How Document Automation Improves Employee Experience
Manual, repetitive processes such as filling out paperwork can be a waste of time and money, and frankly, boring for the employees that have to do it. Whether it’s HR staff that has to process employee forms such as for onboarding or for department managers that have to approve and manage monthly status reports, document management can be burdensome.
Yet with automation, document management can be much more efficient and effective while improving employee experience.
Paper Inefficiencies
Each year, U.S. companies spend over $120 billion on printed forms, most of which become outdated within three months, according to The Paperless Project. Not only is there a cost to printing and storing these documents, but there’s also a significant costs to mismanaging these documents. Large companies lose a document every 12 seconds, which costs $350-$700 each, and even misfiling a document costs a company an average of $125, adds The Paperless Project.
In terms of time, an IDC survey found that information workers’ challenges when working with documents results in a 21.3% total productivity loss. And addressing the time wasted on documents at 1,000-person organization is equivalent to hiring 213 employees, finds IDC.
The survey also found that information workers spend the most time creating documents, averaging 10 hours per week per employee. And more than seven hours a week are spent filling in forms and signing/approving documents.
Why Automation Is the Way Forward
With automation tools like One Paper Lane, which uses machine learning to digitize and autofill forms, workers can spend less time on these processes and focus on more stimulating, revenue-generating tasks. For example, instead of creating a new Word document and then converting it to a PDF to be printed and signed each time a contract changes, users could edit the document directly in One Paper Lane’s paperless platform and send it off for secure approval.
So what does that do for employee experience? Put simply, it makes work better.
Employees value flexibility, and by digitizing and automating documents, they can work from anywhere and free up time to focus on projects they value more. An ADP survey found that more than three-quarters of respondents felt positively about the trend that employees will do all work from a mobile device, and more than half felt positive about automation replacing people for repetitive work.
Even in sectors where automation is often thought of as a threat, automation can improve employee experience.
For example, an MIT study found that in manufacturing, automation actually improves employee satisfaction, as humans and machines can work in concert with each rather than in oppositions.
The study grouped two humans with a robot and tested three conditions: manual, where all tasks were allocated by a human; fully autonomous, where all tasks were allocated by the robot; and semi-autonomous where one human allocated tasks to himself, while a robot allocated tasks to other human.
As it turned out, “The fully-autonomous condition proved to be not only the most effective for the task, but also the method preferred by human workers. The workers were more likely to say that the robots ‘better understood them’ and ‘improved the efficiency of the team,’” writes an MIT News report of the study.
With all theses cost, time, and employee experience benefits of automation, it’s clear that businesses of all sizes should implement a new document management plan.
Getting started is easy. Sign up for a free trial of One Paper Lane to see for yourself how document automation can improve employee experience.
