Paper may seem like your office’s cheapest expense, but there are often unforeseen – and therefore unbudgeted – costs. That $5 ream of paper could cost up to $155 in associated paper costs (storage, copying, printing, postage, disposal and recycling). When you consider that the average office worker uses 10,000 sheets of paper annually, paper stands to have one of the most major impacts on your organization’s bottom line.
There are indirect costs as well.
The first is that paper decreases productivity. Studies show that over $14,000 worth of productivity is lost per worker each year due to difficulties in finding the data needed to complete their job. This is most likely connected to the finding that 50% of an employee’s time is spent looking for information. Rather than actually working, employees are wasting time rifling through scattered documents and deciphering illegible handwriting or mistyped notes.
For shift-based environments, there is a heavy reliance on paper during one of the most critical points of contact between employee and employer: the schedule. Schedules are passed around or posted on a board in the breakroom. Leave and overtime request forms need to be filled out and require supervisor signatures. Basically, there’s a lot of paper being used during one of the most volatile aspects of labor management. People call out sick; there’s an unexpected change in demand that requires adding more employees to the shift; a machine breaks down and an entire line needs to be de-crewed.
Schedules are dynamic and ever-changing, yet the schedule is being communicated via a static (and costly) process.
The second indirect cost?
Health and Safety
In response to the ongoing COVID-19 situation, many organizations are finding ways to reduce the amount of surfaces their employees need to touch. Paper, which floats around like air in any professional office, is an obvious source. Unlike other surfaces, paper cannot be disinfected, so many organizations are looking for ways to reduce paper use.
Some organizations are not able to have their employees work remotely to get the job done, meaning the employees are taking on a degree of risk every time they go to work. These facilities should be considering alternatives to paper processes, particularly with labor scheduling. Allowing employees to access schedules on their mobile devices makes it simpler to social distance; no more pieces of paper getting passed around, and no more unnecessary employee interactions with those not even working the same shift.
Communicating the schedule is one thing, but what about communicating schedule changes? Volunteering for overtime, swapping assignments, or requesting time off are other scheduling-related processes that have the opportunity to be digitized and “touch-free”.
The Indeavor Solution
With the Indeavor Engage mobile app, your employees can have more say in their schedules without disrupting workflows. By eliminating the need for paper forms and hosting job swap opportunities, volunteering and leave capabilities, and the hourly schedule all in one convenient location, you will help safeguard your employee’s well-being while putting real-time labor scheduling capabilities into their hands. With Indeavor, facilities can organize their shift operations remotely; supervisors and schedulers do not have to go to a common area or meeting room to align with this task.
Indeavor’s solution offers clients an end-to-end, cloud-based employee scheduling and absence management system. By integrating with your human capital management and enterprise resource planning systems, you can leverage a robust platform that provides you with real-time employee data. Relieve your supervisors of manual tasks and the constant mental fatigue brought upon by scheduling changes by automating the entire process, connecting the data to all of your existing corporate systems, and ensuring you always have the right qualified employee in each position.
