Half a century ago, mountains of paperwork used to be one of the tell-tale hallmarks of a busy, productive office churning through piles of work. By comparison, today’s digital workspaces are much sleeker. Instead of physical piles, the endless documents, presentations and spreadsheets that we produce each day are helpfully hidden behind a screen.
Advancements in digital productivity may mean that we’re able to produce more documents, but the problem is, the piles haven't really disappeared – they've just been stored out of sight. Given the sheer volume of stuff produced by staff on a daily basis, it's no surprise that inefficient processes have developed, with managers struggling to maintain control over compliance and workflows.
We might not have a paperwork problem anymore, but many companies seem to have a template management one.
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How are your current processes contributing to the chaos?
Given the situation outlined above, it’s little wonder managers are finding that the content produced by staff is often not on-brand and in line with the company's visual identity.
You too have likely attended a presentation by a staff member and seen many off-brand elements on the slides. Or perhaps you've had to dig out an old doc in a hurry, only to find it doesn’t fit with the latest company guidelines, and so have had to spend time and effort updating it manually. When these issues start to crop up routinely, they can seriously affect company efficiency.
Our office suite software and work habits are partly to blame. Because staff are producing so much sheer stuff on a daily basis, they’ll often just build on whatever is available from their desktops, relying on the many features of their digital office suites to style their own documents, or starting from scratch with a blank document and often paying little heed to ensuring that the details like logos and taglines are up-to-date.
Communication bottlenecks along departments can also cause big confusion about which templates must be complied with, while companies with a long history may find that they have several hundred templates floating around, causing a large-scale template mess.
But whether your team is big or small, it’s a near-impossible task to manually ensure every single document complies with the latest company and regulatory guidelines.
What’s worse, it sometimes dissuades businesses from refreshing the look of their brand, for fear that it will be too much hassle to ensure internal compliance, keeping companies trapped in outdated visual styles.
The issue is even more intensified if your company has recently gone through a rebrand. Reinventing yourself is an increasingly important tactic in the fast-paced business world and it’s exciting to see how different companies harness it. But when you’ve gone through the effort of collaborating with designers and strategists to give your brand a makeover, it can be pretty disheartening to realize how difficult it is to ensure that every single staff member upgrades every single working document to the new logo and look. With such a huge margin of human error, traces of your old brand identity will inevitably crop up and your rebranding efforts end up compromised.
All marketers know that a strong visual identity is critical to success, so internal compliance isn’t just a headache and a productivity roadblock, but a big barrier to your company being seen as a strong brand.
A dynamic template management system automates compliance and streamlines workflows
What makes a template dynamic? Office templates are born static, while dynamic templates insert data automatically when a user opens a new file or edits an old one. Elements like personal data, company branding, and department-specific or location-specific info appear automatically when a document is created. Automating these processes saves people a lot of time and hassle, and helps them be compliant by default.
What makes a template management system dynamic? Change is constant in business, so even organizations with a good data structure to support their templates will regularly find that data outdated. A dynamic template management system like Templafy makes it easy to address change and roll out updates to the whole company instantly. Everything is handled through the intuitive Templafy interface and available online. The need for IT involvement is removed, and all templates, documents and content assets are accessible locally or through the cloud.
Better yet, Templafy integrates with the office suites used by companies every day, so all your custom company templates, brand assets and best practice content are available directly inside any office application – whether that’s Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, Apple iWork, Google Drive, etc. – streamlining how users build or rebuild files. It's available on all platforms and devices too, ensuring businesses are on-brand and users create professional documents faster.
Templafy can help your company to automate workflows, stay compliant, improve daily content creation processes, and move essential business functions online.
Want to learn more? Download our free Template Management Guide:
