Do employees utilize the whole 40 hours a week on business tasks? The answer is no. Employees spend time on non-productive tasks, and that affects your workflow efficiency. It is nearly impossible to remove all time-wasting factors from the workflow equation, but there are steps you can take to manage workflow and improve efficiency. Implementing these proven steps can significantly reduce workflow issues and increase your ROI.
Creating a flawless workflow is a challenging task that requires time, but with the proper workflow management software in place , the road becomes easy and less expensive.
Understand The Process in Place
First, start with understanding the workflow process you already have in place and analyze for effective changes it needs. Seek feedback from everyone involved in the workflow. This will give you a clear idea of whether the workflow in place is working or not. Analyze the process from every team member's shoes working along the workflow, and understand the pros and cons. Once you are done with it, you can restructure the workflow to its fullest potential. Remember, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Prioritize Projects
After understanding your existing process, it's time to prioritize the tasks based on their overall workflow impact. You can start by breaking down the project into several tasks and organizing each task in the workflow based on its importance to the overall project completion. A perfect workflow management software and time-tracking tool to track your projects and employees comes in handy to determine your ideal workflow.
Train Your Team
Equipping your employees with the right skills and the tools to perform their tasks to the fullest is crucial. It’s essential to train them according to the needs of the project. Furthermore, make sure they are trained on only what they need to perform better. Avoid unnecessary training that wastes valuable time. Employees with the right knowledge on the given task is crucial to project success.
Organize Efficiently
Creating a successful workflow includes managing projects and your employee's productive time in the best possible way. It would be best to have a perfect process and tool to track the employee's productivity and time on projects to manage workflow better.
Proper Resource Utilization
Proper resource utilization is key to successful projects. Employees tend to waste time if they are not assigned challenging tasks that test their skills. Assign your employees with the specific tasks that keep them occupied for their productive hours. To do this, a clear understanding of the employee's capabilities is necessary.
Cut Down Counter-Productive interruptions.
The major counter-productive factors affecting workflows include lengthy, unnecessary meetings and task-allocation issues. Assigning unclear or unnecessary tasks to the team members could be a big time-waster. Take necessary measures to avoid all sorts of unnecessary interruptions that deviate your employees from their tasks.
Establish Effective Communication
Effective communication not only means removing unnecessary communication gaps and lengthy meetings, but establishing, clear, effective channels for work allocations, tracking work statuses and approvals as well. Setting up a quick and responsive two-way communication channel is essential, as it eliminates communication gaps between the project workers and their leaders.
Embrace Automation
There is a vast scope for automation in your workflow process. You can automate areas like payroll, time-tracking, and process reporting to ensure smooth collaboration and improved efficiency. Thankfully, finding the right automation tools that flawlessly integrate with your existing system is easier than you think.
