How SA businesses are managing to pull rabbits out of hats

Jacques van Wyk, CEO of Ricoh SA.

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South African business leaders are increasingly being asked to pull rabbits out of hats. Amid the offshore skills drain, lockdown economic crunch, rising unemployment, looting and other factors, leaders are being asked to do more than just break even. It’s a tough job.

Employees face their own hardships. Many are worried about returning to the office during the pandemic, but are even more worried about losing their jobs, mostly due to financial reasons. “Do what you must,” seems to be the unofficial, unsung national anthem.

Yet, everywhere we see people continuing. We intrinsically seem to grasp the overriding and absolute necessity to be more productive, more efficient, regardless of the context. The clarion call of office workers across the country, for example, is: “Why go to the office and meetings when I can Teams or Zoom from home and get three times as much done?” Yet, we all agree there are those times when you simply must meet in person. Some customer activities demand face-time. Brainstorms, ideations and hackathons, too. Some jobs require human hands.

In all of this, our businesses must overcome new challenges like identifying new customer bases, reaching those new customers, creating distinctive value propositions to carve a niche for sustainable revenues, managing cash priorities, improving competitiveness to support sales, cut costs, be able to quickly and accurately identify and respond to market changes and find local suppliers to replace or complement disrupted supply chains.

We have first-hand knowledge of these challenges because no business is immune to these factors. We’re also fortunate to have global R&D focused on helping companies of all sizes change the way they work in ways that offer real solutions. That’s why we’ve been able to respond to our common challenges we currently face.

We created Ricoh Spaces, a cloud-hosted workplace enhancement platform that optimises your business with areas such as desk bookings, space bookings, IOT, way-finding, workplace insights and more, taking you on a cost-effective and flexible journey towards a truly connected workplace. Design your workspaces to maximise employee productivity for business outcomes and empower them to become your greatest asset for achieving measurable, strategic growth.

Gartner put us in their magic quadrant as a leader for Managed Workplace Services because of our “…comprehensive offering and expertise in managed workplace services, which includes Ricoh Spaces”.

The office today is a digital workplace. Businesses and people are empowered to work smarter by using innovative technology, and smart buildings are no longer the future, they’re expected. Ricoh Spaces unites people, places and experiences with innovative technology and user-centric design, in a modular, scalable solution.

Find out more about how Ricoh Spaces can help your business here.