Would you describe your organization as efficient?
Versatile?
Adaptable?
Is it more rigid and “set in its ways”?
If you’re leaning toward the latter, it might be time to start making some changes to your internal processes.
Inflexible organizations struggle to come out on top whenever a significant market shift occurs. They can’t quickly adapt to the changing customer wants and needs and take a lot of time to recover even after the slightest setback.
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If you want things to run smoothly during both ups and downs in your company, you need to start by optimizing your workflow management.
What Is Workflow Management?
Put plainly, workflow management is the process of optimizing the steps (aka workflows) required to perform a specific task within an organization.
It typically involves documenting current processes, identifying all the steps that need to be taken to complete a task, eliminating redundancies, and creating an automated workflow when possible.
The ultimate goal is to ensure that every task is completed accurately and efficiently, with as few bottlenecks as possible.
6 benefits of workflow management
With proper workflow management where every minute task can consistently be completed as quickly (and error-free!) as possible, you and your organization can enjoy a multitude of benefits:
- Increased accountability – clear workflows leave a full audit trail that lets you identify bottlenecks and improve accountability;
- Improved transparency – with all tasks nicely defined and outlined, all employees across departments can enjoy greater task visibility and transparency;
- Improved employee satisfaction – over 68% of employees have work overload on a daily basis. Automating and optimizing workflows reduces the load on employees and increases their overall satisfaction levels;
- Enhanced efficiency – workflow management automates repetitive tasks, reduces risk of error, minimizes bottlenecks, and more – all leading to improved efficiency;
- Reduced costs – automating tasks accelerates project completion and reduces the need for hiring more manpower, thus greatly saving both time and money;
- Increased flexibility – good workflow management makes an organization flexible and adaptable, allowing for easy task redesign whenever the need arises.
Of course, these are just some of the main benefits you can enjoy. With reliable workflow management software, there’s little you can’t do.
Types of Workflows
No two organizations are alike, and no two workflows are alike. Depending on your unique external and internal processes, your optimal workflows might be nothing like those of your direct competitor.
That said, they could still share some similar components and can be categorized.
While there are many different ways to categorize workflows, the most common one is by assessing their task dependency. So, we have sequential and parallel workflows.
1. Sequential Workflows
In sequential workflows, tasks are dependent on one another – aka, one task cannot start until another one is completed.
Let’s take a practical example – food delivery. The customer first has to place their order. Then, the restaurant has to prepare the order. Then, the delivery driver has to take the order to the customer.
You cannot change how this workflow goes and first deliver the food to the customer and only after that start preparing it – it’s simply impossible. The workflow has to happen in the proper pre-determined, sequential order.
2. Parallel Workflows
You can perform parallel workflows simultaneously, as they don’t necessarily depend on one another.
Keeping with the food delivery example from above – you can, for instance, prepare multiple customer orders at once (provided that you have enough staff and equipment). If one customer orders a pizza and another one orders a salad, you can delegate these separate tasks to different cooks and have them work independently.
If the pizza chef makes a mistake and has to redo the pizza from scratch, the salad chef is unaffected, and they can complete their task without disturbance.
Key Features of Workflow Management Systems
While some tasks can be easily defined and tracked manually, most require more of an automatic approach. After all, there’s a reason why over 66% of organizations use process automation to improve workflows across multiple parts of their business.
A dedicated workflow management system simplifies all processes – as long as it has all the necessary features and capabilities.
Intuitive Dashboards
An intuitive, user-friendly dashboard will ensure that anyone who needs access to the system can quickly and easily familiarize themselves with it.
Real-Time Updates
Real-time updates give everyone insights into task progress, improving visibility and transparency.
Customizable Templates
Customizable templates give you full flexibility and allow you to create workflows, define tasks and responsibilities, assign roles, and set timelines in a way that makes the most sense for your organization/specific team/particular project.
Collaborative Features
It’s rare for any workflow to be a completely individual endeavor. Collaborative features allow everyone involved in a task to communicate and cooperate without difficulties.
Automation Features
Perhaps most importantly, you need your workflow management system to have a comprehensive set of automation features. It’s what frees up your employees’ hands and lets them focus on the most important aspects of the task they’re working on.
Workflow Management in Business Processes
Workflow management is a massive part of business process management. So huge that these two concepts are often confused for one another! (Workflow management deals with optimizing the steps of a specific task, while process management deals with optimizing the entirety of a specific business process.)
Efficient Workflow for Businesses
Considering that business processes are a combination of related tasks that provide one specific desired output, it’s no wonder that optimizing task workflows can help make entire processes more efficient.
Optimization of Business Operations
With well-defined workflows, it’s much easier to optimize all the critical functions and operations that help your organization achieve its goals.
Maximizing Organizational Efficiency
Smoothing out all rough edges in your workflows lets you create a clear hierarchy of all tasks, processes, and goals that you need to prioritize to improve overall organizational efficiency.
