Working in a team has its advantages and disadvantages. And improving workflow helps save everyone’s time. However, you or your teammates may form some behavior that prevents your team from working at its greatest capacity.
This article shows what workflow efficiency is, its measure, the causes of inefficiency, and how to improve your team’s workflow.
What is Workflow Efficiency?
It is the assessment of resources and performance consumed to complete a set of tasks. An efficient workflow helps you increase the quality of work by reducing wasted resources, i.e., time, materials, and effort. With the rapidly growing technology, you can find employee monitoring software and tools that also help you to improve your team workflow.
The main objective behind effective workflow is to increase your team’s productivity while simultaneously reducing the cost of organizations.
How to measure workflow efficiency?
Measuring the efficiency of process flow can seem like a difficult task, but in reality, you can measure it by using a simple formula:
Flow Efficiency[%] = Value-added Time / Lead Time * 100
Causes of inefficiency workflow
Before improving something, you must first understand what causes inefficient ideal workflows. Below are some reasons behind the inefficiency of workflow.
Miscommunication
The biggest reason behind inefficiency is miscommunication or lack of communication. It affects the employee’s capacity to understand how well they are doing and whether their work impacts them.
Miscommunication should be resolved in the workplace by establishing new tools and transparency in the working place.
Unnecessary tasks
Performing unnecessary tasks is a misuse of time as your business grows, and you need to either remove them or automate these tasks and processes.
It can happen due to miscommunication among teams or the result of mismanagement. Having lengthy meetings can also be a waste of time. Every organization tries to do meetings and produce something of value, but many fail to do so.
Lack of analysis and strategy
Without proper analysis and strategy, any business is doomed to fail. There are many businesses where staffs do their assigned tasks without workflow improvement. With no clear plan, a company will fail to see desired results.
Manual tasks
Manual tasks destroy valuable time that can be used for more quality work. Time spent on manual data entry is a time-waster for the organization’s team.
Manual entering data are low value-tasks, and it consumes more time to enter the data one after the other.
Outdated technology
Outdated technology means using un-updated software and old, laggy computer systems, which can cause frustration for the user. You will have lots of issues using obsolete tools with your IT department, and having newer tools should be a priority in business decisions.
How to improve the team’s workflow?
Improving workflow is far from easy. You must analyze, break down processes, create strategies to work out solutions, and communicate the changes to the whole organization.
If you are a workflow manager, then these are some measures you should undertake to improve your team’s workflow, which will result in increased productivity:
Evaluate current processes
Before implementing new changes, you have to first evaluate the current processes. Is the existing workflow getting you the results that you desired? Ask for employee feedback and document your workflow.
Evaluating helps in visualizing the steps of the processes. By doing this, you can find opportunities to make an effective workflow.
Assign priority to projects
You need to set the highest priority on the short-term and long-term workflow. Create a schedule to manage and complete the tasks. You and your team should follow the schedule and complete the tasks and processes according to the ranked priority. It allows your team to complete projects in an effective way.
Design effective workflow
After evaluating the existing workflow you need to design an effective workflow for your business. The goal of that is to complete the tasks in the fastest and fewest steps and make the office work effective.
Workflow automation
It would be best if you found ways to automate workflows that streamline business processes and it helps cut manual work, which helps in boosting the productivity of work. You can increase your revenue using sales automation.
There are some automation tools that you can use in your business to automate tasks. These tools are worth the investment for the organizations as they helps employees decrease time on redundant work. As Jotform CEO Aytekin Tank puts in his book Automate Your Busywork, “No one will eliminate busywork for you. It’s your responsibility to create space in your work(day), and automation can make it happen.”
Team Communication
Communication is the key element to success. The team can either grow or fall depending on the quality of communication.
You need to communicate with your team members about the tasks. Tell them about the high-priority tasks and assign tasks and roles to each member. Let them know that they can communicate with team members if problems arise. With team collaboration, your team can perform the tasks in an undisruptive manner.
You can use the software “slack” to monitor and communicate with your team members.
Testing and Analyzing
You can’t get an effective workflow on the first try. You need to test the newly designed workflow. Then analyze if it produces the desired results. If not, you must constantly examine what will help your team attain a productive workflow.
Conclusion
Improving team workflow can be achieved by using the right strategies and tools. Many products are available that your team can use to fit your workplace’s needs.
Keep track of the workflow and document your workflow. It helps you analyze the flow of the process and figure out what is needed to increase the productivity of your work.
