When you take our online quiz, you will notice that we devote a section of it to how well your workflow operates and how effective your automation is. There are some very good reasons why this is so important.
Why Automate your document workflow?
Do you ever stop to think about how much paperwork just one employee can cause? From the moment you decide on a new team member, you will start to accumulate a plethora of different records, contracts, personal data and other information about them. Everything about their time with you, from employment offer letter to the offboarding process, generates something to be stored, often for years. Contracts, payslips, pensions, holiday forms, sickness details, addresses and all the other paraphernalia of employment mount up.
All of it is vital, and much of it is a legal requirement.
All that documentation needs looking after. Every bit of paper needs gathering, checking, indexing, and then securely storing so that it can be accessed when needed. The impact of this on your business is astonishing.
Let’s take something as simple as issuing employees with their annual P60s. Most businesses will generate them automatically from their payroll software, so actually creating them is a relatively simple process. It is when you think about the time then taken to produce, collate, pack, post, deal with enquiries, confirm the process is complete, and then store your copies of them that things get a little frustrating. The employee time that needs to be allocated to what is a very simple task is incredible.
That is only an example at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the importance of automating workflow, which is why the quiz has a section purely to look at these important areas.
Here are a few other thoughts on document workflow.
- Manual systems are costly
Let’s take the P60 scenario above. If we assume (being very generous here) that it only takes only a couple of hours to check the details and generate the documents themselves, we can then move on to the dispatch. Each individual P60 needs to be checked and posted; then additional time is needed to ensure they arrive and deal with any enquiries. You are probably looking at a lot of time lost to the distribution of a single piece of automatically created documentation. With an automated workflow in place, the employee simply logs in and downloads their P60 leaving the payroll team member to do something more meaningful. Zero postage cost is just an added bonus. When you consider how many similar scenarios happen every month (payslips, for example), the cost of manually performing these easily automated tasks is staggering.
- Your efficiency rockets
Not only is manual processing costly, but it is also disturbingly inefficient. In most businesses, a manual document flow will inevitably lead to highly-trained team members performing repetitive tasks. Apart from the impact this has on the efficiency of your business, it can also impact job satisfaction. Manual document processing can be a double hit in that you are wasting the talents of an employee and taking them from more important duties.
- Compliance is maintained, and errors are reduced
GDPR, and whatever replaces it, is not going to go away. The sad fact is that the majority of compliance problems start with human error. Secure storage and limited access to personal data and other sensitive information reduces the likelihood of compliance problems. Automating your storage and retrieval processes also means any human error factor is taken out of the loop.
- Collaboration is streamlined.
The speed and ease with which we can interact and collaborate with colleagues is something that is often overlooked as a benefit. Central storage and retrieval alone expedites any sharing of documentation, reduces unnecessary meetings, and, of course, removes the need for physical transfers of documents.
These are just a few of the reasons our quiz will look at your automation of workflow. The system is there to identify where you are efficient (or not) when it comes to saving costs, collaborative working, efficient transfer of documents, employee access to their information, and compliance, as well as other key factors. Once it has the information, it will combine it with three other main areas to create a single, personalised report.
Our online quiz is free to use, and you may just find it an eye-opener, particularly when it comes to how you can rationalise your workflow.
