Are you looking for ways to improve your employee’s output and efficiency? Here are some great workflow solutions you can try out today.
According to a study, companies lose more than 21.8 hours each week on activities that do not contribute to their productivity. Some of the biggest time wasters include spending time in overlong meetings, unclear assignment of tasks, and assigning unnecessary tasks. With the right solution, you can save your money and time, improve efficiency, and increase your productivity.
While it might be impossible to cut down on all-time wasters simultaneously, you can implement some workplace solutions that will help manage and improve your workflow procedures. These solutions will help you cut down on all workflow issues so that you can achieve maximum productivity.
Here are some great workflow solutions that you can implement to help improve efficiency in your company:
- Analyze the Current Processes
If your company is not efficient, then it means that something is broken. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is analyze the system you have in place. As strange as it might sound, some businesses do not know anything about their work process or do not have a system in place.
Analyzing the current workflow includes getting some feedback from your employees on how efficient the current processes are. This will help you know what is not working from their end and maybe even why it is not working. When doing this, collect feedback from various departments and various roles.
The goal here is to know how each process in each department, or individual role, operates. In as much as it may be impossible to talk to every employee, especially if the company is big, try to ensure that every role is represented.
Once you have gathered your employees’ and stakeholders’ opinions, take your time to go through it and audit it. List all the processes, and identify the gaps. From there, you can begin to draft what an ideal process would look like for the different departments or roles.
As you go through your current process, do not forget to:
Identify Key Areas of Focus
This will help you look at the areas to improve on. Watch out for any waning motivation or communication breakdown. This will help you improve your solution so that it has no loophole.
Break Down the Process
You need to divide your work process into smaller or more manageable steps. Make your solution as simple as possible. Several businesses concentrate so much on the needs and decision-making points concerning a project. They tend to forget how everything flows.
This might be because their processes are very complicated. To avoid this, keep your process simple; have distinct steps and focus solely on what you want to achieve.
Document Everything
It is impossible to memorize all your process and tasks. Even though you do not need an official document, write down all the steps that you need to take to get things done. Writing down your solution will help you make sure that you do not miss out on anything.
- Prioritize Projects
Once you have analyzed and understood your processes, the next thing is to rank them according to the importance. This will depend on your primary goal as a company or what you want to achieve in a given timeframe.
You may have to breakdown every project to schedule the necessary tasks. Rank each process on a scale of 1 to 10, starting with the most important process. This step is very important because it will determine how you run your company, and if done right, it will have a positive impact on your productivity.
You may want to consider working with a tool that will help you track the projects. Ranking your processes will help you maintain an efficient workflow process so that you can achieve the best at the end of every process.
- Automate the Processes
The digital world has offered companies with several tools, software, or apps, that can help automate their workflow processes. The first thing is to find a tool that best suits your business. There are software solutions from Endertech that you can use to help track, manage, and report your processes.
These automation solutions offer advanced features that are capable of making complicated business processes very easy. Find a tool or software that can work to help your operations run smoothly. Automation can be used in several aspects of the workflow process, like payroll, time-keeping, project assignments, and more.
You can also automate the report and tracking processes in your company. Most of these automation tools integrate with other tools that you have in place, like CRMs or ERPs.
Workflow automation is very vital in optimizing workplace efficiency and productivity. Its impact is growing throughout the world because of how much it is transforming organizations. According to a McKinsey Global Institute study, automation can increase efficiency and productivity by at least 0.8% to 1.4% annually.
You may also consider mobile integration. It will help you have all the important workflow-related information with you wherever you are.
Keeping your workflows moving efficiently, means organizing schedules and projects so that everyone in the company knows what is required of them. The process should track your employee’s productivity and the time they spend on the projects.
- Testing Adjustment and Training
Testing the workflow system will help you know how effective it is. Evaluate how it responds to the work environment and check out how each element works. Avoid using a solution that has not yet been tested.
Once you have tested the new system, you should be ready to make the necessary improvements and adjustments as per the results. Do not be impatient and implement the system before ensuring that it will create efficiency.
You have a new system in place. This means your employees and other stakeholders may not be able to understand it. To ensure that the new processes work well, you may want to take some time and train your employees before implementing them.
Workplace software solutions providers offer to train all those who will be using the system on how to use the software to help them or their departments become more efficient. Ensure that all the employees are trained and optimize the training procedures so that they only get the training they need.
Do not forget to track and schedule the training. It will help ensure that all the employees have been trained and they know and understand how to do their jobs. They also need to know all the safety procedures that are in place.
After testing the new system, making the necessary adjustments, and training all those who will use it, you can implement it. A good solution should address all the feedback and opinions that you collected from your employees. It should reduce redundancy, improve efficiency, and in the long run, increase productivity.
- Refine the Process
Every workflow process has its challenges; there is no process that is perfect. Therefore, your work towards your company’s efficiency does not end the minute you implement your new process. Be ready to refine with time.
This might not be a simple drag and drop solution, but staying up to date with the company’s day-to-day running. As much as your new system will help you track your employee’s productivity and time, you need to ensure that the processes have been implemented.
To keep refining your new system, ensure that:
- All unnecessary interruptions like time-wasting meetings are minimized
- Employees are scheduled for specific tasks according to their capabilities to maximize efficiency
- All communications are optimized
- Having a practical and realistic budget
Part of streamlining the process includes getting feedback from your employees on how well they adapt to it. When it comes to improving efficiency, feedback from your employees is very important. Their input will provide you the insight that you need to know what is not working so that you can, in turn, know how best to refine it.
Try to ensure that you establish some good metrics to measure your success. Remember not to concentrate too much on the gaps. Instead, look at what the future holds.
Consider These Workflow Solutions to Improve Workplace Efficiency
Implementing great workflow solutions will, without a doubt, take a lot of time, effort, and patience. There is no quick-fix solution when it comes to improving your company’s efficiency and increasing your productivity. These solutions will help you work on your current process and add some new tactics or tools to it.
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