SME Executive Summary

by Tina Smith, Senior Vice President, Corporate Services - Ricoh Europe

There is no denying the immense role technology now plays in our society. In fact, it is hard to envision how we would have coped over the last 18 months without it. The innovation taking place in our industry is unparalleled and is changing the way we work and the way we live.

However, it’s important to recognise that technology itself does not supersede human connection. We have been through a life-altering experience, where our greatest challenge was that of human connection in a period of physical separation. Leveraging technology, we saw an incredible outpouring of social networking and coming together, underpinned by technology, that worked to support us all personally through this experience.

In the business community, during this time, technology was the lifeblood of business continuity. We saw tremendous investment and success from businesses across both the public and private sectors, moving operations to almost entirely remote environments to protect the health and safety of employees. As a result, we have seen the much-needed digital transformation to hybrid working become an industry standard.

But this experience has not been easy, in fact, it has required a lot of nuances. To keep the economy moving, we have seen restrictions lift and lockdown again on multiple occasions. Shortly before the second lockdown, we researched how employees and managers alike were feeling and adjusting to a new hybrid world of work.

We found that more than 1/4 of all managers were finding that different tools and platforms are not synced for blended working (remote and in office).

Beyond the pandemic, businesses are now faced with more varied challenges such as a clear need to focus on climate change, supply chain issues and skills shortages. At Ricoh, we recognise the huge responsibility placed on our IT industry. We wanted to host this roundtable to understand better industry leaders of how these challenges are presenting themselves. Even more importantly, we have distilled these insights into several recommendations for business leaders on how to support the IT community in leading change at work.

Tina Smith,
Senior Vice President, Corporate Services, Ricoh Europe