Feeling Buried Under Your Workload?
You’re not alone, the reality is most of us have more work than we can possibly achieve within a working week. When you add to this the demands of love, life, play, family, regular exercise and an ounce of a social life, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.
Most work involves a certain amount of paperwork, the general term we use for the checklists, forms, invoices, surveys, audits, formal reports, receipts and other business processes that we complete in the process of getting work done.
Although computers can eliminate much of the paperwork that’s used within an office environment, multi-part forms, double data handling and time consuming formal report writing are still commonplace in the mobile work that takes place away from the desk or on the road, where an internet connection cannot be guaranteed.
Paperwork is Inefficient
Yes, this paperwork is time consuming and inefficient. It can get lost, forgotten, or can’t be read. It’s slow to share and impacts your bottom line in terms of lost time, cost or delays. However, we don’t see this as the key problem with paperwork. The key issue perhaps is the feeling of being ‘overwhelmed’. When the paperwork takes the heart out of the job, or increases workload beyond what’s achievable within a working week. The point at which it damages personal happiness or increases stress levels.
What are the Motivating Factors?
The motivation behind a drive for efficiency could range from a small office who would use time saved to take on more clients, or to go home at 5pm and stop working at weekends. To perhaps a larger organisation who need to act on near real time data to improve performance against competitors, or whose workforce require engaging work and find that mundane administrative tasks negatively impacts staff retention.
But there is another way…
The Alternative: Paperwork Automation
Paperwork automation is using technology to make it easier to create, edit, store, and find important documents. This saves time and makes it less necessary to do these tasks by hand. Mobile forms and reporting apps allow mobile workers to capture data on the go using mobile phones or tablets, and automatically generate instant reports. This completely removes the need for paper.
Either way, work isn’t really about the paperwork, it’s about people work. So let’s get paper out of the way and concentrate on working with people.
Introducing a Sense of Calm to the Office
We’ve found that when people ditch paper-based processes and switch to software automation, instead, a calmer office environment is created overall. Team members feel less of a need to run around like headless chickens, chasing for information, and admin teams have data coming through to them instead. Your processes become more efficient and your team are less stressed out. What’s not to like?
Data is All in One Place
Another contributor toward team burnout is when data is overly siloed, or kept in a variety of hard-to-reach places. If all your information is filed away in crumbling boxes in the office attic, or even if it’s kept on a badly organised, old hard drive, then it makes everybody’s life much more difficult.
With data stored in one software platform, no information gets lost and it can be easily retrieved and presented to clients, whenever necessary. There are no worries about jobs not getting done properly because your team have all the necessary information available to them from the off. All the information is stored safely in a centralised location on the cloud.
Greater Sense of Control
Thankfully, we’re living in a time where mental health is far more commonly talked about. But burnout among your team members can really impact upon their mental well-being.
The stress of paperwork, and making sure everything gets filled in exactly how it’s meant to, can be overwhelming. It also means that people don’t feel confident enough to take time off, for fear that things won’t get completed correctly in their absence.
Invariably, this only makes team members’ wellbeing worse – after all, we all need a holiday every now and again. With paperwork automation, you replace your paper-based processes with incredibly intuitive and easy-to-use software processes, instead. This makes it easier for your field team, and quicker for admin teams. Another win all round!
Final Thoughts
Rugged Data takes the paper out of the equation with our data capture and reporting software. We simply turn your paper-based workflows into an easy-to-use app so that you will never be drowning in paper again. Contact us to discuss how we can make paper a thing of the past.
Rugged Data takes paper out of the equation with our data capture and reporting software. We simply turn your paper-based workflows into an easy-to-use app so that you will never be drowning in paper again. Contact us to discuss how we can make paper a thing of the past.
