Category: Streamline Processes

The business world operates at a faster pace than ever before. For this reason, it’s important to ensure that every team, department, and worker in your organization can operate as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, complex processes can hamper your employees’ efforts and slow your business down. Your company will eventually fall behind if it sticks with the same old ways of doing business, so check out these five important reasons to streamline complex processes.

Fewer Mistakes

Convoluted processes and systems are very prone to human error. The slightest mistake can cost thousands of dollars, put people in danger, and significantly affect your organization’s reputation. By streamlining complex processes as much as possible, you decrease the likelihood of human error in your organization, which leads to higher productivity and more consistent results.

Easy Onboarding

Training a new employee can be a very costly and time-consuming endeavor. This is especially true if your organization has a confusing workflow. Simplifying your company’s processes will allow new team members to hit the ground running, and all employees will have less difficulty helping each other and adopting new roles on the fly.

Adaptability

Crucial aspects of your business can change at a moment’s notice. While your organization’s processes may work well enough in the present, your organization must quickly adapt to sudden market shifts in order to compete. Simple processes are easy to modify and scale, so your company can always adjust to new conditions when managers strive to streamline complex processes.

Happier Workers

Complicated processes waste a lot of time and can be incredibly demoralizing. A happy workforce is a productive workforce, so it’s important to understand your employees’ frustrations with your organization’s current rules and methods. When you simplify an employee’s workflow, they feel less stress, so they’re more willing to put in the extra effort to help your organization succeed. On top of that, employees who enjoy their work are much less likely to search for another job.

Better Customer Experience

Streamlined processes tend to result in higher-quality products and quicker deliveries than complex workflows. In turn, customers are more likely to leave high ratings and use your products or services again. If you find that your company has trouble with quality control or customer satisfaction, then you must take a close look at their biggest grievances and simplify your company’s processes accordingly.

Don’t Be Afraid To Modify Your Organization’s Processes

A competitive organization’s processes are never set in stone. To succeed in the modern market, your company must be willing to constantly adapt to new conditions. Change can be scary, but the right adjustments to your organization’s processes can make things easier and less stressful for managers and employees alike. You want to get the most out of your company’s limited resources, so check out our other informative guides on streamlining processes to increase efficiency.

Streamline Processes for Efficiency and Operational Excellence 

The modern business landscape changes more quickly than ever. For this reason, companies need to operate as efficiently as possible. Even if your teams are very effective, there is always room for improvement. Luckily, your business doesn’t need to spend a ton of money to increase productivity. Instead, you can simply follow these five important steps to streamline processes for efficiency.

Analyze Current Processes

What do your current processes look like? You must focus on every aspect of the current way of doing things to understand its strengths and weaknesses. As you track your team’s performance through all of the stages of a process, you’ll likely notice bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. It’s important to take detailed notes of all of your observations so that you can revisit them when you’re ready to optimize the process.

Understand Your Clientele

Knowing how your company operates from the inside isn’t enough. You need to know how your customers interact with your business to get a fuller understanding of your organization’s processes. What do your customers want? Do they avoid a certain part of your store or website? What do they enjoy about your services? To answer these questions, you should watch customers as they walk through your store, send out questionnaires, and pay close attention to your sales data and online analytics. Once you have a better understanding of your customers’ preferences and behaviors, you can easily adjust your organization’s processes to satisfy their needs. 

Set Clear Targets

What do you intend to achieve by adjusting a process? No matter what your goal is, you need to set measurable standards to accurately assess a new process. Instead of simply wanting a process to be quicker, it’s better to use exact numbers or percentages. For example, if a process takes five days to complete, then you might want to set a new goal to do it in four days without sacrificing quality.

Modify Procedures

Now that you have actionable goals, you can finally start tweaking your process. After consulting with relevant personnel and analyzing the weaknesses of the current process, you should determine which aspects you want to modify. Then, you can develop a new process and share it with your team.

Test, Revise, and Repeat

Once your team understands the changes to the process, it’s time to put the new way of doing things to the test. As the team carries out the updated method, you should repeat the first two steps to assess the effectiveness of your modifications. At the end of the test, you can determine your success by seeing how your team measured up to its goals. If the new process underperformed, then you’ll need to start over and use whatever insights you gained from the test. However, even if your changes were effective, you should still try to find ways to improve the process over time. 

