Synchronizing different teams and managing each team member can prove a daunting task, especially for small businesses. In an ideal environment, your employees’ regular tasks should be commensurate with their skills and abilities. This is what we call the natural flow. An employee must be in their element to ensure optimal performance.
When the ideal conditions aren’t met, it could lead to employee dissatisfaction, conflict within the group, and lowered performance. For instance, if the employee lacks the skills to accomplish their tasks, they may suffer from stress and anxiety. Conversely, if they are overqualified for the job, they may lose interest and become detached and uninvolved.
If you want to improve workflow and boost productivity in the office, you need to help your employees achieve their natural flow. A ServiceNow implementation partner will help you match your team members to the right job. Here are a few other tips that will help you improve workflow management for your small business.
1. Distribute specific tasks to your employees
One of the easiest ways to achieve natural flow is specificity when apportioning tasks to your team members. Instead of setting general goals for your employees to meet, it’s better to keep specific individuals in mind during the delegation process. That way, you can ensure that the person with the right set of skills is in charge of the task.
While it may require more micromanagement, this strategy allows your employees to feel their input is valued. Once they have finished the task assigned to them, you can then assign other similar jobs. That way, idle time is minimized and you get to benefit from your team members’ skills and abilities.
This strategy is best used for open-ended projects with an emphasis on quality output. If time is of the essence, you may still adopt this technique with slight variations.
2. Deconstruct the project
When tackling big projects, one can get overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work that needs to be done. Task paralysis can be a serious issue, and the sheer complexity of some projects can affect deadlines.
Instead of looking at the bigger picture, it’s more productive to deconstruct the project into smaller, more digestible chunks. This approach should simplify even the most complex workflows.
3. Simplify documentation
When creating a workflow from scratch, it’s important to document every step of the process. Every addition, deletion, or edit must be meticulously documented. That way, you won’t run into any difficulties once the workflow nears completion. And you can easily isolate any issues by tracking the history through the documentation.
Without proper documentation, you may have to scrap your work if something goes awry. If a mistake is committed in the late stage, you’ll have to start at the beginning without a document to guide you along.
4. Declutter your space
Once you’ve decided to establish order by organizing office workflow, the next thing you need to do is to declutter your space. It may involve organizing your archives, tossing out old documents, and establishing a new system for storing documents.
You also have to declutter your online storage. While you can easily expand your storage capacity by investing in cloud storage or on-site backups, they can cost a lot of money in the long run. Decluttering and organizing your servers can save you thousands of dollars in hosting costs and minimize the amount of clutter you have to go through.
5. Know the end goal
A workflow has a proper beginning and end. Otherwise, you’ll have no way of knowing whether the task is considered complete or not. When creating a workflow for a task, make sure to define the success metrics that determine whether the goal was met or not.
For output-based tasks, a natural success metric would be the creation and approval of the output. Other tasks may have other metrics as well. For instance, success for a social media campaign may entail hitting a certain number goal.
6. Encourage collaboration
The natural tendency is to assign a project to a single team. But more complex projects may benefit from a diversity of perspectives. You may want to split up the work and assign tasks to different teams.
A final word
These six tips should help you manage workflow in the office. If you allow your employees to work on the tasks they want, you can expect better quality and faster completion. Start by building the ideal environment for work, and implement other changes from there.