May 4, 2020 Working from Home? Stay Connected When Working Remotely

There are a variety of methods organisations can use to ensure that important documents and files can be shared between employees.

Everyone is in a bit of a sticky situation at the moment; many businesses are still trying to figure out a way of streamlining their admin side of things, to ensure at least some part of their business continues running, but ensuring they can still communicate and process files to and from other employees is just as important.

Working from home can quickly become difficult especially with issues surrounding communication not only between employees but with the transfer and sharing of important documents.

Fortunately, there are a variety of methods organisations can use to ensure that important documents and files can be shared between employees, allowing day to day operations to become significantly easier.

Document digitisation

Working remotely will likely mean that paper documents and files are unable to be shared directly between employees. Therefore digitising your documents is an essential task that must be undertaken in order to ensure that your employees can work from home effectively and efficiently.

The main benefits of digitising your documents include ease of access and allow for increased employee efficiency and it is therefore recommended that you digitise and back up your documents regularly even when not working remotely.

Alternatively, you can store all future documents directly onto a laptop, computer or company network. The use of a cloud based storage system is also an option as it allows smooth collaboration between employees during critical times when they are unable to get together in person to work on a specific project.

However, this is highly dependent on the type of organisation and the market in which you operate. Working solely on a digital document basis also requires technical capabilities which some smaller organisations may not have, and problems can be more difficult to resolve without sufficient knowledge.

How to digitise your documents correctly

It is important to remember that not all documents require digitisation. It is important to identify which documents are essential to your daily operations and which ones you and your employees will require for the period where your business operations are taking place remotely.

Upon identifying the most important documents the next step is preparing those documents for the scanning and digitisation process. This includes ensuring that essential information is all present and any unnecessary information is removed.

Furthermore it is important to remove any mundane office items such as paper clips, staples, pins and sticky notes which can not only interfere with the scanning process but also affect how your documents look after digitisation is complete.

The final step is to scan your documents and there are a variety of apps and software available that make scanning documents simple. Furthermore companies can send newly scanned documents straight from their phone and modern printer often have a built in scanning feature. However none of these solutions are suitable for large scale scanning and outsourcing to a specialist document scanning company can often be the simpler option.

Communication

Whilst it is important to ensure that employees have access to all the correct files and documents they may require when working remotely, it is just as important ensuring that employees are able to communicate with each other especially regarding tasks that require input from several departments or managers.

Fortunately, there already exists a large variety of communication platforms designed specifically for allowing employees to communicate with each other during periods in which they are working remotely.

These include a variety of paid and free options such as Zoom, Microsoft teams and Skype and each has their own unique benefits and limitations. The communication platform that you require will depend on the size of your organisation as well as the specific requirements of your business.

It is therefore important to ensure that you sufficiently research each platform before making a final decision.

Whilst selecting the correct communication platform for your organisation is essential it is important that you as a manager or business owner understand how to effectively communicate with employees that are working remotely.

The main point to consider when managing communication with remote employees it is essential to ensure that you are taking a proactive approach to communication management. The more involved you can be as a leader the likelier your teams are able to work together and ensure that deadlines are still being met even though workers are not together in an office environment.

https://www.radsstorage.co.uk/

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