Streamlining Processes Will Improve Your Company

You don’t want your company to stagnate. While the old way of doing things may seem good enough at the moment, an inability to adapt will cause your organization to fall behind. Therefore, you must consistently streamline processes for efficiency. That way, your organization will always maintain a culture of excellence and stay ahead of the competition.

The Best Method for Streamlining Your Enterprise’s Processes 

When you have a big project to complete, you may not feel like you’re up to the task. However, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and although a task may seem difficult, you can do anything with the right mindset and an efficient work ethic. Naturally, you want your team to do a stellar job without wasting time or resources, so you should check out this quick guide on streamlining processes to optimize your workflow.

See the Big Picture

Your team needs direction to succeed. You won’t be able to settle on the right processes for the job without a clear end goal in mind. Thus, before you do anything, you need to clearly define what you’re trying to accomplish. What will your final product look like? What does each stakeholder expect from your team? Once everyone involved in the process has a clear understanding of what they’re working towards, they can move forward with greater efficiency.

Break Tasks and Processes Down Into Measurable Goals

Most projects are extremely complex. Your team doesn’t only need to worry about the final product, but they also have to account for labor costs, legal compliance, testing, benchmarks, and more. Many jobs require managers to delegate work to multiple teams and different kinds of professionals. Therefore, each worker, department, or team should have clear expectations for their aspect of the job. Goals and expectations should not be vague. For everyone to know where they stand, managers should set precise deadlines and measure success with numbers whenever possible.

Use the Right Tools for the Job

Technology is your friend, and you may be able to automate a variety of time-consuming tasks. This will save a lot of money while making your enterprise more consistent, and your team members will be able to work on more important things. For example, Geon, a major PVC producer, used to have a severe problem with late shipments and customer complaints due to their very complex supply chains. However, they reported better cash flow and greater customer satisfaction after adopting ERP software. Therefore, you should consider how technology, tools, and outside expertise can make each part of your workplace’s processes more efficient.

Prioritize the Most Pertinent Tasks

Some tasks are time-sensitive, and you may have to finish certain parts of a project before moving on to other things. Failure to complete these duties as soon as possible may have a bottleneck effect that prevents further progress and forces some team members to sit around idly. While you may want to put some things off until the last minute, it’s better to tackle time-sensitive tasks quickly. Projects can be unpredictable, and you don’t want to be held back by an unexpected delay, so your team must stay on top of time-sensitive tasks and processes.

Record Successes and Failures

No matter how well you plan, not everything is going to run smoothly. Sometimes, you will have an idea that doesn’t work, and other times, you’ll find success in the strangest places. Whether you succeed or fail at a certain task, experience is always valuable. Therefore, you should remember to record your successes, failures, challenges, and discoveries as you make your way through a project. With this information, you will be more prepared to take on the next project, and your processes will be more effective in the future.

Streamlining Processes Will Help You Succeed

Efficiency is vital for any business in the digital age. Everyone has the tools to accomplish great things at an unprecedented rate. Thus, if you’re not always improving your team’s workflow, then your business will eventually fall behind. That is why it is so important to streamline your business’s processes. With a growth-centered mindset, a little humility, and the will to succeed, your team can achieve anything.

How to Streamline Your Business Processes in Six Steps

It’s time to face the fact that business people tend to overcomplicate things when it comes to operating a business or handling a project. Whether it involves establishing work assignments, setting up quality inspections, overseeing a project, or reviewing a to-do list, managers and teams frequently make processes more complex than they should be. If you think that you’re taking too many steps to get things done, it’s time to consider ways to simplify. Here’s how to streamline your business in six steps.

1. Assess Your Company’s Workflow

It may seem unlikely, but many project managers don’t know the ins and outs of their company’s work processes. To improve workflow, make a list of every process required in each area of the business. Do this to determine how your company operates and to see where things are becoming cluttered.

Discuss work processes with your employees. Be sure to ask them for feedback on the best way to streamline processes. Review every element and record the details. Once you’ve documented your company’s current workflow, you’ll be able to spot the bottlenecks, loopholes, redundant actions, and nonessential work. This will give you information about what is working well and where the business is struggling.

2. Pinpoint Important Focus Areas

After assessing the results of your company’s current processes, rate each one according to importance. Make it simple by rating them on a scale of 1 to 10. This will make it easier to pinpoint your business’s important focus areas. It also shows you where you can improve workflow. For instance, in some organizations, creating a better system for the warehouse and developing a way to keep the area maintained may be the highest priority. In other businesses, forming a customer retention management team could ease the workload for the sales associates.

