How to Create More Efficient Workflows Within Your Organization

Workflow bottlenecks can negatively impact everything from employee satisfaction to the bottom line. Avoiding the snowball effect that comes with congestion means creating more efficient workflows that steer the business in the right direction. These three strategies can help you keep your operations on time and on budget.

In any corporate workplace, efficiency is key to maintaining the business foundation. It keeps everything on schedule, helps your staff avoid overwork, and prepares you to deliver the ROI you expect and need.

This is also crucial for customer relations, as congestion usually causes customers to be routed from one company representative to the next. Bottlenecks are bad for business and delivery delays have serious consequences if left unattended. The more you fall behind, the more business you lose and the more your supply chain suffers. This can have a snowball effect; before you know it, you really are in the weeds.

But with the right preparation and a little thought, you can keep your operations on time, on budget, and running at full speed. That’s how it’s done:

1. Create a business process blueprint.
   You know the saying, “Those who don’t prepare, prepare to fail.” To avoid falling prey to this platitude, employ a rock-solid business process plan. Sure, companies are always evolving, but the most successful ones develop strong visions of what they want to become from the moment they open their doors.

   Your blueprint doesn’t have to be too complicated either. It only needs the following items:

   a) Foundation: Just like a house, your business needs a base on which to build it. There must be rules and boundaries that employees must abide by, and ethics and standards that customers expect you to uphold.
   b) Verification: Share the draft with your colleagues and listen seriously to their feedback. An abundance of ideas can lead to an abundance of possibilities.
   C) Benchmarks: Once you have set business goals, make sure you make plans for how you plan to celebrate them. This contributes significantly to employee satisfaction and thus to ROI.
   d) Plan for the future: Once you have reached your benchmarks, which ones do you want to set next? Be malleable in your thinking and listen to those who provide input. You put together the team you have for a reason. Trust their judgment and take what they have to say to heart.

   Think of your blueprint as an accountability partner holding all the keys your business needs to grow. According to Caroline Broms, Global Content Marketing Manager at Mavim, your blueprint can include anything mission-critical to growth.

   “The beauty of a business process blueprint is that it can include workflows, terminology, and other elements that are unique to your organization,” writes Broms. “It helps develop more process-oriented cultures and allows your organization to improve function.”

2. Conduct frequent audits.
   Often the path to restoring efficiency isn’t through new solutions, but through ensuring the old ones continue to function properly. By examining your workflows, you can find gaps where things may be stalling.

   Audits allow your organization to apply real-time solutions to existing gaps to move things forward. Whether old solutions or new creative ones, this helps you and your employees to stay agile. Regular audits also shed light on overlaps that could create bottlenecks and halt momentum.

   Finally, use audits to monitor bandwidth and determine if you are overloading your staff. Some people still think that work should be done all the time, but that’s a mantra that doesn’t bode well for your team’s long-term profitability. Audits allow you to see which tasks you can simplify and where you can afford to give your employees a break. They will thank you and you will notice improvements in workflow.

3. Rely on automation.
   If you haven’t kept up with technology today, now would be a good time to do so. We live in a time where businesses can easily automate tedious or redundant tasks so they have time for more important things. This is critical to avoiding congestion, and more and more companies are turning to automation and AI to help.

   Think about it: The time it takes to complete these simple tasks can be reduced to mere seconds with the help of automation. It also means one (or more) employees less need to be pulled from otherwise important tasks to get something boring done.

   This is great for you and your team. Employees will feel more engaged when they’re not tasked with doing things they’re afraid of, and you’ll get better work out of them.

When workflows go down, the hill your business has to climb to achieve its goals just gets steeper. But with careful planning, testing, and automation, you can set up a system that grows with your business.

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Written by Rhett Power.
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