Effective business processes are key to growing your business. When you get this right, you’ll be able to see it working effectively across the day to day work in your business. Having these key processes documented for easy access is integral to scaling.
It allows you to duplicate yourself, and increase the amount of work that can be done. This multiplies your staff exponentially, it is the key to business growth that can be sustained for the long term. This is particularly true for workers that are working remotely. Having that documentation in place to capture how things need to be done every time is essential for people that are working off-site.
“Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship.” Benjamin Franklin
But, how can you tell if your business processes are working to manage your business and grow it exponentially? Effective business processes need to be understood by the people performing them. Otherwise, time is wasted redoing tasks. Communicating the most effective methods can be challenging, especially when trying to pass it on to remote workers.
The Dilemma
Effective person to person communication relies on gestures. 93% of the communication we exchange with our peers, friends, and family, relies on it. Tones of voice and body language are vastly important in terms of conveying our message.
There is also contextual information, as in the situation we’re communicating within. And the spatial relationship, as in how close or far away you are from the person you’re communicating with. All of these help us understand the message being exchanged when we talk with other people. Unfortunately, when documenting your business processes we find we have to strip all of these out. This leaves you with only 7% of the signals people usually rely on.
So there’s the dilemma. We need to document those processes because it’s the best way to scale your business. But we lose a huge amount of our ability to communicate effectively when we do.
Effective business processes make all the difference to your business. So how do we know we have gotten them right?
The Solution
The solution is quite simple. Effective business processes are repeatable and reproducible.
Repeatable simply means those tasks can be consistently done in any circumstance. Regardless of changes, regardless of whether we’re in lockdown, regardless of how things are shifting. The work should be done to the same standard in any circumstance. To the same quality every time. This is a really important way you can tell if your process management or documentation is working.
The second way you’ll be able to tell they are working, is if the process is reproducible. This means that the work can be done by anyone at all, to the same quality standards. Every single time. So when you’re looking at your process management tools, stop and think. Could anyone jump in and do this work?
Effective business processes can be done regardless of where your business is operating from. Whether you’re on-site or off-site, anywhere in the world. Can that work be reproduced? To the same standard every time? If the answer is yes, then you’ve got great process management systems in place. Allowing you to delegate work effectively, growing your business exponentially by multiplying the amount of work that can be done again and again and again.
I hope that’s been helpful and inspired you to think about what you can do to make sure that your business is ready to scale from a process management point of view.