According to Felix Oberholzer-Gee, a Harvard Business School professor, organizations focus too much of their attention on creating a strategy instead of how to streamline processes. This creates conflicting priorities. To resolve the problem, project managers should focus their attention on satisfying the business’s customers and its employees.

3. Break Your Work Processes Down

Streamlining processes requires you to break them down. Make each work process smaller and more manageable. Often, projects experience delays due to dependencies and the decision stages. This happens because the work process is too complex.

Make the steps as simple as possible. Break each one down into separate steps and work only toward the outcome that you need. Neuroscience and psychology research confirms that management is about how decisions are made. Some decisions are more challenging to make than others. Making good decisions when you need to make them relies on your reasoning and willpower abilities.

To confirm that your products or services are working as well as they should be, check with your clients about their pain points. Use this information to streamline processes better. For instance, if your customers feel as though they have to wait too long to receive their product or service, then you’ll want to look into ways to improve this. You may need to hire more employees or give your employees more power to make decisions.

4. Make To-Do Lists According to Particular Goals

It’s impossible to plan without a goal, so be sure to establish clear goals to streamline processes. When you have a goal, it’s much easier to make informed decisions without enduring extensive mental stress. General goals waste time. Once you’ve selected a goal, work backward to create your to-do lists.

Lists are incredibly helpful in encouraging you to take action. You’ll know what needs to be done and when. Lists help you remain on task and prevent you from missing important steps.

5. Implement Automation Where Possible

How to streamline processes? Implement automation where possible. The most popular way for businesses to track and oversee their workflow processes is by using work management software. Automate where you can. Powerful software programs and apps include advanced features that will make your company’s complex operational processes smooth and easy.

When you implement automation, your business will use less paperwork. You may even need fewer staff members since these types of programs to automate data entry and processing.

By streamlining processes, your employees will likely be more productive. This kind of reorganization will give your workforce an accurate idea of their everyday tasks and the assignments given to them. Your workers will be able to increase their focus and improve their work quality.

After you streamline operations, your company will be able to satisfy its customers and make work less frustrating for its staff. Streamlined operations also lower costs and make it possible for the business to do more using the same number of resources, which will make the shareholders happy.

6. Conduct a Test

After deciding how to streamline processes, conduct a test to make sure that everything is operating as predicted. You may need to make modifications. To test the changes that you’ve decided on, assess how your new processes operate live in the workplace. Try it out when you start working on your next project and review how each part of the new process works.

Keep in mind that changes take time to settle in, so be patient. Give it time to work. Evaluate how effective each workflow process is to confirm that everything is working as you intended. Give yourself the flexibility to make any needed changes.

7. Embrace Simplicity

How to streamline your business? Do it by embracing simplicity. Project managers who embrace simplicity will find it possible to streamline operations. When you eliminate unneeded actions, you’ll save time and money. If you need additional support or direction, contact me today. I can help.

Many of today’s careers require people to work intelligently. This means that employees must work together more, generate more and be more successful even as they are expected to work faster and smarter. Regardless of your industry, the amount of productivity that your employees can generate and their ability to work well depends on how much control they have over what they do during their work hours. These days, it’s common for business processes to be inefficient and even broken. If you see this in your company, it’s time for a change. Here are seven ways to streamline business processes.

1. Review Your Company’s Current Work Process

To streamline processes, review what’s happening now. You may need to check with every department to understand how the business has been operating to see where tasks may be getting bogged down or delayed. Discuss the company’s current workflow with your employees to see what advice they might have to make things run more smoothly. Analyze each step and take detailed notes. These steps will help you make changes to streamline how your company conducts business.

According to research, businesses don’t need to hold as many work meetings as they do. Statistics show that too many meetings result in a waste of an estimated 37 billion dollars in the United States.

Review the number of meetings that you’re scheduling to see if you’re wasting time holding them. You might be able to share information just as well through email or share more information during each meeting.

2. Break Down the Company’s Work Processes into Smaller Tasks

Once you have an outline of each work process, break each one down into smaller tasks. Try to make each step as simple as possible. A common thing that happens in many businesses is that project managers become consumed by a project’s dependencies and decision levels because of a complicated work process. Keep it simple. Break the process down into smaller steps and work toward what needs to be done.

