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Owning a business and fostering open communication with your staff are essential to a business’s success. It takes open communication to set clear expectations, build trust and set realistic goals. However, what often happens is that somewhere along the lines there is a breakdown in communication between the owner’s wishes and the employee’s actions. That breakdown causes problems with the workflow. Learn how processes get disrupted in businesses, creating kinks in the workflow, and getting a guide and tips to improve your employees’ workflow with ease.
A successful business follows a repeated pattern of processes and completing tasks. Those steps are done in a specific sequence and make the business work and are called the workflow. When there are communication breakdowns and actions get skipped, shortcuts get taken, or team members don’t adhere to norms, procedures and rules, kinks in the workflow happen, and it gets thrown off balance. These kinds of kinks and breakdowns cause businesses to lose money or worse, it can force them out of business.
To avoid kinks, the guide below demonstrates some ways to improve employees’ workflow with ease.
Establish a proven workflow.
Don’t rely on employees to figure out a workflow or process that works for your business. As the leader, you need to determine what works and if it is cost effective for your industry. Your job is to examine that and prove that your process works, deciding that you make more money than you spend to do it, and then train employees to follow your model.
Establishing a proven workflow also means writing it down in a way that makes it easy to train and is easy to follow. It also means that as your business grows, being willing to adjust the workflow to accommodate your business growth.
Prioritize workflow improvement.
Keeping your workflow top-notch is vital to your business staying ahead of the competition. Business owners do this by making analyzing workflow often a priority so they can see what’s working. Some ways to do this without causing additional disruptions are to measure your profit against what is spent, the cost of making it and your labor force. Also, measure employee efficiency. Prioritizing doesn’t stop – you must keep testing, measuring, and improving to make sure that your targets are met.
Use tracking software.
Partnering with companies specializing in accounting and operations solutions who can assess your needs and provide solutions will improve your workflow quickly with solutions tailored to your business needs. You can even talk to Sage 300 accounting experts who can guide you through financial solutions at your business. These types of companies collaborate with businesses to offer accounting, operations, customer relations, and sales solutions to help your business thrive. These measures also help improve employee workflow.
Assign specific parts of workflow to teams.
By assigning specific parts of your workflow to certain teams, you allow them to become resident experts of that part of the workflow and business. It also means that you know where to go if problems arise with that part of the workflow. Also, instead of watching over every detail daily or micromanaging projects, your experts will lead employees to a workflow that has your stamp and branding on it.
Get internally organized.
Unlike elementary school students, employees don’t need assigned seating. However, your departments should not be scattered in an unorganized way that makes sharing work or information impossible without team meetings. Organize by grouping departments, and employees with similar positions close together. Not only will they work with one another, but they will also benefit from the knowledge of each other, which improves the workflow.
Make information sharing a necessity.
Put systems in place to ensure that document and knowledge sharing is crucial to the daily operation of your business. Integrating a messaging app that makes sharing information, knowledge, and communicating easier is essential to keeping up with the workflow with ease.
Use collaboration tools.
Use tools that help organize aspects of your business and make distractions avoidable. Email tools that sort email and move essential things to one central place help save time from massive emails accumulated and create distractions.
Conclusion
Processes that make businesses successful, or the workflow, tend to get disrupted by lack of communication, which creates kinks and causes companies to lose money. A guide and tips to improve your employee workflow with ease.
