If it’s on Paper, it Should be in OpsAnalitica

The reality is that if you have your employees filling out paper forms as a part of their jobs, your company should be collecting that data digitally, in the OpsAnalitica Platform, where it can be used and analyzed. Or you should not be collecting it at all. 

Do you ever go to the doctor’s office and when you get there, they hand you a clip board with 10 old photocopies of induction sheets. You sit there in the waiting room writing your name and address and insurance information 5 times, filling out forms that you have filled 100’s of times throughout your life. The whole time you are like how do they not have this digitally? How stupid is this?  Really I have to come to this appointment 20 minutes early so I can do this? 

That is how your employees and customers feel when you ask them to do the same thing. They are looking at you like, how do you not have this information already. How is this the way it is done?  

Every year as technology becomes more commonplace in our lives, our tolerance for systems and interactions that are not smart and streamlined gets lower and lower.  People are not willing to work for or do business with companies that make it harder than it needs to be. They expect streamlined processes and technology. 

Collecting Data on Paper Forms:

  • Is a giant waste of data
  • Is Antiquated
  • Is considered not green
  • Is expensive
  • Is considered to be wasteful
  • It is known by employees  that nobody looks at these forms so they are considered a waste of time
  • Doesn’t inspire confidence in the business or its leadership 

By digitizing these paper processes, you will immediately see the following benefits:

  • Digital vs. Paper Process makes employees happier.
  • Data leads to a better understanding of what is happening in your business.
  • Provides management with the ability to make data-driven decisions
  • OpsAnalitica can hold people accountable for following the process.
  • With OpsAnalitica’s advanced rule builder, you can take your team through complex workflows that capture all pertinent data creating a complete picture and saving time.
  • Saving paper and ink is considered green.
  • Cheaper long-term storage costs.
  • If you are concerned about risk, you can delete documentation on a schedule in the OpsAnalitica Platform.

Nothing drives employee morale and job satisfaction lower than when employees are mandated to do processes they know don’t matter. Or even worse, processes that they know will never be reviewed. By definition, most paper forms never get looked at, the data collected on those paper forms never get used because no one has time to enter the information into a spreadsheet or database for analysis.  

Employees, especially millennials, want their work to contribute to the business’s overall success. Technology has transformed every aspect of our lives at home and work, and employees not only expect but demand that if you are going to make them do something that it better matter, or you should stop wasting their time.  

The number 2 reason why employees quit their jobs, according to The Top 10 Reasons Employees Leave Their Jobs in 2021, is stress and unmanageable workload.  

An unmanageable workload is created when employers hold employees to high standards, which is good, but don’t give them the tools and the support to achieve the standard, which is bad. This situation puts the employee in a constant state of feeling inadequate, where they know what they are supposed to do, but no matter how hard they work they can never get caught up.  

The easiest way to fix an unmanageable workload is to clear the employee’s path, remove obstacles, and support the employee with technology and tools that make their job easier to achieve.  

An unmanageable workload and being busy can be two different perceptions of the same amount of work. An employee with an unmanageable workload doesn’t feel supported by management and doesn’t feel like they have the tools necessary to do their jobs. 

The busy employee may have the same workload, but they feel supported by management; they have the tools to succeed. All they need to do is put in an honest day’s work and get through it all.  

Also, I would encourage you to conduct a process review and determine if you even need to have as many processes as you do. There are tons of processes in every business that were created to solve a problem at some point, but over time the problem goes away or the process itself becomes more costly to manage than the original problem. Processes like that should just be scrapped or completely redesigned.

You can look at it like this; there is either valuable business data that needs to be collected and analyzed or there isn’t. If there is valuable business data, compliance reporting, or accountability goals being achieved, great. It is worth it to mandate that our employees follow a process and collect this data. If there aren’t good reasons to keep doing something, we should be brave enough to cut the process and stop wasting their time.  

One other point that I want to mention. Not all data needs to be looked at every day. There is value in collecting data, even if you are only going to look at it once a year or every couple of years. So don’t cut every process just because the data you are collecting isn’t super important today or isn’t a top priority. Don’t just cut processes willy nilly; it’s better to collect data, review it, then determine it is useless than to assume it’s useless and never collect it.  

If your company still has a bunch of antiquated paper based processes, it behooves you to look at those processes and determine if they add value to the company in some way or if they don’t. If they add value then you should convert those paper based processes into OpsAnalitica processes, which is super easy to do, and start using the data, visibility, and accountability that OpsAnalitica provides all of our clients.  

If you determine that the process doesn’t add value and the data doesn’t add value then you should be a great boss and delete the process and free up your employees time, which they will love.  I would also recommend that you market internally all the bad processes you are scrapping to show your employees how much you care about them.  

If you are interested in learning more about how you can use OpsAnalitica to digitize your paper processes and how much insight we can create for you, then please click here and schedule a demo.  

Tommy Yionoulis

I've been in the restaurant industry for most of my adult life. I have a BSBA from University of Denver Hotel Restaurant school and an MBA from the same. When I wasn't working in restaurants I was either doing stand-up comedy, for 10 years, or large enterprise software consulting. I'm currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica and our Inspector platform was originally conceived when I worked for one of the largest sandwich franchisors in the country. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn.

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