Today’s workforce thrives on flexibility, whether employees are working on the go from a mobile device or remotely while on a business trip. To keep up with your fast-paced employees—not to mention to save your business time and money—you’ve got to have the right digital solutions in place to enable your employees to be productive and successful.
The best place to start? With a PDF productivity solution and eSigning solution. Despite the prevalence of PDFs across every industry and most aspects of daily life, only one in 10 employees has access to a PDF productivity solution. However, with the right paper-replacing digital solutions in place, two in five office workers believe that their productivity levels would exponentially increase.
Read on to find out just how a PDF editor can deliver greater flexibility, boost efficiency, improve the bottom line, and, overall, make your employees’ jobs easier.
Managing PDFs in the Workplace
For the longest time, when an employee received a PDF they needed to edit or alter in some way, they would print it out, mark it up, scan it back in to create a new PDF, and then send it off to its final destination. Obviously, there are a few critical problems with this method, including:
- It’s not secure: Printed copies of confidential or proprietary documents can easily get lost, left behind, or into the wrong hands—even if the employee has no malicious intent. Ninety percent of U.S. companies have reported the loss or leakage of sensitive files, because paper documents simply aren’t secure. This is just one reason why paper documents are included in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance recommendations.
- There is no trackable workflow: Printing out a file and marking it up with manual edits or important signatures removes visibility into a document’s workflow, especially when multiple people need to collaborate on a single document. This manual process also means you can’t see who made what edits and when, which removes accountability.
- It’s costly and time consuming: From the cost of paper, toner, printer maintenance, and file storage to the amount of time an employee spends walking back and forth to the printer, scanner, or fax machine, paper documents drain precious resources. Not to mention the environmental impact of printing, scanning, and tossing paper documents.
Another popular method for editing PDFs has been to copy and paste the content of a PDF file into a word processing file for editing and sharing. Unfortunately, this method is also time-consuming and frustrating, and we’ve all been there. The PDF’s formatting, images, signatures, and countless other elements don’t transfer correctly—or even at all—into the new file. The result is that you have to reformat everything and potentially retype the entire document and track down the images, logos, and get stakeholders to resign the document.
With both of these methods, a task such as getting a signature or updating a logo that could have taken a few minutes with a PDF productivity solution has taken your employees hours that they’ll never get back.
The Benefits of a Modern PDF Editor
Make every PDF-related tasks your employees need to complete easier and less headache-inducing with a digital productivity solution. The benefits of a PDF productivity solution are boundless, well beyond the time saved not walking back and forth to the printer or painstakingly trying to copy and paste a file into Word.
According to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), reducing the number of extra processes your organization engages in has huge benefits. In a study, AIIM showed that 84 percent of organizations that implemented a digital transformation initiative saw a return on their investment in fewer than 18 months. A significant number saw ROI in shorter periods of time, including 59 percent of organizations that received all of their money back in fewer than 12 months and 26 percent that achieved ROI in six months or less.
Here are some additional benefits:
- Get signatures faster: With an integrated solution that combines the power of PDF productivity with eSign, your employees won’t have to wait outside of someone’s office for a signature or hope they see the file that was left on their desk that needs to be signed. Instead, a signature can be obtained quickly and easily through the magic of eSign—even if both the employee and the person whose signature is needed are out of the office. Also, if you need to sign something, it’s easy to store your signature, quickly sign a document from anywhere. and send it off to the right person in minutes—no printing, signing, scanning, or faxing involved.
- Avoid security concerns: How many times have you heard about a confidential document being left on a copier or lying faceup in a public place, sparking lawsuits and lost jobs? PDF productivity solutions offer built-in security features to manage permissions, track editing history, opens, and more. When your PDFs are being sent, received, opened, and edited in the cloud, your data is safe, secure, and trackable.
- Increase collaboration: Thanks to ease of use and handy annotation solutions, PDF productivity solutions create the ultimate playground for productive collaboration. The best PDF editors allow you to annotate in real time, so there are no lulls in workflow and your employees can achieve maximum efficiency by working in a shared, digital environment. Employees can work faster and better, together, which makes everyone’s jobs easier.
PDF productivity solutions and eSigning solutions were built with your modern workforce in mind, and they boost employee satisfaction because employees can get work done faster and more efficiently—whether they’re in the office, on a business trip in London, or working remotely for the week. When work gets done faster, employee morale skyrockets, and happier employees are more productive, which is better for the bottom line.
Try a free trial of Nitro Pro now to see how you can digitally transform your office with a technology partner who works with you to implement the ideal solution for your company. You will make your employees happier and more productive.
