Document control software is one of the foremost methods of keeping employees on track with their time, and for good reason: Outdated motivation tactics no longer work, but the tools that optimize workflows do.
Productivity is one of the industrial organizational psychology industry’s biggest obsessions, and for good reason. It’s one of the pillars of money-making activities in an array of businesses.
Without productivity, ideas aren’t reified, profitability isn’t realized, and opportunity cost runs rampant—detracting from expense optimization in a fashion as furtive as it is harmful.
However, using document control software like eFileCabinet’s to prevent employees from wasting time is an ample strategy in increasing workplace productivity.
Whether your business has multiple locations or can be summed up in the existence of one office, these statistics will shed light on how workplace technologies can mitigate the productivity damages businesses occur due to employee inefficiency.
Document control software is just one of the many ways to achieve this end, but it is arguably the simplest and most cost-effective means.
How Employees Deliberately Waste Time without Document Control Software
Most employees, especially among the demographic of workplace millennials, choose to waste time at work, and for numerous reasons.
Several decades prior, it was all about water cooler conversation. Now it’s more so an issue with the number of different distractions we have at our fingertips, and the window to these distractions is a device so small we can fit it in our pockets—the mobile phone, of course.
Not all mobile phones breed apathy and a lack of productivity, however. They do connect us in times of need and ensure we our connected the information we’d like to have. The problem exists in how these devices are used at work.
Social Media
In a recent interview with thought leader, Simon Sinek, he noted that millennials being deemed lazy in the workplace is a byproduct of their brains being hardwired for addictive tendencies that distract them from tasks at work, and social media is to blame.
It has nothing to do with inherent laziness, but rather how their brains have been conditioned to feed on digital information.
Sinek notes that there should be age restrictions on cell phones, as they release the same chemical in young adults’ brains as alcohol and smoking—dopamine.
Since we haven’t placed age restrictions on digital media use, millennials end up in the workplace with an addiction to the dopamine released in their brains via social media.
In result, an entire generation of those born in the years 1984 and after is giving themselves a bad name. To combat this issue, document control software, as a cloud-based technology and inlet to the work environment via mobile apps are good place to start in capturing the work attention of millennials.
Once this issue is conquered, the creativity, resourcefulness and unique worldview that millennials offer in the work environment will serve to help them regain the trust of the generations that preceded them.
Performance Misconceptions
With many of today’s workers raised on the presupposition that “it’s all about who you know,” there’s been less emphasis placed on producing actual work than there is on getting ins with the right people who have the most power.
The problem with this assumption is that the work one produces (including its quality) do not matter to the effectiveness of a task.
With document control software, keeping employees accountable for their tasks becomes easier as it’s a system for tracing all the information a manager would want to have about his or her employees’ activity. Additionally, it helps facilitate and trace who can and who has seen what documents within the document control software.
And if workers continue to play the politics game, removing paper-based processes from the equation will help them more readily discern great work from mediocre work.
Ways Employees Waste Time Without Knowing It
It can be argued that employees feel inclined to deliberately waste time at work because the work they do end up completing feels as if “no progress is being made.”
Although outdated information management processes are to blame (digital clutter and paper-based methods alike), the biggest impediment to feelings of self-efficacy and value to an organization are the difficulties employees face in making a valuable contribution.
Manual Overload
If you think manual labor is only reserved for blue collar workers and those with industrial jobs, think again: Most offices with paper-based processes are completely steeped in processes of manual labor—faxing, printing, and rummaging through filing cabinets to find information are just a few of the ways manual labor carries over into the traditional office space.
But digital clutter overworks the hands as well. With a typical Windows folder structure and a certain number of documents in your folders, reducing the number of steps with a mouse to complete any given task will not only be easier on your hands, it will compound enormous savings over time.
Document control software is one of the foremost ways to reduce the number of steps in both paper-based and digitally chaotic workflows.
Commuting and Its Unheard Expenses
The Washington Post recently reported that the costs of commuting have taken their toll on millions of hardworking Americans. Additionally, mega-commuting, a commute of one hour or more, has risen significantly in popularity.
Although this is not a way employees waste time once they get to the office, it significantly detracts from the productivity and quality of life experience employees need to stay put with any given organization.
In the same article, the Washington Post notes that telecommuting is rising in popularity among those who’ve experienced longer commutes at some point in their careers.
This signifies an important trend for American workers—one in which working from home provides them the peace of mind and time to be more productive despite not being under direct managerial supervision.
What’s more, document control software in mobile apps and for the cloud, can help managers trace what employees are doing while on the clock and away from the office. This makes for a win-win situation: happier employees, reduced operating expenses, and fewer commutes harming the environment.
And if larger organizations want to engage in using satellite and remote access, there is room to facilitate that feature of document control software when employees are working off-site or remotely.