open back up, the need to be operationally excellent has never been more profound. You may not be able to control the cost of raw materials or the prevailing labor wages in your marketplace. You can, however, control the wasted expenses of bad processes that slow down invoice payments, contract negotiations, and employee onboarding. By adding tools like ECM and Intelligent Capture into your organization, you can help your teams work smarter, even from home.

Having the right tools in place to manage those workflows and unleash the power of all of the data at your fingertips are areas opportunity for any organization. At Konica Minolta, we can help you examine where Enterprise Content Management can make an impact. Just like I’m never going back to working on the dining room table, now’s the time to move your organization's management of content and processes from “good enough” to genuinely good. We’re here to help.

Joe Russo is an ECM Account Executive with Konica Minolta, a Hyland Software Platinum Elite Partner and a 2020 Kofax Partner of the Year. Joe has previously contributed to the The OnBase Blog and The Hyland Blog. His work has also appeared on Mic.com, The Fraternity Advisor, and Factory of Sadness, a Cleveland sports website operated by Fansided.