Many industries have steadily been moving towards work-from-home environments, online meetings, and digital documentation recently. The pandemic caused by the coronavirus, however, may push organizations who have previously been resistant to changing the status quo to adopt these practices. Employees are being forced to work from home to prevent the spread of the virus and organizations have had to adapt rapidly to working remotely with fully digital communication networks. Could this be a revolutionary change in the way we work? We’ve outlined the challenges and benefits that various work environments and industries are having because of the rapid and sudden need for digitization.

One of the major benefits of digital documentation is that collaboration across organizations is much easier and more efficient. This is particularly important in the medical research industry when organizations are collaborating to find treatments for the coronavirus. For example, company partnerships between GeoVax and BravoVax, iBio and CC-Pharming, Takis and Evvivak, CEPI and GSK, and many others have formed to leverage their unique skills and capabilities for finding a treatment of COVID19. Their research documentation being in a digital format will make it easier for these organizations to share their research and results while maintaining social distance from colleagues.

This feature of digital documents is also applicable in hospitals and other healthcare facilities. These organizations can share patient information and statistics to better track the treatment of patients, speed up paperwork processes, and create efficiency in treatment within one hospital between colleagues, or across institutions worldwide to better track the virus and its treatment. This is a huge benefit because more data about this virus can lead to swifter treatment for patients and better understanding of how to control the illness.

Overall, this COVID-19 pandemic has forced many organizations including medical institutions like hospitals to consider digitization and online collaboration which may make them more efficient in the future and better adapted to handle future outbreaks. Employees will hopefully be better prepared to work from home if needed.

Many schools, from elementary to university, have closed their doors due to the virus, forcing students to complete their courses and even exams from home. Communicating digitally may not be new for these younger students, but teachers have had to make some major changes in how they teach and evaluate students. Some classes have conducted Skype or FaceTime based courses with the teacher lecturing as normal but at a webcam rather than a class full of students. This may present challenges with students potentially being distracted on their phones with no way to monitor them.

Projects, essays, and assignments are also being conducted entirely virtual. Conducting online exams have become a little more common in recent years but this will still be a first for many. How do schools monitor cheating on these exams? The answer could lie in timed online exams with randomized questions so that students are unable to copy from each other. Or the exam may block the student from opening digital notes or internet browsers. However, there isn’t much these teachers and institutions can do about physically written notes being next to the student to look off of.

Many employers could be facing challenges adapting to this new model of work so quickly. First, not all documents that an employee needs to reference are digital. For many medical, legal, and human resources employees, the documents that they refer to daily are in physical form, making it impossible for them to access remotely and work from home. This is a serious hindrance to organizations who want to keep their employees healthy at home.

The digitization of physical documents and the development of digital work environments has some major benefits, particularly at a time when more people than normal must work from home. Documents in a digital form are able to be accessed from almost anywhere through cloud storage and sharing through email. This allows employees to access the essential documentation that they need to do their job from home, keeping them healthy and the organization running smoothly. They will be able to work in a quarantine situation as long as they have an internet connection of some kind.

The push to move physical documents to a digital format and access them in a digital platform or storage space has been growing in more recent years but there are certainly those who have resisted this change because of concern for data security or to maintain the status quo. This recent need for digital documentation and allowing employees to work from home may be the push that many need to make the switch and we will most likely see big changes because of this crisis in the world of work from here on.

Many organizations have begun to make changes because of the coronavirus epidemic to ensure their business continues to run smoothly while keeping employees healthy. This may change many organizations in the future with an increased need to digital documents, document scanning, and work-from-home situations.

Bay Area Records has the services necessary to organize and digitize your physical documents to better prepare you for situations that require digitization. This business has become an essential service in these times of COVID-19 as remote and rapid access to records is so critical to maintain business as usual, particularly in the healthcare and medical research industry. Don’t get caught without the necessary resources for your employees to work remotely in times of crisis. Contact us today to learn more about our scanning services.