The Top 5 Ways ECM Can Help You Avoid an Annoying Co-worker

The corporate workplace is not for the faint of heart. Any time you get a group of people together with different backgrounds and interests and isolate them into large fabric-covered boxes, chances are that you’ll find some personality clashes.

While not every office is subject to anecdotes about Dwight Schrute’s life on the beet farm or the ineptitude of Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, there are probably some workplace idiosyncrasies that—given the opportunity—you would just as soon avoid. You know what I’m talking about. Maybe you’re getting a little too much information about your coworkers on casual day. Or maybe—now that the obsessive conversation over the American Idol results has died down—there are awkward silences near the water cooler. It could just be that you’d like to steer clear of that coworker who is so fanatical about her hobby that she can’t talk about anything else. (Seriously. We’re all concerned about the honeybee decline, but there are other things to talk about.)

Enterprise content management (ECM) won’t decrease your incidence of email lottery notifications or male enhancement-related spam, but it can help you retain your sanity in the workplace. For those days when you just want to get your work done without interruption— whether it comes in the form of a debate about the discrepancies in the most recent Star Trek movie or a one-sided conversation about why your coworker’s cats are the best pets in the entire history of domesticated animals—consider these benefits:

1. Business process management (BPM) eliminates the need to drop the paperwork off at your annoying coworker’s desk.

With BPM, you can distribute, receive, and access work and online files digitally. This means that all of the information that you need to process your work is available immediately, accessible with the click of a mouse. In addition to enabling you to increase your productivity and improve services to customers and partners, this means that you can also avoid overhearing that phone conversation that is so important that your coworker feels the need to broadcast it on speakerphone.

BPM gives you secure, immediate access to your work documents from any web browser. So if you are the employee who is unfortunate enough to have a cubicle next to the woman who insists on coming to work when she’s sick, it might be nice to have the option of working remotely during cold and flu season. In these days of potential global pandemics, you can’t be too careful.

2. Electronic access ensures that your records are available whenever you need them. Even if your coworkers are alphabetically challenged.

Under a paper-based system, it’s not uncommon for records to be duplicated, misfiled, or even lost. Without question, this can be a major cause of annoyance. The news is worse if you look at the big picture: in a compliance environment that grows continually more rigid, mismanagement of your records can result in expensive penalties. An enterprise content management system lets you scan and store those paper records in an electronic repository along with your business forms, faxes, images, documents (paper and electronic), personnel files, etc. The information that you need to process your work efficiently is only a mouse click away.

If your annoying coworkers are misplacing files, there may also be a chance that they’re not paying attention to document lifecycles. Are you holding on to records beyond their mandated retention times? Are you (or your annoying coworkers) shredding documents prior to their mandated destruction times? Mismanagement of records has repercussions that go well beyond annoyance in the workplace. It can lead to fines and stiff penalties—especially if you are required to produce specific information in cases of e-discovery.

3. ECM means never having to say you’re sorry.

Got an annoying coworker who tries to throw you under the proverbial bus when the work doesn’t get done on time? ECM provides businesses with tracking tools that can prove, irrefutably, who is doing what. Tracking allows organizations to better manage their processing loads. On the personal level, your annoying coworker can no longer take credit for work that was done by someone else. More importantly, consider what it means from an enterprise standpoint: work can be distributed according to standards that you set ahead of time, using parameters such as round robin, first in, first out (FIFO), lightest workload, and other criteria.

Having work distributed electronically ensures that your annoying coworker—the one who is always complaining that “he’s bored”— constantly has work flowing into his inbox. Other workers whose positions might include repetitious, monotonous tasks can be transitioned to areas that allow them to use critical thinking. Processing efficiency is improved significantly, turnaround is improved, and your annoying coworker can move on to his next area of grievance.

4. Without ECM’s integration capabilities, you can’t get there from here.

Sometimes, even annoying coworkers have legitimate complaints. Take, for example, someone whose job it is to use information from a legacy system in order to process work. More often than not, data from legacy systems is—at best—difficult to retrieve. Software system incompatibility can make life difficult, and can result in the need to constantly re-key information. A system that doesn’t communicate well with other software can result in processing slowdowns and delays.

A high-performance ECM system has the capability to make information available quickly and easily throughout your entire enterprise. It should offer easy integration with your line of business applications, back-office system, website, portal, office environment, and the other systems that keep your business running smoothly. An ECM system that is underwritten in open standards will not limit you to proprietary software when choosing components to complement your technology infrastructure.

An ECM system is supposed to simplify your life. It shouldn’t require complicated programming if you want to call documents from within your storage repository. It should also integrate into your current line of business applications without the need for programming. Your annoying coworkers have enough to whine about. A system with robust integration may not alter their outlook on life, but it will make their lives easier.

5. An easy-to-use ECM system silences the chronic complainer.

You’ve heard the complaints. Her job is so hard. She has soooooooooo much work to do. How is she going to get everything done? She’s overworked, underappreciated, frazzled, and—as you might guess—feels the need to share the love. When the complaints dominate the workplace to the point where you just want to stick needles in your eyes, bang your head against the wall, and chew on tin foil, it’s definitely time to consider ECM. A system that is easy to use will bring order and efficiency to the workplace.

ECM will silence your coworkers’ complaints about not being able to find the right documents to process their work. Information will be available at the fingertips of authorized users—securely—from any web browser. There will no longer be any muttering about other staff hogging the files that your coworker needs in order to do her job. Files can be viewed simultaneously, from different locations. Complaints about rude customers become obsolete when you are able to provide immediate customer service.

Work is distributed to you and your coworkers at a manageable pace. You may not be able to have much of an impact on the social skills of people who tend to consistently see the glass as half-empty. But with ECM, you can eliminate the factors that contribute to complaints about work. You’re on your own when your coworkers start elaborating about their personal lives.

Source: - www.ecmconnection.com