A seamless workflow is every business owner’s utopia. Everyday in business, time is of the essence. Despite this, workflow and productivity in the workplace is often neglected because of the other hundred tasks on your to-do list.
Efficiency in any workplace relies on well developed workflows. An effective workflow will help employees maximise their day with less stress and redundant admin tasks. This is such a hot topic in business’ globally because your business’s efficiency will impact your ROI.
So you are looking how to increase productivity in your business? Here are 4 steps you’ll want to follow!
1. Assess your current process
What are you spending the majority of your time doing?
Before making any changes, you want to look at your current environment. What are your staff telling you? How do they stick to their role? Is there anything that frustrates them daily?
These are all important questions for every division in the business. Investigating and contacting people who are regularly across these processes will help you establish what is working and what is not.
Where should you be focusing your time?
Your time is valuable so it is important to assess how you and your staff are spending it. You will want to avoid money-sucking tasks that directly impact your ability to gain revenue. For staff this may be daily internal transferring of documents, communication about clients and unnecessarily long meetings.
Ideally, you should be planning your processes on a prioritised hierarchy. Rank each business process in order of importance to see where you can improve your workflow.
2. Redesign the process
How can I streamline and automate my work?
So you have identified the priority processes that earn you revenue. Additionally you can see the less important (but still vital) processes that eat away at your time. Now look at each of these processes and how they work.
What you need to do is find ways you can simplify your workflow through eliminating the redundant processes. In many ways this may require automation.
How do I know when to automate processes?
If you can see you’re spending more time completing redundant processes than working on revenue gaining projects, you need to look for automation options.
You can do this by breaking down the redundant process into smaller manageable steps. Track your workflow and look at the tasks that can be computer generated or totally removed to streamline the process.
This could be the process of acquiring a new customer. Internally, every time you gain a new customer, it may be the customer service representatives responsibility to save files from the client which are provided.
3. Automate process
Knowing how to automate may be clear for you, while some processes may be a bit trickier to identify. Work management software is the best solution to this issue. While there are thousands of software solutions available today, you need to make sure the software is solving your problem at hand.
For example, you might have one of your staff members spending a long time sorting and deleting old files.The solution to this could be having a system update that automatically deletes files. This will maximise your staff’s time and increase their workflow for other priority processes.
4. Implement and refine the process
When you have established the new process design and have set automations in place. Have yourself and others test it. After implementing and working with the new process, fresh eyes may see more areas of improvement and wasted time.
Keep in mind often when purchasing a management system these processes are structured in a way that simplifies the workflow for you and often requires less amending.
If you're looking for the best workflow software in Orange, the professionals at Select Digital are ready to help you.
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