Small businesses face fierce competition. New products and services are introduced to the market every day – some better than others. The only way your business can compete is if you can react quicker to risks and opportunities. And in order to act faster, you need to have lean, well-thought-out business processes in place.
Every staff member needs to know exactly what they should do and when they should do it. You need to remove all bottlenecks and unnecessary steps, and you need to automate repetitive and mundane tasks where possible. Not only will your staff be happy about this change, but your business will become more profitable, and of course, you’ll be more flexible and ready to deal with changes in the market.
Let’s have a look at the benefits of improving your business processes:
1. Your Employees Will Be More Productive and Efficient
According to a study by Samanage, employees spend 520 hours on average on repetitive tasks that can be automated a year. Imagine if all your employees had 520 hours – or 65 days – extra in a year, what would they be able to achieve in that time?
If you could eliminate bottlenecks and redundant steps, and automate easy and repetitive tasks, you can reallocate that time to more important things, like customer service, better decision-making, or developing a new product.
2. You’ll Reduce Risks and Errors
With better and standardised processes, you can better monitor all tasks in your company, which lowers the risk of both fraud and human errors – especially if many of your processes currently rely on manual data entry. Finger faults happen to the best of us, and manual processes are easier to manipulate by the fraudster, which also makes it more difficult to spot.
3. Your Operational Costs Will Decrease
When your employees are more productive your labour costs can decrease: you could employ a smaller team to do the same amount of work, or just cut down on unnecessary overtime.
Eliminating potential errors can also save you a lot of money in the long run. Fixing mistakes takes time, but making wrong business decisions because of human errors can cost you a lot of money – and we’re not even talking about the cost of fraud.
4. Your Employees Will Be Happier
Better processes will also increase job satisfaction levels. If they get more done each day, they’ll feel better about their performance – there’s nothing like ticking off tasks and finishing on time to boost morale.
Better processes also reduce frustrations, and when you remove tedious and repetitive tasks from their to-do list, they’ll feel more motivated each day.
The happier your employees are, the better they’ll perform in their tasks, and they’ll treat each other and your customers better.
5. You Can Focus More on Customer Needs
Your business can become more customer-focused. With more time available, your customer support team can rather spend time with your customers to help them solve their problems, providing a much better service.
You’ll also be able to respond quickly to questions, proposals and any customer issues that arise. And if you want to make changes to your products or services after receiving their feedback, you’ll be able to do so much quicker.
6. Tasks Become Consistent and Skills Easily Transferable
The great thing about having processes in place is that everybody in the business knows what they’re supposed to do and everybody follows the same steps. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel every time you perform an everyday task.
Standardised processes also make it much easier to train new team members in their positions. They’ll be able to hit the ground running without running to their superior with a million questions every day.
7. Communication between Departments Will Improve
When everybody understands which processes to follow, communication between team members and different departments inevitably improves. There will be less friction as there will be fewer misunderstandings.
If employees don’t follow processes correctly it will be easy to spot who is responsible or if there’s a problem with the system or procedure itself, you can address that quickly.
8. It Becomes Easier to Measure Success
It’s much easier to set KPIs when there are set processes in place that works. Measuring KPIs and comparing them with expected results become painless. And when it doesn’t yield the required results, finding problems and addressing them becomes simple.
All this makes supervising employees, managing expectations, and making important business decisions a breeze.
9. You’ll Build a Sustainable, Healthy Business
When operations work the way it should, it’s easy to adapt when new risks or industry developments come along. The more flexible and adaptable to change your business is, the better your chances are of having a successful and profitable business in the long run.
Time to Update, Formalise, and Automate Your Processes?
If you’re still operating your business with inefficient procedures, unnecessary manual tasks, and long periods where your staff are waiting for your, or another senior member’s, green light, it’s time to invest in better procedures. Get in touch with Contador Accountants. We can help you to redesign, improve, and measure the effectiveness of your processes.