businessinfomag.uk magazine 14 Are your hybrid workers as productive at home as they are in the office or are their efforts being hampered by inadequate, uncomfortable technology? Equally, are they making the most of their time in the office or do they waste valuable minutes getting to grips with unfamiliar settings and work tools whenever they return to the corporate workplace? You may have given your staff laptops to provide a seamless transition between working at home and in the office, but what about monitors? Have you equipped your hybrid and remote workers with a high quality, ergonomic monitor or do you expect them to use their laptop screen or make do with any old monitor they have lying around the house? Dave Hadden, Head of Solutions at EIZO, argues that too many businesses fall into the trap of assuming that ‘a monitor is just a monitor’, which he says is like saying ‘a car is just a car’ and completely ignores the first rule of monitor buying, which is to choose a model based on the job you want it to do and where it is going to be used. With 70 models in its line-up, EIZO has a solution for pretty much Spend more, save more any requirement, from specialist monitors for film editing, medical, video surveillance and air traffic control to high quality, ergonomic monitors for general office work and colour-critical graphics applications. Its office offering, suitable for officebased, remote and hybrid workers, includes two core ranges: FlexScan general purpose desktop monitors with pre-calibrated colour; and ColorEdge colour accurate monitors for the small percentage of office workers who need to know that the colour they see onscreen is exactly how it will be printed or projected. With AI-driven uniform colour correction across the entire screen area, the ColorEdge range includes models with built-in colour calibration and hoods to prevent distractions and on-screen reflections. The latest models (and high-end FlexScan monitors) also have a built-in RJ45 network connection so that users working with, say, very large video files have the option to plug in a wired network cable and enjoy fast, stable data transfer rates as well as access to other network resources. This can also be used to connect virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) endpoints. Hybrid working Traditionally, EIZO FlexScan and ColorEdge monitors have been deployed in offices, but with the rise of hybrid working over the last two years they are increasingly being used in employees’ home offices for use with a laptop, often with a matching model in the corporate workplace to provide a consistent experience across all work locations. Hadden points out that EIZO is well placed to help business customers make the transition to a hybrid working model thanks to features it originally introduced to support hot desking initiatives. “A lot of the products that came out during the pandemic we had started developing 18 to 24 months earlier for flexible working, for docking, for home working, before we had any idea a pandemic was coming. Many of our larger corporate customers were wanting to reduce their owned office footprint and instead of having a seat for 100% of their employees were providing seats for 80% and encouraging people to work from home some of the time and to hot desk when they came into the office.We were designing products to support that, so when the pandemic hit we had the features people needed.” As examples, Hadden highlights a single USB-C connection between monitor and laptop, the ability to use the monitor as a docking unit and the easy daisy-chaining of up to four monitors with a single cable connection between each one. “We designed our single USB for hot desking, not really thinking about home working because it was less of a thing at the time, but as it happens it works beautifully for home working too. The single USB-C gives you a video connection but also a 70W power supply back into the laptop, while multiple USB ports on the monitor itself give you the ability to plug in a keyboard, mouse and other items.” Using an EIZO monitor as a docking station gives laptop users the benefits of a bigger screen and separate webcam, keyboard and mouse, while making it quick and easy to connect/disconnect a laptop when moving between home and office. In this context, Hadden draws attention to a piece of software that lets laptop users take their preferred EIZO monitors are an attractive option for hybrid workers thanks to their ergonomic features and a competitive total cost of ownership MONITORS
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