Go Back To Work Safely, Differently And Digitally - Re-opening The Workplace

What does going back to work involve for many of us now?

The last four months has undeniably changed the working environment, with managers and owners in every industry, and every size of business, in every location having to work through the implications of having employees return to work, return to the office or work from home/remotely. Organisations are having to change and implement new procedures, new processes and new policies to manage workspaces and ensure the safety of their teams. It’s a huge shift in mindset and raises all sorts of new challenges.

For example – I read recently that paper will soon be thought of as a biological agent! A little farfetched perhaps, but think about it – do you really want to accept paper money from someone you don’t know? Many retailers have already made the shift to only accepting card transactions for health reasons. Will people turn away from paper based processes and ask why their employer or service provider isn’t automating all paper-reliant processes? Will they want to accept paper based contracts from your business, if they don’t know who’s handled it – or be asked to sign something physically and hand it back to another person (with or without gloves) if it’s not necessary to do so? If we’re having to come up with processes for not sharing phones/pens/pads/break out areas in the office, then it stands to reason that we will need to eliminate paper and move it around digitally using workflows, document generation processes and eSignature tools.

At Synergi we’ve been thinking about this a great deal – not just as we physically prepare our own office – but also the processes that we’re having to deploy. We’ve had to re-arrange desks and re-think our social areas, not to mention shutting down the microwave and instigating rotating work schedules – we want to welcome back to the office all those who want to come, but we have to do it safely and effectively. Essentially we need to prepare for continued Work from Home and prepare for Return to Office.

Our experience is that process automation is the cornerstone of this operation. It honestly isn’t as daunting as you might think to automate and optimise paper-based processes. Your high frequency contact processes are the ones that should be automated first, and this can be done with solutions that incorporate simple and easy to use robotic process automation (RPA) tools. Solutions such as Nintex exist for this. This is actually a great opportunity to re-define the role paper plays in your organisation, and re-think the whole end-to-end flow of your processes – don’t just replicate your manual processes and automate them – grab this opportunity to really reflect on and streamline your processes.

We have recently won a Nintex partner of the year award for the 5th year running, and are offering a series of Business Transformation packs to help with automating those processes needed for the return to office challenge. These include Daily Check Ins, PPE ordering and despatch, Desk Allocation, Rotas, Site Visits and more. We’re happy to chat through how this works with you. The important thing is to ensure not only business continuity, but also employee safety and welfare.