In the United States, lanes or streetlights are usually a given. Without them, it would be nearly impossible to drive safely.
While paved and painted roads don’t fix all traffic issues, they definitely make driving faster and safer.
The function of a workflow is similar– it saves time and moves a process from start to finish.
In this article, we’ll dive into workflows, why they’re essential, and how to optimize them in your company.
What is a workflow, and why is it important?
A workflow is a standardized series of tasks you complete in order to achieve a specific goal.
For example, most companies have a standardized onboarding workflow they follow for new customers. It might look something like this:
- An automated email asks the customer to schedule a training call.
- A product expert handles the training call.
- A trainer selects an email onboarding sequence based on the customer’s needs.
- After 2 weeks, the account manager checks the usage data to see if the customer is actively using the product.
- Customer service follows up and asks the customer about their experience.
Completing a workflow analysis can involve multiple departments, employees, and tools. It all depends on the desired outcome.
When building a new workflow, always consider how you can customize it to suit your or your customers’ needs.
What is a workflow diagram?
A workflow diagram is a simple visual representation of how the workflows. You can do this online or on paper.
This diagram represents a workflow for approving new web content, like a blog post. Visualizing the workflow in this diagram helps highlight the phases and conditional steps.
Often, illustrating the process’s workflow can help clarify which steps may not be necessary, or how to boost efficiency.
What are the 3 basic components of workflow?
The three primary components of a workflow are input, transformation, and output.
Here they are further defined:
- Input: staff, materials, equipment, and other resources necessary to reach the goal.
- Transformation or process: the pre-defined rules, directions, and steps needed to change the input into the desired output.
- Output: the deliverables, whether it’s a physical product, service, or even a trained employee.
The Lean and Six Sigma frameworks use the SIPOC diagram to break down every essential process further.
With a clear overview, you can start optimizing processes and make decisions about standardizing and automating tasks within the workflow.
The top 7 benefits of a standardized workflow
Project managers and executives often talk about the need to standardize business process management or business workflows.
Simply put, with greater consistency, the easier it is to ensure longevity across business processes and outcomes. A standardized workflow also helps you lower risk and boost productivity.
We’ll examine this further below.
1. Increase productivity
Standardizing a workflow means you eliminate many points throughout a process where workers would otherwise need to make a decision. Everyone involved knows what to do and when to do it.
This reduces the chances of an individual straying from protocol or making a wrong decision, which could cause delays.
It also reduces manual work for 74% of businesses:
Project management platforms and other workflow tools allow you to easily set and share standardized workflows with all relevant stakeholders. This should help answer questions and keep things running smoothly.
2. Free up time by reducing micromanagement
Once employees are used to a standardized workflow, they can begin to manage themselves.
As each team member grows into their role, they’ll start to take ownership and produce better outcomes.
The right platform can enable you to automate management tasks or approval workflows. This includes sending reminders to complete tasks, providing status updates, and seeking approvals in real-time.
That means your managers and executives will have a lot more time to focus on high-level decisions. Instead of the day-to-day process, they can focus on new products or campaigns.
3. Standardize processes for consistent results
The original goal of workflow management was to produce consistent outputs. Assembly lines have the same objective.
Even over 100 years ago, businesses understood the importance of consistency when producing products or delivering services.
With a standardized workflow, you can deliver an almost identical result each time.
4. Improve onboarding or adoption rates with a more organized workflow
Onboarding new hires is an integral part of your business. But until they are adequately trained, new employees cost more than they offer.
By using management tools to standardize workflows, you can drastically speed up their ramp-up time and empower them to start contributing value.
Plus, with an organized onboarding workflow, you can solve 2 of the top 4 challenges of training new employees.
Almost half of companies (47%) struggle with inconsistent onboarding. Another 36% face unorganized processes due to “a lack of technology.”
The leading challenge, overworked managers, is also a sign of weak workflows.
5. Reduce project risks by better controlling variables
Creating standardized workflows will help your team reduce risk, errors, and delay by providing structure and clarity.
Employees will have a clear understanding of how to complete tasks and standards that must be met.
