Online Document Management Systems and Employee Productivity
Your company has already suffered from budget cuts, and you have transitioned a portion of your employees to “virtual” home offices. The LAST thing you need is to feel insecure about where your business files and information are as they leave the company network. So how do you protect your valuable documents with remote workers? Here’s a checklist with the most important aspects to consider when looking for an affordable and secure solution for information access and file storage:
Implement a secure, online document management solution that allows your remote employees to access company documents from anywhere with an internet connection. This encourages workers to save and access documents through an online repository instead of storing information on their personal laptops. With the right document management software, you can restrict employee access wherever, or whenever necessary.
Make sure whatever online document management system you use has strong authentication. This includes not only log in authentication, but also data encryption. With the two, this restricts who can access your documents. Users must be authenticated, and hackers cannot intercept the flow of your documents on the Internet. Also, please, please make sure that whatever system you choose automatically logs users out when they are inactive.
Just because your workers are sitting in their home offices, doesn’t mean you lose all control, or really any at all! Many document management systems allow those authorized to set up restricted access for each user. This prevents remote employees from roaming around in information they really don’t need to see.
Turn on auditing to monitor what documents are edited or changed by your employees. In addition to keeping you informed, this truly helps if you need to perform an audit or are audited for compliance reasons. With audit trails turned on, you always know who did what to your documents.
When you move to a virtual environment, you can lose some of the ability for your staff to work effectively together. Interaction with other staff members fosters collaboration on projects. With an online document management system, you can still foster that collaboration by enabling your staff to upload, comment on, and modify documents. Best of all, with the right document management solution, you can enable version control so no one overwrites or accidentally destroys other people’s work.
Managing employees remotely has its own set of challenges. By automating workflows, you can make sure that your remote staff is productive. You can push work or documents to remote employees and populate their task lists automatically. An automated workflow ensures that your employees are working on the priorities you set and still maintains control over your business documents.
So while budget cuts are a reality in business today, your organization does not have to suffer. With remote workers, you do not need to put your confidential information or intellectual property at risk. Using document management software via the web helps make sure that your remote staff is productive, and that your information is secure. Best of all, document management on the web does not have to be expensive because it’s delivered as software-as-a-service.
Learn more about online document management. Visit the DocuVantage site where you can find out about document management systems and what they can do for you.