Employees waste one day every week working with outdated processes
Inefficient document processes in European organisations are damaging productivity and leading to lost business, warns Adobe in a new report, Document Drain: How Back-Office Processes are Shredding Productivity.
Its survey of 7,000 professionals across Europe found that office workers are spending as much as one day a week (6.8 hours) on administration, such as filling out forms, printing documents and chasing signatures.
Almost half of European employees (48%) say that they have lost a contract due to poorly executed office tasks and one in three (33%) has had to cancel a project for the same reason. Complex and time-consuming administrative processes also add to employees’ workloads, with 64% working late to catch up on work and 49% working over the weekend.
Almost half of respondents blame inefficient technology for office workflow problems. Printing and emailing are cited as the biggest time-wasters by 96% of respondents, with 75% describing email/print processes as boring, time-consuming or challenging.
Other administrative processes that come in for criticism include searching for lost documents, on-boarding new colleagues and chasing people for signatures. These were thought to be ‘unnecessarily complex’ by 65%, 62% and 61% of respondents respectively.
European employees see a solution to many of these problems in modern technology, including e-signatures, viewed as a valuable time-saver by 74% of respondents, and mobile apps, which almost half believe have the capacity to transform work?ow in European offices.