In business, common areas of waste include overprocessing, defects, and waiting. If you can work to eliminate these wastes on your team, you’ll be more likely to increase profits and improve the happiness level of your workers. They’ll appreciate working under a system that operates efficiently. Employees often become frustrated when they have to go through steps that waste time.

As companies grow, structural changes start to happen. These changes may fluctuate from slight shifts in who is managing what department to job switches because of personal preferences. Since changes happen gradually over a long period, it’s easy to miss inefficiencies.

3. Look into Automation

To streamline processes, make sure that you’re using a quality work management software solutions program. In many businesses, the method used to send projects or tasks out to employees is often riddled with communication problems and data errors.

Be sure to install a program that will help your company and its staff communicate quickly and effectively. Today’s work management solutions software makes multifaceted business processes easier to manage.

4. Search for Unnecessary Tasks

Review the job tasks assigned to your team to identify ones that may be unnecessary. This will free people up to do other jobs. It can also help you improve business processes and allow your staff to manage their work time better.

Take a look at how other companies or industries operate. It’s easy to think that your business is unique and that methods used by other industries wouldn’t help you, but you might need to broaden your mindset.

Henry Ford decided to use an assembly line to construct his automobiles after visiting a slaughterhouse that used them to process meat. Vehicles and cows have many differences, but the technique for bringing the final product to the market works effectively in both industries.

5. Determine Pain Points

To streamline your business processes, ask your customers or clients about their pain points. Survey as many people as you can. This will help you narrow down your company’s pain points so you can start addressing them. For instance, if your customers are unhappy with the wait time for customer service, you may need to hire more people or determine ways for your current representatives to help people more quickly. This means that you might need to give your team more control over how they help your clients.

Prioritize key areas. Use the information to focus your attention on operations that will give you the best method for improving business processes.

6. Provide Detailed Explanations

After deciding what changes are needed to streamline your business processes, teach your team how to use them, do this prior to implementation. Make sure that every member of your team understands how the new process operates and how it will help them work more efficiently.

The benefits of streamlining businesses processes include better employee morale, improved team coordination, and increased employee adoption. It’s also likely that there will be fewer errors, missed project deadlines, and redundant tasks.

7. Be Open to Modifications

Once you start improving business processes for more effective operations, be open to modifications. You’ll need to take some time to see how and if the changes are streamlining operations in the way that you need or want. Be patient because changes always take time. Assess how well each new process is working and make modifications if needed. Tweak each process until you have everything working better.

Streamline Business Processes

When you make changes that make things run more efficiently, you’ll save time and money. Be patient and give the changes time to work. Contact us at the Productivity Intelligence Institute to see how we can help.

You’re meeting with partners from your firm, and it’s up to you to convince them that your department needs more money. Why is this a problem? You know that your company’s partners are aware that your department is important to the firm, but your day-to-day operations are specific and complex. In fact, your job might even be so specific that you have a hard time explaining to your friends what you do. How do you persuade the partners to give your department a percentage of the budget? Here are a few ways to market complex jobs.

Familiarize Yourself With Your Audience

To get people on your side, keep in mind that sharing information is about the people you’re presenting to and not about you. This means that you’ll want to take the time to get to know them. Learn what they’re interested in and what inspires them. Also, review their backgrounds and look into their communication preferences.

For example, if you’re in the engineering department and you’re speaking to the budget committee, talk more about the financial value of the product that you need financing to complete. Show them how it will save the firm money and what it is predicted to earn on the market.

Select One Detail to Focus On

When you know your audience, you’ll be able to communicate with them in a way that best explains what you need. What should you do if you’re meeting someone? My recommendation is to ask them a question like, “Before I explain something you already know, are you familiar with the [subject]?” Once you’ve figured out how informed your audience is, select one main part of what you do that you want them to understand.

The New York Times reported on a well-known attempt to communicate complicated information in the military. In 2010, a general was reviewing the details of a particular military strategy, but according to the article, he thought that it looked “like a bowl of spaghetti.” As he tried his best to understand the complex situation, he said, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

What this example shows is that when things are too complex, people are unable to understand or support them. They might even forget what you were trying to explain to them. Complex business problems can be resolved by homing in on one element.

