5 inefficient work processes you should let go in 2022

Every organization strives for growth in productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction. Likewise, school districts aim for positive student outcomes, effective teaching methods, high teacher morale, happy parents, and well-optimized school budgets.

All these goals primarily rely on one major factor: process efficiency. 

What does that mean for school districts? It’s the amount of time, effort, and resources it takes to achieve a particular goal. That goal can range from general objectives like raising test scores to more granular tasks like purchasing supplies or scheduling classes and parent conferences without accidental schedule overlap.

A recent survey found that we waste over a quarter of work hours on average because of process inefficiencies. That’s a substantial amount of lost work hours that can hinder a school district’s ability to reach its goals.

Poor process efficiency occurs when it takes too much time and money to complete essential school administration work. It’s often caused by a school district’s lack of visibility into district activities and being overly dependent on manual processes.

So, what options do school districts have? And which inefficient work processes are slowing your school district down? Read on to discover our list of education-specific work processes you must say goodbye to for good.

1. Too Many Manual Processes

Handling administrative work by hand is a process inefficiency we’re all aware of but aren’t quite sure how to solve. Manual work is slow, tedious, and prone to human error. Teachers aren’t usually a fan either, as it takes away valuable time they could better spend working with students.

The solution: automation software. And we’re not just talking about digital spreadsheets but software-powered processes with a robust education management platform.

Inspect your current processes and determine where repetitive tasks are happening. For example:

• Are teachers still manually typing grades into disjointed spreadsheets? 
• Do IT staff still have to move data from one system to another painstakingly? 
• Are administrators relying on stacks of paper to keep track of everything?

If so, it’s time to explore software solutions to modernize your organization and remove as many manual processes as possible.

2. Siloed Operations

Managing a school district is a multi-faceted and complex endeavor. For example, you have individual departments for human resources, financial administrators, payroll management, student information systems, and many more.

If these groups cannot communicate cohesively, you risk overlapping responsibilities. For example, financial managers might accidentally perform the same tasks that payroll management has already completed, resulting in process inefficiencies in the form of redundant work. 

Additionally, multiple departments might rely on the same data, such as when human resources and the student information system both need to analyze individual instructor performance.

Siloed operations prevent these departments from optimizing their efforts, so what’s the solution? 

Bring all of your departments together into one unified platform. By promoting communication and data sharing, collaboration with software like Edsembli boosts district-wide visibility, you’ll make sure everybody is on the same page and enable better productivity across all schools.

3. Poor Reporting Capabilities

Poor documentation generally results in inefficient processes. In addition, too little usable data makes it challenging to generate actionable insights, and administrators have trouble quantifying and analyzing success at school.

How do you know which courses are working out best and which ones need improvements? How can you discover opportunities to stretch the budget? Without the right reporting tools, you can’t spot inefficiencies when they happen and end up raising operating expenses.

The solution is to turn that data into actionable insights with leading-edge software. You’ll need a centralized platform to collect and analyze that data so that data from one department is accessible to another, all in real-time.

With the right software, the school board can make better decisions and help set realistic goals. Your chosen platform should also support creating reports and automatically tracking trends to see the big picture and improve operational efficiency.

4. Too Many Physical Processes

“Physical processes”—including manual or duplicate data entry, printing, emailing and mailing—are separate tasks that the school has not adequately integrated into its workflow. In the education world, examples include:

• Attendance management: Paper-based attendance sheets are inefficient for tracking student attendance, as the data must be then manually entered into the system introducing the risk of data entry errors and lagging data reports. 
• Procurement and purchasing: Buying school supplies and equipment often involves emailing requisition forms, approving them, and manually entering them into the system.
• Job posting planning & preparation: Most schools still enter job postings by hand.
• Professional development and yearly reviews: Appraisal management is a pain to complete when done with paper forms. It’s also challenging to track changes over time. Additionally, professional development days that rely on physical paperwork further increase the sessions’ costs. 
• New hires: From making contact with new teachers to their associated integration costs, there are a lot of expenses associated with hiring new staff. As a result, schools are scrambling for more cost-effective ways to onboard new hires.

Research shows that each physical paper-based process costs an average of $22 per use. In addition, these processes are a waste of paper and take up too much administrative time that staff could better use for more critical tasks.

You can effectively optimize all of these tasks using automation and digital tools. For example, instead of tedious paper-based processes, online forms are instantly shareable with other team members, relieving the burden of physical processes. 

For example, Edsembli automatically codes the costs of, salaries, timesheets, absences, professional development sessions, expenses, and integrates the data into the centralized general ledger, saving time and paper.

5. Outdated Tools and Software

Your choice of software tools matters too. Many school districts are stuck with outdated, legacy systems that cause more frustration than they’re worth. Some of them are no longer even in development. In addition, the constant calls to the IT department hold up class time and create other problems for operational efficiency, plus increasing IT costs.

It’s important to choose powerful software that runs smoothly and is capable of everything your district must throw. Carefully evaluate your options and find leading-edge software that streamlines all of the processes we’ve discussed, and you’ll be ready to improve your operational processes.

It’s Time to Upgrade Inefficient Work Processes

Inefficient workflows frustrate your teachers and can even impact student success. If schools want to bring modern education to young minds, they must adopt modern technologies that revise their current inefficient work processes.

But don’t just pick any business management software. The education sector has unique needs, and a tailored solution like Edsembli covers all of them, from student information recordkeeping to HR and payroll management for staff. As a result, over 1.4 million students across 80 school districts have optimized their operations through our platform.

Ready to upgrade your operations and say goodbye to these operational inefficiencies? Reach out to us today to schedule a demo and see how Esembli can help.