Workers are more exhausted than ever. The good news is they can now fall asleep where they work.
No, not in their cubicles, but under the roofs of their own homes.
This is important because, ultimately, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. And it’s a big part of what every home office needs in 2017.
We can spend our days stuck in traffic and commuting to the office, or partaking in the empowerment of our professional dreams—a desire closely tied to the emergence of home office and remote workers.
As a subcategory of the smart home, the smart home office is gaining attention in the American worker’s fight for increased self-sufficiency.
As it grows rapidly and more workers decide to go in to business for themselves, start their own consultancy, or freelance to improve their long-term career prospects and earning potential, it becomes clearer that what every home needs in 2017—a home office document management solution.
Today we have the advancement of document management, providing a surge in the number of telecommuting and remote workers, and the trend shows no signs of slowing as more workers decide to go in to business for themselves without drowning in commercial real estate costs.
If we converge the remote workforce with the movement of minimalism, there’s an even stronger case to be made for cloud-based home office document management solutions, which bring tremendous productivity, security, and compliance simplification to the relatively new home office environment.
As an increasingly popular lifestyle, minimalism is a new movement in which people strive to live for and work with less.
Many adherents to this lifestyle claim to own as few as 50 items, all of which are small enough to fit in to a normal-sized camping tent.
This is clearly a way of life that can provide insight on how the home office should be run, as it usually involves one worker. And the less chaos an individual worker has on the job, the better.
Applying Minimalism to the Work Space with Home Office Document Management Software
What every home office needs in 2017 is far different from what the home office needed even one year ago, let alone a decade prior when home offices first became possibilities for the American workforce.
Although minimalism is derived from a consumer lifestyle, workers can learn to apply it in their home offices, taking control of their work lives and making the ever-elusive ‘work-life’ balance a reality for independent workers.
Going paperless through a home office document management solution makes owning fewer items easier than ever, as many of them can be compressed and stored securely in the cloud.
Although working from home will eliminate the long walks to the fax machine, storage room, and printer that most workers experience in a traditional office environment, failing to use the right technology to compress and store the paper-based information in your home office will cause other problems, namely digital clutter.
What every home office needs in 2017 no longer varies much from person to person: it needs to look good, and enable one to do anything they could do in a typical office environment minus the hassle of paperwork, but ensuring digital clutter does not take its place is important, and a home office document management solution can provide the organizational power that a mere Windows folder structure never could.
It also makes finding files much faster, improving your ability to serve your client base; clients being central to what every home office needs in 2017.
Thanks advancements like this in the home office technology space, the number of telecommuting and remote workers has surged in recent years, and the trend shows no signs of slowing as users become increasingly adept with home office solutions.
Cut Out the IT Middle Man and “the Man” with Document Management Software
Cloud-based document management for the home office is ideal not just because the cloud has skyrocketed in popularity, but because it is far simpler to use than most independent contractors, consultants, and freelancers even realize. If you can navigate a web page, you can navigate a cloud-based technology.
The third party hosting the cloud-based document management service will be held responsible for the security, upkeep, and maintenance of the platform, requiring no in-house IT team or expertise from end users.
Minimalism isn’t just about owning fewer things; it’s about avoiding unnecessary costs, and for many businesses, internal IT teams are sometimes unnecessary expenses. And if this way of cutting costs isn’t what every home office needs in 2017 we don’t know what is.
What’s more, there are an increasing number of financially valid arguments for going into business for oneself, encouraging entrepreneurially motivated workers to take a leap of faith. In fact, most entrepreneurs start their businesses from home before expanding.
How Document Management Software Empowers the Entrepreneurial Spirit
It’s no wonder many have branched out on their own to become entrepreneurs considering that if per capita income were commensurate with business growth in 2017, the median per capita income would be over $90,000 annually.
The median per capita income is roughly $32,000 per year. Nearly one-third of what it should be when compared to other economic periods in American history.
Working for oneself may be risky, but it’s worth doing considering the return on investment outlined above. And when it comes to risk, there are many ways home office document management solutions can eliminate security risks and bring peace of mind to workers, as outlined in the next section.
Replicating Traditional IT Security in a Home Office Environment with the Cloud
Scott Ford mentioned several years ago in his Entrepreneur article on smart homes that security and privacy are missing components in the battle to legitimize home offices.
Today, Ford would be pleased to know eFileCabinet is helping workers win that battle. Because since then, eFileCabinet has delivered a document management solution to make up for this gap, and the solution is called eFileCabinet Express.
Security is no longer something reserved just for big businesses, as clients care about the safety of their information regardless of how many people are handling it.
Why eFileCabinet Express Personal Document Management Software is Best for this
Not only is there an audit trail feature for those who need to uphold compliance via a home office document management solution, such as HIPAA-oriented compliance for solo workers, but there is also another component involving what every home office needs in 2017—the ability to eliminate toggling back and forth between software programs.
But minimalism is not just about de-cluttering physical space, it’s also about de-cluttering digital space on our work devices, and the advanced templating features of eFileCabinet’s home office document management solution make this possible, along with its other automated organizing powers.
Dual Environmental Benefits: Personal Branding as an Independent Worker
On a macroeconomic level, less paper-dependent business operations and fewer CO2 emissions from commuting and gas consumption equal government savings, less consumer debt, and the enablement of the remote workforce.
From a microeconomic standpoint, environmental conscientiousness is no longer just for large businesses’ public relations campaigns.
An increasing number of businesses are run from home, and by only one individual, meaning they join the ranks of traditional businesses in competing for PR-worthy sustainability efforts and related news coverage.
In fact, as of 2010, there were over 20 million businesses run by one person in the United States, and this trend has continued upward in to 2017 as the national per capita income has fallen in relation to business profits (as outlined above).
How eFileCabinet Document Management Software for Home Offices Makes this Possible
The cloud is a transcendently powerful technology for not just reducing the expenses of business collaboration and electricity use, but also in helping consumers rely on fewer paper documents, which needlessly shackle workers to their desks and traditional offices while simultaneously reducing their efficiency.
Traditional information management mediums, which are almost exclusively bound by paper-dependent processes, have been shrinking workplace productivity since the emergence of the internet and software.
Going electronic and putting your cruising altitude in the cloud not only reduces operating expenses for single-person proprietorships, it provides the efficiency two employees could bring to the business for the price of one person, indirectly boosting a solo worker’s reputation, brand identity, and potential to acquire more clients.
Who wouldn’t want more clients? Are you ready to get what every home office needs in 2017?