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How to Kick Your Workflow Efficiency into a Higher Gear

How to Kick Your Workflow Efficiency into a Higher Gear Leave a comment
How to improve Workflow Efficiency

Improving efficiency means increasing profitability and reducing waste in your business. It’s hard to think of any business that couldn’t benefit from a boost in efficiency. If this is an area in which your business is currently struggling, consider the following tips for amplifying its efficiency and kicking it into a higher gear.

Audit Your Existing Processes

Before you can identify opportunities for improving the efficiency of your workflow, you will need to conduct a thorough audit of your existing processes. Gather as much data as you can about the effectiveness of your current processes, how long it takes to complete various basic tasks, and how any previous changes you have made have impacted your chosen metrics.


Ideally, you should be auditing your processes fairly regularly. If you only conduct one audit, make some changes, and then never bother to assess the situation again, it is likely that your efficiency will soon begin to slip. Your audit process itself will need to be refined as you gain more insight into which metrics are the most valuable and reliable predictors of your effectiveness going forward.

Improve workflow efficiency by auditing your current processes

Consult with Your Entire Team

Whenever you are working on refining your workflow and improving your efficiency, you need to involve every member of your team. Make sure that you speak to all of your frontline staff, as they are the people who are going to have to execute your plans and implement your workflow changes. If you press ahead making big changes to your workflow without making an effort to speak to the people that are going to be most affected, you will have difficulty getting your new workflow to stick.

Speaking to your staff to make sure that they are on board with any changes that you’re making, and it will enable you to get their feedback on your proposed changes and avoid doing anything that is going to make people’s lives harder rather than easier.

Don’t Rush Your Changes

Once you know what you are going to do to improve your workflow, consider whether it is better to make changes instantly or to introduce them gradually. If you implement your changes gradually when it isn’t needed, you will be postposing success for no reason. If you try to make big changes too quickly, it can be jarring for your workers, and they will be unlikely to take to your changes in the way that you are hoping for.

Often, it will make more sense to break up the big changes that you want to make into smaller, more manageable steps. Doing this won’t just give your workers more time to adjust to your new way of doing things, but it will also encourage you to think carefully about how to implement new processes and procedures.

Always Prototype

The prototyping process is a vital part of bringing a new product to market. If you aren’t prototyping, you are just asking to run into problems with your first few product runs, which will completely get in the way of your business’s efficiency. Prototyping is not a difficult science, it will take you a few attempts to develop a consistent approach that works every time.

Always Prototype your business workflow

While the purpose of prototyping is to help you test the viability of your designs, an efficient design process from the very beginning will enable you to dramatically reduce the rate at which mistakes occur. In many cases, one of the biggest barriers to efficient design work is a lack of access to the right tools. These include design software tools like electronic drawing software for designing PCBs.

Once you have learned to get through the prototyping phase as quickly and efficiently as possible, you will be able to focus on designing, testing, and refining your new products.

Be Realistic in Your Expectations

If you aim for unrealistic or unachievable gains in efficiency, you are going to end up disappointed. Worse still, setting unrealistic goals for your team will ultimately end with them feeling demotivated and stressed. Demanding more from your workers than they can realistically deliver isn’t going to do much for your efficiency in the long-run. Even if you’re able to inspire some short-term gains, these will not be sustainable.

On the other hand, if you set yourself achievable targets and are honest about how much of a difference your workflow changes can make, you will have no trouble getting your whole team involved in your new efficient way of doing things. Once they see that your proposed changes are going to enable them to hit the targets you set, it will be easy for them to understand the benefits.

Make Your Changes Long Term

It’s no good introducing new, efficiency-boosting processes if you are going to abandon them as soon as they seem challenging. Instead, make it clear from the beginning that the changes you are introducing represent a new way of doing things and are changes that you are completely committed to. It takes time for any changes that you introduce to your business to finally take root and stick with your workers, so you will want to begin the process as soon as possible and make it clear to your employees from the beginning that they need to work your new processes into their own workflows.

Consistent and Effective Communication for Workflow Efficiency

Communication is a vital component of efficiency for any business. Without good communication skills, you will struggle to convey your wishes to your workers and will find it hard to explain what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it, and how you will achieve it. Good communications skills are about more than just speaking clearly with your workers. They also require you to encourage employees to communicate with you so they can give you input and feedback.

Improving the efficiency of your workflow can enable you to significantly improve the productivity of your business as well as provide you with sustained increases in your profitability. Sometimes, even relatively small gains can add up to a significant improvement when considered across the entirety of your business. Once you have instituted your first wave of workflow optimizations, make sure to monitor their effectiveness, and don’t be afraid to switch things up if they aren’t working.

Images  Sources:

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/kanban-work-work-process-organize-4281474/

https://pixabay.com/photos/business-office-team-kanban-work-4051773/

https://pixabay.com/photos/ux-prototyping-design-webdesign-788002/

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