Automating tasks and creating KPIs to measure your team’s performance is no longer a differentiating factor, it’s an essential tool for your company to achieve growth. There can be no success without a workflow that provides for performance gains and scalability. Whether your organization is a startup where people have multiple responsibilities, a more mature (but less nimble) company or even an agency, it is high time to revisit your workflows.
The importance of documenting without bureaucratizing
If your processes are not well defined and fail to generate documentation automatically, learning becomes slow and difficult, and the company will be prone to wasting significant amounts of time committing the same errors over and over again. On the other hand, if documentation becomes another layer of bureaucracy, your employees will start getting lost in the processes and your managers will spend more time collecting documentation than analyzing indices and using metrics to make informed decisions.
Powerful tools exist that can help your company take significant strides in its work management routines. If you have come this far already, it’s a good bet that you’re no longer thinking about whether to use automation in your company, but rather the best way to implement it. Right?
Two possibilities
There are two possibilities: internally developing an automation platform or choosing to use an existing market solution. The first comes with an inherent danger: imagine that the system your IT team develops has flaws. Such an event would likely lead to delays, and a consequent need for continual adjustments to the system and your processes, hindering workflows.
The second option, choosing to implement an existing platform, such as Runrun.it, comes with the advantage that the system has already been fully tested and approved by other major companies. Moreover, an existing tool benefits from a full-time team that can provide support, implement improvements and upgrades and develop new functionalities. With the system, you can explore the tool’s suite of features and use them according to your business’s specific workflow. It has everything that could be needed to help you define your business-driven workflow.
What, exactly, are business-driven workflows?
Business-driven workflows are solutions that can be adapted and tailored without the need for IT-led development efforts. The Aberdeen Group recently published a study on the workflows of successful organizations with high-performance teams. What are the commonalities in the management of companies that have adopted business-driven flows? Take a look:
- Streamlined processes using technology and the amalgamation of data from disparate systems;
- Integrated employees and clients with de-bureaucratized information and content sharing;
- Provide an overview of processes, with quick access to reports and work status;
- Avoid becoming overwhelmed with paperwork, digitizing content for simple storage and referencing.
The survey also provides concrete data comparing companies with average market performance in the United States with others that demonstrate superior performance. Among medium-performing companies, 48% use some management platform. Among the higher performing companies, that figure rises to 86%. Regarding the decision-making process, among the companies considered “medium”, only 4% saw improvements in this respect, while the more successful ones saw the index of improvement in the decision-making reach 20%, largely due to their use of platforms.
This data demonstrates a need to incorporate such tools, drive alterations to processes and workflows to increase employees’ performance.
>> Recommended reading: Data-driven company: Learn how to conduct your operations taking a data-focused approach
Spring cleaning and workflow
Before shaking up your company’s processes and changing routines in your departments, it is worth revisiting them. To achieve successful implementation, keep in mind your reasons for investing in automation. Is it mainly to increase your employees’ performance? Avoid waste? Increase project profitability? Keep your objectives in mind at all times during the transition, so you stay focused on what’s most important. Here are some stages in a successful transition.
1) Divide work into stages
To assemble your workflow, you can divide the work into smaller pieces and more easily envision the ideal route forward. It is also a good time to review organizational charts with people’s positions and functions, as well as job descriptions and a flow chart mapping your company’s demands and projects. Does everything look okay on paper? If so, make sure that everyone else on your team is aware of what needs to be done.
2) Create simple reports that are easy to feed and analyze
The timesheet is a classic example: it should be agile and simple to use so that keeping track of how much time is spent on each activity does not simply create additional work. Runrun.it has automatic timesheet, an intuitive way to hit play, pause and stop on individual tasks. It is an integrated system that will help you define your priorities while indicating the status of each project or task.
In this way, your employees will be able to feed data into the platform in a natural way, while managers will have real-time information on your company’s operations. We also suggest that you take a minute to check out how to improve productivity and manage your team’s time in this article on employee time tracking.
3) Overview and review
The use of such a tool makes it is easier to follow your company’s performance, either in an overview or by zooming in on specific projects and tasks and even monitoring the deliveries of specific team members. This speeds up decision-making because, as Kriselle Laran, senior vice president of the Zeno Group, states in this article in Forbes, using processes that remain static, without improvements, hinders growth. So, keep in mind that as each new task is executed or implemented, take stock of the reports the system generates and, if necessary, alter your trajectory so that you stay true to your stated goals.
4) Use technology in your favor
Cloud-based systems allow for real-time updates and collaboration with off-site teams. Workflow automation eliminates the endless back-and-forth inherent in emails, WhatsApp groups, in addition to unproductive calls and meetings. Forget about manual processes and use the technology in your favor, sharing content and providing a clear view of the project(s) to every team member.
It is also always good to remember the importance of involving your team and seeking to make any transitions smoother and more gradual, incorporating any new tools in a measured way so that every employee can easily understand the new processes. Keep in mind that the more technology you incorporate into your processes, the more agile, secure and measurable the company’s performance will be.
>> Other articles that may be of interest:
Managing virtual teams: how to manage conflicts and increase cohesion
Employee Engagement Activities – Facilitating a More Productive Corporate Culture
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Let’s get started?
Workflow automation brings surprising results for task management, the organization of activities, distribution of demands and team communications. With Runrun.it, these benefits are multiplied further, whatever the business segment.
Every firm, from IT companies to advertising and marketing agencies’ creative teams, stand to benefit from workflow automation. Runrun.it allows you to automate team management without creating unnecessary bureaucracy and will help you discover any bottlenecks in your operations. With augmented intelligence, the software provides accurate and real-time estimates for deliverables, while predicting any potential overruns. Sign up for a free trial now and elevate your workflow to a new level: https://runrun.it
