According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Report of Tenure in 2022, the average tenure of all workers is 4 years.  That number goes down to an average of 3 years for 25-34 year olds.  If average tenure is 4 years, then a company of 200 has 50 employees turning over each year.  Since your corporate human assets are replaced every 4 years, it makes sense why successful companies use process and process documentation where-ever possible.  Otherwise, 1 in 4 employees could be making questionable decisions based on whatever limited information and spotty business records that they found.

However, a business process doesn’t provide new employees with answers, it provides the path to find the answers.  But what if the process is only loosely followed.  Guess what, the process fails because the “path” doesn’t stay consistent.  This is one reason that ERP’s and CRM’s have taken hold and proved so successful.  Those solutions can force the process to follow a consistent path with consistent required data.

But think of all the processes in your organization that don’t actually go through an ERP or CRM like bank reconciliations, tax return approval, capex approval, etc. and think of all the processes, even those in an ERP or CRM, that don’t capture the final executed version of supporting documents like contracts.  The path to the right answers becomes a frustrating wasted day of searching and a mistake waiting to happen by the impatient human asset.

Here are two things that can ensure your human assets, however new to the organization, can actually be an asset.  Use workflows that capture the final version of critical documents along with the approval confirmation and archive that knowledge in a consistent, process dictated archive.  Second, don’t use folder-based document repositories.  Those are dis-organization incubators and will blow up sooner than you think and render your human assets worthless and frustrated.  Meta data driven document management with in-bound required data will eliminate future headaches.

Millennia Group has been providing workflow and document management solutions since 1996.  Contact us now for more information to help improve your human assets success rate.  info@mgdocs.com, www.mgdocs.com or (630) 279-0577.