In 2020, many business owners realized they could remain productive while allowing employees to work from home, which in turn increased employee satisfaction, mental health, and work-life balance.
For some, this was an easy transition but for others, it was trickier. Some industries had to outfit their employees’ home offices with expensive technology and supplies, while some others just had to ensure their employees had a laptop and a stable internet connection.
This seems to be the way of the future, so for many business owners, it’s time to think about how to make this a productive, long-term situation, rather than a quick fix that was born out of necessity. One way to make remote work easier for employees and managers alike is by digitizing important company documents.
Here are 11 reasons why going digital with your business documents is best for you, your employees, the environment, and honestly, for your documents as well.
1. It’s Easy To Do
No matter how large or small your business may be, the idea of taking all of your business documents and creating a digital copy of them can seem daunting at best. Luckily, you can enlist the help of a document scanning service to do the work for you.
Place your precious documents under the care of practiced experts who will treat your documents with the care and respect they deserve. Best of all, if you have items that can’t leave your premises, we have experts who can come to you. Precision, security, and integrity remain our priorities whether we’re operating in our space or yours.
2. It’s Digitally Secure
When you hire a document scanning company, research how safe and encrypted your information will be in their hands. Considering anything from technical manuals to large format blueprints can be digitized, it’s important to know that your information will be secure.
Not only does the cloud storage need to be kept encrypted, but the physical premises should be secure as well, with adequate surveillance and alarm systems.
3. It’s Physically Secure
Beyond being safe from uninvited eyes, having a digital backup of your documents is secure in other ways. By digitizing, you literally have a backup copy of anything you need. If something unfortunate were to happen at your physical location and you suddenly lost your database of microfilm, treasured photos, or even books and newspapers, you’d be grateful you had the foresight to create a digital backup in case of emergencies.
4. It Keeps Everyone Organized
While most or all of your employees are working remotely, gone are the days where one can just walk to the file cabinet to check for something. Having a digital database where employees can find what they need will make working from home far easier for them.
Additionally, if everything is stored digitally, you no longer have to worry about someone returning a document to the wrong place, or worse, not returning it at all.
5. It Makes Sharing Easier
For businesses that require a lot of sharing of information, digitizing your database will make life much easier. If you can cut out the need for a courier or a messenger and can share information with the click of a button, you’ll save money and your productivity will benefit greatly.
Not only can a business lose precious time in transport, but information can also be damaged or even compromised on the way to its destination. With digital versions of your documents, your recipient gets instant access to uncompromised information.
6. It May Open Up More Opportunities For Remote Work
If your business has yet to transition to remote work because it’s too important for employees to be close to the information they’re using, going digital may be the answer you and your employees are looking for.
Any information such as books, movies, magazines, microfiche, and plain old papers can be digitized. While remote work may not be for everyone, giving your employees the option to work from home safely, securely, and efficiently shows that you care about them and value their preferences.
7. It Saves You Money
Imagine a disc, and then imagine a file cabinet. A simple CD or DVD can hold the same amount of information as dozens of file cabinets. By digitizing your documents, you can save incredible amounts of valuable space. Saving space can also save you money if you currently own or are renting a property to hold these documents.
As remote work becomes the new way of life, companies will no longer need to house all of their information in an office building. Instead, the information can live on a server, a disc, or in a cloud while the business owner sells off the property and maybe even the file cabinets for a profit.
8. It’s Searchable
This benefit applies regardless of whether your employees are working remotely or working in the office. It’s far easier to search through digital documents than it is to search through books, old magazines, or a pile of large-format maps. This is another productivity booster, as employees will no longer need to spend hours rifling through old papers when they can simply perform a keyword search on your cloud server.
9. It’s Safe From Deterioration
Your company may have documents that just won’t stand the test of time. Over time, film degrades, newspapers fade and the handwriting on documents seems to disappear. By digitizing these items, you’re essentially freezing them in time.
Once they’re digitally preserved, they can be reviewed and enjoyed by generations to come. If your company has documents in its possession that could be considered antiques at this point, making a digital copy is of paramount importance. If the documents are lost to time, that important, historical information is lost as well.
10. It’s Environmentally Friendly
Once a company has used a document scanning service, they’re more likely to continue the digital trend moving forward. This, in turn, benefits the environment as you’re less likely to be using paper and other resources. Using copious amounts of paper is no favor to the environment, so by going digital you are greatly reducing your company’s carbon footprint. As a bonus, you’ll be saving money while you save trees!
11. It Keeps Everyone Happy
Remote work can have its ups and downs. One of the downsides of working from home is not having all of the resources at your fingertips that you might have at the office. On the other hand, working remotely can be difficult for leaders and managers, as they have to supply such information.
By digitizing your information, your employees benefit from access to whatever they need without having to go through various channels. This keeps employees more productive, and it even keeps managers and information keepers more productive too, as they no longer have to stop what they’re doing to track something down.ing of information, digitizing your database will make life much easier. If you can cut out the need for a courier or a messenger and can share information with the click of a button, you’ll save
The new normal of remote work has required a lot of adaptation and compromise by companies and employees alike. Considering how important employee retention is to a company, it’s in the company’s best interest to work remotely as easily and as comfortably as possible.
By enlisting the expertise of a document scanning company, you’re allowing resources to be more easily accessed so your employees can do the best work possible.