Office admin draining Australians’ productivity: Canon

Years spent pursuing the dream of the paperless office have failed to stem the demand for office administration, with 63% of respondents to a recent Canon Australia survey suggesting that they had so much regular admin work that it was making them less productive.

Some 48% of the 1005 respondents to the Canon-sponsored Automate My Admin survey, conducted by PureProfile in September 2012, said they had seen their administrative workload increase over the past 12 months, and 39% expect it to grow even further through 2013.

Increased regulation was named by 27% as the reason for the increased burden, while 49% said it was simply because their jobs were manual and time-consuming. “Many workers have seen an increase in administration in their roles and it is taking them away from the core functions of their job,” said Canon Business Services Australia assistant general manager Jeremy Plint in a statement.

Around a third (35%) of respondents want to see better use of technology to automate those jobs, and 27% want their organisations to employ better processes to manage their administration – which for the purposes of the survey included faxing, photocopying, scanning, filing, data entry, invoice processing, and document approvals.

Commercial law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler was floated as an example of how the digitisation of document workflow can simplify the process.

“Allowing employees to scan paper documents into their email or matter files directly, then storing these in a central repository, allowed us to effectively make an electronic backup and it also made them accessible to other staff working on the same matter,” Arnold Bloch Leibler director of IT David Leong said.

Supported with the right tools, administration can be dramatically simplified – which may be a lifesaver for many employees given that it’s not going away any time soon. Fully 61% said administration tasks gives them a better balance on their workload, although 32% said that if their administration workload was halved they would use the time to achieve a better work/life balance