5 Ways a Document Management System Improves Workflow Continuity in 2022
If there’s any topic that’s gaining steam in 2022, it’s remote work. Yes, COVID was an accelerant in the giant “WFH” pivot, one that was unfortunately necessary, and the trend toward remote and hybrid work isn’t going anywhere. In fact, remote work, and with it remote access, is likely the new normal. If your staff is transitioning to a hybrid in-person/work-from-home structure, or you’re already struggling with a remote work environment, digital platforms can ease friction and improve collaboration.
Additionally, with stakeholders and constituents also having increasing demands for digital access and digital processes, your workflows and electronic document management systems need to respond to those expectations.
How can a document management system ensure seamless protocols for everyone, and how can that improve experiences for employees and end users alike?
Improving Workflow Capacity
Employees understandably want to structure their professional lives in ways that more easily support a work/life balance. That balance, however, is very easily disrupted when work is hampered by the distances between those workers. One of the major concerns of hybrid work environments is communication. While there are some projects and workflows that can be easily siloed, that’s not true for highly collaborative projects.
One solution is digitized and scalable online platforms that enable remote access and scale, without hampering collaboration. For example, if the life cycle of a document involves email exclusively, that could result in missed updates, multiple versions, and general confusion amongst your stakeholders.
A well-resourced online document management system addresses many of these critical problems and improves online collaboration. When the entire team is working from a single record of truth – even if it’s a single document or application – updates, changes, and comments are easily resolved, no matter where everyone may be working.
Disaster Recovery and Secure Storage
Electronic document management systems offer improved security and redundancy of records, which is especially important in the event of a disaster. Emergencies are sudden, and the more redundancy is already in place by way of offsite storage and digital access, the more prepared you are to recover from a weather event, fire, water damage from a burst pipe, etc. By using an offsite storage and a document management system, your organization won’t lose critical documents and can get up and running faster to address emergencies and respond to stakeholder and client needs.
Tracking and Reporting
Employees often suffer from a “forest for the trees” issue. They become so accustomed to workarounds, shortcomings, client complaints, and so forth, those workarounds feel like sustainable solutions, even when they’re not. Tracking and collecting the right metadata for your team ensures that you can prevent future issues, which are often compounded by distance working.
Effective workflow automation and documentation are easily among the most useful forecasting tools available. They provide management the tools it needs (in the form of metadata) to keep track of common performance issues, complaints, and systemic challenges.
When you track both customer/end user and employee metrics, you get an instant understanding of common interruptions, quality issues, delivery complaints, and/or anything else that disrupts the delivery of your goods or services.
Custom Workflow Automation
Burnout is real. How real? In 2021, the job site Indeed conducted a survey of over 1,500 workers in the U.S. The results? 52% said they were “experiencing burnout” in 2021 (up 9% from 43% in Indeed’s pre-COVID-19 survey). Over one-third of those respondents also said that more flexible schedules and remote work would address that burnout.
As you and your team proactively avoid cycles that lead to burnout, try this tip: Automate the tedium. Automated waterfall responses at the database level send out automatic alerts, for example. When a status is changed, or a process is completed, the next set of participants are notified via email or signaled that the next step in the workflow needs to be addressed.
Better yet: Work with a team that has experience and a proven methodology to build those workflows for you, and one that satisfies your needs while discovering areas of improvement that you may not have noticed.
Interfaces and Custom Reports
What are the reports you need that will replace analog systems? Addressing that question is hardly simple, but solving it can be a real game changer for your organization. Automating and documenting the life cycle of a single document (or series of documents):
- Adheres to required document-retention schedules
- Improves compliance for existing regulations (HIPAA and so forth)
- Provides “at a glance” status of current document life cycles
- Follows logic-based taxonomies based on your organizational needs
- Improves search functions for the entire staff
Summing Up
Document management automation provides remote teams and geographically diverse stakeholders with the scale, access, and security your organization needs to meet the demands of a digital future. It’s critical to work with a team that has the knowledge base to customize your system to satisfy your regulatory, security, and organizational needs.
QFlow’s expertise in enterprise document management and cloud systems ensures organizations have the superior service they need. Our Q-Action platforms help reduce processing times and provide encrypted digital environments so only authorized users have direct access to your customer-related documents and data.
If you work for any organization with enterprise levels of document processing, contact us today and learn how we can help you improve productivity while reducing your document processing and storage costs.
