I can almost hear you whispering a retort under your breath from afar, cooped up at your desk and insisting on the fact that you like your job, yet thinking, this guy doesn’t know me. How could he know whether my job is 50% awfuller than it could be?
Because most of our website traffic comes from people at work during the 9 to 5 grind.
You’ve been caught red-handed.
But it’s okay, stay on the page. This is more important than any task you have on hand for the day at your desk, guaranteed, because it’ll teach you how to cope with the realities of contemporary office life through document control management best practices.
Sound boring?
You’re about to be amazed.
You Can Use Role-based User Permissions to Put Employees in their Place
Sometimes saving your job requires saving your sanity, and we all need to poke a little fun at each other to make this a possibility.
We have the perfectly boring document control management tool to make this ideal a reality. It’s called role-based user permissions.
The Role-based user permissions of a document control management solution let the system’s administrator (usually an honest person who won’t abuse their rightfully earned authority), assign different permission levels to the other employees in the solution.
This is part of what makes these solutions high-octane security options for businesses in need of software that helps them simplify compliance.
Now that the boring part is over, let’s get to the juicy stuff—how it can help you put a wannabe boss in his or her place.
If you have a Dwight Schrute on your hands who thinks he or she is Assistant Regional Manager when he or she is really Assistant to the Regional Manager, you can simply limit his or her permissions in the system by doing what follows. Caveat: this will only work if you go fully paperless and have successfully removed all redundant, paper-based processes from the office.
- Create a set of empty folders in eFileCabinet
- Name all folders by the job title the wannabe boss thinks that he or she has
- Block the wannabe boss from accessing the folder via role-based user permissions
If they don’t seem to pick up what you’re putting down, you can always send them a forwarded email from your inbox that he or she previously sent you, revising their job title to fit their actual role.
It Makes Irritating Coworkers Less Irritating
Document control management can change an annoying coworker’s personality, at least while he or she is on the clock.
With fewer stressors and anxiety-provoking feelings about losing important documentation or misfiling said documentation, even the most difficult to work with people can become a bit cheerier.
And even if the document control management solution doesn’t sit well with your least favorite coworker, it gives you a tried and true method of not having to talk to them.
If you want to evade conversation about a document requiring the utmost security, simply rely on the client portal to send the file off to him or her.
If you’re forced to collaborate with this person, just use the file check in and check out feature of the software to make it happen.
What’s more, you’ll have a valid excuse for avoiding face-to-face contact with this irritating person—you can simply state that it’s a “faster” and more “secure” way to get things done, and you’ll be telling the truth. This is also a far easier way to conceal your true feelings of ill will than refusing to show up for a meeting you know the irritator will be attending.
Document Control Management Reduces the Risk of Burnout
Yes, document control management reduces the risk of burnout, which is becoming a very big part of worker unhappiness and American exhaustion as a whole.
The more time you spend shuffling stacks of paper around, the less fulfilling your job will be. Even a librarian wouldn’t enjoy running a paper-dependent office, because TPS reports are nowhere near as interesting as books.
The saddest part of today’s workforce is its inability to see the ball and chain around its own ankle. Many workers are so caught up in the routine of their workdays that they cannot adjust to the digital transformation.
If you keep an elephant chained to a pole, it won’t move once it’s released. Contemporary knowledge workers aren’t much different; the knowledge to move forward is there, but it is rarely potentiated in patterns of technology adoption.
And we see this same phenomenon panning out with document control management technologies: they are available for workers to use, but we fall victim to the fact we are creatures of habit and comfort, and continue playing our roles as Luddites.
Document Control Management Lets You Achieve More
Motivation has a very complex neurological process: Any given set of neurotransmitters in your brain have been engineered (by God or Darwinian adaptation, whichever floats your boat), to transmit a chemical called dopamine. This is the conative chemical that enables and facilitates human striving in the workplace.
So, what does that have to do with document control management processes?
Any blockade from the attainment of dopamine hinders motivation, concomitantly impeding self-efficacy. This means that anything blocking us from achieving our professional goals, whether they involve promotions or pay raises.
Low dopamine levels are associated with a milieu of mental health issues, many of which currently plague the American workforce, resulting in unemployment, poor job performance, and more:
- Adult ADHD
- Addiction
- Depression
Those are just a few of the culprits. And paper-based documentation causes them. Through paper-based processes, we block dopamine neurotransmitters in the brain.
Instead of having processes automated, knowledge workers reduce themselves to manual labor, limiting their achievement and overall professional happiness.
Given this information, it’s safe to say that document control management isn’t just a matter of increasing efficiency and improving the bottom line, but also a means for HR managers to improve the well-being of their employees.