Do your employees experience the following emotions; frustration, disengagement, sarcasm, feeling of doing things for nothing, no desire to surpass oneself, performing without question, “I don’t care” attitude?
Did you think that maybe these emotions come from the fact that your processes are deficient and not optimal? Ask yourself the question honestly. If everything worked like a well-oiled machine in your business, would these emotions still be present?
So, what is there to do? It is likely that one of the major problems you are facing are your processes not working well, not being clear, effective and optimized.
Not knowing who does what, multiplying the steps, expectations not being met, wasted time, non-quality, redoing the work is most likely the situation.
That’s why it’s important to optimize your processes. In addition to the fact that you will stand out from the competition and will surely increase your profits, the quality of life and working atmosphere will clearly improve and the emotions mentioned above will diminish and even disappear.
I have optimized a planning process lately. Why did the company do this? To solve several problems. There were delays, late deliveries, stress among employees and the management team, and a lot of frustration on the part of everyone. Several employees were disillusioned, negative and there was constant negative comments. Not to mention the dissatisfied customers.
The first step in optimizing a process is to understand where you are starting. From there, you need to understand the current process, who does what, the steps, the deadlines, the decisions to be made in the process, the tools (forms, documents, software used, etc.), trips and accumulations of products or documents (stock). Mapping your process will be your best tool, meaning putting on paper all the steps of your process.
During the exercise, they realized the inefficient and unnecessary steps, that some tasks were not done by the right people, that some delays were long for no other reason than the negative emotions that everyone was experiencing.
We have therefore established the future process, their ideal, without limiting ourselves to the actions to be taken to achieve it. We also reviewed roles and responsibilities. We have established an action plan, with leaders and dates and metrics to ensure evolution and improvement.
The next step is to follow up on the actions. The emotions of the team are already doint much better! Just starting the improvement process has made employees more engaged. Not everything is perfect, but it’s an excellent step in the right direction.