3 Reasons To Divorce Paper Forms for Mobile Forms

By Shannon Corgan, Director of Marketing 

You’re constantly frustrated by managing mobile employees when it comes to paperwork. Here are the top 3 reasons, you should ditch those paper forms and simplify your life with mobile forms:

I can’t get my employees to fill out paper forms – When you’re an employee that works in the office and has to collect the forms from your mobile or field employees, you don’t know what you don’t know. The employees and equipment are out in the field moving from job to job and it’s difficult to get all of your employees’ paperwork back to the office and easily track your assets. You probably provide safety training and Toolbox Talks to educate your employees about why it’s important to fill out safety checklists and to fill out your paper safety forms. You know they’ve received training about filling out a safety checklist of their work area, but most of the time you don’t receive the safety checklists back in the office. In the office, sometimes you don’t hear about safety issues until much later. Because you’re not getting your safety checklists back in the office, you end up being reactive instead of proactive with your safety program. If you hear about a safety issue and when you check the safety logs, you’ll often find that what you heard about in passing doesn’t have a corresponding safety or injury report. You are frequently requesting forms after the fact.

Employees don’t fill out the RIGHT forms – Many times when employees are filling out paper forms for performance improvement plans, safety or injury reports, or safety checklists, it can require additional information to mitigate any risk for your company. For example, if you have an employee complete a daily log report and they answer yes when they are asked if there were any injuries on the job today. You might instruct them on the form that they need to call the Safety Manager and/or Workman’s Compensation manager to see if they need to fill out an additional report. They may not have any of the forms to fill out. If so, they would need to fill out an additional injury report and potentially fill out the OSHA 300 log depending on the injury. It might also require some Workman’s Compensation paperwork also. You also run into issues when employees fill out outdated forms which then require you additional phone calls, emails, and text messages to get the new information you’ve added to the current paper form. There are times when you need an employee to fill out more than one form, so even after you get the first injury report form, you have to send additional follow up forms.

Paper Forms are Late or Missing – Does your HR or payroll team always feel like they are behind the eight ball when it comes to getting new hire paperwork quickly from the field? Typically you’re rushing to manually enter the new hire paperwork into the HR or accounting system because you receive it after the new employee’s start date. This late paperwork compounds more of your headaches because you have to figure out how to get the employee’s hours entered correctly for the hours they worked before you even knew they existed. You also have to assign the job costs to the right projects and cost centers to get accurate job costing. This means that you have to call, email, or text the employee’s supervisor and ask him to send you the information to manually enter it into the accounting/payroll system. 

There are also many times when you get a last minute job to complete a work order for a client. Because you have paperwork orders, you have to send employees to the customer’s location as soon as possible with verbal or instructions by text message. They may or may not even have the right tools or equipment with them to fix the customer’s problem because they didn’t receive the detailed paperwork order before being dispatched to the client’s location. Your employees are not showing up not as prepared as they could be because there’s not an easy way to get the paperwork order to the employee before they get to the customer’s location.

With all the extra work paper creates for you, it’s time that you look for a new way to manage your mobile employees and forms. It’s time for the BIG “D” word, DIVORCE! It’s time to break up with paper and put in those divorce papers. If you want to know how you can increase your safety or form completions and get them to your office staff in real time, you should check out our Harvest Energy Services Success Slideshow. They increased their safety form completions by 200% by making paperwork easy with mobile forms. WorkMax FORMS also has nested forms and conditional logic that will present follow-up forms based on responses in the current form. To improve the number of forms completed and get them to the office in a timely manner by combining WorkMax TIME with WorkMax FORMS. With WorkMax TIME + WorkMax FORMS, you can prompt your employees to answer questions and that will automatically present the needed forms on their mobile devices when they Clock IN/OUT. We know employees want to make sure they track their hours worked accurately, so they’re much more likely to give your office staff the data they need from the field when you tie the forms to the Clock IN/OUT.