Focus on the Best Way to Share the Information

After you know a bit about your audience, it will be easier for you to focus on what you want to share with them. You also need to consider how you’ll share it. This means that you’ll need to pay attention to context. How you choose to share your information matters. Consider what examples you want to share as well as the language and the terms that you’re using. Your choices will impact what people understand and remember.

The brain is an amazing organ, one that is able to handle a ton of information. It oversees how you behave based on your thinking patterns. The human brain also has the incredible ability to modify neural connections to cement new habits and diminish poor behaviors.

The downside is that people’s brains are sensitive, which means that they are prone to interference and distraction. To simplify effectively, be sure to obtain and keep the attention of your audience. One thing that makes it hard to keep people’s attention is that the brain automatically seeks stimulation. Use this information when deciding the important facts that you want to share to make something complex simple.

While you might be tempted to share several things about the information that you want to present, keep in mind that you’ll be asking your audience to multitask. Research has found that multitasking decreases productivity, making it a challenge for people to tune into the details that matter most.

A good comparison for attention is a spotlight. When you position a spotlight on one thing, you can see it well. If you were to stretch the light from the spotlight around a big dark room, you could maybe make out the outline of objects in the room. Tap into the mental focus of your audience by sharing the details of one part of your job or presentation.

Simplifying Complex Job Operations

Martin H. Fischer said, “Knowledge is a process of piling up facts; wisdom lies in their simplification.” When you focus on one of the elements of what you do or what you need, you’ll create a better connection with your audience. At the Leonard Productivity Intelligence Institute, I offer complex solutions that are simple to apply. For more information, contact me today.

Building a car is a challenging task. Inefficiencies on the assembly line slow production and increase costs. In the 1980s, Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno created a streamlining technique known as the Gemba walk. In this practice, managers walk the assembly line looking for steps that waste time or materials. They might also interview workers at each station to find improvements.

The Gemba walk is not a one-time activity. Changes to the assembly process may have unexpected consequences. Managers should regularly make the walk to look for new ways to save time and effort. As Ohno put it, “Re-improve what was improved for further improvement.”

What Are Roadblocks, and Why Do They Matter?

Whether it is manufacturing or another complex process in your business, roadblocks in the process will slow things down. A roadblock is an issue that delays or stops progress. Failing to integrate a new software program into your system can lead to time wasted with manual entry. A lack of adequate training can slow down the adoption of new equipment. An unclear accountability structure requires employees to send superfluous notifications. These roadblocks often stay in place because no one takes the time to look critically at the process.

Improving a complex process brings positive results to your team. Inefficiency can be a hard blow to employee morale. Even though they may be getting paid for the effort, no one wants to feel like they are wasting their time. When you streamline processes and establish clear goals, your team members find purpose in their work.

An efficient process is right for your bottom line. When you and your staff spend less time on unnecessary efforts, it lowers production costs and gives you more time for innovation. In manufacturing, a well-crafted process decreases the cost of production and offers consistent results.

A Growth-Centered Mindset

Embracing efficiency may require a change in the cultural mindset of your workplace. Many people enter the workforce with a fixed mindset. They assume there is a single right way to do things. If it reaches the goal, there is no reason to change it. When working on projects, these individuals will spend most of their time avoiding failure rather than learning from mistakes.

A flexible mindset allows for enhanced growth. This type of thinking recognizes that there may be several paths to reach a goal. Rather than perfecting a single process, a growth-centered style of development involves more brainstorming, experimentation, and analysis.

How to Streamline Complex Processes

“If you can’t explain it to a 6-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

 — Albert Einstein

Identifying and removing roadblocks takes effort. This work is not something that will happen through a single brainstorming session. Instead, you are looking to change the way your team thinks about workflow and efficiency.

Establish Benchmarks

It is much easier for people to work toward a goal. Rather than talking in general terms about making a process faster, you might want to introduce the idea of shaving a minute off the production time. An achievable goal will get people thinking about actionable steps.

Break Down Complex Processes

Every complex process involves multiple steps, and each stage requires a series of actions. When you are trying to simplify a process, move from the big picture to the specific. See if there are steps where a great deal of time gets lost. Then, focus on improving the steps within those steps.

Explore Multiple Pathways

When looking at a complicated process, it can be helpful to take a blank-slate approach. Knowing the goal you have in mind, let your team members imagine creative ways to get there. By questioning the assumption that your current process is the right one, you may be surprised at the inventive results.

