As a business owner, you’ll notice that the details of your business can be chaotic at times. Organizing the activities of different sections like sales and marketing, customer intelligence, and how they interact can be daunting for you.
This nerve-wracking process limits you from upscaling your business easily and effectively delegating your team leadership for success. However, having a system for your business process allows you to take care of your business complexities by helping you break them down so your hard-found clients won’t run to your competitors.
In this post, I want to share with you four (4) things to put in place before systematizing your business process.
Let’s get started.
#1. Make a list of common tasks
For each of the sections that make up your business, list all the activities. Then begin a deep dive into the analysis of the daily and weekly tasks from start to finish. This process will help you capture the bigger view of what you’re set to accomplish and reveal how they connect.
Imagine that the first task of customer experience personnel when attending to a client’s technical request is to inform the technical team. A member of the technical team resolved the client complaints but didn’t know what to do next.
Missing out this simple but important step of listing common tasks and how they connect could cripple your business workflow.
With tools such as Trello, Asana, and Slack, you can split your work process into achievable tasks, adding a deadline and also delegate a team member to handle it without stress.
Making a list of the details of your common tasks, including its likely branches, will save your business from response oversight.
#2. Write out each process with the concerned employees
If you want to manage the day-to-day tasks in your company effectively, then you need to take charge of systematizing your business process in-house from start to finish.
The reason is simple. No one understands your business process better than you and your employees. Having worked with your business process for some time, your employees will fully understand the details of these tasks.
Not only that, they know where the faults are with your business process, and probably have solutions to them. So when writing out your business process, you should involve your concerned employees.
When you do, the concerned employees will indicate their most difficult task and provide more insights on how to improve your business process. Not only that, if you don’t include the employees from the onset, they might not be willing to share any feedback with you.
#3. Create a well-organized task direction
Now that you’ve written out each work process, how can your employees have access to it quickly when they’re on the job? This is when you’ll need a well-organized task direction that is created based on departments.
With the technical employee example mentioned previously, a direction will point him to inform the customer directly that the job is done.
To have a well-organized task direction, there are two ways to go about it.
First, you can create a workflow chart that uses visuals to explain to your employees what they need to do at every point in time.
Also, you can create level folders using Google drive to develop step-by-step activity from one folder to another.
With this, employees know where to look when at a crossroad of performing any task.
#4. Document the processes
Since you’ve identified each task with the concerned employee, and created a task direction, this is where you provide the details of the steps involved in accomplishing them.
You’ll invest a lot of time doing this, but when your business begins to grow, the stress will be worth it.
Take, for instance, if you help businesses gain more brand exposure using content marketing, your process could be something like this:
- Perform in-depth keyword research
- Analyze client’s competitors
- Interview target audience to understand their pain points
- Write out article ideas
- Outline article and create the first draft
- Edit the first draft and create a second draft
- Proofread the second draft and finalize the article
- And so many more
Having this kind of process, the next step is to document it. That way, it’ll be easy for employees to go over and use them whenever they want to.
Conclusion
Using systems in your business will ensure that every employee, irrespective of sections and levels, have an agreed understanding of improving their work process and attaining the company’s mission.
Not only that, it will make the task of onboarding new employees and training them a seamless one.
Have you created a system for your business process? Kindly share your experience in the comment box below.
AbdulGaniy Shehu is a content marketing consultant for B2B and SaaS brands. He uses tried-and-true content marketing services at his agency, Winsome Writer Services to help B2B and SaaS companies grow.
Business stock photo by MAD_Production/Shutterstock