6. Use workflows to establish a new company culture
If you want to create lasting change in your company, you should create workflows and expectations that foster autonomy and accountability.
When employees’ work is designed to help them succeed and grow, these core traits will become embedded in your company culture.
As Will Durant (not Aristotle) poignantly put it, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
So a repeating pattern of daily or weekly actions is a core building block for your culture.
7. Provides transparency and an audit trail
With a clearly defined workflow where each step is documented, you can easily trace delays or mistakes and monitor performance.
If you assign tasks without specifying an owner, it’s difficult for upper management to single out individual performance.
Why you need a workflow management platform
Without workflow management software, managers lose precious time providing hands-on process guidance to employees.
Workflow management platforms empower your team to complete any kind of business process with ease and autonomy.
monday.com is regarded as one of the premier workflow management software, and for good reason:
1. Centralize data into a single dashboard
Integrations aren’t just useful for getting rid of small data entry tasks in a process. You can use them to centralize data and give your managers a better overview of performance.
For example, you could connect a tool like monday.com directly to your CRM and marketing platforms. That way, you could import sales and other performance data.
In that same dashboard, you could also view the number of leads handled by employees.
Your managers can create the 30,000-foot view that they want from scratch.
2. Set due dates and notifications
monday.com helps teams stay on schedule by making it easy to set due dates, notifications and reminders, and update status.
With a structure in place, you can dramatically increase the efficiency of your workflows.
Here are just some of workflow management settings you can add into monday.com dashboards:
- Task owners
- Task descriptions
- Due dates
- Notifications
- Milestones
- Workflow action status (in progress, done, etc.)
- Time tracking
- Task-dependent timeline
monday.com enables greater efficiency because it allows teams to automate many processes that otherwise consume time and slow down workflows. It allows you to transform materials in your workflow that might otherwise be static into a dynamic and actionable process. After a certain project is over, you can save your workflow template, including the automation, and reuse it in the future.
3. Eliminate unnecessary manual tasks
By automating a large part of the management process, you can also cut back on other manual tasks.
For example, you can:
- Use integrations to update task card info across platforms
- Notify other departments of bug reports
- Reach out to coworkers when you finish your step
These are just a few examples of manual tasks that you can leave to the workflow management system.
4. Improve team clarity to avoid duplicative work
In large organizations, duplicative work can become a large cost center if mismanaged. Two members on the same team could be working on the same problem without knowing.
Multiple teams within an organization could launch projects with the same business objective in mind without ever noticing.
Clear task management and cross-department transparency eliminate low-level duplicative work.
5. Easily coordinate work across teams and departments
Increased transparency doesn’t just reduce the chances of duplication. It also makes it a lot easier to coordinate between teams.
By sharing high-level goals and roadmaps, you can coordinate projects to support and build off of one another. Plus, with monday.com, you can easily map out and assign specific tasks across teams.
The power of workflow automation and integrations
Experts estimate that the value of automating unnecessary tasks (for US companies alone) could be as high as $15 trillion.
Start automating up to 27% of all processes
Just think of how many small-scale administrative tasks you do every day. Up to 27% of all work is automatable with today’s technology.
Many of today’s software can handle tasks like copying the text from an email and adding it to your CRM.
And automatable tasks go far beyond simple “copy and paste some text.” You can automate a large part of every essential business process.
From receiving payments and onboarding customers to handling production and hiring staff, automation can transform your business.
Minimize manual data entry with system integration
Manually inputting data from various disparate systems is time-draining and error-prone. Manually inputting data from various disparate systems is time-draining and error-prone. Instead, you can create automated workflows that automatically input the right data into your reporting system.
monday.com, for instance, integrates with dozens of other workflow and data tools to make your life easier:
The second a new order is placed and confirmed, you can automatically create a workflow step to start fulfilling the order.
In the card, you can link to essential documents that outline the entire process. That makes it easier to outsource to virtual assistants or new hires.
Hit the ground running without breaking the budget
You don’t need a huge budget or a beyond-horizon timeline to get into automation; you can start small.
monday.com offers native integrations with CRMs, marketing platforms, customer support tools, and more.
