Dive Brief:
- Some organizations are losing up to $1.3 million a year due to inefficient tasks weighing employees down, according to a report by Formstack and Mantis Research which surveyed 2,000 workers.
- While automation might seem like the obvious answer, not all businesses are open to change. In organizations that have mostly manual, paper-based workflows, 3 in 5 respondents said their biggest struggle with implementing automation was a desire to stick to the status quo, according to the report.
- Formstack and Mantis identified financial services and software organizations as the most digitally mature compared to healthcare and education companies.
Dive Insight:
Inefficient processes can lead to wasted resources, time lost and unhappy employees. More than half of employees said they spend at least two hours on repetitive tasks daily, according to the report.
But if revamping an organization’s approach to technology was easy, everyone would do it.
“Like most mindset and cultural shifts, the process takes time — it doesn’t happen overnight,” Chris Byers, CEO of Formstack, said in an email.
The amount of time transformation takes will depend on several factors, including the size and scale of the organization. However, the purchasing mindset of some organizations could deserve partial blame.
More than 9 in 10 organizations with mostly manual, paper-based processes purchase tech as the need arises, according to the report. In these cases, tech is looked at reactively rather than part of long-term strategies or plans.
“This purchasing mindset leaves less digitally mature organizations with piecemealed tech stacks that don’t integrate well or adapt to business needs over time, lengthening and complicating the process,” Byers said.
