What Are The Costs of Managing Policies and Procedures?
Summary
Soft costs consist mainly of your employees’ time — the worker-hours you spend within the organization preparing, printing, collating, fixing, distributing, training, searching, maintaining, and answering questions about your policies, procedures, forms, and other documents. Once the document is released, employees can spend 2-10% of their time looking for the right policy, procedure, and/or form to do their job (and, of course, they sometimes don’t find anything), which brings us to training. If you pay an average office worker $50,000 (including expenses and benefits), a small system of 100 documents could be costing you $30,000 a year in lost productivity. How many sales are you losing because customer service operators can’t find policies or procedures for returns, complaint handling, or release of information? Hard to quantify or not, it makes sound business sense that automating document management will save you a lot of money.