How Processes Overcome These Small Business Productivity Hurdles

With a constant revenue stream and a growing customer base in place, one important area of focus for making a small business a more profitable one is productivity. Most small businesses struggle with managing their processes efficiently and end up incurring more costs than necessary.

Imagine having ten steps for a simple business process like managing in-time, out-time and attendance of employees. You can easily reduce the steps required for these processes and automate them.

Many businesses suffer from using outdated manual processes that should have been shed long ago. Here are some common hurdles to small business productivity and how you can overcome them.

Productivity Goals Are Not in Place

Small businesses often suffer from lack of process planning and organizational goals. You often know that you have costs associated with an individual process, but do not know what to do about it.

“You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” - Zig Ziglar

Goals help move a team forward and stay motivated to achieve a particular target. You can attach incentives for teams to meet their productivity goals, to ensure they are proactive about performing tasks in a smarter way. A productivity goal must be measurable as well as attainable. It must provide the teams with a roadmap and the right set of tools to be able to achieve it effectively.

No Process Review

Most small businesses fail to review their business processes appropriately. As a business owner, it is your responsibility to track the workflows related to every process in the organization.

You can take professional help to understand the areas where technology can replace manual processes.

A review helps in understanding which of the processes can be automated and which ones can be optimized by streamlining the steps involved. It can help you understand whether you need to use cloud-based tools or create customized software to get these processes to function more efficiently.

While you map each of the processes, you can gather insights about the interdepartmental integration and collaboration opportunities that exist within the organization.

The process review must be undertaken on a periodic basis to do away with redundancies.

Improper Process Mapping

Many times businesses fail to map processes on a granular level. You need to have a documentation policy for each of your business processes. The methods must be defined with the help of activity charts and workflows that make it easier to analyze them. It is essential to understand the bottlenecks that a process may be facing or figure out the reason for delays in certain procedures.

Similarly, if the cost of certain operations is going up, then you need to document the factors behind the increase.

When auditing a process in a detailed manner, you will realize that there is a massive scope for improvement.

Having a consensus on the current set of issues with each of the processes and teams makes it possible to create long-term and strategic goals for them. Here is an example of a cross functional process map:

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Hesitation with New Technology

Many small business owners are reluctant to adopt the latest technology. They are worried about managing the structural changes that the company will have to undergo. The existing teams are often also apprehensive about these changes.

Businesses must be open to changing with the times. Automating one or more processes can make it more productive and cost efficient.

Some small business owners feel that automation is only for large enterprises while others are of the view that it may not fit into their organization. It is crucial for a business to understand the cost and the benefits of investing in a new technology before making the final decision.

Lack of Training

Technology is changing at a fast pace, and the organization, as well as its employees, must keep up with it. You need to ensure that newer, more efficient processes are implemented at the workplace at regular intervals. The implementation process involves communication and training.

Many times businesses wish to innovate and switch to newer methods, but the training process is not brought up to the appropriate standard to make it work in practice.

You need to ensure that each new process is explained clearly so that the teams know how to go about following it.

If they have not understood the newly implemented technology, they must be given the freedom to attend training until they become proficient in it.

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by Abhishek Talreja via SitePoint