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Employees never feel comfortable under a boss who doesn’t trust them or whom they don’t trust. In the absence of mutual trust productivity falls as the workers get into politics, covering their backs and other inefficient activity. Not trusting each other will affect morale, which leads to a deterioration in customer satisfaction as the environment shifts from the business needs to internal wrangling.

So, let’s look at some key qualities a document management system must possess to develop trust.

A Document Management System must communicate well to build strong relationships with their people. In hard times, employees might think no news as bad news, so the boss must keep in close touch. Lack of knowledge reduces trust; being open with information creates it. A manager must develop an ability to trust others and create an environment of trust throughout the workplace. Really, it is rather to assume the trustworthiness of employees to start with, rather than waiting for them to earn it. Team members state that it is much easier to trust their manager if they feel trusted on their part.

Being open and honest is a key ingredient for generating well-organized Document Management System. When you are open about your vision, actions and intentions, you will usually generate strong support. Both good and bad news should be openly shared, reducing rumor and internal politics. By admitting mistakes and not attempting to cover them up, shows any manager to be a normal person, just like everyone else!

Managers should produce a moral value system for the workplace. Teams which have a common ethics are better operated, resourceful, adaptable and productive owing to the common root of their file value systems.

By making actions visible and fulfilling commitments, managers become trusted. Not delivering promises is insincere and causes tensions. A manager has to deliver actions visibly, to ensure everyone knows that they can be depended upon. In the process of building trust, being consistent and predictable is very significant.

Employees who you manage using such a document storage system must be able to disclose to you the sensitive information, express concern and share issues. People need to know that you can keep this confidential when they need you to. Sometimes these can be individual matters and in such cases this becomes even more important. Watching your language is crucial. By not using the “us” and “them” figures of speech and instead using “we” wherever possible, your team will bond better with you. Your language should be clear and simple, because everyone interprets what is said differently- so you need to speak plainly for everyone to understand. Having informal social interactions with the staff enhances the trust building procedure. In context, social interactions are a big opportunity for success for any good document system.

To make Document Management Systems which work together efficiently, requires the abundant availability of mutual trust. By consistently thinking of and working on earning trust, any manager will reap long-lasting positive benefits.

To be successful as a boss, it is important to develop a relationship with the team that is based on trust. When employees trust and respect their manager they will give special effort especially when they know they are trusted and supported.

Effective Communication is essential. Managers who communicate openly and frequently build relationship and trust with the team. They should not make team members guess what they’re thinking but should tell them. Workers can feel that no news is bad news. A lack of interaction erodes trust. Face to face interaction is the best way to build trust. It is important for a manager to create an environment of trust. This begins by trusting others. It is more effective to assume employees are trustworthy unless they prove otherwise rather than waiting to give trust when they haven’t deserved it. As team members come to feel they are trusted by their manager, they will find it easier to trust in return.

Be honest as honesty is a very important factor that affects trust. Managers who demonstrate openness about their actions, intentions and vision, soon find that people respond positively to self disclosure and sincerity. As a manager share good and bad news candidly. This can eliminate gossip and diffuse inappropriate politics. Great bosses know that they are not perfect and they make mistakes. It is more appropriate for a manager to admit mistakes rather than ignore them or cover them up. A plot (perceived or real) is probably the greatest single enemy to trust.

Establish strong business ethics. Managers need to set moral values for the work place. Teams with mutual ethics are healthier, more productive, adaptable, receptive, and resourceful because they are united under one common values.

Keep your word. Do what you promise to do and make your actions visible. Team members rapidly pick up on insincerity and broken promises. Visibly adhering to the promises will foster trust. If a manager neglects to make actions visible to the team it can create the impression/perception that they don’t follow through.

Keep interactions consistent and predictable. Building trust is a process. Trust results from consistent and predictable interaction eventually. If a manager responds in a different way from week to week it becomes harder to trust him or her.

Using the Document Management Systems is critical for creating an effective team that works well together. Taking time to build such system will reap benefits for managers that go a long way. Employees rarely excel under the punitive thumb of someone they do not trust and who they feel does not trust them. Without Document Management Systems performance suffers as team members play politics, spend time hiding themselves and being compliant to dictates that they know are damaging, this be irrespective of whether business employs Document Management System or not. Lack of trust affects confidence and customer satisfaction as the employees shift energy and center from working on real life issues that affect customers to resentment and dissatisfaction towards management.

