It shouldn’t come as a surprise that running a business is challenging. You’ve got to juggle so many tasks! These include:
- Serving clients
- Creating marketing material
- Working on your finances
- And managing your team
But that’s just scratching the surface! You’ve got so much more to do, which could lead to burning yourself out. And that’s the exact reason why your business needs efficient workflows!
Workflows are a collection of fixed tasks that accomplish specific business processes. That means you and your team will spend less time thinking about solutions and more on solving the problem, which increases your productivity.
But how can you create them? Stay tuned to find out.
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Step-by-Step Guide to Creating an Efficient Workflow
Fortunately, there’s a formula for creating efficient workflows. All you need to do is follow these seven steps, and your productivity should increase.
Step #1 – Identify the Goal and Your Current Resources.
The first step to creating efficient workflows is to understand two things:
- Where is your business currently?
- And where you’d like to go?
If you don’t, you’ll be just wandering around thinking about why your business isn’t improving.
So start by writing down the goal for creating a workflow.
- Is it to improve customer support answering speed?
- What about making communication faster?
Whatever it is, please write it down!
Once written, we’ll have to get a clear understanding of what resources we have for implementing a new workflow or improving an existing one. That will help us choose the correct solution without going bankrupt.
Step #2 – Create a list of business processes and document who does what and when.
Now that you’ve set your goal and know what resources are available, it’s time to take a step further and understand how the business processes work currently. If we don’t, we can only guess what is wrong with our business processes. You can start by answering these questions:
- What does the current workflow look like?
- Who is responsible for each step?
- How much time does the process take?
Once you’ve got answers to these, I suggest you talk with the people involved in each step of your current workflow. Then you can get a better insight into how everything is working.
Step #3 – Create a workflow diagram to visualize the steps.
Now comes the hard part. With the collected information, we now need to start brainstorming, so we can improve our current workflow issues and performance. For that I suggest you do a couple of things:
- Create a Distraction-Free Zone – If you’d like to find a solution to this problem as fast as possible, you need to create a distraction-free zone. For that, try to find a quiet place (a meeting room, for example) and switch off your distractions (like your phone or laptop).
- Invite Responsible People – While you might be able to find a solution quicker by yourself, you can’t be sure that it’s going to improve. So for this reason, it’s best to have all the responsible people with you, to find the most optimal solution.
Once those are done, start designing your workflow. You can do it easily with presentation tools like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Just make sure you use standard symbols and terminology, so everybody involved understands the changes.
Step #4 – Test the Workflow
Now all that is left is to see if the improved workflow works. However, don’t deploy it yet! Right now, all you want to do is give that workflow to a small group of people to test out if everything works as intended. You want to look:
- If the software work as intended?
- And if the testers are happy with the changes?
If you answered no to any of these questions, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and fix those issues. Once everybody seems satisfied with how it works and the software is bug-free, it’s time for the next step.
Step #5 – Deploy the Workflow
Now that all the testing is done, it’s time to launch your new workflow to your whole organization. That is usually as easy as pressing a button.
However, even if your workflow works smooth like butter, be ready for one thing – resistance. That’s because not all people are willing to change, as it’s more comfortable to do what they do currently.
Also, be sure to track your workflow. While it might feel like you’re doing better, you cannot guarantee that it’s like that. That’s because feelings can be deceiving.
But what should you track? Well, that depends on your objective! For example, if your goal was to improve customer service, you can track:
- The number of client problems solved
- The number of complaints
- The average time it takes to solve a customer’s problem
Step #6 – Train Your Team
So what do you do with those who resist the change? Easy, you train them to use the new workflow. Start by getting everybody involved together in a meeting. There you need to answer two questions:
- Why are we changing the workflow? – To convince your team members to start using the new workflow, you need to answer why you are changing. Tell them the problems with the current one and the benefits they’ll get when they change.
- How to use the new workflow? – Now that your team is convinced to change, show them how to use your new workflow. Explain everything as plainly as possible, so it’s clear for everybody.
Once those two questions are answered, you should listen to what your team has to say. They might give you insight into missing things or give your team more clarity on how everything works.
Step #7 – Analyse and Optimize
Congratulations, you’ve created a new and improved workflow. However, that doesn’t mean your work is done. Nothing is perfect when it first comes out, and there’s always room for improvement. So keep a close eye on how you and your team are performing.
For example, you could meet up with your team monthly, looking at how the changes have improved and where you could still improve. And then, all that is left is to repeat the whole cycle all over again.
But before you do, you have to do one thing: don’t change anything for at least a month! The thing is, it takes time for you and your team to adapt to the new changes.
That means if you see a worse performance, it’s okay. Your workflow hasn’t been fully implemented yet, so let it breathe and look back at it later. If then it hasn’t improved, you’ll have to rework it!
Conclusion
Now you should understand why a workflow is so necessary. Not only does it help you to increase your productivity, but it will also help increase transparency. And with the 7-step guide in the back of your mind, you’ll be able to build the most effective workflows possible!
