Think of a process that’s been taking too long to complete, costing too much to execute, or, even worse, constantly failing to deliver higher-quality work. Maybe that’s sales outreach in a retail company, proposal writing in a marketing agency, customer onboarding in a tech startup, procurement in a manufacturing firm, invoicing in a service industry, employee onboarding in a corporate setting, or accounts payable in a financial institution.
We know you wish you could hit pause and spend some time working your way out of all those inefficiencies. But we also know there’s a more effective approach to raising operational efficiency, and that’s a workflow optimization strategy, supported by the right workflow optimization software.
In this article, we’ll show you six workflow optimization techniques and three examples of workflow optimization. And you’ll see that successful workflow optimization is less disruptive to business operations than you think.
What is Workflow Optimization?
Workflow optimization is properly implementing a set of methods and techniques to make organizational processes smoother and more efficient. It eliminates bottlenecks in current processes of different sorts regardless of industry or whether they’re cross-functional or belong to a single functional unit. Automation, on the other hand, is the use of technology to perform tasks with minimal human intervention, and it’s often a key component of workflow optimization.
Benefits of Optimizing Workflows
Increased Productivity
Let’s consider a workflow to be an activity consisting of a sequence of tasks (or steps) in an organizational process. Your employees must complete it frequently, but the way steps relate to each other is so intricate that they feel overwhelmed every time they need to follow them.
Successful projects and happy customers depend on faster turnaround times. And faster turnaround times depend on the faster completion of tasks. Now, sometimes, speed isn’t an issue with your employees’ expertise or experience but rather a matter of how efficient your workflows are. Achieving this efficiency brings a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction to your team.
That’s why effective workflow optimization came into play—organizing process steps to avoid overwhelmingness. It breaks complex tasks down, discards unnecessary steps, and figures out which parts of the process a software solution can do autonomously. All in all, the workflow optimization process not only makes your team more profitable but also lightens their workload.
A streamlined workflow is faster to complete. It saves your team members valuable time and makes them more productive by removing redundant steps and reducing bottlenecks through workflow automation software. Also, because of that kind of software, everyone involved in the process is informed of its current status at all times. Last but not least, workflow automation software minimizes delays, as each person has access to all the information they need to execute their tasks when the time comes.
Cost Reduction
An optimal workflow decreases resource waste, which means it doesn’t include pointless tasks, needless meetings, or duplicate tasks. It also automates repetitive tasks and makes some documentation and communication practices obsolete. Workflow software keeps track of information flows and notifies all participants of what’s going on as the process progresses.
Not needing personnel to carry out unnecessary work reduces payroll costs and achieves operational cost savings. That’s an excellent win for every company in the world, but particularly important for those that must do resource allocation with limited resources.
Enhanced Quality
One goal of workflow optimization is to deliver high-quality outcomes. This means low error rates in completing process tasks, especially manual ones. However, the likelihood of errors in manual processes is high, so the only option is to put consistent processes in place and automate them as much as possible.
Workflow automation reduces the human error that comes with manual tasks and makes processes unfold in the same way, regardless of who follows them. And the ones who’ll absolutely love the results of automation down the line are—you guessed right—your customers. Consistent, automated workflows improve customer satisfaction.
6 Ways to Optimize Workflows
If your company is small, we bet most of your workflows are pretty linear and easy to execute. But if your company is bigger, you most likely own or follow more complex workflows that contain more steps and possible paths with many decisions in between.
Workflow optimization is a systematic approach to analyzing and redesigning current workflows for maximum efficiency. And it all starts with mapping your current process, which is the first of our workflow optimization tips.
Process Mapping
A visual representation of your processes is the best instrument for workflow analysis. That’s how you investigate ways to make those processes faster, cheaper, and more capable of producing higher quality.
With process maps (or workflow diagrams), you can more easily pinpoint redundant tasks that cause delays and unnecessary steps that you can discard without compromising the quality of final outputs. In other words, a workflow diagram facilitates the identification of bottlenecks, which you can fix by automating the tasks involved.
Automation
You can’t always replace humans in the execution of manual processes. But you can reduce the manual intervention in your processes by adopting software tools dedicated to workflow automation. Those tools not only decrease the number of manual errors but also the manual effort involved in performing tasks that software can be programmed to do on behalf of humans.
You see, humans are a source of inaccuracies and other types of errors. For instance, in data-intensive workflows, humans must process a large amount of data, and it might be challenging to maintain accuracy. So, if you can remove the human element from a process without impacting the outcomes, you should seriously consider doing it.
Workflow automation is likely to benefit repetitive tasks such as sending payment reminders or transferring data between software systems. When you automate those tasks, you can track them at all times and monitor employee performance, making everyone accountable for their work and empowering them to take control of their tasks.
Standardization
Establishing optimized workflows as a best practice means turning consistent processes into standards. Then, regardless of who follows the workflow steps, the results should be the same, such as delivering products that meet user requirements every time.
Standardized processes are fundamental for organizations to comply with industry regulations. But actually, you can improve your company’s policies and a wide range of other processes through standardization, too.
And because consistency maintains high quality and efficiency levels over time, you repeatedly offer a reliable customer experience, building a positive brand reputation and trust among your clientele.
Cross-functional Collaboration
Airtable found out that employees spend 12 hours per week trying to find the data they need to do their jobs. That’s 2.4 hours a day and the number one reason for employee disengagement.
Inefficient workflows are usually built on top of cross-departmental silos, so it’s critical that you break those silos down. Design workflows in a way that your staff shares data across functional units whenever needed. This makes everyone informed about who is doing what, which prevents two employees from executing the exact same task.