You are in excellent company if, like other companies with no email management strategy, your employees are complaining they are being overwhelmed by email. The convenience of email is rapidly being lost in the time spent reading, replying to and managing it.

There are 3 important reasons to get your company’s email excess under control. Let’s examine how compliance, employee efficiency and electronic discovery are compromised by an disorderly email management system.

Compromised Compliance

If your workers regularly receive email with legal documents attached having a structured electronic content management (ECM) system is vital. This would ensure that your emails related to documenting commitments and responsibilities are recorded, complete and easily retrievable.

Ask yourself such questions: “Do my workers always document receipt of business-crucial documents by email?” and “What type of legal files is received that isn’t being stored in a way that allows access by others?”

Compromised Employee Efficiency

New studies show that workers at major companies are spending as a minimum one hour, and many of them up to three hours, every day reading, replying to and trying to manually organize email. Overflowing in-boxes seize employees chained to their in-box and away from their main job duties.

Capturing, sorting, archiving and retrieving email letters and attachments manually and not having an automated record retention and email destruction schedule are some of the ways efficiency is compromised.

To obtain a picture of what email handling is costing you in terms of workers efficiency, multiply your overall number of employees who receive email by one hour. That’s the smallest number of man hours per day you’re probably losing to inefficient email management.

Compromised Electronic Detection

Electronic legal detection is often essential when litigation is filed by or against your company. It’s the procedure of retrieving and examining electronic records for data relevant to legal action or compliance reviews.

Being able to retrieve electronic documents and messages rapidly is very important to a strong legal defense or compliance plan, and mandated by law. Astonishingly, many companies still do not have an official system for archiving employee email in a method that makes that retrieval straightforward.

Even worse, many companies have no written guidelines about when employee email can be deleted. You may end up forced to explain that crucial messages were deleted by employees because no email preservation policy was in place.

An Affordable Solution

You can in fact realize significant savings through increased employee competence brought about by automated management and fast retrieval of documents and emails. Having the ability to access this data off-site via a secure web-based document management repository further improves efficiency and minimizes expenses for document management system.

A well designed document management system improves security, increases worker efficiency and allows timely compliance with regulations and electronic discovery requests. If your workers are buried by email overload, it’s time to bring in centralized email management as component of a document management system at your firm. The efficiencies you’ll realize will have you wondering why you waited so long.

The path to true collaboration with your commerce partners begins with developing an exceptional scheme of internal controls. For document intensive organizations, those controls are implemented using a robust document management system. If selecting a document management system for your business, you will need to research systems that provide collaboration as well as metadata indexing, workflow routing, quick searching, file audit logs, records organization, and business guidelines enforcement.

Organizations with fully deployed document management system recognize the benefits of their performance immediately. Repetitive tasks that involve searching for and/or dispensing company files can be performed in a matter of seconds by a single employee. Implementing agreed-upon standards for archiving, naming, and profiling files means fewer time searching for files and more time focusing on what makes the corporation money. The list of benefits an organization will achieve is quite remarkable. The question that inevitably emerges is how to connect your internal business tasks with resources on the exterior of the organization.

The ability to collaborate with resources, both inside and outside of the company, while maintaining your internal business controls is king. Collaboration is the means to efficiently communicate and share information with your outside customers and/or suppliers in a consistent and auditable manner. Your success with collaboration is reliant on whether you possess the necessary tools to provide a safe, intuitive portal for effortlessly uploading and downloading documents and for involving external users in workflows.

Advanced collaboration solutions also offer tools for distributing bulk documents to resources for the reasons of document turnover, transmittals, or e-Discovery. This technology is used for extracting entire projects or folder directory structures from inside a document management system and transporting the information to an outside storage device- CD, DVD, thumb drive, or USB hard drive. The files are accessed through a self-contained, searchable file archive that is organized as the complete folder and file structure, metadata information, and a quick search function. All of this set of features is available to the information recipient without requiring any special software installation process.

