Organizations have adapted well to the new realities of business. After months facilitating remote teams, they’re well versed in using digital alternatives to replace business staples like meeting in person and signing paper documents.
With the rise of the hybrid office — where employees split their time between a corporate hub and home office—it is imperative to fix this disconnect. With opportunities for impromptu meetings and in-person collaboration reduced, organizations must find alternative ways to facilitate nimble, agile processes. Physical offices will still have a role, but according to Harvard Business Review they “will become primarily a culture space, providing workers with a social anchor, facilitating connections, enabling learning, and fostering unscripted, innovative collaboration.”
Real work will be done remotely — and, increasingly, it will rely on greater integration of critical business processes and core business applications. When document-based processes lack integration, they can only be sustained through a lot of duplicate data entry and repetitive physical or manual steps. Worse, with staff working across a range of unpredictable locations, relying on physical document workflows and paper-based steps will exacerbate delays. It also forces staff to work across multiple applications, which increases the chance of introducing errors at every stage and makes maintaining an audit trail — for compliance with regulations such as GDPR — significantly more difficult. This can expose the organization to financial penalties if its practices are found to be lacking.
More than a third of respondents to surveys conducted by IDG and Adobe found their jobs more complex and time consuming because of poor integration. Overwhelmingly, this was something that impacted their ability to complete document workflows — from creation to sign-off. Why? In many cases, their organization had not adopted a holistic approach for creating, sharing, and authorizing key business document processes. Another key factor was document processes were not integrated with critical productivity and business solutions like Microsoft 365.
In contrast, integrated workflows enabled by Adobe Acrobat Sign help organizations track a document’s evolution from creation through approval to sign-off. With Adobe Document Cloud, organizations can integrate e-signature workflows into Microsoft 365 and more.
With prebuilt, out-of-the-box integration with Acrobat Sign and core business applications, organizations can more easily equip their teams with the tools they need to get work done smoothly and efficiently. This is good news considering more than half of UK workers surveyed by Adobe cited physical or manual steps as a significant cause of delay. A similar number in the United States, Benelux, and Germany felt that such processes resulted in a below-par employee experience.
While those findings might have the same root cause, low employee satisfaction should be most troubling to organizations that value their existing staff. As the employment market recovers and jobs are offered on a remote or hybrid basis, there will be a wider range of opportunities for the best and brightest talent. Organizations with integrated, unified solutions will be able to meet the expectations of their top employees by providing efficient, smooth, and fulfilling experiences.
Contact Adobe to learn how Acrobat Sign can empower your document workflows while simplifying the signing process.