Here, is a list of 6 reasons that explains why business needs a solid workflow.
A Clutter-free Workstation
Who wants to have in built paper warehouses inside offices? The more you pile up files and documents on your desk, the more difficult will it be for you to focus on your work. Also, when you go for a cursory check, you are guaranteed to find many of those papers needless. Get rid of them and go digital. If technology allows you to go paperless and boost productivity, why not use it?
Kill Redundancies
In many businesses, there are tons of unnecessary and redundant tasks that take place daily. Once you have more insight into your processes, you can determine what activities are truly necessary.
Identifying and eliminating redundant tasks has, of course, countless benefits – it creates value for your business. Instead of wasting time on a useless task, your employees will be able to focus on what’s important, and what does contribute to the business.
As such, the more useless processes are eliminated, the better your business will perform.
Better Understanding of Operations
Mapping out your processes in a workflow allows you to get a more clear, top-level view of your business. Even if you have a well-established set of business processes, do you really know if they are delivering you results? Are the processes as good as they could be?
One of the biggest reasons why workflow is important is because it gives you greater insight into your processes. From then on, you can use the said insights to better your workflows, and improve the bottom-line of your business: get more profits.
Less Micromanagement
Who wants to be micromanaged? Who wants to have a supervisor roaming around tell him that the paper in scanner has to be kept at a certain angle? Being asked, ‘what’s the progress?’ every hour feels like real torture. And we empathise with whosoever has through bear the brunt of micromanagement. They dis-empower their team, squander innovation and opportunity, and give poor performance an impetus.
When the workflow process is clearly laid out in this way, managers can spend less time micromanaging their employees. There’s no questioning on what the further steps are, or if there something wrong with “step 4.” Everyone in the team sees exactly what’s going on, and what needs to be done.
This will, in turn, increase the job satisfaction of everyone involved and will most likely improve the relationships between management and employees.
Better Communication
There are cases where the main conflict in the organization is from miscommunication – employees and management supposedly “disagreeing,” even if both are after the same goals.
Which leads us to another big reason why workflow is important: visibility of processes and accountability can increase workplace communication dramatically.
This communication will reduce employee turnover and make day-to-day operations smoother overall.
Better Service
Without your customers, there is no business to run.
So, it is important to constantly find ways to improve the customer experience. Unfortunately, customer requests or complaints can be easily overlooked when you are relying on outdated manual systems.
This results in dissatisfied customers who will end up taking their business elsewhere. Workflow can, however, help you provide better customer service and respond to customer complaints more quickly.