Coordinated collaboration instruments in your organization will enhance your ability to produce the merchandise or services that drive revenue. Collaborative instruments provide real-time data sharing with your vendors and suppliers. This increases your overall efficiency while reducing errors. Bulk document distribution functionality allows your organization to provide a greater level of service to your vendors and therefore a strategic advantage over the competition. Introducing a document management system with collaboration has proven valuable to many organizations throughout a broad range of industries. The last argument is that the Great Recession has created a great necessity to reduce your costs and increase your productivity to stay afloat in this dismal market. There wasn’t ever a better or more essential time to put this valuable technology tool to work for you. Less pressure and more productivity that is a significant return on any investment and most excellent strategy to go after.

In these unclear economic times, a large number of companies are faced with the challenge of how to maximize returns on lower budgets. It’s a do-more-with-less strategy that requires business operations be optimized now to meet current economic realities.

One place to consider for improving the bottom line is to look at how information is managed in the organization, particularly document management. This involves all the content, things like documents, invoices, etc.; all the actions, things like reviews, and approvals; and all the processes, these are the repeatable steps that drive the flow of information. Improving how information is managed, the content, actions, and processes, will improve efficiency, reduce risk, and lead to cost savings.

There is another positive outcome to consider with this as well, and it’s a silver lining. With any change comes opportunity, and the right kind of change now can position an organization for even greater success long term.

There are least seven ways that improvements in how information is controlled can influence the bottom line in terms of efficiency, risk and cost savings, and here they are:

Number 1: Make information findable so people can find information, instantly,
every day. Research has shown that among those who are involved with the flow of information, about one-half spend two hours per day searching for what they need to do their jobs. This can translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars in unproductive cost per year.

The goal is to lower the time it takes for people to find information, making them more efficient and able to complete their tasks much faster.

Number 2: Automate business processes
Manual processes, especially those that involve paper, have a real tendency to breakdown. As information is routed in steps, for example in review or approval cycles, it’s often delayed, there are interruptions, and any number of user-influenced lapses can occur. These processes are a real challenge to manage for accountability. At any point in the process, it’s difficult to identify at which step the process is currently in. And looking back at completed processes, it’s virtually impossible to identify who did what and when. As result, business processes tend to be slow, taking days or weeks to cycle. And it’s this lack of speed, not mention the errors, that are the real burdens on efficiency.

Automating processes using workflow minimizes the need for people to manage processes and allows people to focus their expertise on making decisions and adding knowledge. The flow of information is handled automatically, which not only establishes consistent processing of information, but also shortens cycle times, increases accountability, and leads to greater quality and accuracy of repeatable business process.

Number 3: Improve collaboration
Many companies still use shared file servers to store information, email to share it, and sometimes FTP to exchange files back and forth. But here’s the problem: these methods are unstructured and disconnected. Managing information in this way lacks the necessary controls and collaborative tools to make the most efficient use of corporate knowledge. Files are easily copied or lost, information has to be re-created, and versioning is ad-hoc at best. Even worse, in some instances files are silo’d into line-of-business applications, for example a project management application that is only accessible to a few in the company.

The answer to improving efficiencies is creating a unified, enterprise, work environment where people and knowledge are connected company-wide. This allows everyone, no matter what area of the business they are in, to leverage the collective intelligence of an organization.

Number 4: Capture a record of every change.
Without a system to manage files as they change, it is virtually certain that information will be lost, it will be difficult to reassemble later on, and there will be confusion surrounding which are the correct versions of files.

Documents are not static. They change over time. Automated version control offers a standardized way to capture and organize information in what would otherwise be a chaotic and uncontrolled process. People are more productive and the risk of information loss is minimized. Plus, with version control, everyone immediately knows which is the current version, while past versions are always retrievable.

Another benefit of version control is that it can reduce risk. Version control eliminates the potential for losing content in prior versions and importantly, it allows for visibility over content history, for example who approved a document and what did the content look like at that time.

Number 5: Reduce the risk of email.
Email may be fast, cheap, and convenient, but it’s a mistake to believe that it’s an informal mode of communication. Email is increasingly falling under the scope of regulations such as eDiscovery. For this reason alone, it’s important to view email as business records. But even beyond regulation, there are other aspects of how we use email today that make it more and more essential to consider when reducing risk factors.

