Managing workflow among a team of employees with different skills and abilities can become a rather complex process. Forbes describes the difficulties of workflow management by discussing Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s theory about how employees need to work in an environment where their natural abilities align with the challenges they face.
When people work outside of their natural flow, they face problems where their skills don’t align and they suffer from stress and anxiety. On the other hand, if someone’s skills are too advanced for their job, they feel too much boredom and end up being apathetic at work.
Supervisors looking for ways to improve workflow management will need to align their workers with the right responsibilities to fit their skills and capabilities. Below we detail how to properly manage workflow at your company. Keep reading to learn more.
How to Enhance Workflow Management for Your Business
To ensure that workflow is moving along appropriately and productivity is high, you will need to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your workforce. Figuring out your natural strengths along with the team members you work with will help you create the right tasks and responsibilities for each individual worker.
Figuring out the skills and passions of each individual will ensure everyone is happy with their job and workflow management moves forward positively. The next important part to include in improving workflow management is to ensure no one becomes too comfortable in their day-to-day work.
Partaking in the same, exact tasks or projects every day could lead your workers to become bored and tired of their jobs. As such, be sure to not let anyone become too comfortable at their job and to add some significant changes into their projects and daily assignments.
Making positive changes at a company involves removing the “allure of comfort,” according to Forbes. This will ensure your employees feel more fulfilled in their careers. The last step toward boosting workflow management in your business is to take more risks and encourage your workforce to take risks.
Life can be complicated and taking the easy way out instead of moving forward will not help your company progress and advance. To ensure your business is growing and profit is high, you’ll need to take risks and ensure your workers are also taking some risks. Taking both big and small risks can help workers find their right state of flow. Often, taking risks leads to rewards in the workplace. As such, be sure to not get too comfortable and take some risks in your career.
Why Workflow Management is Important for Your Company
Workflow management involving automation as well as effective documentation and communication is vital for a company because it will save time and reduce human errors. However, if these processes – workflow – are not defined effectively and documentation is not conducted automatically, time is often wasted and the same errors will continue.
Without automation in terms of your documentation, employees will end up getting lost in the bureaucracy of documentation and supervisors at your company will spend more time entering in data instead of analyzing information and making important business decisions.
Implementing productive tools and technology could make a big difference in better managing work processes. So what are the best ways to implement automation? Two solutions include:
- Creating an internal automation platform
- Purchasing an existing market product
The first choice may have the following problems including your IT team creating a system with flaws and delays. This can lead to ongoing adjustments that disrupt workflows at your place of business. The second choice, however, comes with the benefit of already being tested before being put on the market and the positive reviews from other companies.
The benefits of workflow management includes providing organization in terms of your documentation and task delegation. Everyone will know what their assignments are and when the deadlines for their projects are due. Some tips for delegation tasks and improved workflow includes:
- Map out what you’re asking employees to achieve in terms of their assignments
- Assign tasks to the right person for the job
- Confirm your workers understand what is expected of them
- Ensure accountability by talking to your workers during every step of a project
Why Your Company Workflow may be Inferior
One of the potential problems that may be apparent from your company’s workflow management may deal with the multitasking factors embraced by your workforce. While usually business leaders believe that multitasking brings more value to an organization, multitasking may actually be a bigger problem because it takes too much time for people to switch their mental gears every time they move onto another task.
Essentially, it may be more efficient if tasks are completed one at a time and employees don’t switch from one topic to another in a short period of time. Transitioning from one thing to the next does not happen as quickly and smoothly as employers would hope. This process of multitasking could be a reason why your company workflow is inferior.
Along with multitasking, if your company does not operate workflow apps, the general management of workflow is likely declining. Without the right technology, your organization is likely lacking organization. Having a workflow app, however, can keep your day-to-day operations in check. Workflow apps can help you organize your projects, sort out all priorities, and reduce your overall stress.
If you don’t want to have inferior workflow management processes, keep reading to learn about how you can changes your processes and create a new workflow strategy.
How to Change Workflow Processes and Develop a New Documentation Strategy
The best-performing organizations operate well and succeed due to business-driven workflows. Essentially, at these organizations, business leaders are working with IT teams to develop workflows that are centered around innovation. The best things that business leaders can do to improve their workflow is to customize and tailor automated business-driven workflows to fit their needs. By doing so, a company can improve productivity and their return-on-investment (ROI). In fact, business-driven workflow automation can drive innovation at your company and help you compete with other organizations.
In order to have productive and successful business workflow processes, effective documentation is a necessity, according to an article from Forbes. Documentation and communication is vital for more productive and successful outcomes in any business. In fact, the Holmes report outlines that communication problems cost businesses as much as $37 billion annually.
14 Tips to Improve Your Business Workflow
The Forbes article outlines the advice of 14 members of the Forbes Communication Council for improving communication and documentation of work processes.
1. Use “recipe cards” to outline the steps to refine a new work process such as listing out ingredients like hours necessary to complete a project, the tools needed for an assignment, and the type of content required.
2. Follow a list of specific habits such as rules needed to accomplish key benchmarks.
3. Develop a brand handbook for the content put out by your company.
4. Regularly review and analyze each program at your business.
5. Utilize technology to improve collaboration especially project management tools.
6. Keep track of your on-brand messaging to properly represent your story.
7. Focus on the basics such as identifying your audience, assigning and delegating responsibility, and defining the end goal of every project.
8. Utilize templates, repeatable processes, workflow diagrams and automation to save time.
9. Incorporate workflow tools and effective project managers.
10. Implement cloud software programs in order to receive notifications in real-time.
11. Develop a system with local experts who can teach newly hired employees.
12. Create a list of internal subject matter experts in order to know who to contact when problems come up.
13. Practice working through more complex workflow processes with your employees.
14. Automate workflow to save time and eliminate manual processes.
Project Management Software Boosts the Automation of Your Workflow
It is highly important to incorporate project management software programs such as Runrun.it software in order to ensure the workflow at your place of business becomes more automated.
There are countless benefits your team would see from Runrun.it project management software such as simpler task approval processes and sequencing of responsibilities or task delegation. In fact, this project management software simplifies the flow of task approval through a few different clicks that the evaluator can follow.
There are a variety of different capabilities that Runrun.it software includes to boost automation of your workflow such as quickly creating tasks, prioritizing tasks, allocating and removing projects or assignments, automatically tracking hours worked on projects, and scheduling repetitive actions. In addition, this system improves workflow management by transferring information to a backlog and sequencing responsibilities.
If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of Runrun.it software and whether it will benefit your business, click here to check out a free trial.