Are poor workflows holding your team back? With a large amount of business problems stemming from workflows, chances are the answer is yes—in more ways than one. If it’s done well, setting up better processes for your team boosts productivity, work quality and, in many cases, staff morale. Our Enterprise Manager, Robert Thompson, talks through some of the top considerations to take into account if you want your workflows to boost team success.
Listen to Workflow Warning Signs
Our first piece of advice is not to wait until something goes wrong before you upgrade your workflows. Businesses often don’t see the warning signs until it’s too late. Over time, these can build up and cause significant business disruptions. Some of the most common warning signs to look out for include:
- Limited visibility: Do issues such as poor product or service quality arise when your staff members go on leave?
- Unexplained productivity issues: Has your product output decreased or are you experiencing slow service delivery?
- Bottlenecks: Are there specific groups in your business that seem to always be slowing down other employees?
- Negative customer feedback mysteries: Is it difficult to find the root cause of negative customer feedback?
- Poor morale: Are your employees unhappy, disgruntled or taking excessive leave? This is a sign of a poorly performing workflow especially if your staff are unable to easily articulate why they are so busy.
- The business is growing: Is your business expanding or changing? Growth often comes with the need for smoother and more efficient workflows.
Start with a Business Analysis
Before you choose a new workflow system, make sure a business analysis is completed. This ensures your new workflows fit with your unique business requirements and empower your team to work more productively. If you don’t have this understanding, it’s very difficult to make any changes to your business without unforeseen impacts and you can end up with just as many problems as you started with.
For example, at Area9 we apply business analytics techniques to pinpoint the processes through which a business creates its value. Next, we identify possible opportunities to modify the process using tools, training, skills, or staffing to improve the quality of the service or product delivered by the business.
Our analysis is done through a series of short workshops with management and staff to identify how work is done, how it flows through the company, what the expectations are (of management) and how staff execute their work. For narrow-focused problems it can be as quick as a couple of hours of conversation and a write-up. For more general and across-business problems, we usually complete 3-4 interviews and create a report with recommendations.
Find the Right Solution
Choosing the correct software to meet specific needs is often far harder than people initially think because software rarely covers 100% of a problem ‘out of the box’. Below is a behind-the-scenes look at how we find the right solution for each business we work with.
1. Understand requirements: We only begin selecting software and building solutions once the problem or requirement is fully understood.
2. In-depth software reviews: Our team do functional reviews on software to match capability with customer requirements.
3. Software capability review library: We keep our reviews in a knowledgebase and draw from it when solving problems for customers. In many cases, this allows us to have solutions on-hand once problems are identified.
4. Customisation: If a good fit can't be found in existing solutions, we use our in-house development capabilities to customise and integrate software to fit customer needs.
Prepare Your Team for the New Software
Once you’ve found the perfect fit for your business, you’re nearly there. The next step is to prepare your employees for the new software to make sure everyone is on board, ready and able to get the most out of it.
1. Be clear on the outcomes: The real goal is to solve business problems, not to install and use a piece of software.
2. See their point of view: Scope and understand the people who are impacted by the new system so that you can better prepare them and anticipate challenges.
3. Communicate well: Ensure early and regular communications with the people affected by the update.
4. Provide training: Training and awareness should be key components of any workflow change.
5. Support your staff: Make sure your staff have access to technical support in case they run into any issues.
6. Inclusion: Ensure that staff are included in the process as much as possible. This gives staff control and ownership of the process and increases buy-in and the quality of the outcome.
Get Support for Smooth Sailing
Your new workflow software is in place, so what now? Reliable support is a key part of keeping your business operations and systems running smoothly and boosting your team’s success. Whether it’s training, technical support or software upgrades, having an IT partner that goes above and beyond for you guarantees a great workflow experience now and into the future.
We’re always excited to see businesses grow and improve their operations, so we hope these insights have been helpful for you. If you’re considering upgrading your workflows, we’re here to support you in any way that we can. Whether that’s answering any questions you have or implementing a tailored solution for your business—get in touch with our team of experts to learn more.