Is Your Organization Ready for Workflow Optimization?
As a workflow optimization consultant, I often encounter organizations eager to enhance efficiency and productivity through workflow improvements and automation. However, the success of such initiatives largely depends on the organization’s readiness for change. Below, I outline key factors to determine if your organization is ready for workflow optimization and provide recommendations to increase adoption and readiness for change.
Determining Factors for Readiness
An organization’s culture plays a significant role in the success of workflow optimization. In my experience, clients who have cultures that are open to change or trying out new things will have more success with making meaningful improvements to how they work. Employees must understand why the change is important and what is in it for them. Knowing this will lead to greater adoption.
Evaluate your current technology to determine which tools would help your improvement efforts. Then decide if there are any gaps in where you want to make improvements and the technology needed. For instance, using Google Sheets as a CRM system may have worked when your organization had 50 employees, but is probably not going to work for you now. It could be hurting your business if you are not able to quickly capture critical customer data as part of your sales funnel. Also, you may need to identify or at least familiarize yourself with new technology to determine if it might apply to resolving some of your workflow challenges.
Strong support from leadership is essential for driving workflow optimization initiatives. Employees need to have clear intent from their leaders as to what outcomes they should be trying to achieve and why they are imperative. Leaders then need to ensure that employees feel empowered to make those improvements by having the time and resources made available to them.
Recommendations for Increasing Adoption and Readiness
Engage stakeholders from various departments early in the process to gather input and build consensus. Not everyone’s input will make it into each initial workflow improvement or agree on the path forward, but employees will feel more engaged if they are at least heard and taken into consideration. It is also important to ensure that these improvements are not missing any critical blind spots that could lead to negative downstream impacts. Lastly, there will be a higher chance of adoption of these improvements if everyone feels that there is an inherent benefit to them. This has to be clearly articulated up and down the organization throughout the initiative.
Offer training sessions to ensure employees are comfortable with any new technology and processes. These shouldn’t just be one-off events either. Training and support should occur continuously until user adoption is adequate and assessments are made to determine effectiveness. Some training can be self-led and other training may have to be more hands-on to allow employees to ask questions or learn by doing. Also, you will need to consider what type of training will be available for future employees when they are onboarded.
Implement pilot programs to test new workflows and technologies on a smaller scale before rolling them out organization-wide. For one, most organizations cannot handle large improvements in one fell swoop. It can be overwhelming and lead to people resenting the change. Most importantly, whatever workflow improvement you want to implement will surely have changes that need to be made once it is incorporated into the real world. Starting small (especially with technology) allows for further updates to be made that weren’t previously anticipated or because of feedback from customers and key stakeholders.
Develop a Change Management Plan that outlines the steps for implementing workflow optimization. This should highlight the various types of communications that should go out before, during, and after the change occurs to drive adoption. You will also want to identify all the key stakeholder groups, their impact (negative or positive) on workflow improvement, and the best ways to address those impacts. The key is to put some structure and planning into making sure that the critical stakeholders impacted by the change will adopt these improvements. The change management plan also incorporates many of the topics above such as training and communication.
By assessing your organization’s readiness and following these recommendations, you can pave the way for successful workflow optimization and automation. Also, you will reduce the chances of employees rejecting the improvement and not achieving the desired outcomes for your organization. Think proactively about how people are impacted and what the benefits will be for them while also bringing them along on the workflow improvement journey.
