Employees still lose 15 hours a week to administrative tasks

Administrative burden is still slowing down Belgian businesses

Belgian leaders are increasingly aware of the impact of administrative burden on their organization’s performance.

Yet in many companies, employees still spend a significant portion of their time on repetitive, low-value tasks.

According to a European study, office employees spend an average of 15 hours per week on administrative tasks such as document processing, information search, email management, or manual data entry.

More than a quarter of employees even say these activities take up most of their working day.

A reality also observed in Belgium

At Novoffice, we see this same reality every day among Belgian organizations. Despite investments made in digital transformation, many processes remain heavily dependent on paper, emails, Excel files, or manual interventions.

This situation leads to:

• considerable loss of time for employees;
• error risks linked to duplicate entries and manual processing;
• difficulties in quickly finding the right information;
• delays in validations and internal processes;
• increased risks in terms of compliance and data security.

Beyond the loss of productivity, this administrative burden ties up resources that could be devoted to value-creating activities, serving customers and business development.

Teams regularly face repetitive tasks that slow down their work:

• re-entering the same information multiple times;
• searching for documents scattered across different systems;
• managing overloaded mailboxes;
• manually updating reports or dashboards;
• following approval processes that remain largely paper-based or email-driven.

These tasks, often invisible, represent a significant cost for companies and have a direct impact on employee motivation.

Automation as a performance lever

Intelligent process automation now makes it possible to eliminate much of these repetitive tasks.

Through document dematerialization, electronic document management (EDM), automated workflows and integration of existing systems, businesses can:

• significantly reduce the time spent on administrative tasks;
• improve data quality and reliability;
• accelerate validation processes;
• strengthen document compliance and traceability;
• give employees more time for high-value assignments.

The Novoffice approach

At Novoffice, we support Belgian businesses in their digital transformation by simplifying document management and automating business processes.

Our objective is straightforward: to enable organizations to reduce administrative burden, secure their information, and free up time for activities that truly create value.

Digital transformation is not just about digitizing documents. It is first and foremost about making processes smoother, faster and more reliable, to simultaneously improve operational performance and employee experience.