Every company has a set of central processes that they use to run their business. The question is, how well are these processes documented? Are these being followed by everyone, and are they being regularly evaluated as to their effectiveness?
Let’s look at each of these points to see why they are critical.

Whether you are looking at the major areas of finance, human resources, sales and marketing, operations, manufacturing, or others, each area has key steps in those processes to complete a task.

Imagine if you had ten employees performing the same task, say manufacturing, and they all had their own approach to doing the job. Then, one of those employees leaves and a new employee fills that spot. Who is going to train them? What is the process for performing that job? And how will that relate to the way the other people are performing that task? Will some tasks be left out of the process, and what will be the chain reaction throughout the company for that task being missed? Can you see the challenge in scaling your business? Can you imagine all the time it will take to fix a problem created by a critical step being left out of the process?

You may have experienced a situation where an employee is spending a tremendous amount of time working on a particular task. You ask them why they are doing the task in that manner, and they pause to think of how to answer. Then, the answer comes back as “well that’s the way we have always done it.” When you ask them why, they can’t come up with a better answer, indicating a disconnect.

Conditions change as companies grow, technology improves, and we become more efficient at how things are done. We all used to have checks mailed to our homes. New technologies allow us various ways to have the money deposited electronically into our account. We can also save time and fuel by handling bills and transactions online. What if everyone in your company had the “that’s the way we’ve always done it.” attitude? Your company would never move forward.

As your business and technology grows, you need to constantly evaluate how your employees are performing the company’s central processes and if all the steps in the process still make sense. So much time is wasted in our business and personal lives, doing things that we don’t really need to do anymore. There are often better, more efficient solutions for getting things done.

As stated earlier time is a finite resource that we can’t manufacture more of. And with a limited amount of time to do all we need to get done, everything we spend time working on has an opportunity cost. That cost is what other things we could be doing with our time while we are working on a particular task.

Surmani Business Coaching can show you how to document your company’s central processes, get all your employees to follow them, and continually review them for improvement.