Millions of hours a year are wasted on administrative functions in the Federal Government. That’s a lot of time that could be spent doing better things to help the country. Working in such a bureaucratic sector, there are always forms to fill and boxes to check to meet federal compliance requirements. But it doesn’t have to waste so much time, there is an answer…
We all know the hardships of being a very busy program manager with perhaps hundreds of employees. Your project is already eating up 16 hours of your day, and you are behind schedule with a tight budget. Your email inbox is burgeoning with dozens of unread and unfulfilled requests on your time.
As you race to your fourth meeting before lunch, you receive the following email from HR: “Supervisors, it is time for each of you renew all your employee’s telework agreements/OGE 450 filing/Ethics Filing, etc…” Great. One more thing to do and track in your busy schedule. Even better, they are likely PDF forms that need to be routed, tracked, and signed.
We know how it is; each year, supervisors and team leaders everywhere have to track a variety of standard documents that often require refreshing on an annual basis. Non-Disclosure Agreements, OGE 450 forms, Ethics filings, IA training certificates, IT User, Wellness, Telework, and Work Schedule Agreements, and other agency-specific documents are just some of the examples that recur each year.
Organizations tend to handle these requirements in an ad hoc fashion. It’s a hodgepodge of paper documents, PDFs, SharePoint, and homegrown solutions. The process is not viewable end-to-end and is certainly not trackable. Even worse, each of these documents requires different methods to accomplish a similar task, forcing supervisors, team leaders, and employees to access multiple systems or locations.
It doesn’t have to be that difficult. With Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) the process could be unified into one workflow with automated features to save time and ensure compliance. IPA allows you to set up automatic start dates with timed reminders and incorporate seamless workflow for the completion, approval, and storage of all these documents. So, supervisors and managers can easily pull completion and status metrics and track individual employees’ completion.
You lose countless hours trying to figure out arcane processes to ensure every federal employee is compliant with these filings. A fully-automated IPA solution solves this problem and also integrates with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to enable fully-automated processing and filing of the documents. So you can free up hundreds of hours for employees to do more important things.
You can also configure this system to process leave requests, family medical leave act submissions, reasonable accommodations requests; and now with the passage of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, parental leave requests for new parents. You can do all of this in one unified workflow while protecting employees’ confidentiality and ensuring timely processing, storage, and tracking for management.
While most of these tasks are considered small, they fulfill an essential governance task addressing legislation and regulations. It may just be a single document, viewed as a light administrative task by those imposing the requirement. But the combined weight of these requirements is no small matter.
Hundreds of hours each year are swallowed up by these tasks. It should be imperative that automation focuses on eliminating this waste. If you would like to learn more about how to embrace digital transformation, get in touch with our federal team, who can offer you tailored advice on how to modernize your IT services.
If you’d like more advice on how to ensure efficiency and compliance across your processes, you can find out more in our ebook, ‘Make your Breakthrough in Governance & Compliance.
