Brother UK recently conducted a survey of 501 IT leaders at UK SMEs. With many workers furloughed and hiring frozen, productivity has never been more important. In a series of articles this autumn, we are using the findings of the survey to see how UK businesses can improve productivity.

Our previous article addressed how smartly businesses are investing in their print estate. Here, we build on that by looking more closely at how smart IT leaders are making those investments, and the productivity gains they are seeing as a result.

Investing wisely in productivity

Brother UK’s survey found that 79% of the firms polled have allocated specific budget to improving productivity.

Of those, the main investments have been in collaboration software such as Microsoft Teams and project management platforms (82%), remote working tools such as laptops and cloud applications (82%), and hardware refreshes such as printers and tablets (74%).

The crucial role of IT in productivity

Armed with this knowledge that there are productivity gains to be made from smart investments in IT, a comprehensive 98% of those leaders surveyed indicated that they think infrastructure investments can improve productivity.

In addition to the investments they had already made, those leaders were focused on providing more collaboration software for their users (41%), remote working tools (37%), and more modern hardware refreshes such as printers and tablets (28%).

As we mentioned in a previous article, “invest to save” is one of those terms that risks becoming part of the furniture and losing all meaning. But these findings indicate that some investment for productivity is not only a smart move in the present time, but it is an almost essential move.

Businesses looking to weather the coronavirus crisis and even thrive in it need to be thinking slightly differently about how their users go about their work, and the tools they have to do it. Flexibility and efficiency are the keys to this, and good, modern infrastructure underpins this.

Find out more

In our next article in this series we will explore in more detail how to focus on what counts. In the meantime, read more about how you can boost productivity your organisation in Brother’s Guide to Improving Your Print Productivity.

Find out more

Give us a call on 01274 396 213 to find out how Complete IT Systems and Brother can help your business. Alternatively have a look at our main Brother information page here.

 

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