Recently, the term “workflow” has become a bit of a buzzword in the business community. And while most business owners can intellectually understand why workflow is important, it’s hard to truly wrap your brain around it until you have actually seen it in action.
Workflows can help streamline and automate repeatable business tasks, minimizing room for errors and increasing overall efficiency.
This, in turn, dramatically improves your business. Managers can make quicker, smarter decisions and employees are empowered to collaborate in a more productive and agile way.
However, developing a workflow in your business is no small feat. It can often be incredibly challenging, as it requires that you can see the big picture while simultaneously paying attention to the hundreds of small details that go into it.
But as a business owner, you must develop strategies for how you can help your business grow and stand out in a competitive marketplace. Workflow automation is just that — a strategy to help you improve the efficiency, overall revenue, and day-to-day operations of your business.
6 Reasons Why Workflow is Important
Other than the structure and order workflows create in your business, there are several other benefits that come with it:
More Insight into Business Processes
Mapping out your processes in a workflow allows you to get a more clear, top-level view of your business. Even if you have a well-established set of business processes, do you really know if they are delivering you results? Are the processes as good as they could be?
One of the biggest reasons why workflow is important is because it gives you greater insight into your processes. From then on, you can use the said insights to better your workflows, and improve the bottom-line of your business: get more profits.
Identifying Redundancies
In many businesses, there are tons of unnecessary and redundant tasks that take place daily. Once you have more insight into your processes, you can determine what activities are truly necessary.
Identifying and eliminating redundant tasks has, of course, countless benefits – it creates value for your business. Instead of wasting time on a useless task, your employees will be able to focus on what’s important, and what does contribute to the business.
As such, the more useless processes are eliminated, the better your business will perform.
Increase Accountability and Reduce Micromanagement
Micromanagement can cause a lot of problems in a business setting: employees hate being micromanaged and (most) managers hate having to do it. Studies have shown that micromanagement is often cited as the biggest reasons for quitting a job.
In some cases, however, there might just not be any other solution but micromanagement. There’s important work to be done, and not everyone is as motivated to do it.
By clearly mapping out your workflow, everyone knows what tasks must be completed, who will be completing them, and when they need to be finished by.
When the workflow process is clearly laid out in this way, managers can spend less time micromanaging their employees. There’s no questioning on what the further steps are, or if there something wrong with “step 4.” Everyone in the team sees exactly what’s going on, and what needs to be done.
This will, in turn, increase the job satisfaction of everyone involved and will most likely improve the relationships between management and employees.
Improved communication
Have you ever felt like your workplace is like a game of telephone? Everyone is talking but somewhere along the way, the message becomes muddled. Poor communication is a common workplace problem that is often not dealt with.
According to this article in the Harvard Business Review, communication in the workplace is critical because it affects every other aspect of the company.
There are cases where the main conflict in the organization is from miscommunication – employees and management supposedly “disagreeing,” even if both are after the same goals.
Which leads us to another big reason why workflow is important: visibility of processes and accountability can increase workplace communication dramatically.
This communication will reduce employee turnover and make day-to-day operations smoother overall.
Provide better customer service
Without your customers, there is no business to run.
So, it is important to constantly find ways to improve the customer experience. Unfortunately, customer requests or complaints can be easily overlooked when you are relying on outdated manual systems.
This results in dissatisfied customers who will end up taking their business elsewhere. Workflow can, however, help you provide better customer service and respond to customer complaints more quickly.
Improve the quality of your products or services
Often, employees are chosen for projects based on who is available rather than who has the best skill sets to perform that job. Another reason why workflow is important is that it allows you to think about and choose the individuals who are best suited to perform the available tasks.
By automating workflows and processes, you can also reduce the likelihood of human error. Over time, this will improve the quality of your products or services.
How to Implement Workflow in Your Business
Although many business owners understand why workflow is important, it often takes a backseat to more immediate and pressing business operations. This can happen because most business owners feel that they are operating well enough without a clearly defined workflow.
If you’re an SMB owner, however, setting up and optimizing your workflows might just be what sets you apart from your competition.
Do you have any experience with setting up and optimizing workflows? Let us know how it helped your business down in the comments!
Related Questions
What is the purpose of workflow management?
By directing the flow of work, workflow management makes organizations run like a fine-tuned machine. “It’s just about making sure those tasks move from one person to the next as gracefully as in a perfect production number.” The endgame is to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and make everyone’s working life just that little bit easier. When processes are documented, teams can spot bottlenecks, eliminate redundant processes and ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. It’s like having a GPS for your work — that gets you from the start to the finish line, with the least extraneous back and forth.
What is the significance of flow of work?
Things can buzz, all right, when they’re right and humming, and work can flow like a song. A smooth flow is when work moves seamlessly from one stage of a project to another, and people feel they are propelling the ball forward. The end result is faster finishing times, a happy staff and a happy customer. Picture a kitchen where chefs, servers and dishwashers all flow seamlessly — that’s work flow. It’s going to reduce stress, it’s going to reduce confusion and it’s going to free people up to do whatever they do well, which in the end is going to have better results and make the actual work more enjoyable.
Why is workflow important in project management?
In project management, workflow is the magical elixir that transforms disorder into order.” It functions as a roadmap, leading team members through intricate work and making sure everyone knows what to do, and when. A well-conceived workflow enables managers to identify potential problems early, allocate resources more efficiently, and maintain projects on schedule and within budget. It’s as if you have a crystal ball that tells you exactly what you need to do to make your project a success. And it is also a collaboration dream, letting team members effortlessly pass tasks and be kept in the loop no matter where they are, or what time zone they’re in.
What is the purpose of organizing workflow?
Workflow organization is essentially decluttering your digital workspace. It provides transparency into unwieldy processes, which in turn helps everyone understand their role and responsibilities. The point is to have a rational, step-by-step process for getting it done. This system removes the guesswork, minimizes redundancy, and maintains consistency in how things are done. Call it the recipe for success – when you have all the ingredients and the step-by-step instructions laid out, you’re much more likely to whip up a delicious dish every time. Structured workflows also facilitate the onboarding of new team members more easily, refining processes over time, and to further scale the operation as business conditions change.
