Forms are a great tool for every team, providing tremendous value in terms of time saving, standardization, information flow, compliance, and more. They are easy to setup, and are highly adopted by team members as they make things easier for everyone. Automating processes and standardizing them is something that is important for every business. Our Forms feature allows your employees to fill in reports, forms, checklists, requests, and more, all from their mobile app.
In this article we will go
The Value of Using Forms
The forms feature has four core qualities that provide tremendous value for your business:
Forms automate and simplify the information gathering from your team: Whether it's a weekly checklist, an incident report or a confirmation of a recent policy release, forms are always available for your team and are easy to fill with just a few clicks.
Forms instantly digitize your business: by default, every form entry is filed, providing you with access to all historical information in a searchable and organized manner, so you can later search, export or generate relevant reports from the information gathered.
Forms automate information flow and improve response time: forms don't just gather the information, they auto-forward it to the relevant stakeholders so they can take action. Reducing response and communication overhead, making your business more efficient and more productive.
Forms support follow up actions: as a manager, forms provide you with the ability to track statuses, confirm entries with signature and more so you can track the follow up action triggered by your team members.
Examples of Using Forms
To bring this all down to earth, let's look at some examples of forms. Forms can be broadly segmented to a few key categories:
Operational Checklists
Form examples: 'Site opening checklist', 'Pre drive checklist', 'Monthly safety checklist'.
Advantages: Operational checklists by default dictate standardization across your organization as all team members adhere to the same reporting format. They drive operational efficiency, improve the service level and help you flag out exceptions that may require further attention.
As an example, Bob the store manger can see from his mobile at any given time today's opening checklist and to take action on any potential exceptions, even if he's not in the store.
Reporting Forms
Form examples: 'Incident report', 'Safety hazard report', 'Accident report'
Advantages: Reporting forms allow quick detailed reporting at any time from anywhere and empower a quick response.
As an example, when Jessie reports on an incident that took place, her manager is automatically notified in real time and gets a pdf copy of the incident details, images and locations from the field.
Pro tip: If you want to learn more about reporting forms check our this article!
Inspection / Audit reports
Form examples: 'Site Audit', 'Health and Safety Inspection', 'Team performance audit'
Advantages: Audit reports make it easy for the auditor to document findings, standardize the inspection process and also to track results overtime and across the organization by digitizing all audits from all across the organization, making them accessible and comparable.
As an example, when Rob conducts a Health and Safety audit in a restaurant site, he first looks at the audit from last year to evaluate the previous results, and than can include in his report if there's a trend of improvement or further action is required to raise the team's standards.
Read and Sign Forms
Form examples: 'Employee book acknowledgment, 'Daily COVID19 Health declaration', 'Uniform policy acceptance'.
Advantages: Read & Sign Forms are very efficient in getting quick and documented response from your team, to ensure you meet compliance standards and that your team is up to date with your internal protocols and guidelines. Read & Sign forms provides you with full visibility to who completed the form, and makes it easy to follow up with push notifications just with the team members that didn't so you can reach 100% compliance from your team.
As an example, Elise from HR wishes to make sure all her team is up-to-date with the recent updates of the company's Employee Handbook. So she issues a read & sign forms detailing the relevant information, and is able to gather acknowledgment from all her team in under 24 hours. She also downloads a PDF copy of every form filled to ensure documentation for compliance purposes.
Pro tip: Want to learn more about read and sign forms? Check out this article!
Ticketing with Forms
Forms examples: 'Opening a maintenance ticket', 'Reimbursement form', 'Stock order', 'Reporting a speed ticket'.
Advantages: With ticketing forms, every team member can fill in and document all the relevant information with ease including uploading of supportive images and any other required information. All tickets are automatically documented, filed and organized so the team can later respond and act on them as needed.
As an example, James is a controller that is responsible for reimbursing team members on approved expenses. When it's time to do payroll, he just looks at his reimbursement form table, and see all the entries from the last month, he can then marks all expenses that were paid and even ask for clarifications from relevant team members if needed. He downloads all invoices for record keeping and moves on to his next task.
Summary
In this article we've covered the value that our powerful Forms feature can bring to your business and your running platforms on Connecteam.
In addition, we've covered several use cases that could help you take the Forms and utilize it in your company and boost it to the next level!
Still lacking inspiration? You can check out more great use cases for our Forms feature right here!
Want to learn more about our Forms capabilities? You can learn all about it here!
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