Incentivize Innovation

Offering a bonus for creative streamlining ideas will keep your team members on constant watch for improvements. Rewarding new ideas will inspire a culture of creative problem-solving.

Make Process Streamlining an Ongoing Priority

Organizations devoted to simplifying processes recognize that there are many factors at play. When a new staff member comes on board, it can change the entire system. As new technologies emerge, and inspired team members may discover a creative application that makes things easier. Taking a flexible approach to workflow allows for continued innovation. A creative approach to removing roadblocks and simplifying processes can take your organization in new directions. If you need help on this journey, I would love to work with you, so reach out to me today.

Life isn’t that complicated, but our inability to focus can make it seem that way. If you don’t start each day with a clear plan and a well-defined goal, your day could unravel and spin out of control. Fortunately, there are simple, proven steps to getting your life back on a more straightforward track.

Why Do People Make Life Complicated?

Most of us don’t want to make our lives more complicated or stressful, so why do we do it? Most of us do it unintentionally. We think a complicated problem must have a complicated solution. In reality, a simple answer is usually the easiest and most effective solution.

Neuroscientists have found differences in certain portions of the brain among people who “overly complicate” things by being too literal and unable to see simple solutions. These people seem to operate on a higher plane, but they have difficulty dealing with everyday problems.

Could that be causing you to overthink everything? If you think so, it’s time to bring yourself back to earth. Try this experiment, run your problem by a trusted friend. Ask them to propose a solution. Chances are, they’ll come up with something much simpler than the complicated answer you chose.

Are You Designing Your Life or Letting It Design You?

Are you letting your life get overly complicated? All too often, we can get confused, derailed, and blown off track.

This type of thinking affects many aspects of our lives. According to Psychology Today, financial planner Michael Kay says his clients sometimes complicate their financial lives with too many accounts. As he concludes:

“There is a dividing line between our self-created complexity and our ability to simplify and move forward. We all have habits that ‘feel right’ because we’ve always done them. However, when we examine those habits, we may find that they don’t provide the value they once did. What are you overcomplicating? What can you simplify?”

How to Simplify Your Life

Here are some daily steps you can take immediately to make your life less complicated.

1. Stop worrying about the future: The past is gone, and the future isn’t here. Stop worrying about either one. The present is the only time you can control, and you can get control by having a plan for every day. Use meditation to keep yourself focused on the present moment.

2. Take action: If you can’t face your work right away, start the day by doing something you enjoy. It will “wake up” your mind with something enjoyable and spark your creativity. Don’t use it as an excuse to put off work for too long, however. Procrastination can lead to more complications if you don’t get your work done on time.

3. Change your mindset: Studies on neuroscience and motivation have found that a negative attitude about life can affect your ability to focus on your work and goals. To reverse this, read something inspiring written by a business leader, meditate, write down your goals again and start small. Even a few minutes of action can change your negative mindset into a positive one.

4. Clear the decks: If you have too many commitments, start cutting back on them. Stop saying “yes” to every request. Hire help for specific time-consuming tasks that don’t help you make money. Drop everything that isn’t necessary from your calendar. If it’s complicated, don’t be afraid to ask for assistance.

5. Stop comparing yourself to other people: We all tend to compare ourselves to people whose successes we envy, especially if they’re successful in our chosen field. Of course, we never really know what the lives of those successful people are like. You’ve had your struggles and triumphs. Everyone reaches their life goals at a different pace. You will get there if you stay motivated and work every day.

Make It Stop: Untie the Knots of Your Life

If you’ve let your life become a tangled mess, it’s time to unravel the knots. Look for simple solutions to your daily problems and stop worrying about things you can’t control.

If you’re having trouble with this or any issue related to your productivity, contact me at the Leonard Productivity Intelligence Institute. My team and I can help you find ways to simplify your schedule and get your life back in balance.

Ways to Streamline a Business Process

The Productivity Intelligence Institute understands the importance of creating a well-designed process in a business setting. As a project manager, developing a sustainable path toward a goal can be just as critical as reaching it. Inefficient processes lead to lost time, unnecessary friction, and frustration. A smooth process accomplishes goals and creates a positive team culture.

Tips to Improve Workflow Efficiency

Improving the efficiency of your workflow is an intentional choice. While some parts of a system will fall together naturally, others will take time and effort to improve. Streamlining your business’s processes is a process in itself.

