Stop Watching Your Employees Strike Out! Get a Workflow Management System

Congratulations! You purchased document management software so you can scan paper, store digital files, and… well... that’s about it. It’s a great start to be sure—an essential one!—but it’s missing one important thing that gives your employees what they need to slide into home, bases loaded. Without it, your office gets tagged by the shortstop every single day. In the face.

That important thing that’s missing is called workflow software. 

Don’t have it? Look around. 

Poor Annabelle’s over there staring out the window, looking despondent (more than usual). Billy-Bob’s banging his head gently on his desk so no one can hear it (but everyone can hear the muffled agony). And Harry just went from happy to hellfire because he found a document his client needs but it’s locked because Chatty Cathy has the file open but isn’t at her desk because she’s distractible—she’s down the street getting second-round coffees from the coffee shop dude with the tatt sleeve. 

Your employees don’t want to be despondent or negatively self-aggressive or distracted or irritated. They want to feel happy and do a good job. But you didn’t give them the tools they need to get stuff done. And since that kind of friction trickles down from your employees to your clients, you better get on it. It’s time to pull up some office socks, bring the coffee in-house, put on some rubber hats, temper tempers, and draw the blinds—with workflow software.

Get Your Game Face On With Workflow Software

Maybe you didn’t do your homework—that hurts! Or maybe whoever sold you your document management software made it sound like it could do more than it can actually do. Whatever the oopsy, all is not lost; it’s a simple fix. Time to add workflow software to your system. Play ball!

Scanning and adding your documents to a document management system is great because it eliminates the paper mountain that crushes productivity. Problem is, without proper access, search, and share controls, the paper mountain becomes a digital mountain. Leaner, yes. More cost-effective, yuh-huh! Super efficient? No sir. Not yet. That’s because leaving people in charge of managing digital documents works out the same way leaving people in charge of managing paper documents does—inefficiently.

Workflow management software takes over the flow of how documents go so employees can get down to doing what they were hired to do to make your company money. Workflow software takes charge of accessibility, findability, and permission-editability (for everyone) quickly and easily.

Workflow Management Software Reduces Human Touchpoints

Your company likely uses a lot of different workflows to complete tasks and reach business goals. If you don’t manage those flows properly with software, that means you depend too much on humans to keep things moving. Most humans don’t go to school to manage workflows. They go to school to sharpen their laser-sharp skills that you pay them a premium to apply to the advancement of your company’s bottom line. 

When you install workflow software, it’s like hiring a robot to manage emails, meetings, calls, instant messages, and office pop-ins that, if managed by high-salary employees, turns into expensive mistakes, long turnaround times, compliance issues, and other problems. 

To truly manage your organization’s workflow, get used to the idea of robotic automation. Because paying people to perform repetitive tasks doesn’t make sense. In other words, stop sending your pitcher to retrieve foul balls. What you need is a departmentally-agnostic and flexible system that lifts your office into 2021. 

Dare to Dream: What Workflow Management Software Can Do

You see, your documents are data. And data fuels the forward movement of your company. If you’ve been dreaming of something that allows everyone in your company to act quickly with relevant and accurate information at the click of a button, dream no more! Help is here.

This is why companies invest in workflow software:

Reduce errors

Zero errors is not a realistic goal for human beings. The best of us proactively flag a lot of errors and fix them. The non-best of us misses stuff. With a workflow management system, errors are prevented from occurring in the first place. When they do happen, your system pinpoints the exact location where the mistake happened so you can prevent the same errors from happening again. That’s called learning. And bots do that well.

Eliminate silos—everyone and everything is connected

Workflow management systems connect people, software, and work culture. A workflow system draws data from different software tools and runs workflows between them like electronic connect-the-dots. Since employees use more than one application, workflow systems bring apps into a huddle where knowledge is shared. Post-huddle plays are pulled off with perfect execution.

