When we at Ricoh USA, Inc., a technology company, increased our focus on services that make our customers more efficient and improve the way they make information work, we knew we had to assess our own operations, too. As we evaluated ourselves through that lens, many opportunities for improvement – in productivity, employee morale, and cost-savings – came into focus. This transformation is what we call the “new world of work.”
It starts with minimizing real estate costs, but improves with infrastructure.
To be sure, reducing our office size by an average of 30% helped us realize some immediate savings in real estate costs. But we knew that our goal was to increase productivity by immediately re-investing some of those savings into new technology and eco-friendly solutions, as well as upgrading the furniture to allow for open floor plans that could help unleash the full potential of our adaptive, mobile workforce.