How & Why A Clear Business Process Can Change The Growth Of Your Business

If you’re a solopreneur or working in a startup, managing processes is fairly easy. You have a limited number and you can easily scroll through to find the one you need when you need it.

But what about large organizations? Companies where people on different teams are in different countries? Businesses where different departments speak and operate in different languages?

How can we manage processes on such a large scale, and what does that tell us about managing processes for small businesses looking to scale?

This is where a process comes in.

In this article let's learn about it and see why it's so important in the growth of your business

Quick Overview:

Step 1: What is a Business Process?

Step 2: Why Process Improvement is essential for your business growth?

Step 3: How to improve your process? (PDCA - Kaizen)

Step 4: Steps to Process Improvement  + an example of process improvements

Let's dig into each step..........

Step 1: What is a Process?

These are a series of steps and decisions that involve accomplishing the work to be done (deliver a product or service to the customer). Each stakeholder performs a specific task they are specialized in to achieve a concrete goal. These steps are often repeated many times by multiple users in a standardized and optimized way.

Why is it important? 

• It allows us to look at how we perform work
• Can focus on eliminating waste (money, people, materials, time, and opportunities)
• Jobs can be done easily and quickly than before

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Step 2: Why Process Improvement is essential for your business growth?

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. – W. Edwards Deming

A well planned and strategized business process will help a business in the following ways:

• Reduced expenditure and risk
• Improving efficiency
• Bridging communication gaps
• Better time management
• Adaption of new technology
• Reduce human error
• More customer-focused

See how I can help your organization to build and improve the process: Read here

Step 3: How to improve a process (PDCA - Kaizen)? 

a). Find a problem or gap - Address the problem, collect data, and plan a change

b). Create a solution - Develop and implement the solution

c). Measure the performance - Review test, confirm results, measure how effective was the change.

d). Act - Take action based on the result of the previous step. Implement improved solution

Step 4: Steps to Process Improvement  

? Step 1: Select a Process

? Step 2: Establish an objective to achieve

? Step 3: Understand the current process

? Step 4: Measure current state

? Step 5: Analyse data and develop a plan

? Step 6: Simplify the process

? Step 7: Implement change/plan

? Step 8: Test the change and collect data

? Step 9: Standardize the process 

An example of Process Improvements - HR Department ( +With an Ideas)

Hiring the right person for the job is critical. It’s not only your business growth that depends on it but also the mere existence of your company.  

Hiring the wrong employee can cost you time and money, which hampers your progress. Make a poor hiring decision, and it may cost you more than that—your customers may start leaving you for good.

Below we’ve listed some tips for your recruitment and onboarding process. I’m keeping it short in this article below: 

1. Identify the hiring need
2. Devise A Recruitment Plan
3. Craft clear and attractive job description 
4. Boost your candidate sourcing
5. Build talent pipelines
6. Enhance candidate experience
7. Improve your recruitment efficiency
8. Evaluate candidates effectively 
9. Interviews
10. Applicant Assessment
11. Complete Hiring Formalities (e.g. Reference Check, Background Check, Job offer)
12. Onboarding

Some other HR Process Improvement Ideas:

• HR self-service portal
• Holiday request workflow to simplify authorization from managers
• Holiday reminders to encourage employees to use their allocated holiday allowance
• Employee management application
• Automated request to employees to update missing details from HR records e.g. phone numbers, next of kin etc.
• Monitoring of time and attendance records and alerting when anomalies occur e.g. regular lateness or excessive overtime etc.
• Alerting directors with details of how much overtime employees are working
• Sickness monitoring with email alerts of an employee who has an abnormally high number of sick days
• Probation period monitoring e.g. generating an alert to relevant managers when an employee’s probation period is nearing its end
• New starters welcome emails including details of whom they report to, why they are responsible for, details of procedures relating to expenses and holiday booking procedures, company intranet details, etc.
• Chasing employees for overdue timesheets or asking them to re-submit if they were incomplete
• Chasing employees for missing payroll information such as bank details and P45s
• Alerting managers when an employee leaves the organization
• Alerting departments when a new member of staff starts
• Allowing employees to use SMS text messaging to check remaining holiday allocation. The SMS text message is received by BPA Platform which then finds out how much holiday the sender has left and sends the information back to the employee as a text message
• Providing easy checking of staff rotas. For example, companies that have emergency staff on-call can enable their managers to query staff rotas by text message. This ensures that even at 3 am they can quickly and easily find out which member of emergency staff is on call

Conclusion

Every organization is made up of hundreds of interconnected processes. Imagine if you could easily build a new business process for the newly created department or you need to make some improvements in some areas to make it more productive without much juggling around.

This is the type of superpower organizations are dying to have in their employees. I get the process out of people’s heads and into working frameworks.

Well-designed business processes set up your teams on the path to success. Everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities and work with a clear vision towards the end goal.

It's okay to admit that we all, not 100% perfect in creating a clear and effective process for our businesses and ask for additional help who has experience in this.

I’ve helped several businesses to solve the business problems that helped them to achieve their goals and now I’m ready to help you. The result is an improvement in their teamwork and revenue.

I can help your business to define a clear and improved business process strategy. You can read more about me here: www.amansingh.pro

xoxo

Aman