New research from Canon Europe shows there is a disconnect between IT managers’ and end-users’ technology experiences when it comes to hybrid working. 78% of IT decision makers (ITDMs) believe their company provides the right technology to enable people to work from home, but one in five end-users are still having to provide their own equipment and are struggling to get remote IT support.
Equipping new workspaces has been a major challenge for IT teams. Accessibility, collaboration and integration are among the biggest pain points when transitioning to a hybrid model, with 71% of ITDMs claiming that solutions to support hybrid practices are incompatible with their legacy infrastructure.
Employees’ top issues with hybrid working concern business processes. Two in five are facing difficulties with approval processes, signing documents digitally and escalating admin, while 41% are struggling to access physical or digital documents when working out of the office. As a result, 37% of respondents report having to visit the office to print, pick up, or sign documents in person.
The research revealed that most regular help desk calls from remote workers are about issues accessing files remotely (43%) and having trouble sharing and collaborating with others (36%). On top of these software demands, IT teams are also experiencing high demand for remote hardware assistance, with over half (56%) receiving requests for printer/ scanner support in the home and 33% for personal devices.
Responding to these issues, sourcing, and implementing the right technology for this new environment is proving to be difficult for IT teams. Just over three quarters (76%) of IT teams say they have found sourcing technologies from multiple vendors challenging. In the event of an issue, 71% must contact multiple vendors for a solution, which means problems can take significantly longer to resolve in a hybrid setting.
With this in mind, the appeal of a single vendor solution for print and document management is significant for companies embracing hybrid working. The majority of ITDMs (81%) agree their organisation would benefit from technologies provided by a single vendor that are compatible with each other and open to integration.