1. Clarify the Goal

The Greek philosopher Epictetus once wrote, “First say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.” A lack of clarity about the goal is one of the greatest frustrations for team members. If they do not understand what they are working toward, they will struggle to maintain the necessary motivation to achieve it.

2. Third-Person Observation

It can be a challenge to improve a system when you are in the middle of it. Taiichi Ohno, a Japanese businessman, and executive at Toyota, realized the power of observation when he developed the Gemba walk. In this assembly line model, a manager routinely walks through the entire process looking for wasted motions and inefficiencies. In other business settings, you or another employee can talk through your process and look for the friction points that slow things down.

3. Know the Players

Your team includes individuals with strengths and weaknesses. Regular conversations can help you identify the leaders, the dreamers, and the workhorses. Knowing your team will help you assign the right person to the right tas

Discover Your Team’s High-Performance Maturity Score

4. Seek Feedback

Your team members are the people with first-person experiences of your workflow. Process-oriented interviews will help you clarify whether a sticking point is a matter of procedure, personality, or lack of training.

5. Automate and Integrate Your Technology

Almost every aspect of a business depends on technology. In the past, a single organization might have worked with several different platforms to get jobs done. As you integrate systems, you will find opportunities to remove tasks from your team. When your project management software solution automatically sends reminders through your communications system, it will prevent missed goals without adding to another team member’s workload.

6. Repeat and Refine

Especially for repeated tasks, working to streamline a process requires sustained effort. As staff members change or new technologies arise, you will need to consider whether your current model is still the most efficient one.

Make a Complex Process Simple: Changing Individual and Group Habits

Whether at work or home, much of what we do happens by habit. According to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, almost 40% of the average person’s daily activities occur without thought. Neurologically, this makes sense. It takes less mental energy to do routine tasks like tying your shoes or brushing your teeth when you do not have to make a strong conscious effort.

Damaging or ineffective habitual processes can be challenging to break. In the workplace, this can cause inefficiency and a lack of innovation. Simultaneously, people retain poor habits because there is comfort in doing something as they have always done it. For this reason, it is vital to devote time regularly to streamlining.

The Benefits of Streamlining a Process

If you take the time to do this work, you will begin to experience the benefits of streamlining your processes. One of the top advantages is improved team culture. The streamlining task often involves clarifying roles and improving lines of communication. There are fewer unnecessary emails and more meaningful conversations. Your team members will have a stronger sense of personal accountability to the cooperative effort.

Making changes to improve efficiency also inspires an innovative workplace culture. When your team sees that you take their time and gifts seriously, they will be more willing to try new things and share their best ideas.

Higher efficiency means being more productive in less time. Your team will operate with reduced stress levels, leading to a healthier workplace. You will see fewer sick days, improved attitudes, and less burnout.

Getting Started With the Streamline Process

If your business has always done things the same way, you may need help streamlining your processes. The Productivity Intelligence Institute is ready to help you on the journey with online resources, e-learning courses, and productivity coaching services. Contact me today to set up an appointment for a consultation.

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle.“ –Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Would you like to be able to streamline complex processes and increase workflow? Me too! Let’s look at some ways to do just that together. 

According to Trackvia.com, there are six ways to streamline complex processes and increase workflow. The first step has to do with taking a business workflow inventory. The article has this to say about it: “List each process, write down what you believe the purpose of that process is, and then list all of the people within your organization involved with this process.” 

The second step has to do with ranking your processes. Prioritization is key. I recommend giving each process a star ranking from either one star to five stars. It can be a grueling process, but it’s worth it in the end. 

The third step has to do with breaking down the process. The article recommends breaking down the processes on a piece of paper. I’m a visual person so I know this helps me a lot. This is a crucial step because it helps you have practical steps that you can take day to day to make the process work. It’s a lot like goalsetting. When you break down your goals into tiny, realistic steps, you have a higher success rate. 

The fourth step has to do with soliciting feedback. This is another important step. Like the old adage says, “Teamwork makes the dreamwork.” Getting feedback from supervisors and colleagues helps give you perspective and may give you ideas on how to create better workflow.  

The fifth step has to do with automating your business workflow. I personally love automation. It takes the pressure off of you to remember and implement. I highly recommend using a BPM (business process management) software.  

The final step has to do with refining. Nothing is perfect. Everything needs tweaking now and then so don’t be hesitant to go back and look at other ways to improve streamlining complex processes.  

Which step speaks to you? I’d love to hear from you.