Streamlining for Success: 4 Simple Tips to Make Any Company’s Operations Smoother
Disorganized management can doom even the most cutting-edge company. As businesses begin to think realistically about post-pandemic operations, they must pay special attention to modernizing their workforce management practices.
To create a more streamlined, effective approach to workforce management, it’s important to first understand how your current operations are performing, both positively and negatively, for employees at all levels. Understanding where you’re succeeding and where you’re falling short will lead to more effective long-term solutions.
Here are three tips to help you modernize your workforce management processes in the coming months:
Centralize Your Workforce Management
Your employees are only as strong as the resources they have at their disposal. Unfortunately, many companies are utilizing too many platforms for daily operations and communication, which can overwhelm instead of empower teams.
Centralizing workplace operations in a single platform can make the average employee’s day less hectic and distracting. They won’t have to juggle multiple platforms to communicate and get work done. By reducing the number of logins necessary for daily operations, teams can onboard new hires more quickly and efficiently and avoid complicated procedures that slow work down. A centralized platform can also open up more opportunities for collaboration across the organization. All employees will be logging into the same system instead of being siloed in their own tech.
What, precisely, should an all-in-one platform help you do? Research your options to find the best choice for your organization, but be sure to focus on how a solution can help you streamline processes, effectively communicate policies and expectations, create accountability, and track employee information. A platform that can handle training and employee reviews can also come in handy.
Encourage Open, Ongoing Communication
If effective workforce management relies on one thing, it’s efficient communication. Every employee on a team plays a role in ensuring communication is open, honest, and ongoing, yet 80 percent of American workers are stressed by their companies’ ineffective communication practices.
Again, centralizing workflows can help here. It’s easy to miss a memo when they’re coming from all angles — email, phone call, text messages, etc. If all communication occurs through a single channel, you can eliminate the confusion and missed information caused by juggling too many communication touchpoints.
Use the same channel you use to communicate policies and business updates to assign tasks and follow up with employees. This ensures tasks, like memos, don’t get missed in the madness of multiple communication platforms.
Nurture Employee Engagement
Employee engagement plays a critical role in business success. High levels of employee engagement promote productivity, retention, and loyalty. According to Gallup, the most engaged employees are 22 percent more profitable and 21 percent more productive than their less engaged counterparts.
For this reason, employee engagement should be a top priority for anyone worried about workforce management. The good news is employee engagement levels can be influenced by management. For example, if the company invests in employees’ career growth, workers are more likely to be engaged at work. Similarly, simply having positive daily experiences with one’s colleagues and supervisors can also boost engagement.
Of course, HR teams can lend a hand by designing practices and policies necessary for cultivating and maintaining engagement. Managers can then take the lead in implementing those practices and policies for employees on the ground.
Clearly Define Roles and Responsibilities
Do your employees know exactly what you expect of them? If employees don’t have clearly defined roles and responsibilities, efficient workforce management is nearly impossible. Operations can’t be streamlined when people don’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.
Each role’s job description should carefully outline expectations and responsibilities and should be accessible to the employee at any time. In addition, HR teams and managers should work with employees to define success for their roles. That includes connecting each employee’s current role to their career path within the company. Show workers exactly what skills they need to get to the next level of management or take on new responsibilities.
A business thrives when employees can properly execute the company’s vision and deliver consistent performance along the way — and that requires a clear understanding of how an employee’s role fits into the bigger picture. Every team member must know what is expected of them, from values-aligned behavior to daily tasks and special projects. Only then can employees contribute to your streamlined workflows and operations.
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When workforce management and operations are modernized, centralized, and streamlined, the business as a whole is set up to succeed. Choose the right tools, keep communication open, cultivate engagement, and clarify roles. You’ll see the change in no time.
Matt Goebel is founder and CEO of Woven. Follow Woven on LinkedIn.