While the astronomical rise in remote working was necessary for companies to remain operational during the pandemic, many CEOs have found that a permanent move to hybrid work has led to many benefits – most prominently, improved employee wellbeing and productivity.
Here are some interesting facts and statistics that illustrate the significance of this change and the new normal that we live in:
However, while remote working has certainly become a staple of our ‘new normal’, this major move isn’t necessarily plain sailing for every company. Effective document management is a key area of difficulty – since when staff are working over multiple locations, keeping files accessible as well as secure is obviously more difficult.
With this in mind, let’s look at the implications that remote working has on document management; and how remote working becomes more effective simply by improving your document-handling processes.
When employees are spread out over a wide area, manually mailing files to them is inefficient and expensive. However, it’s imperative that moving to digital files is done with care – since the right people must have the right access permissions to certain documents in order to prevent costly data breaches (that average £3.1 million).
When staff are working remotely, collaboration naturally becomes more difficult, and can easily become downright frustrating if improperly supported. This can contribute heavily to a decline in staff satisfaction, so remedying this is an enormous priority.
While physical documentation is automatically harder to secure than digital counterparts, extreme care must be taken when digitising your existing archives to ensure full data compliance. This may require external assistance from data security experts.
If your archives are paper-based, it can take a long time for retrieval requests to be completed, presenting a significant roadblock to jobs being completed in a timely fashion. Productivity costs associated with preparing files for postage makes this particularly untenable.
Generally speaking, remote working represents a huge cost saving for businesses – and effective Document Management systems further contribute to this by eliminating your reliance on physical archiving solutions, allowing you to downsize with ease.
Quality of collaboration is also improved with digital Document Management systems, since files are easier to upload, share, locate, and access – allowing your staff to coordinate their efforts more effectively, no matter where they’re working from. ,/p>
Having a shared Document Management system allows staff to be effective from home – meaning less travel time, not to mention all the frustrations that come with it. Tedious, time-consuming tasks can also be automated through a system like this, allowing staff to focus on more valuable, engaging tasks instead.
Many organisations are making a pledge to improve their green credentials. Moving to digital documentation helps you to eliminate potentially wasteful paper-based processes – while also boosting efficiency elsewhere.
Achieving compliance is much easier with digital Document Management systems, since access controls can be calibrated to prevent internal data breaches. Audit trails are also generated automatically for additional convenience and peace of mind.
With benefits like these readily available, the next question is: what are the specific technologies you need to adopt to access them?
A low-cost and compliant storage solution for your physical documentation, Digital Records Management (DRM) also empowers your remote staff to search for specific documents from any location. This follows a straightforward three-step process:
Data protection is assured through this process, with your files being stored compliantly at our secure facility. However, unlike a normal archiving solution, DRM also gives you access to the benefits of digitisation – namely, staff being able to get records immediately instead of having to wait potential weeks for them to arrive by mail.
So, you’ve finally gone digital, and found a way to compliantly store your hard copies. But what about incoming paper mail that still comes to the office? With staff working from home, travelling to the office just to retrieve mail is inefficient to say the least – and this is where Digital Mailroom comes in.
Key to preventing your staff hours being wasted with tiresome busywork, Digital Mailroom lets your employees get their office mail separated, sorted, scanned, and distributed to them via email, removing unnecessary touchpoints from your internal processes without skimping on security.
Besides records and day-to-day mail, remote workers require other important office documents - but shipping these files via mail is impractical, costly, and bad for the environment. However, scanning and storing these documents on secure servers gives your staff continual access to everything they need, from wherever they happen to be working from.
Scanning Solutions can be applied to several formats, allowing you to easily digitise business documents, detailed images and schematics, and microfilm – be it 16mm, 35mm, microfiche, and aperture card. Simply send your records to us and we’ll do the rest.
Did you know that 57% of invoices live as loose pieces of paper? Don’t limit yourself by relying on manually processed, hard-to-retrieve data – instead, remove the headache of invoice processing with a digital service, which uses image and character recognition software to update your financial records automatically.
Using this solution not only gives valuable time back to your financial teams, it opens the door to greater data accuracy throughout your bookkeeping records – with the added bonus of files being made easily retrievable for auditing and compliance purposes.
Considering the many advantages of remote working, it’s clearly not going anywhere soon. This is why bridging the gap between employees with effective digital document management is so crucial. While you could certainly source your own technology, doing so is the most expensive, inefficient, and risky route you can take - whereas with our expertise, you can be assured that these new processes are cost-efficient, simple, and above all, compliant with data protection regulations.
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