Three focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money, Business/Entrepreneurship and Technology. If you’re using an office to conduct your business and operations, you may want to consider future-proofing your office to ensure its continued operations. The following contributed post is entitled, How Future-Proofing Your Office Can Save Your Business Money.
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If you run your business from an office, you’ll likely also employ many staff to take care of the daily running of things. As you can appreciate, today’s modern offices require a lot of equipment and technology to operate at optimum efficiency.
The trouble is, some business leaders don’t invest much time or money into modernizing their working areas. As a result, it takes longer to do things due to outdated or faulty systems. And that ultimately means a lower annual turnover and reduced profit.
The good news is that all is not lost. You can take several steps to future-proof your office and ensure that your business is a market leader. Here’s what you can do to bring your company into the 21st century:
Install fiber optic cabling
One of the first things you need to look at is how your business interacts with the outside world internally. All modern business offices have network cabling that allows computers and electronic devices to communicate internally and across the Internet.
But, if you have a large office or your business is spread across several different offices, you could easily face the limitations of CAT5 and CAT6 network cabling. To overcome those challenges, it makes sense to use fiber optic cabling for trunk communications.
You might need fiber optic cable installers to install the cabling for you. But, any person competent in IT communications can install and set up fiber equipment such as switches and routers to utilize fiber optic cabling.
Upgrade to high-speed Internet access
You should also upgrade your office’s Internet access to complement your new fiber optic cabling. The shocking truth about many business locations is they only have basic broadband speeds – completely inadequate for the needs of today’s modern business.
Did you know that fiber optic Internet access is very affordable these days, even for small businesses? It makes sense to upgrade to such Internet connection technology. Plus, as your business grows, you can upgrade to higher speeds in the future with ease.
Upgrade to a unified communications model
It goes without saying that all businesses need telephone systems, whether they are landline-based or mobile. But, one of the challenges that face all companies is tying together the various communication methods they use each day.
Thankfully, it’s now possible to upgrade to a unified communications model in your business. What does that mean exactly? In layman’s terms, you can unify your telephone, voicemail, fax, and email systems into one single setup.
For example, you can receive voicemail messages and faxes in your email inbox. And you can easily divert your phone number to any location around the world, making it easy to work from home or abroad.
Final thoughts
The above is just a few of many ways that you can future-proof your office – and your business. In an extremely competitive market, it makes sense to do everything in your power to stay ahead of the competition.
Future-proofing your office is one of the biggest ways to achieve that goal, yet it’s also one of the least thought of methods.
