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Your business is like every other business, relying on processes to operate. And just like those other businesses, more than a few of your methods are involved. Maybe really involved even. While that conclusion may not initially feel very helpful for your business, it highlights a significant opportunity.
By simplifying some of your more complicated business processes, you position your company to increase its efficiency, bolster team members' productivity and ultimately serve your customers in ways your industry peers may not. That's a competitive advantage.
Here are six ways to simplify your processes to gain a leg up in your industry.
Outsource areas beyond your expertise or bandwidth.
Running a business may feel like you have to do everything, but that should not necessarily be the reality. It likely can't be – there are only so many hours in the day. Instead, choose to play to your strengths. Perform an audit of all the areas of your business, identify which of those you're an expert in, then make those areas your priority.
For everything else, consider outsourcing:
- Save yourself time and bypass costly mistakes by connecting with an accomplished, trustworthy accounting agency to handle your bookkeeping needs.
- Hiring freelancers can also be an effective and economical alternative for more specialized activities you may not be able to tackle, such as graphic design, content creation, social media management, and website development.
You’re not expected to be the person operating every process that powers your business. Handle the processes that best leverage your experiences and expertise, then lean on experts to take on processes that fall outside your strengths.
Find and remove the fluff in your workflows.
Quick question: Do you have a background in forensics? Okay, that's a little dramatic, but when attempting to simplify processes, you should be mildly prepared to investigate what may be going wrong with your workflows.
Better yet, see what doesn't need to be happening. Of all the steps that stand between initiating an activity and its result, are there any unnecessary actions taking place? Outline all the steps for your most common processes and remove any that aren't directly aiding in the desired outcome.
Engage and employ influential team members.
Simple processes can feel more complicated if the right team members aren't performing them. Mistakes must be corrected, adjustments are needed to accommodate insufficient skill sets, customer service issues arise, and more time is spent dealing with turnover. It doesn't sound very simple.
By truly emphasizing the hiring, retaining, and preparation of your employees, you're also simplifying your processes. So as you look to grow your work workforce, be sure to ask the right interview questions to make sure you're identifying talented team members. And once they're hired, ensure their onboarding and training are performed in a way that prepares them for the processes they'll be using.
Standardize basic processes.
It may be helpful to introduce some standardization for any processes that do not (or should not) vary from customer to customer. And why might that be helpful, you ask? Because when team members perform their work the same way, results become more consistent, efficiency increases, process improvements become easier to recognize and problem-solving is faster.
Regarding how you begin to standardize your processes, the best first step is to look at what you're already doing. After that, here's a course of action outlined by Lucidchart that may be effective to follow:
- Meet with those processes' team members to absorb their experiences and listen to their recommendations.
- Use feedback from those operators to identify some shared best practices.
- Lean on those best practices to develop and document a single standardized process.
- Train current and incoming team members on how to perform your newly-standardized procedure.
- Repeat all of the previous steps.
Once you've taken the steps to standardize your processes, it's important to measure the results. Set KPIs or metrics to track the impact of these new changes on efficiency, productivity, or customer satisfaction.
Take a look around your industry.
Think of this exercise as a kind of competitive analysis; only your focus is on – you guessed it – processes. The types of processes you have in place to create your products or serve your customers are most likely not unique to your business. It's not a reach to realize that companies operating in your industry have similar processes to achieve those same outcomes.
Please look at their approach to sourcing inspiration for simplifying your processes. Performing that analysis helps you uncover things your business is doing exceptionally well.
Remember: The best solutions for process simplification may reside outside your organization.
Consider incorporating some automation.
Think of this as an extension of the earlier item that touched on outsourcing. As you evaluate all the processes you currently employ, think to yourself, "Is this a step technology can take care of for me?" If you find instances where the answer you land on is "yes," then boom, you just found a solution for simplifying.
Opportunities to automate have become more readily available in areas such as marketing, where developments like email automation have helped companies stay in mind with their customers without manually deploying those correspondences. Plenty of analytical, operational, sales, and planning activities can also be automated.
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BBB Great West + Pacific contributed to this article.