Corporate America Is Struggling with Broken Processes

More than half of US employees think their corporations they are experiencing troubles with internal processes and procedures, a survey by Nintex reads. In the midst of massive technology breakthroughs and in times of widespread shift to knowledge-based practices, 620 of 1,000 surveyed employees say IT processes are a major issue.

The “Definitive Guide to Corporate America’s Most Broken Processes” reveals that 58 percent of respondents have concerns that employee onboarding processes are not working as required, an alarmingly high percentage for a leading world economy.

Worrying Findings about Corporate Processes

With close to 60 percent of respondents citing technology troubleshooting as a main area of concern and 42 percent saying they can hardly request a new computing device, corporate America should re-think its IT implementation strategy and approaches. Over one third of America’s corporate employees, or 36 percent, also say that processes related to application troubleshooting are broken.

Overall, 54 percent of those surveyed are of opinion there are malfunctioning processes across their company. This means every second corporation suffers from broken processes and procedures that reflect the overall corporate health and hinder growth prospects.

The Top Five Most Broken Processes:

• Technology troubleshooting
• Access to tools and documents that enable good job performance
• Annual performance reviews
• Promotions
• Employee onboarding

It is even more alarming that 53 percent of employees cite the process for conducting annual performance reviews as a broken administrative process. You cannot achieve growth without having the right professionals at the right positions and, hopefully, in the right time. With 47 percent of respondents saying the process of raises is being broke and another 53 percent thinking that the process of promotions is poor, corporations face hard times ahead due to evidently decreasing employee morale.

The grim picture is worsened by responses pointing out at systems for identifying problems or recommending problem fixes as being inefficient, by 37 percent and 34 percent, respectively. Worryingly, half of employees, 49 percent, consider document management practices across their company as ill designed.

How to Fix the Mess?

First of all, corporations should realize that in today’s market ecosystem customers often interact with multiple departments. Better customer experience is achievable only through productive and transparent collaboration involving teams in sales, finance, customer support, and marketing. Customer satisfaction in a fast-paced market environment usually requires marked streamlining of everyday tasks, which in turn increases satisfaction levels.

“It’s important to provide employees with the tools to do their best work as internal functions reflect outward,” Nintex Chief Customer Officer Josh Waldo comments on the report’s findings. By automating, orchestrating, and optimizing everyday administrative and document management processes, companies move closer to their respective vision of a digitally transformed modern workplace, the report concludes.

It is not acceptable 76 percent of respondents to say they perform personal online research to deal with IT shortcomings, for instance. It results in worse efficiency and productivity levels, as well as loss of human resources. For instance, a survey by project management service Wrike finds that 42 percent of employees have looked for a new job due to broken processes at work while 15 percent had actually quit their job for the very same reasons.

Automation as well as adoption of working IT processes are vital for the future of corporations in North America and worldwide. Surveys as the one conducted by market research group Opinion Matters on behalf of NewVoiceMedia show, however, that an average salesperson is spending 28 minutes per day manually entering phone numbers. It makes 15 workdays a year invested into typing information into systems. Which, of course, is unacceptable in the second decade of the XXI century.

Paperless Processes Boost Efficiency

Organizations, both private companies and state agencies, are losing time and money due to paperwork related to job performance, employee onboarding, healthcare enrollment and the like. By eliminating much of the paperwork and going paperless, organizations will be able to cut costs and improve efficiency, the report concludes. One should add improved morale amongst employees as another improvement resulting from digitization and automation of time- and resource-consuming processes.

To conclude, organizations in the US should more widely adopt technologies that result in the use of “single point of truth” where all departments and employees work with the same version of original data. What is more, automation of many tasks and digitization of a good number of processes is a pressing need, especially in the light of increasing use of advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence in other leading economies across the world.