91% of employees are wasting time doing this one thing inefficiently

"It's deja vu all over again," Yogi Berra once said, speaking of repeatable business processes.*

According to our recent survey, 45% of employees spend half their day working on repeatable tasks. That may sound like hyperbole until you step back and consider what you've done so far today. How many times have you followed the same steps over and over again? Are you trying to push a press release or new marketing asset through the approval process? Closing out contract redlines or a procurement process before the end of the quarter? Or maybe trying to onboard a new member onto your team? If you're like 91% of the people we surveyed, you too use email to handle these types of tasks.

What's the result of being stuck in this manual, email-based world?

• As a company, you lose tons of money! While there are cascading effects (highlighted below), the bottom line is that your bottom line suffers when your employees are tied up manually managing repeatable tasks. Over half of our survey respondents said they'd save at least a day each week if repeatable processes were automated. That means that a 1,000 person organization paying its workers $50,000 per year is wasting $5,000,000 annually on repeated tasks (not to mention that opportunity cost)!
• As an individual, you can't focus on getting your job done. Instead of creating content, selling to a customer, or generally driving your business forward, you spend time checking in with internal and external stakeholders on their status. Or worse, you edit an outdated document that you think is the latest.
• Your work is late (and then you work late). Due to an unclear understanding of who is on point for each task and when it's due, your team misses deadlines and your backlog starts to look more like a backforest.
• Unclear trail of approvals. With 15 different processes going on, you don't remember if your manager approved that new vendor contract or new hire salary. What was the subject line of that email again?
• Outputs are sub-par. Without formalized processes about all of the steps each stakeholder needs to go through, employees are likely to miss steps and the final output suffers.

With all of this downside, why do most teams still handle these repeatable processes with email?

1. Most people don't know an alternative option exists -- many leaders are focused on innovation as it relates to their outputs or strategies, but less frequently on how their work gets done and their teams collaborate. As a result, they typically don't think about their day-to-day work as a series of "workflows" that follow the same steps
2. For those who have tried to automate their repeatable processes with an existing business process management (BPM) solution, they've been irked by the complication of setting up a usable workflow. It turns out that most "user-friendly" tools are not actually so easy to use
3. IT is too bogged down to provide the right support to the business for everything except the very most important processes. With IT typically under-resourced and the majority of their budgets spent on IT maintenance, the thoughts of managing and rolling out another tool is an overwhelming thought.

It is with these critical challenges in mind that we developed Box Relay, the first workflow solution designed specifically for Marketing, HR, Legal, Finance, Sales, and other functional teams to use to automate their repeatable processes, without requiring IT involvement. With Relay, automating the coordination of repeatable processes is as easy as making a to-do list. And since Relay is part of the Box cloud content management platform, content collaboration in Relay benefits from the same security and compliance standards that over 80,000 customers already enjoy. It's workflow made simple.

In coming blogs, we'll detail how our customers are using Relay to power the way they work together. Can't wait? Contact us to get started.

*Yogi Berra did reportedly say this. We don't think it was about business process.