How to achieve better workflows with a remote workforce

Human Resources: A Model for Workflow Automation

Human Resources – the recruiting, employee onboarding and retention, and promoting a positive company culture – is a central pillar for any organization. A lot of the processes begin with paper and offer an opportunity for improvement.

For example, Caitlin is the Director of Human Resources at a manufacturing facility. Her job requires compliance with several privacy laws, highly regulated policies, and consistent audits. She is constantly handling documents that have sensitive, personal, and confidential information.

Manual systems and piles of paperwork increase the risk of error and put a strain on timelines and resources in an effort to keep up with the movement of information off the paper and then the movement of the paper itself from one person to another.

Under the current system, a simple task such as enrolling an employee in the company benefit program is more complex than necessary.

• First, an employee must print and fill out the document by hand.

• Then, the paper documents must be routed to the accounting department for payroll.

• Next, the documents loop back to the health benefits manager for manual entry into the database.

Throughout this journey, Caitlin is constantly communicating deadlines while spending extra time trying to manage and organize all the other administrative tasks in her workload. Her challenge lies in overseeing the movement of paper – for the information it contains – from one siloed process to another.

But as we’ve seen, needs can change and change quickly. In this instance, Caitlin knows that to keep up with the sudden and ever-evolving needs of her business, she needs solutions that reduce time-consuming manual tasks, speed up response times, encourage collaboration, and can be easily integrated without causing disruption to daily operations.

Plus, she needs to keep remote workers in mind. Any solutions she considers must also provide off-site staff (and potential new talent) the ability to access and retrieve documents from any location.

Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams

Caitlin knows communication is key when you have remote workers. To ensure the best communication, she turns to Microsoft 365™ and Microsoft Teams. Microsoft Outlook, applications like Word and Excel and Microsoft OneDrive provide productivity tools. Microsoft Teams makes it easy to schedule virtual meetings via videoconferencing with screen-sharing features for presentations.

With her team connected on one secure platform, she can monitor and track progress of tasks through virtual check-ins and maintain accurate timelines for recruiting and onboarding. Her team can also share files and images within the chat application, and consistently communicate timelines and goals.

Ricoh MFP and Smart Integration Solutions

Paired with the company’s Ricoh Multifunction Printer (MFP), Ricoh’s Smart Integration Solutions digitally transform documents with the push of a button – making records retention, document security, and document storage faster and simpler.

Instead of waiting for files to process through the accounting department, Caitlin can scan or email documents into the MFP – in the correct format, under the correct file name – without the risk of it ending up in the wrong hands.

DocuWare

With DocuWare, Caitlin can easily search for and manage critical employee and company information securely, from one centralized document management system. With this automated system, she can share, edit and archive employee records while maintaining an accurate audit trail.  

Better Workflows, Better Engagement

Now, with easily integrated solutions provided by Ricoh, Caitlin has gained more time in her day to focus on strategic business initiatives and less time tracking down paperwork. She has seen significant improvements in these areas:

• Better communication and collaboration between departments

• Centralized, searchable documents that can easily be shared with authorized users – remotely or on-site

• Timely processing of documents and employee information

• Reduced manual data entry errors