Australian businesses, grappling with substantial challenges in the past three years, have endured a significant model shift, especially with the surge in hybrid and remote work since 2020. While technology offers many tools, successfully executing digital projects remains formidable, often resulting in substantial investments in misaligned transformation programs.

As we progress into the second half of 2023, many businesses face persistent hurdles such as high inflation, escalating prices, supply chain vulnerabilities, high energy costs, and labour shortages. Despite these challenges, there’s an opportunity for businesses to expedite digitisation, adopt proven Document Management System (DMS) technologies, and champion sustainability, even amid constraints. This narrative captures the evolving landscape where challenges become an opportunity for innovation and resilience.

So, how can we harness technology to attain our business goals in the next twelve months, optimising operations for increased efficiency and sustainability?

Successful digital transformation efforts can positively impact many facets of a business, particularly in HR. It includes heightened efficiency, accuracy, advanced data analytics capabilities, enhanced employee experience, and substantial cost savings. Insights from many industry experts highlight these key advantages.

For example, in the recruitment and hiring phase, digitisation goes beyond identifying candidates with the necessary qualifications; it plays a pivotal role in ingraining diversity and inclusion in corporate culture. Using appropriate platforms ensures a respectful and accurate approach to communication and positions companies as inclusive workplaces welcoming talent from diverse backgrounds.

This technology provides employers with valuable insights into the prevalent challenges faced by their staff. It opens a window to understanding what employees require to optimise their performance by analysing data from diverse sources like employee engagement surveys, absence records, and online resource usage.

Having this technology to collate and analyse data accurately works wonders for enhancing employee engagement and retention. Liberating HR professionals from the time-consuming, daily administrative tasks associated with people management grants them the bandwidth to focus on crafting relevant well-being strategies and inclusive employee benefits packages.

At Docuworx, we consistently receive feedback indicating the desire of HR practitioners to embark on the digitisation journey and harness the associated benefits. However, a common challenge is the uncertainty about the initial steps, often resulting in a reluctance to take action. Amidst the digital transformation, HR faces numerous competing challenges. Three years post-pandemic, leaders are still fine-tuning strategies for promoting employee engagement and communication in a hybrid work environment. Employees seek additional support amid the cost-of-living crisis. Skill shortages and fierce competition for talent acquisition are prevalent even among top employers, struggling to bridge existing skill gaps while strategically planning for the technical and soft skills essential for the near future.

We concur with the experts that prioritising digitisation is essential for HR leaders in 2024. Existing and potential employees actively seek benefits that align with their needs and offer support when required, and we believe that engaged workforces yield superior results.

Embracing digitisation also aligns with sustainability goals. Millennials and Gen Zs, in particular, prefer engaging with, investing in, and supporting businesses with solid and sustainable practices. Organisations aiming to attract and retain top young talent must address this matter.

Initiating a sustainability initiative can begin by addressing paper waste, a significant contributor to global deforestation, chemical usage, and carbon emissions, costing businesses billions annually. While transitioning to an entirely paperless environment might appear daunting, gradually becoming “paper-light” is a feasible starting point, such as digitising smaller, manual tasks by adopting electronic signatures instead of printing documents. Achieving this step makes the business journey to a paperless operation more attainable.

Transitioning to a paperless platform offers the opportunity to harness the immense value in the data generated daily by businesses. Traditional paper-based processes or fragmented data storage hinder seamless communication between departments, fostering silos that impede alignment on goals, projects, and visions. Often, it results in prolonged task completion times and delays in accessing crucial information for decision-making.

Over the past three years, work dynamics have undergone a significant transformation. Adopting cloud-based platforms has become crucial with teams balancing their work between home and the office. This technology enables seamless access to documents and workflows from anywhere, empowering businesses to scale resources up or down as required.

As the year ends and we look into 2024, businesses can harness automation’s potential for handling labour-intensive and repetitive tasks. This automation saves countless hours and redirects efforts towards tasks that bring genuine value, enhancing employee satisfaction and engagement. This positive impact extends to HR teams, liberating their time for more meaningful, value-added activities, fostering innovation, and contributing to overall profitability.

There has never been a more opportune moment to embrace cloud-based platforms. The prevailing sentiment is that failure to adapt may result in being left behind.

Docuworx has an all-encompassing cloud document management platform designed to navigate every phase of the data lifecycle, plus a team of young, dynamic, experienced and dedicated people to assist your business in automating manual processes and achieving its goals, fostering growth, and enhancing operational efficiency.

Make a no-obligation inquiry to asses your current processes. https://docuworx.com.au/contact/