Document management software for home use is becoming more prevalent with each passing year, and for many valid reasons.
Whether you’re considering document management for reasons outside the economic climate or are merely curious about what document management technology entails, the objective of this is to explain why document management software for home use has become an economic imperative in today’s business climate, and for the following reasons.
Telecommuting Is More Available and Viable for Workers
Gallup reported in the final quarter of 2015 that thirty-seven percent of U.S. workers have telecommuted at some point, a minor shift from the prior decade but four times greater than the 1995 findings, which reputed only 9 percent of workers having experienced a workday as a telecommuter.
These statistics can be explained by the longer workday. It would only follow that longer workdays are catalysts for more flexible working environments.
Another explanation resides in the changing role women are playing in the workforce. With more women climbing career ladders and earning bigger paychecks than ever, parenting responsibilities are increasingly shared by mothers and fathers, also stimulating demand for flexible work environments and, therefore, document management software for home use.
Entrepreneurship Is on the Rise
Entrepreneurship is risky, but necessary to any burgeoning economy and its businesses. The risk associated with entrepreneurship often begins with startups creating “office-like” environments within their own homes and apartments. For instance, as a patron saint of productivity and entrepreneurship, Steve Jobs and his development team spent months running Apple from a home office environment.
According to The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobs created by businesses that are less than 1 year old have declined significantly from roughly 4.5 million in 2000 to 3 million in 2015. When adjusted for population growth and an increase in the number of running businesses, the statistic is especially alarming. It also points to the fact that most entrepreneurs keep their businesses small, creating an optimal environment for document management software for home use.
The Proliferation of Mobile Apps for Business
As data compression technology skyrockets and mobile phone applications become increasingly popular for transaction-based procedures, work forces have more power than ever to be remote and mobile.
Although mobile phone applications for business do not retain all the functionality one would experience with the same program on a desktop, they are nearing that stratosphere. Document management software for home use is more prevalent solely because of the portability and functionality document management apps bring to professionals everywhere.
Employee Behavior Can be Traced
Although many managers, supervisors, and executives are leery of letting employees work from home or in a remote location, document management applications’ ability to trace employee behavior through workflow, role-based user permissions, document routing, and other forms of user activity offer a means of workforce management from within the document management application itself.
Although most organizations are yet to realize this, evidence suggests there is an uptick in understanding of workforce management features within document management systems, which may serve as a determining variable for the growth of the remote workforce.
Ironically, some studies even suggest that employees get less done at a physical office than they do when working remotely. This is in large part because bosses make a greater effort to track employee behavior when employees are working remotely, and require them to “check-in” via email.
However, when employees are merely at the office, many managers assume the employees are working at their desks when they’re merely perusing Facebook or other social media.
Commercial Real Estate Costs Have Skyrocketed
Although many decisions to hire an entirely remote workforce are voluntary, many of them are arguably coerced by skyrocketing commercial real estate costs, particularly in tech startup areas such as Silicon Valley. And these commercial real estate costs even impact the affordability of rental space for even the highest earning of employees.
For instance, a recent article on Facebook engineers (who make roughly $200,000 per year) highlighted how these elite software developers could not afford rent close enough to Facebook’s corporate office.
And this is just a microcosm of the commercial real estate costs in the area, which cost a small fortune. The Seattle area is experiencing a similar hike in residential and commercial real estate costs. New York and the greater surrounding metropolitan area aren’t impervious to the effects, either.
But even if your organization doesn’t reside in a Geographic boiler room, commercial real estate costs are always a sacrificial expense given today’s technology. As long as managers leverage the features and tracking tools associated with document management software for home use, a remote workforce can truly be held accountable for its labor.
Employees Are Held More Accountable for Proving Their Efficacy
Technologies like Salesforce have enabled businesses to track and monitor the impact of their efforts with enduring, causal, and verifiable accuracy. Even professions whose worth could not be proven a mere 20 years ago, such as marketing, employ a mathematical exactitude in tracing the output and revenue from marketing dollars.
And given how so many professions have been metricized, employees know the value of their work will be traced whether they are in the office or not. This improves accountability and ensures employees are contributing whether remotely or on-site.
With these 6 points, document management software for home office use can be justified. The future remains unclear whether such a method of work will be adopted in mass, but the general trend hints that the next century will afford a variety of unique working circumstances for professionals of all ages and in all industries.
