The office imaging industry faces a post-pandemic reckoning.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought rapid changes to companies’ work styles, which raises questions about the ideal set up for employees who must work onsite. Those changes will have a big impact on the office imaging industry. This evolving situation represents market loss and creation.
It is too early to determine if traditional offices will disappear, evolve into something different, or return to their original form after the pandemic. For the past few years, Japanese companies have been improving office workflow productivity by promoting changes in office layouts and information sharing between mobile workers and offices under the theme of work-style reform. Digitalization of paper documents and linking to the cloud are driving this trend. Coordination between information communications technology (ICT) and A3 MFP platforms has also been promoted in this new environment. As for the internal layout of offices which serve as a base of operations for a company, a “free address” environment is recommended because it allows employees to freely choose where they want to work when onsite rather having an assigned workspace.
Because of COVID-19, sharing desks and chairs is a concern unless they are constantly sanitized or sterilized, one reason working from home is attractive to employees. However, that work style has dramatically decreased the use of A3 MFPs in the office. At the same time, going paperless by digitizing documents and storing them in the cloud is rapidly advancing, enabling people working from home to carry out tasks smoothly. Although opportunities for A3 MFPs in the office have decreased, the need for A4 MFPs with a common platform to enable scanning or printing documents in the network environment that connects people working from home (although not a solution for everyone) is emerging.
The traditional office, which served as the home base for a company, has become just another space due to the large-scale shift to work from home. The head office, branch offices, and sales offices served as locations where people gathered to carry out company business. In this new hybrid environment, companies do not have to pay high rents for large offices if employees can use ICT to perform their work remotely. If offices disappear, A3 MFPs will no longer be needed.
Some companies may not need an office where people gather if they shift everyone to work from home, and they have a data center that stores data on the network. Others may shrink the size of their offices by reducing the number of people required to work onsite. Dentsu, the largest advertising agency in Japan, is considering selling its headquarters building in Tokyo (as of February 28, 2021). Approximately 9,000 people worked in the HQ prior to the pandemic, but that has dropped to about 20% because of the shift to remote work. Dentsu is looking to improve the efficiency of its assets by selling the building.
On the other hand, some companies wouldn’t think of selling or relocating their offices. Employees will work together in the base office or from home or split their time between working onsite and at home for those companies. When COVID-19 is over, employees in those companies will likely work in the base office as before. This represents most companies in Japan. In these companies, the print volume in the office has not declined much.
Due to the shift to work from home that was brought about by COVID-19, I expect industries and companies will make different decisions as to whether to reduce the number of offices, reduce office size, abolish them, or do nothing. These decisions will have a significant impact on the imaging industry that serves those companies.
How will the imaging industry respond to the ever-changing office and the work from home trend? No doubt the number of employees working from home and the number of work styles that use the cloud will increase. I believe the industry should address these changes by focusing on networks and cloud applications using ICT bundled with MFPs. The challenge will be identifying what kind of proposals will appeal to customers whose offices and work styles are diversifying. I recommend you prepare several answers to that question.
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