FYI resolving problems of remote and hybrid working with digital workflows

‘Workflows’ is the phrase du jour for any business owner seeking increased efficiency and visibility of work. This is becoming especially important with the rapidly emerging hybrid and remote ways of working.  

What does it mean in practice? For most firms, it means finding a way of completing work in as quick and accurate a way as possible.  

This makes practical sense, as strong workflows and streamlined processes mean that more work gets done and more work can be taken on, fewer mistakes are made, and all teams know what they are doing and who is responsible for what.  

Simple, surely? Not so in today’s hybrid world, where miles, if not borders and oceans, separate team members.  

Without adopting the right tools, even the most forward-thinking firms open themselves up to inefficiency and missed deadlines.  

The problem with remote working

In our experience, using the right tool addresses many concerns brought about by remote working and disparate teams.  

According to employees, the top challenge of remote working, experienced by 48 per cent of workers, is that the lack of physical proximity makes it harder to work with others.  

It’s easy to see how this is the case. Without being in the office together, teams are open to the risks of miscommunication, duplicated work, and a lack of accountability, particularly if a business doesn’t have a dedicated server or online workflow management system. 

So, what is there to do? 

We have developed a comprehensive solution which prioritises and facilitates a cohesive approach to team working. 

Rather than avoiding remote working – which has been shown to boost employee satisfaction and productivity – it’s time to start addressing its challenges by adopting the latest developments in workflows.  

Creating accountability through workflows

The first step towards strong workflows is accountability.  

When remote working, it can be harder to assign tasks to individuals and maintain a culture of responsibility for projects and individual pieces of work.  

In response to this, we have developed a dedicated task manager, allowing team leaders to assign and delegate tasks with visibility to the relevant people.  

With managed to-do lists and tasks linked to emails or video calls, our task manager provides you with a bird’s eye view of outstanding tasks by person or client. You can create custom lists and visualise workflows to identify bottlenecks and achieve efficiency as well as accountability.  

This way, team leaders can keep track of what work has been done, manage approvals and understand what still needs doing to avoid delays or confusion over who needs to do a particular task.  

Visibility

Hybrid working has several advantages when it comes to innovation, and one of the major ones that we’ve seen is in the field of document management.  

Paper-based practices are now a thing of the past for most industries, meaning most work is done online or through a dedicated server.  

While this is fantastic news for the environment and for general efficiency, this development does come with a word of caution.  

Without proper document management, teams are at risk of being bogged down in search and retrieval and creating multiple disjointed versions of the same piece of work.  

Based on our experience with this issue, we have developed a client-centric solution within our product which supports enhanced practice visibility through: 

• Structured filing by Client, Cabinet and Job 
• Easy imports and filing of documents from elsewhere 
• A dedicated database for emails, documents, and meeting and phone call recordings 
• A digital knowledge base for templates and policies 
• Integration with the Microsoft Office suite 

By enhancing document and progress visibility, we allow firms to avoid many of the pitfalls of hybrid or remote working and work more efficiently.  

Why integrate?

Having separate client lists, job lists and task lists in multiple locations is a nightmare, it becomes incredibly easy to forget to update changes. This can lead to some nasty surprises. 

The FYI platform integrates seamlessly into leading products such as Xero, CCH and Iris, allowing firms who already use them to easily start using FYI to create workflows and manage work with remote or hybrid teams.  

We understand that working remotely, while clearly the way of the working world and popular with employees and employers alike, can carry issues with responsibility and visibility.  

We have developed our solution to address these problems and ensure that, wherever your team is, they are making the most of their time and only doing the work that they need to do.  

Want to know more? Get in touch with us today.