According to research from Brother, UK firms are investing in digital infrastructure to boost their productivity in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The findings, taken from interviews with 500 IT decision-makers, show that more than eight in ten companies have ramped-up efforts to boost productivity since March, with more than half saying it is now vital to deliver cost savings (59%) and higher profits (54%) for their businesses.
Firms are ramping-up digital investment to tackle their productivity challenges, with IT budgets set to rise by an average of 13% over the next 12 months. Respondents said that legacy working practices such as excessive meetings (35%) and poor IT infrastructure (33%) are the biggest barriers businesses face.
Modern hardware, such as printers and tablets, (98%), collaboration software, such as project management platforms and video conferencing, (98%), and remote working tools, such as cloud-based technologies, (96%), top IT decision-makers’ lists for technology that will deliver the greatest productivity gains.
The research analysed the potential time savings and value to employers when a number of typically manual IT practices were replaced with more efficient alternatives. For example, scanning straight to a secure network location, rather than a PC and then saving the file, to streamline and secure document management.Brother says that an average business of 250 employees could stand to save nearly 52,000 hours of workers’ time a year – worth an estimated £776,000 – just by implementing simple, cost-effective updates across their IT operations.
