BPM and Employee Engagement

It's 8 p.m., you haven't had dinner, and the end of the work day is nowhere in sight.

You've got management reports to prepare and a presentation to deliver in the morning. Those are the highest-priority items on your plate, but that's not how you spent most of your day. No, you used up valuable hours tracking down the approvals for your trip, the paperwork to hire that new assistant you need so badly, and the documentation that internal audit has been screaming for since last week. None of those things is going to make your company any money, and none is high on the list of things you signed up to do when you took this job.

Employee engagement is a 21st-century metric, one that nobody really considered or cared about in earlier decades. It can be hard to gauge, but in my mind, it's proportional to the percentage of time a given employee spends doing things that move your company in the right direction. That, in turn, relies on the "softer" measures of engagement--how much does the employee like her job? Does she spend half his day looking for deals on Groupon, or thinking about new ways to reach and connect with your customers?  Is he attentive to details like contract terms and discount opportunities, or does he rush through agreements and procurement in order to catch the early train back home.

BPM software can be a secret weapon in the battle for employee engagement. BPM, properly used, can create an environment with less bureaucracy, fewer menial tasks, and more time to focus on what's really important.  BPM is used by organizations every day for:

• Rapid collection of verifiable approvals with full accountability
• Instant discovery of historical actions for audit and compliance review
•  Seamless collaboration across and beyond the organization for cross-disciplinary activities such as procurement and hiring

Take the boring, routine, and soulless paper chase out of your employee's workday, and her engagement is bound to increase. Higher engagement is linked to higher productivity and greater profitability.  But, beyond that, wouldn't you rather work in an environment in which you and your colleagues are freed from the dreariest parts of your work day?  

When we speak of BPM, we usually talk about hard savings like paper reduction or risk mitigation. But BPM's less well-known impact on employee engagement can make an even greater contribution, to your bottom line and to your colleagues' work life.  That's an investment worth making.