Human capital is the intangible and collective resources possessed by individuals and groups within organizations.
Containing a broad subset of components, human capital includes the sum of knowledge, talent, skills, abilities, experience, intelligence, training and judgment possessed individually and collectively at group levels.
When managers develop human capital, it helps individuals and organizations achieve their goals. However, most executives and management teams only view the development of human capital as an abstract “nice-to-have.”
Although this perception of human capital is understandable, it’s no longer a good perspective to have when electronic document control software helps organizations develop human capital effectively, and for the following reasons.
How Human Capital Impacts Labor Economics
If human capital is to grow to its full potential within an organization and within the individuals who facilitate it, productivity must be optimized.
And in a knowledge economy where productivity is inseparable from knowledge, learning systems play a crucial role in nourishing human capital.
Although human resources and training programs are great starting points for the development of human capital in organizations, most contemporary leadership fails to recognize the role technology can play as a learning system in facilitating productivity. This is where electronic document control software can improve human capital.
How Electronic Document Control Software Empowers Labor in the Office
Provided ample training is involved in the onboarding process and for preexisting employees on how to use the technology, an electronic document control software can save the world’s workforce.
Additionally, most of organizations’ information is contained within files, documents, and email content. Using a system to automate processes surrounding these office modalities impacts and informs the production of the labor process within organizations.
Furthermore, many employees working in white collar office environments incorrectly feel that manual labor is only restricted to blue collar workers, but paper based document processes make their jobs as manual labor-intensive as any other blue collar occupation, regardless of the employees’ skill level or body of knowledge in their current role.
By improving customer service, ensuring a consistent file structure, and controlling document access and routing, electronic document control software optimizes labor for the betterment of human capital.
The Role of Employee Wellness in Managing Human Capital
Employee wellness programs are on the rise, and for good reason. Since employees no longer care about retiring with gold watches and working for the same companies their entire lives, most organizations understand they must improve their talent retention efforts through employee wellness incentives and implementations.
This isn’t just true of millennials, either. Job hopping is becoming increasingly popular among workers with anywhere from 10 to 20 years of experience, too. Employee wellness is not just about giving ample time off, a great benefits package, and upward mobility. It’s about using the right tools to make workers’ goals easier to obtain.
Over 90 percent of the world’s data has been created within the last decade, but many organizations still use file management tools from over a hundred years ago to manage this mass of information, inevitably leading to information entropy. What’s the point in creating so much data if we do not use the technology necessary to utilize it?
Why Electronic Document Control Software Facilitates Employee Wellness
Electronic document control software latently enables employee wellness by improving workers’ sense of self efficacy, a measure of how one feels about his or her job performance and competence on any given task.
This effect also impacts the customer experience, too.
For instance, one study conducted by Johns Hopkins University reported that paperless offices, which electronic document control software can facilitate, are conducive to the wellbeing of patients served within healthcare clinics and hospitals.
Why OPEX Reduction Is Crucial to Human Capital Management
OPEX (operating expenses) are crucial determinants in the bottom line of small businesses across the globe, particularly in the United States. Given the amount of competition and entrepreneurial verve native to the American business landscape, companies are increasingly pressed to ream the most benefits out of as little cash as possible.
But if resources are cut too slim, employees begin to endure psychological distress from constant pressure and uncertainty, therefore needing a way to remain focused without being stressed at work.
How EDM Software Reduces OPEX
Most organizations already researching electronic document control software and similar solutions have discovered that paper-based processes waste tens of thousands of dollars annually, not including the security breach costs that could be incurred from losing sensitive information or compromising a client’s sensitive data.
Electronic document control software reduces the pain of operating expenses by ensuring information flows consistently through one step of an organizational workflow to the next. The best solutions can handle the process from scanning and imaging to simplifying onboarding processes, project collaboration, audit trail enablement, and more.
Analyzing Human Capital in Terms of Opportunity Cost
Although opportunity cost sounds like a fancy term, it’s quite simple: the axiom simply means that there is a loss of potential gain from any number of alternatives when one specific alternative is chosen over others.
In organizations and small businesses, every employee incurs numerous opportunity costs in every single 8-hour day. The costs are incurred because even the most educated and intelligent knowledge workers make decisional mistakes.
The trick to mitigating opportunity costs, then, is to reduce the number of mistakes employees can make when completing work-related tasks. Electronic document control software (especially in its cloud-based form) is one of the best technologies to help businesses minimize opportunity costs.
How Electronic Document Control Software Mitigates Opportunity Cost
Paper-based tasks (which electronic document control software eliminates), create profound opportunity costs.
The average organization spends $20 dollars in labor to file each paper document. And $6 dollars in handling for every $1 of printing.
And $120 in labor searching for misfiled documents every year. The average organization also loses 1 out of every 20 documents it produces, makes 19 copies of each document, and spends 25 hours re-creating each lost document.
This racks up costs quickly, even in small organizations with only 1 to 5 employees. Worst of all, these are the businesses that cannot afford to lose any money as they are usually anxious to grow quickly.
If an organization uses the right technology to eliminate paper-based tasks, they are also eliminating significant and debilitating opportunity costs, which frees up time for them to partake in revenue generating activities.