In many cases emails are used as a principle means of communication among employees, as well as with people outside the company, like customers or vendors. The content within emails, and files attached to them, are often times the most complete and thorough record of history over time. Your ability to quickly research and retrieve information from an email archive not only improves your chances of successfully complying with regulations and legal requirements, but it also helps with matters like researching and exchanging knowledge in hand-offs between people, say for example in times of employee transition.

Number 6: Maintain compliance with regulations
As with email records, some companies also face regulatory requirements that affect all types of information. Information itself can be a liability if it is incorrectly managed. Studies vary widely, but some have indicated that as much as 80% of documents reside on user’s desktops, beyond the control and management of any structured information system.

Government regulations, quality standards, and legal requirements are an increasing challenge, and programs that manage for compliance by documenting policies and procedures, applying consistent business processes, and securing information are necessary to reduce exposure to risk. Where quality standards and compliance exist, such as ISO, FDA, and Sarbanes-Oxley, regulated content and processes must be managed using records management.

And finally, Number 7: Eliminate paper storage costs and go Paperless.
Traditional storage of paper documents in filing cabinets, archive boxes, and off-site warehouses is a no-value solution. The expenditures of all that paper storage – the space and money spent on it – offers no return in value to the company. It’s an unnecessary operational cost. Filing cabinets consume valuable office space that could otherwise be used for meaningful and productive work areas; and dollars spent on off-site storage in warehouses could be invested in areas of business that actually have a positive return on the bottom line.

When documents are stored electronically, however, there’s an added value because information can be filed, searched and retrieved instantly. This is a big factor in terms of process efficiency. And there are other areas to consider as well: electronic document storage makes information more accessible, including even outside the office for employees who might be traveling, working at home, at satellite offices, or perhaps even vendors and customers. When documents are accessed, changed, or approved, everything is recorded in an audit log. Electronic document storage also makes it easier to plan for business continuity, so records can be restored quickly and the business can get immediately back up and running. And finally, electronic document storage is a greener, paperless approach that not only reduces storage and its associated costs, but also cuts down on the need for paper and printing.

Trimming costs is nothing new. And possibly you’ve gotten used to a lot more with a lot less. But you’re still feeling the pressure to increase efficiencies. Yet you’re not going to buy something “just because.” Any solution that you seek will need to be flexible, dynamic, and secure.

While budget concerns are of the moment, improving productivity and innovation is timeless.

Why have static and outdated approaches when dynamic and secure tools are out there? As Microsoft is preparing to launch Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, it’s time to think about the tools and systems you use, especially when it comes to document management systems.

A rewarding investment
Businesses are always looking for value. The right investments help improve productivity, increase collaboration, and facilitate innovation. Also crucial is meeting mounting security demands. Protecting data is of primary importance to any IT department, and many organizations are bound by industry or government regulations to protect data from unauthorized access.

To that end, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 offer enhanced security features, including policy-based network security. This allows only healthy computers to access network resources. And Windows 7 offers all the user-interface improvements of Vista with levels of speed, power, and performance that outperform XP.

But if security, efficiency, and user experience is important to you in your operating system–then what about your document management software?

Filing cabinets wise up
You wouldn’t upgrade your kitchen and then not buy food for the fridge, right? Electronic document management systems integrate with Microsoft operating systems and applications, making it easy for people to manage, store, control, and share documents and information. Document management software makes an already simple process more effective through version control, workflow, scanning, email management and archiving, document delivery, records management, and remote access.

While Windows’ use of folders has given us an easy-to-navigate interface—complete with copying, cutting, pasting, moving, and renaming files—document management software makes the system even more useful. Imagine if your filing cabinet was given intelligence. It could, for example, send notices out to 20 different people when a document is modified. Or route a file to a supervisor for approval, control document access, note every time someone accesses a file—and more.

Seek and you shall find
Windows 7 Enterprise and Windows Server 2008 R2 remove barriers that keep you from accessing your information, regardless of where it’s stored, and helps you stay productive when at home, on the road, or working from a branch office.

Whether you’re in or out of the office, document management does more than just index the files; systems can cross-reference, record association, provide context—all so you can find what you need even faster.

The files you need, when you need them, all with the highest level of security and reliability. You don’t have to search far at all.

Timing that works
So, with the impending arrival of the latest Microsoft Windows upgrades, take a moment to consider your content management methods, and determine how best to take advantage of the latest document control and collaboration tools.