Paperless productivity: Business gets done faster without paper

One interesting observation to come out of this year’s extraordinary events is that, by and large, we don’t need paper to get on with business. Stuck at home, far from the office printer, people have remained as productive as ever and business dealings have continued apace. No paper in sight.

Thanks to the swift actions of IT teams and the can-do mindset of disrupted workers, many businesses have adopted digital workflows this year, effectively negating the need for printing, copying or scanning all those business documents.

It’s been an interesting time. Many of the businesses that went paperless this year had previously been thinking about it – along with other digital transformation initiatives like migrating to cloud. Yet the perceived effort was holding them back. What the pandemic did was force them to change their workflows overnight, which then proved that it’s actually a lot easier to go paperless than many people think.

A big bonus of this forced change? Productivity gains. Here are some of the ways that going paperless has transformed the productivity of teams and is boosting business outcomes as a result.

Faster agreements

From the creation of a new document to the way that document is filed away once completed, digital workflows are simply so much faster than their analogue counterparts. For example, using DocuSign templates, you can quickly and easily replicate a sales agreement to send to a new customer, who can then open the doc on their phone, sign it, and send it straight back.

Compared to the old way of setting up a document, printing it and then racing off to the post box – not to mention the interminable amount of time it would take for the document to be posted back, and then the hassle of filing the document away in a physical filing cabinet – it’s so much faster to use a digitised workflow.

According to our new eBook, It Pays to Go Paperless, eSignatures are helping organisations save substantial amounts of time on routine tasks and workflows. Domain, for example, has reduced the time it takes to process a contract from 20 minutes to just 2 minutes; and has reduced the average turnaround time on customer contracts by a massive 13.5 days. CPE Leasing has slashed the handling time of lease documents from 54 days down to just 2 days.

This acceleration means that deals are sealed faster. Companies like Domain and CPE Leasing can strike while the iron’s hot, boosting the bottom line and growing the business.

Focused growth

All that time your team saves by digitising the agreement process? It can now be spent on nurturing stronger customer relationships, reaching out to new customers, and engaging in product or service innovation.

Workplace productivity is a huge winner here. Unshackled from the office printer, your staff can focus on adding real value to business processes and improving customer service. They can also get work done on the go, pushing out important sales agreements from their phone or tablet when they’re on the road. It’s a much more nimble, efficient way of working.

For example, REED Specialist Recruitment Services is saving 70 hours per week in productivity as a result of the ten-fold reduction in document preparation time. Savings like these are having a huge effect on how employees’ time is spent at work. Question is, what would your business do with time savings like these?

Want to learn more?

The pandemic has proven that we don’t need paper – and it’s hard to imagine any business going back to the old way of printing and posting documents once they have experienced the convenience, speed and productivity gains of a paperless way of working.

If you’re keen to try it for yourself, sign up for a free trial of DocuSign today. And don’t forget to read our eBook, It Pays to Go Paperless, for more great reasons to get rid of paper.