7 Steps to Streamline Any Business Workflow and Improve Your Processes

Processes are the lifeblood of business.

But when they're over-complicated, they can crush your company's productivity. 

A complex workflow that allows for a lot of wasted resources and hinders efficiency can slowly but surely drain your team's time and energy, as well as hurt your bottom line. 

So, in today's article, I want to take a look at the most common challenges that emerge when you’re trying to optimize your business processes and offer you a step-by-step guide on how you can overcome them. 

But first, I’d like to give you a better understanding of why it’s so important to have powerful and reliable processes for your company.

The risks and costs of inefficient processes

Dysfunctional processes are very common, even amongst big companies. And they’re often one of the primary reasons why businesses fail as their growth gets halted and their owners aren’t exactly sure how to pull through and recover. 

From disjointed processes that lack rules or a clear structure to processes that have no visibility to management, a flawed workflow is bound to lead to higher customer churn and low performance. 

This is why you should never undermine the importance of business processes and the impact they have both on customer satisfaction and your team’s morale and productivity.

Here are some of the risks and issues that can come up: 

• Missed deadlines
• Unhappy customers and poor reviews
• Overworked and frustrated employees
• Wasted resources
• Increased costs

These are all problems that are best avoided as they can pile up over time and cost your company money, as well as loyal customers. 

So, how can you avoid these pitfalls and ensure that your workflow is as effective as it can be? 

Here are 7 simple steps to improve your business processes:

1. Review your workflow

You need increased visibility across all of your business processes. This means that you need to have access to every workflow so you can be able to thoroughly analyze them. After all, you can’t fix problems within your organization if you don’t know what they are. 

To do this successfully, you should aim to cut down your processes into small, practical steps that are easy to manage. Then monitor each task, transaction and other activities that are relevant, particularly where you know there might be performance issues. 

Once you’ve gained more visibility into your business processes, you can identify major issues, challenges, and areas that can be improved.

Here are some main factors you’ll want to be looking for:

• Misunderstandings as a result of vague or unclear instructions
• Low efficiency and performance issues
• Decreased motivation in employees
• Ineffective communication and breakdowns 

2. Rank tasks according to their importance

The next step is to review each of your processes and categorize them based on urgency and customer value. Make sure you document everything and have this list on paper so you can have a clear-cut vision of which tasks have the highest priority and add the most value to your company. 

3. Gather feedback

One of the most effective ways of overcoming internal challenges is to ask your team for feedback on what their main struggles are. Cross-check what they tell you with the data you gathered and find out where your processes could be improved, as well as which of these processes should be at the top of your priority list to start optimizing.

Get input from people at every level of the workflow chain. The more information you can collect, the more accurate your vision will be of how smooth and effective your business processes really are. So every tidbit of data on this can offer you valuable insight into what your next steps should be.

4. Figure out your game plan

Now that you know what the most pressing issues are, you can start finding smart tools and resources to help you overcome them. 

Here are some questions you should ask to find the best solutions to your challenges:

Find out the root cause of the issue:

• What is the sequence of events that leads to the problem?
• What combination of factors or conditions make it more likely for the problem to occur?
• What other issues make the central problem more difficult to manage?

Find out the issues that have the highest priority:

• What processes are most prone or lead to missed deadlines?
• What tasks and processes take up the most amount of time?
• What are the major areas with low quality but a high cost?
• Which part of your processes is most prone to creating a bottleneck?
• What tasks and processes does your team struggle with the most?
• What processes do your customers get most frustrated with?

Narrow down the best solutions:

• What are the steps you can take to prevent this problem from occurring in the future?
• How will these solutions and the new processes be integrated into your current workflow?
• Who will be responsible for delivering change?
• What are the risks of implementing your solution?
• Are there any alternatives that have lower risk?

5. Implement change initiatives

Once you have a plan in place, it's time to start gathering your resources and implementing change. Choose the right software solution, revise security protocols, test your new processes and track their efficiency over time. Remember to keep communication lines open at all times to make sure that the new processes integrate smoothly with the old system. 

6. Start automating

Now that we've covered the basics, you can power up your productivity further through automation. Firstly, you'll want to single out low-level, repetitive tasks that don't require a specific set of skills but still take up a good chunk of time from your employee's daily schedule. This could mean emails, research, prospecting or data collection. 

Next, you'll want to automate connections between the different software solutions that your teams use. This can significantly improve the quality of your deliverables and make project management easier and more effective. 

Lastly, it's a smart decision to automate both your external and internal engagement and communication. This is crucial to scaling your marketing across different channels. 

7. Keep improving your workflow

No business process will be perfect. This is a given. But you can strive to make continuous improvements and consistently implement smart workflow solutions to ensure that you're providing the highest level of quality possible. 

The bottom line

A good business workflow can be hard to achieve, but also very rewarding. It prevents miscommunication, boosts productivity for your team, and gives you increased visibility into all of your projects.

Ensuring that your processes are well-defined and as effective as they can be is vital for your company because it eliminates the red tape that keeps you from being able to focus on your core objectives. It’s the key to making smarter business decisions that drive growth and put you on the path to success. 

So, if you’d like to improve your task management and increase revenue in the process, start by simplifying and automating your workflow and take the quality of your company’s output to the next level.