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Create Streamlined Workflows for Every Team in Your Company It's your responsibility to empower individual departments to work with autonomy and efficiency.

By Chris Byers

entrepreneur daily

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Ensuring all teams within your organization are working productively and efficiently requires constant vigilance and attention to detail. As a business leader, it's your goal and your responsibility to empower individual departments to work with autonomy and efficiency. But rather than hovering over your employees' shoulders and micro-managing departments, the solution to this challenge often begins with implementing the right systems and workflow processes.

According to a recent study by ADP, 55 percent of today's employees have positive feelings about automated systems replacing repetitive work. But as a leader, how do you execute automation that effectively gets the work done and satisfies your team?

Related: What You Can Learn From Hollywood on Hiring and Managing Employees

An easy, effective way to get started in business automation is with a reliable online form solution. Online forms can help every team in your company manage digital transactions with ease and efficiency. Below are a few ways online forms can positively impact every employee in your organization and anchor your online business in automation.

Marketing team.

Marketing teams and sales teams need to be able to work in unison. Online forms can make that goal a reality by allowing teams to utilize a centralized dashboard and track leads, sign ups and inquiries in an organized, shared database.

Collecting and managing leads is typically a top priority for marketing departments and is most effective when automated. Using an online form to capture leads can increase sign-ups, conversions and, ultimately, revenue when effectively implemented. At Formstack, we've seen a client increase their conversion rate by 114 percent by switching their email sign-up process to an online form.

Human resources team.

Human resources teams are often burdened by a heavy load of administrative tasks and paperwork, especially in the way of new employee interaction and ongoing employee engagement. Eliminating email and switching to online forms for this type of employee communication can help HR teams save time and focus their limited hours on what's really important: addressing the needs of new hires and ensuring existing employees are being heard.

Related: Managing the Unmanageable: The 6 Most Common Types of Difficult Employees

Cutting down on hard-to-manage email threads is only one example of how HR teams can benefit from online forms. From automating annual employee reviews, streamlining PTO requests and allowing for creation of cost-effective training programs, there are dozens of ways HR teams can use online forms and business automation to work smarter.

Finance team.

Approving budgets, fulfilling reimbursement requests and tracking new vendor information are several functions of a finance team that can quickly become tedious and cumbersome if not streamlined into an efficient workflow. Online forms have the potential to help finance professionals keep all their critical information organized, accessible and easily shared between team members within the department.

What's more, online forms can help finance teams save precious time by standardizing approval processes and automating request forms. One of our clients at Formstack minimized the time it took to approve a new customer by two full days, simply by adding online forms to their workflow.

Sales team.

Using online forms to automate your sales functions can benefit both your internal team's workflow and your customer's experience in interacting with your website. By using online order forms and business inquiry forms, sales teams can decrease the time it takes to make a sale and make the overall ordering process more efficient and seamless. If your sales team hasn't been using online tools to supplement its sales process at all, it's likely that you could see an increase in sales simply by adding an online order form or demo request form to your process.

Related: 7 Ways to Manage Your Most Motivated and Talented Employees

In addition, online forms can help your sales team manage customer memberships. By increasing the visibility of online touchpoints and making interactions with your website a more streamlined experience, online forms can lead to stronger customer retention and an increase in leads.

Automating and streamlining the workflow of your company's various departments won't be an overnight project. But online forms can quickly help your teams become faster, more efficient and more organized in their day-to-day tasks. Prioritize workflow automation within your company and be prepared for positive results.

Chris Byers

CEO, Formstack

Chris Byers is the CEO of Formstack, an Indianapolis-based company offering an online form and data-collection platform. Prior to Formstack, Byers co-founded an international nonprofit that was built via remote relationships among partners in Europe, Africa and the United States.

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