“Workflow” has become a well-established piece of terminology in the business community. Most business owners can understand why workflow is important in theory, it’s difficult to fully understand what it means until you see it working in practice.
Workflows can be a way of streamlining and automating business tasks that you frequently repeat, and this minimizes chances of errors and raises overall efficiency.
This radically improves how you work. Management staff are able to make faster, smarter decisions and employees get the chance to work together in a more agile way that leads to greater productivity.
On the other hand, developing a workflow is a difficult task. It can often be very challenging because you need to look at the bigger picture at the same time as looking carefully at its multiple small details.
But workflow automation is a necessary strategy for increasing your business’ efficiency!
So let’s look at some benefits that it brings:
1. Clearer insight into business processes
Setting out your processes in a workflow enables you to see your business in a clearer way. Are your business processes really as good as they could be? This is what your mapping can show you.
Workflow gives you greater insight into your processes. After that, you can use those to develop your workflows and improve your bottom-line of your business: more profits!
2. Discovering the unnecessary
Lots of businesses have many, many redundant happening on a daily basis. More insight into your processes means you can decide which of your activities are really vital.
Doing this creates value for your business. Your people can focus on what’s important for the business instead of wasting time on useless tasks.
The greater number of useless processes you can eliminate, the better your business will perform.
3. More accountability – less micromanagement
Micromanagement causes a lot of problems in businesses: people hate being micromanaged and good managers hate being compelled to do it.
Sometimes though, micromanagement is the only solution: not everyone is equally motivated to do the important, but less challenging, stuff.
When your workflow is clearly set out, everyone knows the tasks that have to be completed, who by, and when.
In this way, managers don’t need to spend so much time micromanaging their people. Everyone in the team can see what’s going on.
This leads to an increase in job satisfaction for all those involved; it’ll probably improve management / employee relationships too.
4. More effective communication
Sometimes workplaces become like a game of Chinese whispers. Everyone is constantly talking with one another but at some point, the message gets confused and distorted. Poor communication is a commonly ignored problem in the workplace.
But the visibility of processes and accountability can startlingly increase workplace communication and as a result reduce employee turnover and create better flowing day-to-day operations.
5. Improve the quality of your products or services
Employees are often selected for projects based on availability instead of who has the best skill sets to perform that job. Workflow is also important because it allows you to think about and choose the individuals best suited for the tasks at hand.
Automating workflows and processes can also reduce the probability of human error. This will gradually raise the quality of your products or services.
NotifyMe’s work is highly focused on improving workflows. We think an important component in that work is sharing experiences. Do you have any experience with setting up and optimizing workflows? We’d love to hear how it helped your business!
