Imagine for a moment that you own a pizza restaurant and have employed a talented team of chefs – but you fail to give them a step-by-step, process-driven pizza recipe to follow. What kind of product would your restaurant be delivering to your clients?
The fact is, even if you have an excellent vision for pizzas and Michelin-star winning chefs to make them, you would be highly unlikely to deliver consistent results without a recipe for your team to follow.
The same principle is true for business. You can have a solid mission, vision, and values statement and an amazing team of gifted people to carry it out. Still, without scalable processes for your team to follow, you risk delivering inconsistency in the quality of your products and services.
Execution – how you cook the recipe – is our third pillar of a resilient business.We believe excellent execution demands the creation and implementation of repeatable, scalable processes for your team to lean on and follow.
Why Processes Matter
It wasn’t until several years after launching System Six Bookkeeping that we began to truly realize the value and impact of creating and implementing processes for our company.
We had team members who used various preferred tools and strategies to stay on task and organized. Some employees preferred online resources, like Asana and Trello. In contrast, others preferred using an old-fashioned notebook, planner, and pencil to plan out and keep track of their work and schedule.
While these tools and strategies might have worked well for the individual team members, we realized not having a universal, centralized system would invariably cause inefficiency, confusion, miscommunications, and inconsistent quality for our customers.
It’s not enough to simply assign your team tasks and expect them to get the work done however they best see fit. Even if they ultimately produce good work using their own methods, your overall execution will lack the efficiency and cohesion necessary for a successful, resilient business.
It’s ultimately on your leadership’s shoulders to create and implement the right processes to set your team and your company up for success.
Step One: Creating Processes
We believe the same thoughtful intentionality you took to write out your mission, vision, and values statement should be applied to writing out your company’s scalable processes.
Take time, and if necessary, get away with your leadership team to work through and write down these important steps. Keeping your mission and values close to heart, write out the processes you want your team to execute.
What will your hiring process be? What steps are necessary for your team to follow in onboarding new staff and new clients? What is your month-close process?
No detail is too small as you create the processes your team will follow. Think through each element of your teams’ responsibilities and your clients’ journeys – is there a documented, clear pathway? Is there a consistent way to teach and train your team these steps?
Step Two: Implementing Processes
It’s important to note that when it comes to implementing processes, what works for a small, local team of 5-10 employees won’t necessarily work as well for a global team of 15 + remote employees.
For smaller teams working in the same office, a shared spreadsheet of word docs or a database of processes your team can access and share via cloud might be just the right avenue for implementation.
For larger teams, especially those with remote employees working from different locations and time zones, we are big fans of resources like Karbon, a workflow management software, to integrate team communication and collaboration.
Your leadership team can choose from many other cutting-edge tools and technologies to make accessing and implementing your company’s processes as easy as possible. Training and equipping your team is a critical component for success. Take time to ensure your onboarding includes thorough training on your programs and expectations for use.
Additionally, allowing your team members to provide regular feedback, criticisms, and improvements to your processes will build buy-in and ownership of your operations. Since your employees work in and out of these systems daily, provide pathways for them to provide input.
From thoughtfully writing down the processes that make sense for your business to adopting smart tools and technologies to make following those processes as natural as possible, you are setting your team up to execute your mission, vision, and values with excellence and success.
Join us next time as we dig into how to curate successful rhythms for resilient execution.
