Fax machines are an office staple – they are still being utilized by organizations across every industry to send and receive sensitive and timely information. They help companies collaborate on projects and deliver signatures across the world. According to Fortune contributor Kurt Wagner, manufacturers shipped 37 million fax machines worldwide in 2011 and 2012, and that number is expected to stay steady.
According to TMCnet contributor Tania Ramirez, it can be critical to ensure the delivery of fax documents to the proper party, whether it be medical health records or court documents. In essence, these kinds of documents could mean the difference at a meeting or in a patient's diagnosis. But what if the information necessary isn't readily on hand at the office? What if an employee has important documents with them at home or on the road, and has no way to get them to the office in time for that meeting?
This is where the inherent mobility of fax-over-Internet-protocol systems can give a boost to business processes. Bring-your-own-device and work-from-home policies are steadily becoming the norm for companies in nearly every sector, and it's important for managers to take advantage of the many ways these kinds of strategies serve to increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Fax solutions can help.
"Employees can send sensitive documents via email instead of having to go to a physical machine."
Brings BYOD to life
According to a study conducted by Tech Pro Research, 74 percent of companies are utilizing a BYOD policy to enhance their workplaces, ZDNet reported. By allowing employees to bring their own mobile technologies to use at work, enterprises and small businesses alike have been able to cut hardware and maintenance costs. After all, they're no longer investing money in new equipment, since the added devices already belong to the employees themselves.
Fax solutions can help enhance BYOD policies. When workers are utilizing their own devices to send emails and view projects, they can take it one step further and send faxes as well. This just becomes another way that fax-to-email systems can contribute to the day-to-day operations of businesses, because employees can send sensitive documents as PDFs via email instead of having to go to a physical machine and take the time to send a piece of paper through. This can result in a distinct increase in productivity.
Allows employees to fax from home
Work-from-home strategies have become more popular with corporate organizations, as more managers realize the benefits of such policies. It's well-documented that working from home can result in a boost to productivity and employee satisfaction in the long run. A recent study from Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom found that call center workers who worked from home for a nine-month period made 13 percent more calls than their office-bound counterparts. In addition, the previously high turnover rate at the company was reduced drastically after the nine months.
"So our advice is that firms – at the very least – ought to be open to employees working from home occasionally, to allow them to focus on individual projects and tasks," Bloom and fellow researcher John Roberts wrote in the Harvard Business Review. "We think working from home can be a positive experience both for the company and its employees."
A fax-over-Internet-protocol solution gives companies the opportunity to take even better advantage of their employees’ time while working from home. With fax-to-email systems, clunky equipment is unnecessary, so employees can feel free to send faxes from the comfort of their own homes. This adds an extra level of flexibility to businesses and can help contribute to higher levels of productivity and worker satisfaction.
The bottom line
Fax solutions offer companies greater mobility, because faxes can be sent from any connected mobile device just like an email. With fax-over-Internet-protocol, therefore, employees can feel more empowered to work from home or on the go, because they can still send their sensitive documents and signatures via the Internet. Stuck in traffic or away from your desk? Take a picture of a document and fax it from a smartphone. Working from home? Send time-sensitive documents from a tablet. No matter where employees are, they will be able to transmit that important information to the office and to business partners in time for meetings.
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