Businesses, both the corporate and SMB's. We are all struggling with our performance and productivity with our paper based processes, but we have gotten so used to these struggles that we take them as normal. I’m in support of an efficient and highly productive workplace. This applies to all the employees being able to deliver but also to the decision makers being able to deliver even when they are not in office. Approvals could happen quite fast without being a hindrance.
The biggest questions we ask ourselves come with struggles with lost documents, misplaced documents and looking for particular documents for days.
These struggles occur in all the departments of a company, accounts, human resource, operations, customer service. This episode is important for all of us because this is something that happens to all of us in our careers. I don’t think there is enough conversation around it.
We look at 4 different struggles we go through in our workplaces that slows down our performance and productivity. The struggles in our everyday tasks as we try to accomplish our daily objectives, ang how to avoid them.
1. When dealing with clients, the customer service staff requests for copies of personal documents over and over again when clients apply for loans. This happens because whenever they receive the paper or digital documents they keep them in their archives and nobody is usually willing to go back to the archives to look for them again because it is tedious and wastes a lot of time which could be used somewhere else. The easiest option is to request clients to bring in other copies for the processing of their transactions. This leads to accumulation of unnecessary duplicate documents.
The way to eliminate this struggle is to have a central repository whereby every customer's digitized documentation has been captured and stored in file folders. Accessing them becomes easy for the authorized stakeholders who search by just a click of a button. A document management system is necessary to manage this process.
2. In a no. of companies, there are policies in place where approvals of claims above a certain level can only be done by the CEO. Most of the time the CEO’s are not in office. There are times when they might not be in town and even worse out of the country. These would force the staff involved to advise their clients to wait for the CEO to come back, which depending on his assignment can take long. These are instances which lead to client frustrations and disappointment. The way to go about this is to come up with a streamlined process system where the CEO can be able to approve from wherever he is despite the distance, using his smartphone or tablet.
3. What about instances where documents are produced either physically or digitally but are kept aside either in an out tray for physical document or on the desktop for digital document for later storage. These can accumulate and cause clutter on the out tray or desktop becoming tedious to search or sort and store. Storage is done manually and as you know people tend to avoid such kinds of tasks. Searching for these documents when required can take hours and sometimes even days assuming they are not lost.
4. Sometimes the documents are not even labelled, and we always take it in our comfort zone that it is the way it has always been done. We continue until a crisis like a legal issue occurs or KRA comes calling. Then we realize the importance of having easy access to documents.
When you look back, what can we do differently in our work process by having a proper document management system. This would be a good solution to save us from all these headaches
These are the struggles and strategies on navigating in our workplace documentation.