Workflow Management Software for Teams
Workflow software can be handy for larger, cross-departmental teams that must stay on the same page.
Workflow Management for Remote Teams
A workflow management tool allow for easier task delegation among team members.
These systems improve task visibility, transparency, and cooperation, so they are essential for remote teams that might not be able to gauge the day-to-day operations quite as well as in-house teams.
Collaboration Tools for Workflow Management
Workflow management systems with comprehensive collaboration tools help team members to cooperate and collaborate on tasks.
However, more than this, they allow staff members across different departments to seamlessly gauge task status and adjust their own workflows accordingly.
Project Management Tools for Workflow Management
No workflow management system is complete without project management tools that let you optimize more than just recurring tasks.
Though most projects tend to be flexible and temporary, many of the tasks required for their completion still need to be pre-defined and monitored, which is where workflow management systems shine.
Workflow Management for Project Managers
Though project managers mainly deal with larger, one-off projects with clear time limits, that doesn’t mean they won’t benefit from having proper workflow management that mostly deals with recurring tasks.
After all, workflows are essential for completing all tasks, especially those between crucial project milestones.
Project Plan Templates for Workflow Management
A project plan template includes all the guidelines and procedures you need to follow to achieve the objective of a specific project.
Workflow management is an inseparable part of that, as it defines how these guidelines and procedures should be followed. It defines the exact steps you need to take to complete a project.
Traditional Project Management vs Workflow Management Systems
Traditional project management approaches tend to be highly rigid and systematic. You need to follow a defined, linear structure – initiate, plan, implement, monitor, and conclude the project. There’s little to no room for any flexibility.
Workflow management systems, on the other hand, are much more agile.
They allow you to dissect a project and break it apart into smaller tasks. This style of task management gives you flexibility and keeps you adaptable.
Though the traditional approach can come in handy for larger projects that require a lot of planning, workflow management systems are much more useful when you need to adapt quickly to unpredictable changes.
Project Lifecycle and Workflow Management
The project lifecycle defines all the phases that a project goes through. Traditionally, that includes five phases we briefly mentioned a moment ago – initiation, planning, implementation, monitoring, and conclusion.
Proper workflow management is critical for each stage a project goes through. It helps to optimize the overall flow of all the tasks required to bring the project from initiation to completion. It defines how everything from information to resources is shared and used.
Workflow Management for Employees
Though workflow automation is useful to the entire organization as a whole, it’s the employees who get to experience its full benefits.
Employee Onboarding Workflows
Workflow management systems can turn employee onboarding from a hectic nightmare to a flawless process. With a good system in place, everything from assigning a mentor to adding a new employee to the payroll can go smoothly for everyone involved.
You’ll accelerate the onboarding process and help the new hire reach productivity without any hiccups.
Tracking Employee Activities and Timesheets
Workflow management systems let you closely monitor all employee activities and timesheets without making it seem like you’re micromanaging. You’ll be able to easily track task progress, identify top performers, spot those with heavier workloads, and assist those struggling with a given task.
Automating Repetitive Employee Tasks
94% of SMB workers perform highly repetitive, time-consuming tasks daily. Automating even just some of those tasks can help free up those employees’ hands to focus on more important things. It can improve their productivity and minimize the risks of errors. Workflow management systems are designed just for this!
Workflow Management for Business
Workflow management isn’t something you should implement solely for a single task – like adding a new employee to the payroll. To take full advantage of everything it brings to the table, you need to implement workflow management systems throughout the entirety of your business.
Get more tips on knowledge bases from Tettra:
- Simple guide to internal knowledge bases
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- Internal vs external KB and why you need both
- 9 top AI knowledge base software
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Simplify Business Processes With Tettra
Creating effective workflows can be a bit of a hassle. You must analyze the current processes, define your goals, outline workflow steps, identify hiccups, set up roles and responsibilities, and more. However, with the help of dedicated workflow systems, this whole process becomes a piece of cake.
Tettra allows you to seamlessly store, manage, and streamline all your workflows and processes, then makes all the relevant information about them easily accessible to those who need it.
AI-powered, intuitive, and versatile, it helps you improve productivity organization-wide.
Tettra has a streamlined interface that is beginner-friendly. It has a question and answers feature, as well as content verification which keeps knowledge base content up-to-date.
Tettra integrates with Slack which allows you to find answers directly in Slack even when it’s stored in Tettra.
No more pinging random channels or waiting on a response from the team leads — you can find it via the Tettra Slack app.
Tettra offers a full suite of tools for sharing knowledge.
With a Tettra internal knowledge base, you’ll get:
- AI-assistant for instant answers from your knowledge base, saving time and ending repetitive questions
- Q&A workflow to capture questions
- Knowledge base to document answers
- Knowledge management features to keep content up to date.
- Integrations with chat tools to make sure your team actually uses Tettra
Tettra works best as:
- Internal knowledge base for customer support, success, and service teams
- Documentation for operations and growing companies