Take a minute to think about how most work and projects get done on your team. You come into it with a solid plan, but does it always go smoothly? Chances are you have some hiccups along the way, and no matter who initiates the task or approval, confusion or chaos can strike when you least expect it.
If you think this only happens to your company, the truth is you’re not alone. Companies worldwide deal with workflow issues every day, and they often turn to workflow software as a solution. This software handles all types of workflows, with employee time tracking, project management, customer relationship management, and human resources being the most commonly used.
In this article, we’ll explain why workflow management systems are so popular, along with a list of the direct benefits workflow software can provide to your business.
Greater Business Insights
The first and foremost benefit to workflow management systems are their ability to provide much greater insights into your business. When it comes down to it, one of the very best things you can do for your business is to map out your processes, giving you a clear, bird’s eye view of how well or unwell things are going.
While you might feel as though your practices are well-established, what’s to say things couldn’t be better? After all, do you really know if your employees are delivering top results 100% of the time? Are your processes truly as good as they could be?
Using employee time tracking software as an example, what if your company’s productivity had been slumping lately, and the insights provided by the software showcased an increase in employee downtime? Rather than finding out this information later down the road, as things continued to get worse, you leveraged the software data to find the problem quickly, saving time and money in the process. You now have the opportunity to make swift changes, whether they be an overhaul to your workforce, changes in policy, or reallocation of resources. No matter your decision, these insights help you put your profit margins back in the green.
Identifying and Eliminating Redundancies
Just about every business has some departmental redundancies, and these are typically categorized by daily, unnecessary tasks or procedures. Whereas some of these redundancies eat up finances, a great number of them eat up valuable time which, in most cases, contributes to greater financial loss in the long run.
Workflow management systems (like the time tracking software mentioned before) help to identify these redundancies quickly, giving business owners, managers, and other senior personnel a better idea as to which could or should theoretically be eliminated. Those daily 10 AM meetings? They might be better suited to weekly instead. Those soul-crushing hours spent on manually typing up reports? There’s likely a software option to streamline that process.
No matter the circumstance, working to identify and eliminate redundancies from your organization creates value and opportunity for everyone involved. Managers are free to focus on holding better workflow strategies, and employees are free to focus on tasks that better contribute to the business’s overall health. It’s a total win-win.
Building Accountability & Reducing Micromanagement
That’s not to say that some employees don’t benefit from the practice, as every employer can testify to having a few “special” employees who just can’t seem to get their work done otherwise. Different people work differently, and some people are naturally more motivated than others.
Nevertheless, workflow management systems do an amazing job of mapping out what needs to be done, and who needs to do it, with little to no misunderstanding. By leveraging workflow software towards this end, managers can spend less time annoying their employees, and more time helping to build the company through less-intrusive means. Employees feel more engaged and accountable, and those who prefer to be left alone to finish their tasks are happier for the change.
Greatly Improved Communication
Has your workplace ever felt like a giant game of underwater telephone? Everyone is relaying the same message, but somewhere along the way, things get more and more muddled. Well, you’re not alone there either, as communication issues are a major pain point in a lot of different businesses. To make matters worse, an all-too-common story is that these communication issues tend to linger far longer than they should, often resulting in “disagreements” that were actually complete misunderstandings.
Imagine a situation where management wants to change a key part of a project’s workflow. They pass that information down a very long chain of managers, supervisors, and finally the employees on the front lines of that project, only to find out their instructions became muddled along the way. The project is completed “poorly,” clients and managers are displeased, and it’s later revealed that key instructions were simply lost in the mix.
Workflow management systems are designed to tackle this problem directly, providing complete visibility of all processes within a workflow to all parties involved, typically via detailed reporting features, special user/admin privileges, and more. In doing so, all needed information on any given project remains visible from a single, easy-to-read location, greatly reducing misunderstandings, and greatly improving communication along the way.
Improved Customer Service & Product/Service Quality
Every business owner knows that without customers, there is no business. Everything you do as a business owner relies on securing and nurturing those relationships, and it’s important to always be on the lookout for ways to improve the customer experience.
Unfortunately, juggling loads of customers can be a tricky when your business relies on outdated methods or technologies of doing so, especially in the current digital playground. More customers expect faster solutions to their complaints, and luckily for business owners, there exists a wide variety of workflow management systems to aid in that venture.
To add to this, these workflow management systems also serve to highlight which employees have the better skillset to deal with the issues at hand. Managers can map out how employees spend their time on the clock, which employees seem to be the most task/goal-oriented, and which could be swapped around to other tasks. By leveraging this information from multiple angles, the quality of that business’s products or services can improve dramatically. Those 5-star customer reviews speak for themselves!
Easy Integration
Last but not least, workflow management systems make sense because they integrate so well with other platforms. Interested in project management software? There’s a good chance it pairs well with that CRM module you googled the other day. Curious to try out some new payroll technology? That human resources bundle probably includes a solid contender.
No matter the size of your business or the scope of your next project, workflow management systems make sense because they make sense of your business. As your business grows, so too do the pieces and data that tie it all together. You want to move onto bigger and better things, but you don’t want things to get muddled or lost along the way. You owe it to yourself to manage and optimize that journey with the perfect system. See what workflow management can do for your business today with a free demo.
