How to Keep Paperwork Processes Moving with a Remote Workforce

Organizations and workforces are always evolving, as we become more and more digitally connected many organizations are no longer limiting where their employees can work. Remote work has expanded in the past decade and is likely to continue to grow.

Recent events surrounding the spread of COVID-19 (also known as Coronavirus) sparked organizations across the globe to take precautions to ensure the disease doesn’t spread within their business, including enforcing that sick employees stay home or pivoting to an entirely remote workforce. Additionally, as local and state governments enforce lockdowns or shelter-in-place mandates, organizations must ensure all non-essential employees can work remotely.

As businesses make this shift, they likely have to completely change how their day-to-day tasks are completed. To best accommodate remote workers, it’s absolutely crucial to have the systems and processes that allow for work to be completed without any disruptions.

While the use of digital communication tools can be helpful for remote employees, typically more advanced solutions are required to effectively complete work outside the four walls of the office. Fortunately, with automation your organization can easily adapt to a remote workforce.

Document Management

Just about every organization relies on paper documents to complete day-to-day tasks. Unfortunately, when shoved into storage, these piles of paper are virtually inaccessible to in-office employees, and unless they take filings cabinets home, these physical documents are impossible to retrieve for remote employees. By storing files in a way that makes employees unable to find and view them, you put your business at risk for slowing down or completely halting key operations.

Enterprise Document Management (EDM) eliminates those issues both inside the office and remotely by securely hosting and organizing all your documents in one place. Employees can quickly retrieve the file and continue working without hiccups. To best support employees regardless of the platform they’re using, an EDM solution supports all popular browsers, meaning they can access key documents anywhere, anytime, on any device.

It’s designed to be user friendly, meaning your employees will be able to utilize the system without spending extensive time in training, which is ideal for those who work far from your central office. Enterprise Document Management is made to be versatile, and is designed to work with multiple locations, departments, and devices. Even with its versatility across your organization, it’s extremely secure, allowing for version control and user-based access to ensure that a document doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

Our solution is much more robust than free file-sharing programs, it has full imaging features (scan, separation, OCR), a comprehensive audit trail to track changes, allows for annotations to make updates to the document, retention scheduling to ensure best case evidence and document lifecycle and web viewer control to view all common document formats without needing the native application. All these features promote active communication across departments, offices, and employees.

Web Forms

Your organization likely has dozens of forms required in order to complete basic day-to-day tasks. Processes such as hiring, onboarding, sales and work orders, safety and service checklists, and more rely on forms in order to complete them. By using traditional paper forms you’re doing a massive disservice to your remote employees who either have to mail, scan, or email them back to someone who then has to manually re-enter the data into whatever system you’re utilizing. A paper-intensive form process leads to a loss of data, efficiency, and profitability. Fillable PDFs help alleviate some of these issues, but they’re clunky to use and are still error-prone, plus employees still need to manually enter in data.

Much like Document Management, web forms easily integrate with your ERP or other business software, meaning that an employee can complete a form and the data can immediately go exactly where it needs to.

This can be especially successful in human resources tasks that are typically paper-heavy. For example, during the hiring process, prospective employees typically need to complete a handful of forms. Rather than sending each form separately and hoping that it’s completed correctly, your human resources team can send a link to the application and background check forms, and once they’re hired, send a link to additional onboarding forms, prefilled with the information they put in on the initial application. For existing employees, forms designed for timesheets, time off requests, and other regular HR activities can eliminate the scramble of getting this information from employees who aren’t in the office.

Remote Accounts Payable

Accounts Payable used to be a paper-intensive process that could only be completed in-office. Using manual methods, the average invoice takes two weeks to process and requires approval from two to five people before it is fully processed. For remote employees, this could mean sending countless faxes and emails back and forth trying to get approval, and if a document needs to be sent from one office to another, it delays the process even more.

Implementing an Accounts Payable automation solution means that employees gain access to crucial documents as needed, and no longer need to manually enter and re-enter data, something that can prove to be a frustrating task if employees have limited desk space or a single monitor. Beyond that, your organization can eliminate late payment fees and take advantage of more early payment discounts.

Through AP Automation you can easily streamline your organization’s manual processes and significantly reduce invoice processing time and costs. The best part is you can take advantage of these benefits while supporting your remote employees, without needing to send documents back and forth for review or approval.

Why supporting remote employees matters

Having business processes that work effectively regardless of where employees are located is absolutely crucial in the case of emergencies such as the COVID-19 outbreak. By not having a plan and process in place, your organization may struggle to maintain day-to-day operations, frustrating employees and customers, and leading to loss of profits.

Fortunately, Mosaic can help your organization implement an automation system that is effective regardless of where your employees are located. Give us a call at 1-800-387-7859 to learn more.