Most employees are familiar with the term “busy work”: work that is done to keep employees busy, either to impress coworkers and supervisors or to pass the time until employees can go home. Unfortunately, busy work is unproductive, and doesn’t allow employees to advance their careers or make a difference on the job. The good news is that busy work may become obsolete once your company embraces document management software (DMS).
What Constitutes Busy Work?
There is nothing wrong with employees being busy. After all, if you don’t have work that needs to get done to keep your employees busy, then there is no reason to hire anyone in the first place. So what constitutes busy work? Busy work is defined as anything that either doesn’t need to get done at all or could be done more efficiently. For example, sorting invoices alphabetically to file them in your storage room is busy work because there are better ways to store your documents. Similarly, checking email every 5 minutes isn’t an efficient way to do business. It’s much better to check email only a couple of times a day.
How DMS Eliminates Busy Work
Busy work wastes company resources and isn’t very rewarding for employees, either. The good news is that your document management software (DMS) can eliminate busy work at your organization.
1. Workflows Create Transparency
Most employees aim to look busy in order to impress their boss. After all, if your boss knows how hard you have been working, that means you might be the next one to get a raise or promotion. In most organizations, each employee’s job responsibilities are not always clear, which is why your employees may only have to look busy in order for their supervisors to assume that they’re hard at work.
Your DMS helps your organization by using workflows for all of your processes. Setting up workflows creates transparency. Now your department managers don’t have to wonder what their employees should be doing. Instead, they can see each person’s tasks and responsibilities right there in the workflow. And no matter how busy employees look, you’ll know whether they’re really getting the important work done or not by checking out the workflow documentation.
2. DMS Promotes Efficiency
There is always more than one way to get something done. You know that, and your employees know that, too. As an organization, your goal should be to get things done in an efficient manner. Document management software helps you do that.
Instead of spending hours of valuable employee time filing and searching for documents, your DMS allows you an efficient way to store, access, and manage all of your important information. There is no need to locate the keys to the filing cabinet from the person who has them, dig through paperwork to find what you’re looking for, and read lengthy contracts to find the paragraph you need. Your paperless document management software can get all of this done with a few mouse clicks, including a text search of your stored documents.
3. Workflows Promote Teamwork in Your Organization
In many organizations, employees have to receive permission from coworkers, supervisors, or other department managers to get things done. Unfortunately, it’s not always clear who is in charge of doing what. And since every employee has their own workload, it can be hard to encourage teamwork inside of your organization, especially if it spans different departments.
The workflows inside of your document management software clearly illustrate the relationship between employees in your organization. This makes it easy to delegate tasks to the appropriate employee. For supervisors, it’s also easier to see which employee can handle additional workload and which ones have too many tasks on their plate to get them done in time.
4. Workflows Enforce Deadlines
Whether your employees stay busy or not is probably not as important as whether or not they meet their deadlines. When your employees have a big workload that carries over from week to week, it can be hard for individuals to pay attention to the most urgent tasks. If all they have is a big pile of paperwork, then they may just work through it from top to bottom.
Fortunately, document management software lets you prioritize tasks based on their deadlines. Your workflow even provides your employees with reminders ensuring that they get the time-sensitive things done first.
Use DMS Workflows to Improve Productivity
If your organization is struggling with keeping employees busy doing important tasks, then eFileCabinet might be the right solution for you. Contact us to learn more about workflows and how they can improve productivity at your office, or fill out the form on this page and start your free 15-minute demo now.