What Is Workflow, and How Can It Help Your Business Be More Efficient?

At some point in your career, you will feel overwhelmed. It doesn’t matter if you are the CEO, the executive assistant, or in any other position in the company. Your inbox number may be in the triple digits, that pile of paperwork maybe leaning since it is so tall, and your day may be filled with so many meetings you don’t know how you will power through it all. Your day may feel like you are in survival mode instead of being productive. But how do you get ahead when you are battling time?

You may have heard of a new buzz word floating around the business community called “workflow.” Among professionals, it is often touted as a tool that saves time and maximizes efficiency in the workplace, but what exactly is it? In this post, we are going to discuss workflow, why it is important, and how LifeSquire can help you get started creating one for your business.

What Is Workflow?

According to Merriam-Webster, workflow is defined as, “the sequence of steps involved in moving from the beginning to the end of the working process.” This may seem a little confusing to understand, but to simply put it, workflow is how people get a particular job completed. It is comprised of a series of steps that detail the project’s process, who will be completing it, and by what deadline.

Workflows can be used for simple tasks you need to complete and for large projects that involve multiple people. Some examples of what you can create workflows for include:

Personal Work Projects

Digital organization, email inbox management, role-specific jobs, and more.

Group work projects

Preparing payroll, handling an invoice from a client, employee onboarding, and more.

Why Is Workflow Important?

Now that you know what a workflow is, why is it important? Well, as we said above, workflows help businesses save time and maximize efficiency, but they also help minimize mistakes and so much more. When you’ve thought about creating a workflow, you may have asked yourself if your business or your role could actually benefit from it. The short answer is, yes, and to prove it, we are sharing some other benefits to creating workflows:

Simplifies Decision Making

Managers and employees won’t have to stress about making a decision when there is a guide on how to do specific tasks. You’ll also save time because your employees won’t be wasting time on decision making.

Business Insight

Workflow processes give you an inside look into your company. Once you have this view, you can easily identify if you are delivering the results you think you are and improve the process if you are not.

Eliminate double duty

Businesses often waste a lot of time with redundant tasks. With your new insight, you will be able to identify redundancy and eliminate it.

Maximize Accountability

Mapping out your workflow will let you know what needs to be done, who is working on it, and when it needs to be completed by. With everyone on the same page, accountability is much easier.

Prevent Micromanagement

During crunch time on a project, you won’t feel the need to constantly ask for a status update and will eliminate micromanagement tendencies.

Clear Communication

Get everyone on the page when there is a visual representation of the process for the tasks that need to be completed. You won’t have people going back and forth on what they thought they heard or didn’t hear.

Quality Work

When creating or utilizing a workflow, you can pick the right employee for a specific task. This will help eliminate human error and provide top quality work, as opposed to just selecting the first employee that isn’t busy.

Time-Saving

We’ve said this a ton, but we thought we’d reiterate that the time spent creating a workflow will pay-off in the long run. You’ll save more time and make more money.

How Lifesquire Can Help

Often, workflows can be complicated and overwhelming to create when you’re already struggling to keep your head above water. Not to mention that if you are trying to create workflows while under intense stress, you’ll likely skip steps and cut corners to get it done. In the long run, this could create more mistakes or confusion for other employees.

LifeSquire is a small business that is always changing. Not only have we added a lot of new services for clients, but we have also conquered some client requests that may have you wondering how someone even thought about that. We’ve also had to work on very limited deadlines on a regular basis. Because of all of these things, our company has grown and created tons of workflows for our team, but also for our client’s teams. We have helped overwhelmed business owners get back on track and improve efficiency almost immediately. We say all this because we are now offering worfkflow organization services. If you’d like more information about this service, click here to contact us and we will get back with you as soon as possible.