Additionally, you must automate communication between teams by setting up alerts and email notifications in custom workflows. You’ll enable timely follow-up meetings and project managers to act upon the completion of tasks or other task status updates as needed. No more forgotten emails slowing down the process, no more progress tracking on endless spreadsheets, and no more documents being impossible to locate.
Involve all personnel in workflow optimization. Ask them for feedback about current processes. Remember that innovating and being creative in product development depends on efficient collaboration within and between teams.
We also recommend that you document process changes and elaborate workflow rollout plans that inform your staff of the steps and timeline for process changes.
Continuous Improvement
The workflow optimization effort never ends. It’s ongoing, an answer to ever-changing business and organizational needs, and consists of incremental improvements to current processes.
But for you to become aware of shifts in needs, you must continuously monitor your processes and regularly assess workflow performance. Rely on real-time feedback from employees, partners, and customers to remain vigilant and proactive about workflow efficiency.
Employee Training and Empowerment
Last but not least, an effective approach to workflow optimization encourages employee input for process improvement. Make your staff feel safe about sharing valuable insights from firsthand experience with inefficient workflows.
Team members involved in the constant improvement of existing processes tend to adopt workflow changes faster and better. Also, offering the skill development they need to follow improved processes effectively and efficiently is key to successful workflow optimization.
3 Examples of Workflow Optimization
Across sectors, project managers achieve workflow efficiency through digital solutions and the adoption of proven optimization strategies.
Call Center Industry
Call center businesses are heavily focused on performance. However, Six Sigma can help you make the performance of customer support agents more consistent across calls. Six Sigma is a statistics-based methodology from the manufacturing industry, and call centers frequently rely on it for workflow optimization. In that industry, optimizing workflows means finding inefficiencies in the call and post-call workflows that customer support agents follow and fixing those inefficiencies.
Healthcare Sector
Hospitals and clinics traditionally implement the principles of another manufacturing methodology: lean manufacturing. For instance, they apply those principles to optimizing patient flows, such as admissions, and use electronic health records to make their processes leaner.
A lean workflow optimization strategy removes pointless tasks from workflows and squeezes the time spent on tasks that don’t deliver value.
In the healthcare industry, this means providing as much quality care to patients as possible, as quickly as possible, while spending minimum resources, as they’re usually limited.
Financial Services
Banking operations are another example of how organizations tackle inefficient processes. Banks digitalize their documentation and use workflow software to automate loan approval processes.
Combining Workflow Optimization with Business Process Optimization
Although we use the terms “workflow” and “process” interchangeably, as workflows represent processes, business processes and workflows are not the same thing, yet you must focus on continuously raising the efficiency of both.
A Holistic Approach to Improvement
Compared to workflows, business processes explicitly target business goals and are usually more complex processes with a more significant impact on organizations. But even though they’re distinct, their optimization is intimately related.
To optimize a business process, you need to optimize a few workflows. And when you refine a workflow, you might be doing that because you need to optimize a business process. Besides, workflow updates force you to review the business processes that include those workflows. That’s one of the triggers of business process improvement.
Strategic Alignment
Despite business processes existing to ensure business goals are met, optimized workflows must support overall business goals. This means you should always worry about contributing to your business’s goals when fine-tuning your workflows. You must always do your best to achieve short-term efficiency while not compromising your company’s long-term strategy.
Change Management
The more employees are used to following a certain process, the harder it is to overcome their natural resistance to changing how they do things—including you. But consciously learning change management techniques and putting them into practice is essential to establishing a culture of continuous improvement. Ask coworkers from other teams or departments to put in their two cents, as their fresh perspective on your processes might help you find new ways to improve them.
How Teramind Makes Workflow Optimization Easy
- Boost Productivity Instantly: Teramind’s advanced analytics and real-time monitoring help identify inefficiencies and streamline workflows, ensuring your team spends less time on administrative tasks and more time on value-driven activities.
- Enhanced Employee Engagement: By providing clear insights into work patterns and productivity levels, Teramind helps managers tailor support and training, resulting in a more engaged and motivated workforce.
- Seamless Integration: Teramind easily integrates with your existing tools and systems, allowing for a smooth implementation process that enhances workflow optimization without disrupting your current operations.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Leverage Teramind’s comprehensive reporting and analytics to make informed decisions on workflow adjustments, resource allocation, and process improvements, driving better overall business performance.
FAQs
What are 3 basic workflow management practices?
Three basic workflow management practices include defining clear objectives for each workflow, utilizing automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks, and regularly reviewing and refining workflows to enhance efficiency. By focusing on these practices, organizations can improve process visibility and ensure alignment with overall business goals, ultimately driving greater productivity.
What is process flow optimization?
Process flow optimization involves analyzing and improving the sequence of tasks and activities in a business process to eliminate bottlenecks and enhance efficiency. This can include simplifying workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and aligning processes with strategic business goals to boost overall productivity and effectiveness.
How do you optimize work processes?
To optimize work processes, start by mapping out each step of the workflow to identify bottlenecks and redundancies. Implement automation tools to streamline repetitive tasks, and regularly review and refine your processes to ensure they align with your strategic business goals, enhancing overall efficiency and productivity.
Conclusion
It’s hard to keep workflows simple, but business growth depends on workflow optimization. Your business depends on workflow optimization. So, roll up your sleeves and invest time mapping, automating, and standardizing your processes.
Reduce the duration and cost of your processes and break down your company’s information silos. You’ll see the quality of products and services go up.
