A manager or an entrepreneur juggles many tasks throughout a workday. Staying organized and efficient is the key to getting the best out of a day’s work.
One way of staying organized is by building processes to get work done by various teams. Building processes is an important aspect of organizing work for maximizing productivity.
Here are two common approaches that businesses use to improve processes:
- Do it yourself the first few times. Document how you do that work, and write down the step-by-step workflow, as well as commonly encountered errors and resolutions. Then, hand over what you’ve written to a team to do it on a regular basis.
- Ask your team to do the work and document their experience. You can then review, adjust, and approve the process.
The first way is often followed, but is very inefficient. You risk putting yourself in a bottleneck position where all work needs to get channeled through you.
The second way is less common in smaller organizations, but a standard practice in medium and large ones. It may seem risky to start with, but it’s a great practice when you need to remove yourself from a bottleneck.
Here is a little trick to make the second process more thorough:
Give complete control to your team to work through and document the process. However, when you review it with them, ask a lot of questions.
Thorough questioning will directly lead to thorough process documentation and seamless work. And, by asking lots of questions, you’ll have another advantage of understanding the work processes in more detail.