One of the things most office workers struggle with is keeping on top of their personal admin without letting it be at the expense of their job. It’s not always easy to open and read all of your post, read through all of your emails and take the appropriate action for each of them and then tackle your set workload on top of all that. By the time you’ve opened all your post and written replies, another inbox full of emails have arrived. So how do you deal with this?
A digital mailroom could be the way forward for your office. Instead of having to deal with communications coming in left, right and centre, imagine if there was a way you could access all of your post and emails in one place, fully archived and completely organised. For many offices, this makes the struggle of dealing with admin a lot easier as you’re not constantly struggling to remember what you’ve read and replied to and what you haven’t.
Digital mailrooms work by sending all post and emails through a third party who will scan any hard copies of letters and send them to the appropriate person in digital form. Emails will be processed and sent to the right person, as often emails aren’t addressed to the right department or carry the heading ‘To Sir/ Madam’, so the digital mailroom staff can make sure it is sent to the correct department to save time.
Another useful thing about storing all of your correspondence digitally means you can keep track of everything and it all remains properly archived. If you need to find a paper letter in a hurry, it might have been misplaced or moved, or you may not have got round to filing it yet so it can take a lot of time and searching to discover where you’ve put it. If you can simply search through your archives online, it will make you a lot more efficient in the speed of your reply. You can also refer to your entire correspondence history with someone to make sure you have all the relevant information immediately.
In this environmentally friendly age, it is far more green to store everything online rather than keeping lots of paper stashed away in the office. This is also handy because it saves space in terms of storage units and filing systems, so you have more room in your office for more important things, and all paper forms of letters can be recycled immediately and not left to gather dust for years.
Craig Simpson is a business productivity consultant who advises businesses of all sizes on the best methods to employ in order to maximise efficiency and profitability