Workplace administration tasks are a drain on employee productivity and impacting employee work/life balance, according to a new study from Canon Business Australia.
Canon’s ‘Automate My Admin’ study found that workplace administration tasks are a drain on employee productivity with 58 per cent of Australian workers saying that their current role had too much administration associated with it and 63 per cent saying that administration was making them less productive.
“This is important as Australia is currently in a ‘productivity dip’, which is affecting our competitiveness on a global scale," said Canon Business Services Australia assistant general manager, Jeremy Plint.
While the majority of the survey's 1005 respondents stated that office administration impacts their productivity, 61 per cent said that doing administrative tasks gives them a better balance on their workload and 32 per cent commented that it helps them to achieve a better work-life balance too.
Administration tasks included activities such as faxing, photocopying, scanning, filing, data entry, invoice processing and securing document approvals. While 49 per cent of respondents put this increase down to the nature of their role being manual and time-consuming, 27 per cent associated it with increased regulation within the business to keep hold of documents. A further 23 per cent have seen an increase in the number of processes implemented by their workplace, which is adding to these administration tasks.
Commercial law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, a Canon customer, is familiar with the challenges facing organisations when it comes to managing administrative tasks more effectively.
“By digitising paper documents and using a secure central repository for storage and retrieval, the amount of printing and copying undertaken by staff has reduced and our information management dramatically improved,” said Arnold Bloch Leibler director of information technology, David Leong.
