What is workflow analysis?
Workflow analysis is the process of analyzing and reviewing your business processes and improving them. It helps streamline business operations, accelerate business growth and improve productivity. Workflow analysis improves employees engagement, customer satisfaction and the competitiveness of the business itself.
Workflows are extremely useful for any business. They help you and your employees clarify what each person is responsible for and automate workflows for maximum efficiency.
However, the world changes constantly, and if your workflows are left unchanged, you won’t feel the benefits anymore. And that’s why workflow analysis is so critical! But what are the advantages, and how can you do it yourself? Continue reading to find out.
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Why Does Your Business Need a Workflow Analysis?
As mentioned in the introduction, the world changes constantly! Your competitors always want to find a way to get an unfair advantage, and if they can be more effective at work, they can overtake you.
And for that reason, many businesses constantly analyze their workflows to make sure that the workflow is as effective as possible. With the correct strategy, they can easily spot the bottlenecks in their workflows and find solutions.
Benefits of Workflow Analysis
Now that you understand why workflow analysis is so crucial for your business let’s go over what benefits you’ll get when you start doing workflow analysis. There are four main benefits:
Enhanced Productivity
One of the most apparent benefits is that you and your employees will work more efficiently! That’s because if you do it right, you’ll constantly be improving!
Then, you can spot where you and your team could improve upon, making everyone’s work more efficient. And even if the change is only 1% more effective, it’s still worth it!
That’s because these small changes will accumulate, giving you massive improvements in the long run.
Better Employee Engagement
Thanks to constant improvements, your employees should be more engaged and satisfied. That’s because when you eliminate the time-consuming and repetitive tasks, your employees can work on more meaningful work.
And the more meaningful work they can do, the more profit your business makes!
Competitive Advantage
As mentioned previously, constant workflow analysis can also give you an unfair advantage against your competition. Thanks to the better employee engagement and productivity, your competitor cannot keep up with you.
Plus, you’ll find new and better solutions in their business which leads us to the next benefit.
Increase Satisfaction of Customers
As a by-product of all the other positives, you should also see your customers be satisfied with your service. That’s for multiple reasons!
It all starts with increased productivity, which in return, will make your employees more satisfied, which means better service for your customers.
5-Step Guide For a Successful Workflow Analysis
Now that you know both why you need to do a workflow analysis and its benefits let’s talk about how you could implement this in your business. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy if you follow our five-step guide for doing a workflow analysis.
Step #1 – Evaluate Your Current Workflow
For starters, we need to take a look at how our workflow is currently doing. We do this by pointing out its strengths and flaws. To go even further, we’ll try to find answers to some questions:
- Why do you use this workflow?
- What are the problems with your current workflow?
- How vital is this workflow? How many employees perform this workflow?
Whatever you answered, write it down! Then after answering questions and pointing out the pros and cons, we need to create a goal. Without it, we don’t know where we should try to improve upon.
Step #2 – Collect and Analyse Your Data
Now that we’ve set a goal, we need to collect some data. Without it, we won’t know if our analysis made anything better. For example, if you’re looking to improve your customer acquisition workflow, you might want to have data on:
- Conversions
- Conversion rates
- Ad CTR (click-through rate)
- Add-to-Cart Number
- Abandoned Cart Percentage
- And so on.
Once you’ve collected your data, now you need to analyze and try to find your problem. Maybe your problem is that too many people abandon their checkouts?
Whatever you think it is, write it down. Then, you’re ready for the next step.
Step #3 – Get Real User Feedback
You can speculate as much as you want, but you’re going to have to listen to the end-user. That’s because you’re not doing this to yourself! Instead, you’re doing it to the people involved!
And that’s why they are the only ones that can say what’s wrong with your workflow. All we need to do is ask for their feedback. In our example, the best thing to do is ask the customers yourself. You can do it by enticing them to answer for a coupon/free gift.
And once you’ve gotten their feedback, you’re ready to continue to the next step.
Step #4 – Propose a Change
And now, what is left to do is use the data and user feedback to think and implement a change. But before you do change, I highly suggest you do one thing, and that’s that you’d talk to your team about it.
The thing is, your team could have some fantastic suggestions that could make your reworked workflow even more efficient than it currently is!
And once you finish this, you’re ready for the last test.
Step #5 – Repeat it
Now all that is left to do is repeat it! It’s not enough to just do it once and forget it. Just as we repeatedly mentioned in this blog post, the world changes, so instead of giving your competition an advantage, you should constantly improve your workflow.
And to ensure you don’t forget about it, you can add an event to your calendar each month to remind you to do a workflow analysis.
Conclusion
And that’s how you create a workflow analysis! So remember that doing regular workflow analysis leads to a more efficient work environment, which in return gives you an unfair advantage against your competition.
And when you follow the 5-step formula and see your business continue to grow.