We shouldn’t be making-do with makeshift offices

We shouldn’t be making-do with makeshift offices

Like most, I’ve been working from home for over a year now. It certainly has its benefits: the five-second commute, home comforts on hand, the extra time to spend with my family.

In fact, we recently carried out a survey amongst 1,000 of our customers across Europe and it revealed that one in twenty people have admitted to having a nap during work hours, taking a relaxing lunchbreak to new heights. I’m sure none of them were Epson employees.

Sleeping aside, if you’d told me at the very start of the pandemic that I would still be sat working in my home office a year later, I would have put more thought into my set-up from the beginning.

Our recent survey shows that people have worked in less than ideal conditions throughout the lockdowns. More than half admitting to working on surfaces other than a desk. Meanwhile, 55 per cent say they have set up in unconventional spaces around the home, such as hallways, bathrooms and gardens. When offices were only expected to be shut for a few weeks or months, this may have seemed tolerable, perhaps even a novelty. However, it can’t go on.

There may not be much that can be done to stop doorbells interrupting meetings, cats walking over keyboards or never quite being able to get the heating right. However, more thought can be put into ensuring our home office spaces are up-to-scratch, particularly if you are considering working from home in some capacity once the pandemic ends.

In the office you would never work from a hard kitchen chair, nor make do with an ironing board as a desk, so why should you at home? Makeshift solutions can lead to physical discomfort such as back pain or strained eyes. They can also make doing a good job more difficult.

This includes not having the right tech to do your job properly. If documents need printing or scanning, they need printing or scanning. You can make do, but it’s a faff and it doesn’t offer the same result. Almost every office provides employees with this tech and so our home offices should be held to the same standard.

Throughout the pandemic, we have been working to help home workers find permanent and practical solutions to some of these problems.

Firstly we have EcoTank. These are printers with large ink tanks that you fill with ink bottles instead of cartridges. From the start there is enough ink to print up to 14,000 pages1, which saves money and time as there is no need to frequently change cartridges. The set-up is simple, refilling is mess free and it’s reliable too, turning out page after page of quality prints

And there’s also ReadyPrint, our subscription printing service for consumer cartridge printer models and EcoTank printers, allows you to have the right amount of ink exactly when you need it. It monitors ink levels and delivers new ink to your door when you are running low, meaning you’re never under- or over-stocked. This helps to avoid temporary solutions and empowers workers to be their most effective.

As many look to a blend of home and office work going forward, now is the time to make makeshift a thing of the past. It might have been tolerable for a while, but as we enter a post-COVID world, we all need to get ready for the future.

ENDS

This Blog is part of a series of editorial and social media content, created by Epson, that explores the habits and opinions of people working from home across Europe during the pandemic. It is based on the results of research carried out by Epson in January and February 2021. 1,000 Epson printer owners working from home were polled across 11 countries (Italy, UK, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark). Other content can be found on our website and across our social media channels