Telework: Removing the Document-Sharing Bottleneck

Telework has unquestionable benefits – employee satisfaction, health, and productivity are often cited – but without easy access to business documents, those benefits may not be realized.

Forbes reports telework savings averaging $11,000 per employee per year, including the value of healthy, productive employees and the cost savings of reduced real estate and other facilities expenses.

But teleworkers need access to information in order to work efficiently, and that includes access to data which may currently be available only in paper form. Remote sharing of physical documents is obviously unwieldy. Teleworkers must to come to the documents’ location or the documents must be delivered to the remote workers. And if teleworking team members all need the same documents, the logistics get even more complicated and expensive.

All the teleworking productivity gains are wiped out by the paper document bottleneck.

You might think that a simple PDF of a physical document would be easy to share with any teleworker who needs it. That’s true. But what if there are hundreds or thousands of pages that teleworkers need to access? Further, what if they need to search for specific individual elements within those many documents?

That’s where enterprise-level digitization becomes a vital component of teleworking productivity. Digitization, also termed document conversion, creates “smart” digital documents – secure, searchable, and shareable via cloud computing. When paper documents are converted to a smart digital format, teleworkers’ productivity is preserved. Digital documents remain secure (have paper documents ever been lost or destroyed in your business?). And managers can monitor staffers’ work and support their collaborations remotely.

Some businesses have the time, expertise, and resources in-house to plan and execute a comprehensive digitization program. For many, however, an experienced outside vendor saves them the time and cost of a long learning curve and the personnel to administer an digitization program. If your business is making a move to telework, and time is of the essence, talk to a trusted digitization vendor about the best way to convert your paper documents and avoid the information bottleneck.

Photo ©James Steidl  / AdobeStock