Global Study Shows 69 Percent of Professionals Would Switch Jobs for Less Paperwork. Adobe survey finds 83 percent of workers feel hampered by outdated ways of working with documents.
A study of more than 5,000 office professionals across the US, UK, Germany, France and Australia exposes how antiquated business processes and outdated ways of working with documents are having a dramatic impact on productivity, efficiency and worker satisfaction. The findings are detailed in Paper Jam: Why Documents are Dragging Us Down, a new report released today by Adobe (FTSE: ADBE) that provides new insights on the attitudes of business professionals toward how work actually gets done.
Professionals are clearly fed up with antiquated business processes. An overwhelming majority (83 percent) feel their success and ability to be productive at work are slowed down by outdated ways of working with documents, and 61 percent of professionals (69 percent in the US) would change jobs solely for the sake of dramatically less paperwork. Further, more than a quarter of professionals (more than a third in the US) believe mundane tasks and cumbersome, inefficient processes are holding back their career advancement.
The research findings show that document-related tasks are more than a source of frustration: they’re a bottleneck to getting real work done. Sixty percent of office workers feel mundane and inefficient processes distract them from more important tasks, and over half (54 percent) of professionals believe these inefficiencies stop them from doing their best work. Forty-four percent of respondents report that the volume of e-mail attachments has made their work life more complicated, and cite not being able to find documents they know exist (82 percent) and version control (77 percent) as the most frustrating document problems. Forty percent of professionals have lost important electronic information or documents, and 66 percent of those losses were caused by a computer or hard drive failure.
Digital document disparity
People want to be able to access documents as easily as other forms of popular digital content today, yet documents lag behind other content and media types in going digital. “Other content types like music and photos – and the ways we interact with them – have moved forward. Why not documents?” said Kevin Lynch, vice president and general manager of Document Services, Adobe. “The rise of mobile will exacerbate this document gap even more. This should be a wake-up call to businesses that their productivity is taking a hit and they need to do something about it.”
Respondents say that accessing important information from anywhere is a priority, whether for work (64 percent) or personal use (60 percent). However, respondents reported that only six percent of their documents are stored in the cloud. Moreover, respondents say that 63 percent of their photos are digital and the majority (55 percent) of music is digital, but only 43 percent of their documents are available and accessible in digital format.
People have embraced digital formats for other types of content in their personal lives, but they still cling to traditional paper at work. When asked about going paper-free for various tasks, more than four in five agree it saves time, is fast and easy. However, 74 percent of professionals say they are reliant on paper documents at work and 50 percent admit to being emotionally attached to paper documents. Further, people report feeling uncomfortable with the idea of having digital-only copies of important personal (55 percent) and work (35 percent) documents and 44 percent of respondents believe they will still be reliant on paper at work five years from now.
