With the advancement of technology, offices nowadays are becoming more strategic in finding ways to make their operation efficient through automation. Office automation is when technology is maximized to manage office operations without human intervention.
Automating office operations aims to reduce human effort in doing repetitive tasks. This leads to reducing manual errors, easy identification of work difficulties, and optimizing processes essential to increase productivity to grow the business.
If you’re still starting up, here are some of the ways on how to automate your office operations:
- Recruiting Process
Hiring is one of the daunting tasks for an employer, especially for those who are still starting their operations because they have to search among a sea of applicants to find the most suitable for the positions available. The use of automated hiring and recruitment tools helps reduce work by having functions, like searching for keywords into the applicant’s resume or application letter, to filter out and identify the best candidates.
By means of automating the hiring process, you can run through each application in a timely manner. Since the results are filtered, you only have to interview a few candidates that can match the qualifications you’re looking for. Depending on the system used, you may also store online applications in the database, so you can contact previous applicants for future job openings.
- Report Generation
If your business involves a lot of processes to operate, one of the ways you can gauge if you’re growing as an organization and check the team’s performance is through generating a report weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Creating office reports takes a lot of time, and it’s prone to human errors. Report automation software extracts data from your database, and in just a few clicks, gives you accurate information no matter what range of scope you want the system to generate.
Through automated report processing, you may schedule when to generate it so that the system will automatically cascade it in emails, or you may employ applications on how to transport the report data to concerned departments, like faxing online, if you want to secure the data since reports are considered as confidential information.
- Employee Help Desk Support
Chatbots aren’t only used to answer customer’s queries, but they’re also helpful when it comes to attending to employees’ frequently asked questions, so time isn’t wasted answering the same queries all over again. Some communication tools, like Slack, offer excellent automation services when it comes to employee desk support lessening the burden of HR, office managers, or the IT department in attending to employee’s usual and recurring inquiries.
For more advanced support that can answer queries, even those that aren’t asked frequently, the help from Artificial Intelligence is used to draw insights from internal policies or from the world wide web. Automating the help desk support aims to assist employee or customer’s needs faster.
If they aren’t satisfied with the answer that they get from chatbots, that’s the time when they can reach out and direct their concern to live customer support. Aside from chatbots found on communication tools, if you have a website, it’s always ideal to allot a page where you can include a comprehensive FAQ section where all possible questions regarding your products and services are answered.
- Purchase Orders
Purchasing office supplies is considered a systematic process in your office. If your office has different departments, the one who’s in-charge in processing purchase orders for approval may have a hard time collating all needed supplies in each department. If the purchase order automation is practiced, each team will just have to fill out a form about all the supplies they needed, and it will then be forwarded to the purchasing team for approval.
Without automation, manual processing of purchase orders may lead to delay in approval, errors in inputting the necessary information, miscommunication with the supplier, and incomplete records. It also helps the purchasing team to become organized so fast-tracking of supplies that were recently purchased is accessible.
Final Thoughts
Implementing office automation may deliver beneficial effects in an organization, but thorough planning on what to automate is still needed to ensure that it’ll help improve the workflow and if it’s worth it for the initial investment that you have to spend and other resources that you have to use.
The best ways on how to automate office operations for your startup are through the hiring process, report generation, help desk support, and purchase order automation. Through office automation, the workforce is directed towards productivity and efficiency.
