Choosing the device that best suits your office’s work style is an important consideration to make. For this week’s tip, we’ll dive into some of the reasons you may want to standardize laptops in your office.
Reason No. 1: Mobility
Let’s begin with the most obvious reason laptops are a great option—you aren’t tied to a desk to do your work as you would be with a conventional desktop. Instead, you can just pick it up and take it with you to a meeting or home for some remote work.
Potentially traveling with a laptop is also much easier. A desktop workstation would need to be carefully stowed in a vehicle, if not shipped to its destination. While it may seem like a hassle at the airport, stowing a laptop in a carry-on is a much more secure and convenient option.
In short, utilizing a laptop makes a lot more sense in an increasingly mobile world than does utilizing its far less mobile cousin, the desktop.
Reason No. 2: Concision
If the resources are there, one might make the argument that it makes more sense to utilize both a desktop and a laptop—one for the office and one for home and travel.
Financial considerations aside, there are issues with this strategy. The major one is the fact that it makes it that much more complicated to ensure that everything you need is where you need it, when you need it. There is little that is more professionally frustrating than sitting down to work and realizing that the data you need is on your other device. Hopefully, you have access to the other device at the time to make the necessary transfer.
While properly utilizing a cloud solution would be another way to approach this difficulty, why use two devices when one will suffice? That way, you can be sure your employees always have access to the programs and data they need to be productive.
Reason No. 3: Consistency
One of the most important considerations for any office technology configuration to take into account is how compatible the many devices it contains are with each other, and the solutions needed to accomplish each day’s tasks. If each employee has a different device, not only is this no longer guaranteed, you have no guarantee that each laptop will have the same shortcuts and features. For instance, if you want to encrypt the data on laptops and allow your staff to sign in with a thumbprint scanner, not all models are equipped with that option. Different devices don’t tend to change how complicated it is to manage the devices, but it can vary the experience your users have and limit the policies you can set.
Standardizing your office’s devices becomes much easier when everyone has the same device, which inherently means that everyone has the same capabilities in the office. Of course, if someone needs their device to have more specialized capabilities, they should be the exception. However, for the every day tasks that many are responsible for, the average laptop should suit them just fine.
If you want more help in designing your technology infrastructure and setting it up for prolonged productivity, reach out to Advisors Tech. One call to 844.671.6071 is all it takes to start receiving the technology services you need for success!