The Top 5 Workplace Productivity Pitfalls And How To Avoid Them
By Chris Byers, Formstack
According to statistics from DOMO’s 6th “Data Never Sleeps” report, we are close to creating 1.7 MB of data every second—or one million TB of data per minute—for every person on Earth. To visualize the immensity of that data, consider that a standard DVD stores 8.5 GB of data. One million TB of data is enough DVDs laid end to end to span the distance between our company’s headquarter offices in Colorado and Indiana.
Illustrated this way, it’s no surprise that workplace productivity is impacted by how you collect, manage, store and analyze data.
To better understand the data issues businesses face, we reviewed more than 260,000 anonymized user forms created over a two-year period starting January 1, 2017. These forms spanned all industries and business sizes, including healthcare, legal, real estate, education and nonprofits. We also analyzed a variety of Formstack workflow automation tools, to include 1,900 workflows with nearly 125,000 submissions; more than 27,000 Formstack Go submissions; and close to 75,000 integration use cases.
Through our database research and customer interviews, we’ve identified five common workplace productivity pitfalls plaguing businesses all over the world:
1. Data collection is still paper based. Whether due to outdated paper forms, confusing fillable PDFs or complicated multi-step processes, collecting data is still an issue halting many businesses from making progress on projects, processes and business improvements.
Inefficient data collection leads to inaccurate data, or no data at all. Furthermore, according to data from our previous report, The State of Workflow Automation in 2018, we found that managers are spending upwards of eight hours per week on inefficient data collection.
Hundreds, if not thousands, of productive hours are lost every year on manual data entry.
2. Data is not easily searchable. Another shocking statistic that we found in our research was the amount of time being spent simply searching for information. A McKinsey & Company report found that employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching for and gathering information.
That means that workers are spending nearly a fourth of their workweek searching for information, which includes finding and accessing documents from file storage. These findings are confirmed by our research: workers are spending hours searching through multiple storage sites and locations to track down just one file.
3. Information sharing is inconsistent. How many times have you seen, or used, the words “per my last email” when communicating with a coworker? Business professionals are inundated with communications from multiple streams, making it more difficult than ever to streamline sharing data.
Did your manager send that new proposal for your edits via email or Slack? Maybe it was a Google Drive notification, or perhaps linked in Monday.com or Jira?
If those questions caused you to twitch, then you already know that relying on email or sending various communications through different channels is a recipe for disaster. Our research has found that consolidating data into one location and communicating within that channel minimizes miscommunication and boosts productivity.
4. Repetitive tasks aren’t being automated. Manual tasks take up a huge portion of the workday across most industries. Automating these tasks—like data routing, emails, and file storage—makes a huge impact on productivity. When something is as easy as set it and forget it, you get ample time back to focus on major priorities.
In our research of more than 260,000 forms, we found nearly a quarter contained at least one integration to another tool, with the three most common being integrations for accepting online payments, exporting and syncing spreadsheets, and managing customer data through a CRM. This is no surprise considering these workflows have historically involved some degree of manual work.
5. Documents, while vital, take a significant amount of time to create. For those in the sales, healthcare, or law profession, manually creating or updating documents can be a nightmare. Finding a way to automatically transfer newly collected data into pre-created documents can save time, improve customer satisfaction, and simplify complicated workflows.
Looking at just one industry, in our report, we found that 50 percent of law offices take more than a week to create a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). As NDAs become more and more common, a week or longer production time quickly becomes untenable, never mind the small inconsistencies that come as a result of different attorneys and paralegals producing the documents.
Using document creation tools helps standardize documents—including NDAs, sales proposals and contracts—across an organization and reduces the amount of time required to develop these documents.
Where Do We Go From Here?
With these pitfalls in mind, it’s no surprise that improving data collection and management processes can quickly boost workplace efficiency and employee productivity. With data becoming increasingly more important to businesses by the minute, implementing workflow process improvements is crucial to cutting through the chaos.
It’s time to say goodbye to inefficient and complicated manual tasks and identify tools and SOPs that help all members of a business become more efficient. The amount of data you process day in and day out is only going to grow going forward. By auditing and analyzing your processes and implementing new strategies, workflows, and technology now, you’ll be ahead of the ever-changing data landscape.