It’s probably not surprising to hear that remote workplaces are working. Although a day in the office now includes pets as coworkers and business casual means a robe with slippers, working from home is a viable and efficient option for many companies these days.
Upwork reports over 1 in 3 U.S. employees will be working in a remote environment for the long run. To put this into perspective, the same reporting stated that prior to the pandemic, 78% of Americans were working in-person full-time. With this drastic and unforeseen change, IT workers are faced with finding printing solutions for remote employees.
That leaves IT admins scrambling to find advanced print solutions to improve remote and hybrid work environments.
Centralized Print Management for Remote Workers
With employees working from all over the globe, how are print problems and requests managed you ask? Don’t worry, it doesn’t involve IT making house calls. The answer is centralized print management. From a single pane of glass, IT admins can manage a company’s print environment system-wide.
Gone are the days of IT having to manually fix every print-related issue in person on each individual machine. Even better, company-wide updates can be implemented simultaneously with centralized print management as well.
Off-Network Printing for Hybrid Offices
Remote work doesn’t solely happen from a home office. Sometimes it’s from a cafe, on an airplane, at a stoplight, or even in someone else’s office. In our new normal, employees have the freedom to work on the go and move around as needed.
Off-network printing offers employees the flexibility of sending print jobs to printers within their workplace’s network from anywhere while maintaining a secure connection. This also goes for employees living and working out-of-state from a company’s hub.
Now that we’ve established how employees can print from anywhere, it’s time to address which devices can be utilized for off-network printing services. The answer is…ANY! Yes, any laptop and desktop, and even tablets or smartphones with the right applications, are compatible with off-network printing services.
Secure and Touchless Printing for All Employees
And what good would off-network printing solutions be without secure retrieval processes as well. Secure release and touchless printing are other necessary components of a remote work environment. In this way, you can ensure that only the intended recipient is able to retrieve the documents when needed.
If sensitive documents, medical records, or confidential print jobs are being sent, an employee simply chooses the secure release printing option. Then the content can only be retrieved by swiping an I.D. badge or entering a user ID/PIN at the printer console. This way, you can print from home or on the go, but control when or who can retrieve the print job.
Touchless retrieval is another helpful option in which an employee can scan a QR code on the printer to select the print job they want to release. This option reduces the use of shared surfaces while maintaining a secure print environment.
With so much else changing right now, print management doesn’t have to be something your team is worried about. Serverless print solutions can improve and maintain a thriving remote work environment for any business while saving you money and offering more advanced features.