Every business can run more efficiently. What’s holding it back is usually human error. To make your business more efficient, you’ll need to discard the old ways of doing business and adopt new approaches and tools that minimize downtime and let you monitor progress without overbearing employees. Creating a more streamlined workflow is much easier when you have a step-by-step guide to keep you in check.
Benefits of Streamlining
There are many benefits to streamlining your business. It improves the efficiency and productivity of your teams. You’ll also find you communicate more clearly, and have documentation of the entire process from start to finish. This minimizes errors and gives you critical information you can use in the future to improve your approach further. Streamlining also simplifies employee training, defines roles, and enhances team coordination.
What to Remember About Streamlining
It’s important to recognize when and where streamlining is appropriate. While it may seem that simplifying every aspect of your business is the best way, it’s rarely the most economical approach. You want to use your budget most effectively and understand what needs streamlining for your business. What other companies streamline may not make financial sense for you, and vice versa, so investigate what needs improvements. Your employees are a great place to get some suggestions, but it may help to get a third party to assess your situation.
Then when you are ready, you can follow these 6 steps:
1. Identify What Process to Streamline First
Identifying the first process to streamline can be difficult. In general, it’s always best to focus on the area that has the most significant impact on customer satisfaction first, then move on to what will improve employee satisfaction. In many cases, what will improve customer satisfaction (faster services, automatic updates, improved feedback) will also enhance the employee experience.
2. Set Key Performance Indicators
Key Performance Indicators or KPIs are essential to set and quantify so that you can see improvements over time. Without identifying these indicators in advance, it can be challenging to understand how these changes impact your business. How you quantify these indicators is up to you. To measure employee satisfaction, for example, you can create a monthly survey that asks the same questions and has employees rank their satisfaction from 1 to 10.
3. Workshop Your Workflows
Each workflow likely has unnecessary steps involved. One of the most common steps is back-and-forth emailing. This slow method also risks information being lost. Marking issues directly on a shared document or speaking with an instant messaging system is far more effective. Workshop with your employees to understand what steps take too long, which are unnecessary, and what they think should be done. As they work with the system daily, they’ll have the most relevant feedback for you.
4. Choose a Management Software
Management software has changed the game. There are options to suit businesses of all types and individual processes. You could, for example, streamline development and troubleshooting for your DevOps team with JAMS. This centralized workload automation and job scheduling solution lets you assign, track, and monitor jobs and workflows. To learn more, visit https://www.jamsscheduler.com/ to find out how workload automation can help your business.
5. Automate Your Business
Workload automation isn’t the only way you can automate your business. Using an enterprise system opens up many doors. To automate, you need to create if this, then that protocols. Suppose stocks go below this threshold; order 100 more, for example. These simple, consistent rules streamline your workflows and free your employees from more creative problem-solving.
6. Use Data to Make Future Improvements
Using programs and KPIs is a great way to collect data on the performance of your system and employees. You need to analyze this data to understand if employees are working faster and better; ideally, you should also know why. Don’t assume employee satisfaction is up because of your new workflow when it could be because a new manager started. Always try to get contextual information to make better sense of the data in front of you so that you know where to focus on your next wave of improvements. Feedback and data are going to be essential during the streamlining process.
