Waiting – we all hate to do it. Whether it’s sitting at traffic lights waiting for the green light or standing in a kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil, we would much rather be using our time more productively. Unfortunately, these kinds of things are hard to avoid in everyday life, but that doesn’t mean we should accept waiting in the workplace. Here, Stephen Parker, CEO of Parker Software, explores how business automation technology can give businesses the green light.
Everyone knows what it’s like to twiddle your thumbs while waiting for a large email attachment to download, or spending hours sorting through emails that landed during meetings or lunch breaks. We accept these tedious and time consuming anomalies as part of a normal working day. However, things like this are actually costing businesses £2,100 per employee each year. A recent study by Sharp UK found that businesses waste a total of 167 hours per month on bad technology and inefficient business processes. However, outdated computer systems aren’t the only thing putting the brakes on efficiency. How effectively companies approach time intensive administrative tasks are the main causes of wasted productivity.
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The Sharp UK survey discovered that inefficiencies in business processes and outdated technology amount to four weeks a year per employee in wasted time. Employees are frequently distracted from key tasks with things like responding to and filing incoming emails, waiting for downloads or recording key information from social media channels and SMS messages into CRM systems. As the average employee receives 121 emails each day, 55 per cent of their day is spent on these administrative tasks, taking attention away from responsibilities that hold more value for a business. So how can businesses increase workplace efficiencies?
One simple answer is to incorporate business automation technology, such as ThinkAutomation, into your processes. Business automation technology can automate 30 per cent of existing administration activities. For example, parsing key information from incoming emails and responding with the correct information can be completed instantly without employee input.
A+ for efficiency
However, handling incoming emails is not the only task that takes time away from a business. Locating files on a company server is responsible for the largest portion of wasted time, taking a total of 23 minutes per day per employee. While those 23 minutes spent sifting through servers may not seem that damaging, they’re actually having a major impact.
Business automation software can drastically decrease the time employees spend searching for files by automatically filing incoming data from emails, SMS messages and social media platforms into the correct place. By removing the inefficient process of manually saving documents, businesses can ensure no key information is lost and time is spent more efficiently.
The software can operate in the background across all aspects of a business —handling anything from generating automatic translations of emails and sending automated responses to creating Autotask tickets. Having the software working away behind the scenes is like having an additional member of the team solely dedicated to streamlining all your communications.
Just as home instant coffee machines have removed the annoyance of waiting around for your morning cappuccino, business automation software can remove the waiting at work. The simple technology completes all those annoying tasks employees dislike, leaving them free to focus on the jobs they actually enjoy and that actually make your business more successful, creating a happier workforce and happier customers.
