Flex Your Organisation

On April 6th 2024, flexible working laws changed for British businesses - is your business ready? Are your applications and processes?

▶ All employees will be able to make a statutory request (2 requests in any 12 month period) to make permanent changes to their contract from their first day of employment.

▶ As an employer, you will be required to make a decision on the request within two months of receiving it and there are only a limited number of reasons that such a request can be refused.

So what does ‘flexible’ actually mean and how could your organisation utilise document management to remove risk and protect your organisation’s efficiency and productivity? For example:

• Job sharing - Two (or more) people doing one job and splitting the hours.
• Remote working - Working from anywhere other than a permanent office (for example, from home).
• Hybrid working - A combination of working remotely and in the employer’s workspace.
• Part time - Working less than full-time hours (usually by working fewer days).
• Compressed hours - Working full-time hours but over fewer days (for example, a 9-day fortnight).
• Flexitime - The employee chooses when to start and end work (within agreed limits) but works certain ‘core hours’ (for example 10am to 4pm every day).
• Annualised hours - The employee works a certain number of hours over the year but they have flexibility about when they work. There are sometimes ‘core hours’ which the employee regularly works each week, and they work the rest of their hours flexibly or when there’s extra demand at work.
• Staggered hours - The employee has different start, finish and break times from other workers.
• Predictable hours or set shift patterns - The employee has set hours they work instead of hours that may change week to week or day to day. It may be set hours for a whole week or part of a week.
• Phased retirement - Default retirement age has been phased out and older workers can choose when they want to retire. This means they can reduce their hours and work part time.

Document Management to Centralise and Secure

By simply ensuring that all documents (invoices, contracts, emails, service forms, applications…) relevant to business processes are stored centrally in your organisation’s document management system, every employee (regardless of work location, hours or role sharing) knows where that information can be accessed. With cloud based platforms or appropriate VPN (remote) access, those same documents can be accessed from anywhere at any time with full access security.

Document Management to Maintain Efficiency and Productivity

With the potential for employees to be not working during another employee’s core hours, ensuring that documents and tasks are visible without the need to ask the unavailable employee is critical. Ensuring that information is not stuck in an inbox or stored to a ‘personal’ drive ensures employees can continue to progress day to day tasks and maintain productivity. With task management (workflow) the status of key jobs and (more importantly) the next steps can be taken without having to wait for someone to return.

Document Management to Reduce Risk

With your organisation's documentation securely stored, not only are you protected against unauthorised access but the risk of duplication, temporary misplacement (and the time wasted locating what is required) and loss (and the potential for reputational or financial damages) is also greatly reduced. When employees work away from the central office environment, maintaining control of documents is key to further managing risk without compromising efficiency. By accessing work through the document management system, copies are not required, versions are controlled and functions such as printing or export can be limited.

Document Management to Control Process

With flexible hours comes the potential for extended processing wait times. However, with business process management tools, including schedules, role sharing and automated redirections, key process decisions can progress even if the original intended processor is unavailable - without management overheads. Not sure if the task you started was completed - task status or audit reporting will show almost immediately any system task status so there is no unnecessary repetition, duplication or oversight.

Document Management to Assist Mobility

• An employee wants to emigrate to Canada but your organisation doesn’t want to lose their expertise.
• An employee is training to join Team GB at the next Olympics (which you want to support) but it means being away from a desk for extended periods.
• An employee is on the road meeting clients but is a key decision maker / approver but can only get to a desk after hours.

With secure cloud hosting, integrated access controls and mobile applications designed for iOS and Android (with full platform functions), employees can not just work from anywhere at any time, they can fulfil all aspects of their role with minimal interruption.

Document Management is not Simply Documents

✔ Centralise your information pool

✔ Enable anyone with access to the system to retrieve information in seconds, regardless of what format the original information was in

✔ Create a watertight audit trail. You can instantly see where information has gone, when it was edited, by whom and who received it. You can also instantly compare different versions of a document without having to wade through mountains of archives

✔ Pull up information at any time, from anywhere on a large array of supported devices - letting your distributed workforce work as well as if they were in the office

✔ Automate business processes remove the mundane from employees' days and allow them to concentrate on the valuable task - essential when hours are reduced.

✔ Integrate departments, offices and systems to automate information sharing and enhance collaboration

✔ Have a complete backup of all your files, off site - for instant disaster recovery should the worst happen

✔ Meet compliance and regulations through configuration and complete legal audits without stress.

If your biggest issue is “I don’t know how we can ensure tasks and efficiency are maintained should an employee request flexibility“ then come and talk to PacSol today and understand how.

Toby Gilbertson, Director of Operations. April 2024

 

 

 

#PacSolUK #DocumentManagementSystem #BusinessProcessManagement #DigitalTransformation