Small Office Home Office: How to Make it Work

The phrase “Small Office Home Office”, otherwise known as SOHO, is a known phrase in the industry, but it gained even more use when the COVID pandemic hit, and physical offices closed, sending employees to work remotely from home.  

Quickly, people realized that a temporary space to work from home, such as working at the kitchen table; on the couch; on the bed; or even on the floor of a closet to try and hinder the background noise of kids who were also at home wasn’t going to cut it for more than a few weeks.

This resulted in the realization that temporary remote office spots weren’t equipped to successfully work from home, especially if you worked at a corporate office with high-speed wired networks and state-of-the-art commercial printers and scanners for printing and document management. The quest for a longer-term home office solution created a backlog in orders for laptops, webcams, home office desks, chairs, and of course printers.

Now, over a year later, offices are starting to re-open, but employees aren’t ready to return to the office full-time. In fact, PricewaterhouseCoopers found in a survey that over half of employees (55%) would prefer to be remote at least three days a week once pandemic concerns recede.

 

How to Make Remote Work Work

If you are one of the employees that are going to remain working in your home office full time or participate in hybrid work, which is being at the office for a few days a week and working remotely the rest, you may still need to get the right technology and tools for your home office.

Or if you own or manage a company, and will have hybrid workers, you need to have the right technology so your employees can be equally productive in the office and at their remote home office.

When it comes to documents, if your company has a closed-based system like SharePoint for Microsoft Office or a Google Drive, employees can work on documents at the office and then log in from home and work on the exact same document. The same holds true if the company has a virtual private network (VPN) that allows an employee to log into their work computer and network from their home computer.

However, if an employee needs to scan or print documents from their home office, that quality usually isn’t the same unless they print to the office printer to pick up the next time they’re in the office. That process isn’t exactly timely nor productive though.

So, what can you do? Invest in office equipment for your own small office home office or your employees’ remote offices.

 

Home Office Equipment: Rent or Buy?

Since you might not know if you’ll be working from home full-time or in a hybrid capacity for an extended period of time, the best option for furnishing your office with a printer/scanner could be to rent instead of buy.

Here at Adams Imaging System, we offer all-inclusive equipment rental program that includes the following:

  • The rental of your dedicated printer
  • Toner
  • Parts
  • Labor
  • On-site service, and we stand behind that as a service-based company

 Through our program, you’ll rent month-to-month instead of being locked in for three to five years, so you’ll be safe in case an employee leaves for another job.

 

Call Us

Adams Imaging Systems has an extensive inventory of office equipment and printer toner cartridges to outfit your small office home office. We offer quality products, service, and technical support that sets us apart from our competitors. Give Adams Imaging Systems a call at 978-462-9206.