Can software be good for your health?

It’s great that business leaders are recognising the need to deliver targeted health initiatives to promote a productive, healthy and engaged workforce. Especially when it’s no secret that companies can struggle with the complex issues of low productivity and absenteeism – both having a direct impact on costs as well as competitive advantage.

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reports that around 9.9 million working days are lost in the UK each year due to stress, depression or anxiety. In fact stress, anxiety and depression are behind one in five visits to a GP, and according to the latest estimates experts claim that 80% of all disease could actually be attributed to stress.

Let’s face it… it’s not difficult to see how the ever increasing demands of customers, suppliers, partners and colleagues can lead us to become overwhelmed with the need to think, act, react, make decisions and meet targets and deadlines quicker than ever.

And yet there are many companies using out-dated software applications that require constant human intervention, consolidation and re-checking. Intelligent, career-focussed finance and procurement professionals can find themselves spending too much time form-filling, record keeping, report writing and carrying out basic admin tasks – left feeling undervalued and overwhelmed.

Surely addressing the bottlenecks and frustrations that are causing employees unnecessary levels of stress is a hugely beneficial thing that business leaders can do. For their bottom line, the health and productivity of their team, and for competitive advantage.

That’s what I love about my job: seeing first-hand the impact of the software we’ve implemented.

We recently helped an organisation reduce the amount of time it takes to import a 45,000 line invoice from three days to three minutes!

Another client told me that they had been working late into the evenings, copying and pasting data from two different systems (in this case finance and Purchase-To-Pay) to produce management reports. This is now completely automated and they told me that although they had been considering leaving the company, this one thing has completely changed their working day.

We often think of technology helping us in terms of fitness apps and calorie trackers, but it can also help us improve our health in the workplace.