5 Common Tasks That Can Be Made Easier With Office Automation
Want your office to work like a clock but with less effort? Learn how office automation can improve the most common tasks that your team has to deal with every day.
In our day-to-day work lives it is becoming increasingly more important to embrace office automation to facilitate tedious and repetitive time-eating tasks. Especially, as more people are working from a coworking space or even from home where they might have less resources than in a traditional office environment.
The amount of manual labor that was previously acceptable for certain tasks is no longer efficient or feasible. Office automation technologies allow for high volume/low touch processes that increase productivity. We are seeing many companies of all sizes modernize in many areas:
- Human resources
- Organizational tasks
- Administrative duties, etc.
You may be wondering, “What is office automation?”. Office automation is the process of using various types of computer software/machinery to create, collect, store, edit, and relay information to accomplish basic tasks. If you are looking for ways to automate office tasks in your business, here are 5 easy things to automate starting today.
Automating the Most Common Task First: Use Electronic Signatures
Does your business require clients to complete or sign any kind of paperwork? It’s likely it does, and implementing E-signatures is an easy and cost-effective way to start automating tasks. Rather than having your client, colleague or partner company fumble around with completing physical copies of paperwork, use an e-signature software to eliminate the manual process.
How to automate such tasks, you ask? With office automation tools like Adobe Sign or DocuSign you can quickly email a form to one or more parties to complete. As an added bonus, you can even receive notifications for when a document has been signed. If a document requires signatures from multiple people, you can even arrange a signing order so that once the first-person signs, the next signee in line will automatically be emailed the document and so on.
Hiring, Payroll and Benefits: Office Automation Makes Them Flawless
While the human resource roll will likely never be fully automated, there are numerous tasks such as new hire onboarding, payroll and benefits management which can be easily automated. In turn automation allows HR managers to handle higher volumes of work, which is vital for large corporations, or to focus on other tasks that would not be optimized by automated office equipment.
With programs like Bamboo, Rippling, Namely and many other types of office automation software, your HR department can spend less time pushing paper and more time interacting with and engaging employees.
Resource & Information Sharing
An office automation system or software is one major way to create efficiencies by placing all documents and resources in one place. If your question is “What is office automation software and how do I choose it?”, we advise you to rely on trusted companies for starters. For example, the Microsoft Office Suite has been continually updated over the years to include programs like Teams, To Do, SharePoint and many others to integrate all administrative office tasks shared by multiple team members and reduce the time and effort spent on previously labor-intensive tasks.
Customer Relations Management (CRM)
Automated CRM programs help your business stay on track with managing and communicating with existing and potential clients. Office automation software makes it possible to customize communications and tasks for individual leads or clients, and some manual steps can be removed from the process. Additionally, automated task reminders help maintain productivity. CRM programs provide the organization a company needs to be continually profitable.
Use Office Automation Tools for Data Backup
As the average office place continues to transition to digital platforms, like the ones listed above, it becomes increasingly important to protect data. Speaking about the data backup, automated task management is vital to keep information stored safely.
You have two options here:
- Invest in an IT service to install and monitor data backup and other IT services - it may be more beneficial for larger corporations.
- Services like Carbonite, IDrive and Dropbox are a great resource for data back-up for the startup or small business/
Make Another Step Forward With an Office Automation System
There are numerous ways to integrate office automation into your business. With new software being developed and released each day it is becoming more and more possible to create a completely customizable system for your team to ensure that your business is thriving!