Two decades into the 21st-century, efficiency remains the name of the game. Nowhere is this more applicable than when you’re trying to grow your business. If you can find ways to improve the efficiency of your work systems and processes, it can take off some of the current workload.
Removing less mundane work frees up your employees to spend more time on human-oriented growth activities. Innovation, creativity, and continual learning can all thrive when an operation has a smooth and efficient work process.
Of course, you can’t improve your work processes without some good old analysis and research. Start by reviewing your current situation and looking for areas in need of improvement. Here are a few of the best ways that you can enhance your work processes throughout the business growth journey. Review each one and consider how you can apply it to your current situation.
1. Upgrade Your Software
Before you get too lost in the weeds, it’s important to start with the basics. Your company’s software is crucial to your success and efficiency.
As such, you want your software solutions to be able to handle every aspect of your growing business. This means it needs to do more than provide basic automations. As you grow, you don’t want to waste time changing software to keep up with your more complex systems. It’s better to put time and money into finding the right solutions on the front end.
For example, your current payroll solution may be working well at the moment. However, as you begin to grow, you may need to upgrade to a solution that can keep up with hiring internationally. Keeping track of global payroll can be a pain to handle on your own, so investing in a global payroll solution now may just save you hours down the road.
2. Unify Your Customer Service
It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B or B2C company. If you grow your business, you’re going to have more customers, accounts, and clientele to handle. This can bog down your staff and stifle growth.
The problem is, you don’t want this to lead to dissatisfied customers because you’re focused on other things. You need to create a solid customer service solution that will meet customer needs without filling up your staff’s schedule.
There are multiple pieces of automation software that can help with this. For instance, contact center as a service is a powerful cloud-based SaaS platform. It unifies your customer service interactions into one intelligent cloud contact center. This streamlines the numerous communication channels and helps your team answer calls in an efficient manner.
It’s also a good idea to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Companies like HubSpot and Salesforce have created robust platforms to serve this need. These can organize client data and keep everything in easy reach whenever it’s required.
As your business grows, solutions like these can be critical in maintaining your momentum. Automated customer relationship software cuts down on the number of calls that your team needs to answer and provides a polished 24/7 aspect to your customer service. CRM software also gives you a sense of control and organization as your customer data begins to balloon in size.
3. Stay Remote-Friendly
Another aspect of a modern healthy work process is the ability to stay cloud-based. A remote-friendly office is critical to sustained success as you scale your company. The coronavirus pandemic showed how a catastrophe can strike from out of nowhere. The crisis caught many small, growing businesses unaware, and they found themselves in serious trouble before long.
One of the best ways to future-proof your business against potential growth-stunting disasters is to keep everything virtual and remote-friendly. Workflow platforms like Trello, Asana, and ClickUp are great ways to share documents and keep projects online. Companies like CapLinked can also provide virtual data rooms that are perfect for sensitive or private business transactions.
Even if your team works on-site at the moment, utilize SaaS and cloud-based solutions so that everyone remains connected. This way, if a crisis closes your office, you can continue to tend to business from afar.
In addition, a remote-friendly company can tap into a much larger talent pool. This can be instrumental, as it allows you to usher game-changing players into your team as you grow.
4. Always Be Improving
While specific software solutions can help you in the here and now, you shouldn’t stop there. If you want to truly benefit from improved work processes as you grow your business, you also need to steer into perpetual improvement. Three ways that you can do this include:
- Setting goals: It’s difficult to improve your workflow if you don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish. As your organization grows, set additional goals that keep your workflow in lockstep with your company’s maturation process.
- Regularly reassessing: Setting initial goals and using current software is where you start. However, you must also schedule times to reassess how well everything is working. Software can require upgrades and solutions can become dated as your business grows.
- Adopting a growth mindset: A fixed mindset leads to atrophy and stunted growth. If you want your work processes to remain efficient (and your growing business, by extension) then you must maintain a mindset oriented toward growth and development.
There are many aspects that you must tend to when you’re growing your business. Often the focus is on things like research, development, marketing, and recruitment.
As your business grows, though, it’s essential that you don’t neglect your work processes. Many aspects of the current ways that your staff operates won’t translate well as your organization expands.
With that in mind, look for ways to streamline, organize, and scale your work processes. Upgrade your Wi-Fi. Unify your customer service. Build a remote-friendly infrastructure. Maintain a mindset of perpetual improvement. If you can give your workflow activities this kind of attention, your work processes will help rather than hinder your enterprise throughout the growth process.