On top of being a grand facilitator, your workflow system learns more about how your company works as time goes on, adding that data to a digital dugout. As the dugout grows, you analyze how it looks and use it to improve your game going forward. That’s called optimization right there. Got a lot of lefty-batters popping out of the dugout? Send your strongest outfield arm to right field. 

Increase productivity

You know how some people don’t like change? Even those people will fall in love quickly with a workflow management system. That’s because when things are automated, team members notice how much time they save not having to keep track of the menial stuff—no more sending emails and updating information in multiple tools.

Harry stops sending hate beams from his eyeballs at Cathy’s empty chair. Cathy stops leaving files open because her team’s requests for access boop her out of her daydreams. Billy-Bob focuses his attention on a neatly-organized task list instead of the surface of his desk, and Annabelle took charge of her procrastination because the barriers fell away and the too-hefty heap became a doable direction. 

Eliminate redundant manual tasks

Office workers spend an average of 69 days a year on mundane tasks. Those repetitive tasks cost $5 trillion a year globally. That’s gross! No matter how you look at that cost, breaking it down in a per-whatever way, it’s a ton of money. There are more interesting tasks that require human attention. Instead of throwing money away like that, move some of it over onto cheaper auto-bots that don’t mind performing those tasks—and pocket the rest. 

You see, workflow systems, designed with your pre-defined business rules, do these jobs for you. Go ahead and configure them to automatically trigger steps based on specified conditions. For example, if a budget-maker finishes a budget, set the workflow to notify the budget-approver to approve it. No hallway walking. No emails. No shouting down halls or leaving voicemails. No dust gathering. Is critical data missing? Send it back to the budget-maker in the previous step of the workflow and communicate non-approval using the tool. Information is not stuck in a confusing email thread, so everything happens quickly and smoothly. This is a big deal. All of those minutes add up and keep the wheels turning better.

Juggle multiple tasks with ease

Everything you need is in your workflow management system, whether you want to onboard multiple employees, manage IT requests, run internal surveys, raise marketing content requests, create a contactless customer experience, build digital sales interactions, or approve travel reimbursements. All requests are neatly organized according to different processes in one workflow system instead of multiple project boards, individual systems, sticky notes on windows, tacks stuck in corkboards, and plays markered on whiteboards. No confusion and no delays. 

Increase control, transparency, and trust

There’s no need for micromanagement because the duties of each job role are crystal clear with defined goals and expectations. Employees know what they need to do, and this makes managers more comfortable when delegating tasks. Everything happens out in the open with more control over data accessibility. If you’re the Catcher, you work on flexibility and your hand signals. Second baseman? Work your double plays and relay position. 

Administrators publicly display or privately hide information relating to specific job roles or teams. If your Backstop needs a personal trainer or a pair of glasses, don’t announce that to the entire team. Keep that between you and the near-sighted, chubby Backstop. 

Improve work culture

One frustrated, unhappy employee is one too many. Unhappiness breeds a pull-down effect. Give your employees collaborative push-ups and drive their productivity with goals. A workflow management system keeps work organized and trackable. Employees focus on completing projects benchmark by benchmark and spend less time sifting through emails and chat messages that pull their attention away from incremental gains.

All of this gets you to home base like a line drive off the sweet spot of a money-making bat. Get workflow software today and watch your ROI hit the flyball sky.

No More Excuses—Efficiency Awaits

Automating office workflows creates a real, measurable impact. Today, automation is a top priority for businesses across industries around the world. Global forecasts project workflow software investment to grow from $6.8 billion in 2018 to $12.6 billion by 2023. It’s the world we now live in. Productivity gets things done faster and better at the nuts-and-bolts level. But improved workplace morale—employee happiness!—ultimately affects your company’s bottom line, spreading good vibes throughout your organization like the smell of popcorn and hotdogs drifting through a stadium. 

We’re making the workplace a better place. RDS gives forward-thinking companies just like yours the tools they need to do good things in 2021 (and beyond). We install automated workflows that give you back time, minimize daily frustrations, and set you up to royally knock one out of the park. We’re over-achievers! Reach out today.