At a time when schools are dealing with tighter budgets and decreases in enrollment, many Higher Ed professionals are looking for ways to streamline their operations and clean up any inefficiencies.
One of the best ways to tackle that challenge is to leverage workflow automation so that you can build automated, proactive solutions for many of the things that you may currently be doing manually.
When looking for ways to automate your processes and increase efficiency, you’ll find that many of the solutions are hiding in plain sight. Quite often, this looks like resistance to change in the form of, “Well, this is how we’ve always done it!”
Some of the most frequent examples of this can include instances like:
- Work that doesn’t need to be manually done but is because of software limitations
- Repetitive work that could be alleviated with automation
- Human errors that cost time and money to correct
This type of manual, repetitive work can also lead to staff burnout. This is a challenge across all of Higher Ed, especially with the pandemic.
When people are burned out, they’re less likely to be productive, more likely to make mistakes, and they probably don’t have the bandwidth to come up with innovative ideas or new solutions. In many cases, they’re just trying to get through the day.
This can also lead to less-than-ideal student experiences because many of your staff members have daily student interactions. If they’re stressed, anxious, or burned out, are they going to be able to provide the consistently stellar student experience upon which your school prides itself?
With competition fierce and profitability more critical than ever, it’s important to find those opportunities to streamline. Not only are you making your life (and the lives of your team) easier, but you’ll be able to make a stronger impact on profitability.
How Workflow Automation Improves the Bottom Line
Workflow automation makes an impact on a lot of areas on a college campus—freeing up time, improving efficiencies, and enhancing the student experience, to name a few—but perhaps the largest impact it has is on profitability. Here’s how:
Reducing Staff Turnover
People who do the same kind of repetitive work every day can often feel bored or unfulfilled in their job, and who can blame them? When that happens, they’ll likely start looking for jobs elsewhere so they can be challenged and feel excited about the work that they do.
It typically costs hundreds (or thousands!) of dollars and many working hours to recruit, hire, and train new employees. You can imagine the kind of negative impact that would have on your bottom line.
Minimizing the Chance for Human Error
When errors are made (like overbooking a class, allowing a student to register for a class without all prerequisites fulfilled, or updating a record in one platform but not in another), they can cost a lot of time and money to identify and correct. We’ve all been there!
Most of the time, they’re completely avoidable errors that would be resolved by having workflow automation in place that never creates the opportunity for those errors to be made in the first place.
Improving the Student Experience
By leaving some of that repetitive work—like updating files, scheduling meetings, or sending emails—to automation, you’ll be able to free up super valuable staff time to work on projects that inspire them and help with what matters most: creating incredible student experiences.
This could look like improving campus life, planning events and activities, and building new marketing campaigns. Freeing up your time also enables you to focus on recruiting new students, which is crucial in this competitive environment.
Automating Faculty Management
Automation software also gives you the ability to be more proactive with class scheduling so that you’re maintaining a profitable course schedule.
As we outlined in our blog post about faculty management and class scheduling, “if you’re looking for areas to improve your bottom line without having to raise tuition costs, this is the number one opportunity.”
We could go on and on about the benefits of utilizing workflow automation, but hopefully, this list has given you an idea of how it can help your bottom line.
If you’re not currently using automation to make your job easier, now’s the perfect time to start. You can schedule a demo of Verity’s platform and we’ll show you how we’re helping schools all over the country streamline their operations and improve their profitability.
