Build a Strong Foundation: The key to business success
Establishing processes is the foundation of business success. Of course, many factors will influence your company’s ability to thrive, but if you don’t go through the 101, it will be hard to step up your game. Seemingly obvious, a lack of processes in business can cost your company huge losses of productivity.
When we say establishing processes, we don’t mean making sense of them in your head. You need to take your time and actually sit down, outline them and share them with your employees. Here is why:
Constant growth: establishing processes allows for constant and accurate assessment of productivity.
Achievement of goals: having processes helps your company understand which practices and projects are actually contributing towards your mission and goals, allowing for better-informed business decisions.
Accurate projections: understanding the workflow allows stakeholders to know what to expect from their team’s delivery and make more precise predictions about success and the resources needed to achieve it.
Easy training: having established standing operating procedures makes it easier to train and onboard new team members.
There are many reasons why companies may not have streamlined processes. Some, for example, have a big workload and don’t make time to think about how it gets accomplished. Others have complex processes with multiple stakeholders involved, so it is difficult for them to identify roles, responsibilities and deliverables. But when the business flow stays on stakeholders’ heads, issues arise if they can’t show up because no one else fully understands how work gets done. Also, as tasks are completed differently every time, it is impossible to measure key performance indicators and the timeline for delivery becomes inconsistent. That, combined with a lack of ownership for specific tasks, forces leaders to micromanage, making the work tedious and stressful for everyone involved.
Basically, a process is a set of predefined tasks performed in an order to deliver a service or a product. It can be as simple as setting up meetings with clients or as broad as developing a marketing campaign. The objective isn’t to control and constrain employees' moves. Rather, processes are used to understand how everyone already operates in relation to one another in order to assess and improve the good work.
To identify your company’s processes, think about which are the tasks employees perform on a daily basis and how they relate to each other. Then, identify the stakeholders in those tasks and their responsibilities. What are the inputs and outputs exchanged between them?
Next, visualize the workflow. We recommend you map each task independently and color-code the different responsibilities of people involved in those tasks. Online mapping tools, such as Miro or Mural, can help you do so. It’s important to include in your outline which softwares you are using to perform the work. Are employees doing similar things with two different platforms? Is there any way to streamline the process by using a single platform? Identifying such aspects will help you define the tool stack of your business. This way, you can optimize your budget by choosing the right programs.
Once your map is ready, make it accessible to everyone in the company. Understanding bottlenecks, pain points, and miscommunication is key to improving productivity. Allow workers to express what is negatively affecting their daily work. Involving them in the process will keep them engaged and content. In the end, it will be much easier to assess your company’s processes on a regular basis.
Processes aren’t fixed. As you assess the work dynamics of your organization, employee interactions will change and new challenges will naturally arise. It’s essential that you repeat this exercise with your team at least once a year. Don’t approach it as a one time fast-track to perfection. Rather, as multiple learning opportunities that will allow you to greatly improve in the long-term.