Our platform is ready for you to start using today, without cause for a million-dollar budget or 5-year timeline.
6 tips for optimizing your workflows
Starting to document and set up workflows can be overwhelming at first.
Luckily, we’ve got plenty of tips to help any company standardize recurring business processes and make them more effective
1. Assign employees ownership, not just tasks
If you don’t give your employees some level of autonomy, managers will still be forced to micromanage. That’s why you need to delegate ownership and responsibility, not just tasks.Employees should be empowered to handle every aspect of their assigned task.
2. Automate to eliminate excess steps wherever possible
Wherever possible, introduce some automation to the mix.
For example, if you have an email collection form on your site, there’s no need for a manual inbox check.
Instead, you can set up an automation that automatically creates new task cards based on incoming emails.
Automating these steps reduces required labor and guarantees nothing gets overlooked.
3. Keep all communication easy to access for everyone involved
Centralizing communication regarding projects and workflows is paramount to keeping everyone aligned as time goes on.
Discussion around a task should be easily accessible to everyone. This way, a record is kept and they don’t miss any critical details that could cost you later.
You can avoid confusion over Slack or email threads by housing these comments directly in a task’s feed.
If it’s a long discussion, you can summarize the decisions and add comments to tasks after the fact.
4. Set clear performance expectations and measure KPIs
You should have clear expectations for performance, both on a team and individual level.
Based on these, establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track them over time. The data will show you how the workflow is impacting the output of your company.
Every team and employee should be aware of how they are evaluated.
5. Use priorities and milestones to avoid bottlenecks
Bottlenecks are the enemy of productivity.
You can minimize this with timeline and dependency planning, but that’s not enough. You also need to single out urgent tasks with priorities and milestones.
6. Create and reuse custom templates to standardize workflows
Once finished, make sure you save the workflow as a template. That will allow you to reuse it at a moment’s notice.
Templates can help you set up detailed processes for new projects in familiar territory in mere minutes.
7 templates for standardizing complex workflows
monday.com’s powerful workflow management and automation features are only enhanced by ready-made templates for many different workflows.
1. Employee onboarding
Want to improve your workflow for onboarding new employees? This template is perfect for formalizing employee onboarding in smaller teams.
You can easily customize the board to add or remove steps from the process. You can also optimize the process with automations and integrations to suit your needs.
With a partially automated workflow, your managers can focus on integrating new hires into the culture.
2. Creative design
Any design agency or in-house creative team has a multi-step process for delivering finished designs.
Typically, they’ll start with an internal brief review before designers even create a concept.
You can easily add or remove steps to the workflow to make it suit your organization.
3. Video production
Video production planning is a complex process with a lot of moving parts. Plus, each project lifecycle has unique variables that can change the necessary inputs.
This template outlines a basic pre-production workflow that you could repeat for each shoot.
Of course, the required resources will vary depending on the budget and length of the project. But polished repeatable workflows will give you more space to focus on high-level project management.
4. Manufacturing
If you rely on outside suppliers or manufacturers, you can set up a simple manufacturing workflow like this.
You can also expand on the template to better suit internal manufacturing processes.
5. IT requests or bug reports
Whether you work in internal IT or you offer IT services to enterprises, you need to manage IT requests efficiently.
This template can help you quickly categorize and prioritize important tasks, as well as protect any SLAs.
6. Lead management
Once someone signs up to receive more information, you need to strike while the iron is hot. If you wait too long, you risk losing customers to competitors.
That’s why we’ve created this template for lead management. You can easily assign sales reps and drive the sales cycle forward.
7. Marketing campaigns
Developing effective marketing campaigns requires organizing a lot of moving parts. With a marketing template, you can keep things more organized from the start and easily track deadlines and outputs.
With this simple template, you can manage campaign ideas and requests from the early stage.
Workflow efficiency equals business efficiency
The first step towards establishing a new workflow is to break down the process into steps and moving parts. The second is finding a workflow software to automate and improve your processes.
Try our platform now, the first two weeks are on us!
