How to Keep Your Employees Happier Without Trying

At the end of the day, companies are organizations of people. A house without a foundation crumbles; likewise, a company without a good culture of communication and personal accountability will decay from within. Overall employee happiness is inextricably linked to company culture, which determines whether your company succeeds in the long term.

The best companies’ processes are deeply informed and shaped by their values, which can be seen as an expression of company culture. What a company values directly influences employee happiness.

The following are a few tips which should make your employees - and thus your company - happier, more productive, and ultimately more effective.

Decrease Repetitive and Meaningless Work

It’s no secret that people generally don’t enjoy performing tasks that feel repetitive or seem disconnected from the overall mission of the organization.

In all but a few cases - newspapers and book publishers being notable exceptions - businesses tend to view record-keeping and other paperwork as a necessary but unwanted chore.

The dislike isn’t entirely unwarranted. From an efficiency standpoint, walking to the copier and waiting as hundreds of sheets of paper scan and print, only to carry them to a storage room, filing cabinet, and physical folder insert is clearly out of place in a world where emails, texts, and virtually limitless inboxes are the primary mode of personal communication for many. To carry the comparison further, imagine having to flip through folders by hand, then skim myriad pages searching for a single reference - a task accomplished with a few keystrokes and the click of a mouse on any email or text client.

A properly integrated Electronic Content Management solution resolve the inherent inefficiency and empty, repetitive nature of paper content management by centralizing and streamlining the process of data/record entry and access. The last area of overhead - maintaining that system itself while staying abreast of document retention - is totally unnecessary with the proper Electronic Content management partner.

Increase Employee Autonomy

Organizations tend to perform more effectively when their employees are trusted with enough autonomy to make decisions and function independently of management wherever feasible. On a fundamental level, delegation and trust are actions and attitude that allow a company to expand in scope.

Electronic Content Management boasts a less obvious benefit that’s arguably more powerful than its indexed text search capabilities: that is, the ability for multiple employees to access the same information concurrently. Not only do granular access controls allow your business to better separate concerns where sensitive information is involved, you’ll also sidestep the greater danger possibility of losing potentially irreplaceable records due to human error.

Unscrupulous competitors can’t access your trade secrets by digging in your dumpster (don’t put the database password on a paper memo, or shred it if you do - many ECMs even offer drive up on premises on demand document destruction services!), but on a more day to day level, it’s easier to handle the misplacement of an access code that can be re-issued to someone with the proper credentials than it is to track down a particular client file that’s out of place thanks to a mistaken filing or another employee having checked it out of storage. There’s simply no reason for someone to spend hours searching in vain for a file that’s physically out of order when an algorithm can sort it properly in microseconds.

Implementation of a full-fledged Electronic Content Management system is non-trivial, but when done properly with an experienced storage partner, the transition process can be a one-time occurrence, leaving your business more efficient, happier, and more able and willing to grow.