Reportedly, around 60% of businesses can save around 30% time and effort with the automation of some repetitive tasks in their regular workflow, including generating sales leads, approval, and review of paperwork, and processing large documents. With good workflow management of an organization can easily define the outcome for a specific task, as well as the sequence of the business processes and people responsible for the desired outcome. 

If a business has a great workflow, it means that all the tasks are assigned carefully to reliable people, according to the set timelines. Workflow management is an essential tool for transitioning the existing business processes from good to best. Not only business processes, but adequate workflow management is also essential for boosting team productivity.

Wondering how? Well, here are certain ways for you can enhance team productivity of your business tasks using workflow management:

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1. Defined Work “Flow” For All

It may sound very simple, but the workflow is actually a blueprint that’s set by high-level management and the employees and no idea about it. If your employees keep coming to you every other day, asking you about “what to do next?” or “how to do a task?” in your firm, the workflow is not implemented effectively. 

With automated workflow management, there is transparency of the complete business processes. It also defines all the steps and deadlines that need to be met for completing certain tasks by every employee. This result in getting all the tasks completed and passed very efficiently. The automation of workflow and transparency can be implemented in all sorts of tasks, like order management, dealer network management, and customer support management.

The processes even involve people joining or leaving their jobs due to several reasons. Even in these cases, a defined and automated work ‘flow’ can help the firm catch up with the history of work done and work left for completion. This will save their valuable time that’s otherwise wasted to update new employees or the management about the workflow. 

2. Repetitive Tasks are out

All business processes have various repetitive tasks, like reminders, follow-ups, checking stats, generating documents, delivering reports, etc. All these repetitive tasks are done by the employees daily. But if these processed are automated or deducted from workers’ schedule, they can easily focus their energy, creativity, and time on more high-value tasks. 

3. Better Accountability

If all the tasks are defined at every step in a workflow, it can easily help a firm achieve transparency. With a robust design workflow platform for multiple teams, the managers and high-level management can effectively track their employees, as well as the employees, are aware or accountable for their defined goals. Furthermore, the auto-generated notifications, deadlines, and reminders for due dates are also helpful in keeping managers away from micromanaging while running the whole process without extra efforts. 

4. Identifying and Resolving Bottlenecks

With increased transparency and accountability at granular levels, it is easier to identify bottlenecks in a workflow. Usually, the points or departments where a large number of tasks get stuck are the places that choke up the workflow, leading to bottleneck situations. The very common example of a bottleneck situation is a managed getting stuck with documents for approvals to start the next process. To get the workflow to get back to its normal state, you have to optimize or resolve the bottlenecks for faster turnaround.

5. Improved Communication and Collaboration

Various tasks and processes involve using several platforms and tools for tracking and executing them. Departments and employees might be using distinct tools for carrying out different tasks, tracking their time, and collaborating with their respective project teams. For instance, a company’s software development department uses Slack to for collaborating and sharing project resources, whereas the marketing department is using Asana for a similar task. This leads to scattered data formation in an ecosystem of various tools and finally results in inefficient process collaborations. 

This also goes for communication between various teams. It might be through texts, chats, emails, or messenger on social media. This also leads to lost resources and lost messages, which ultimately results in delays and frustrations. 

If both communication and collaboration are brought together on a single project management collaboration tool, workflow management will improve and lead to boost productivity. This also enables different teams to access resource controls at different levels, such as department, employee, and organizational levels.

6. Reduced Inefficiencies and Errors

Human error is a big blunder that most companies face while implementing their business processes efficiently. Speaking of human error, even NASA lost worth $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter satellite somewhere in the space because of a simple error during a metric conversion. If such a brilliant team of rocket scientists can suffer a huge loss due to a mere human error, even your business can. 

 Humans are prone to making mistakes and errors, especially in repetitive and redundant tasks. But if these redundancies are removed and more focus is on improving communication, the business process workflow management can diminish human errors to a great extent. 

This is also one of the best solutions to improve productivity by enhancing employee focus. If employees use different tools or apps for communication, they might be distracted by other messages or notifications. 

According to a study conducted by the University of California Irvine, it takes around 23 minutes or more for an individual to get back to the task and refocus after an interruption. But when all employees are on a single platform, this will eliminate the chances of losing focus and refocusing efforts. Finally, it will result in improved efficiency and productivity. 

7. Centralised Resource Database

Besides enabling smart communication between different organizational teams by using a single work platform, workflow management of a business must also use the single database for accessing and storing all their relevant resources. Workflow management can be handled well by a central repository for all your organizational data while tying all employees and processes together. For instance, if a manager has to find a year-old contract sent to their client, they can easily find it on the centralized resource database by going through the past emails. 

8. Automated Insight into Organizational Data

Performing repeatable tasks and processes will not be going to bring success. One also has to know how to measure the outcomes of the processes and whether the workflow management processes are helping you bring the desired result or not. With a centralized resource database, individuals can analyze their organizational data can while going through other information at various sub-levels. The workflow management platforms even offer advanced analytics solutions for giving deep insights into your organizational data. It will further enable you to make well-informed and better business decisions. Furthermore, these centralized platforms also save employees’ time and errors, using an automated report generation/delivery mode. 

Conclusion

Workflow management is bliss for all organizations, as it provides employees with advanced tools for communication and collaboration. Meanwhile, it enables managed to build and overlook various business processes in an effective manner. This not only improved the routine business processes but also enhances team productivity by eliminating unnecessary or repetitive tasks from their routine. 

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