Are Workflows Essential For Success With Your Business Systems In 2021?

Why workflows are essential to your successful business systems. Now, some people, they would say that to create business systems without putting too much time and effort into them. Is to just record your screen the next time you are doing this task.

Now, although this is a really good strategy, it very rarely works, when that’s the sole strategy you’re using to document your processes or your systems. And the reason behind that is because when you just record your screen, when you then come to hire someone, or when you yourself, want to be reminded of the process for that particular process that you’re doing.

You have to re-watch that video!

This is really frustrating because rewatching a video means you’re having to watch the video, pause it or revisit the video, why you’re then doing the process itself. Because when you are doing a process, you can’t watch the video and do the task at the same time. You’re going to need to watch the video do the task. This becomes a real-time burden.

My whole point around systemising is that you create a business that’s going to save you time and money further down the line.

When you’re creating your processes, just like your screen share, it’s actually not going to save you time. It’s not going to save you money. Because when you then come to hire a team member, that team member is also going to have to do that. So rather than having a documented process where they can tick off what they have done, they’re going to have to watch the video. Pause it, then do the task, and vice versa and do that all the way through.

That is actually costing you more money.

And they’re spending more time doing that thing. So that seems crazy, right? So I don’t want you to be sold into this, just record your screen. And that’s your systems up and running, don’t need to do anything else. Because yes, it is a really good way to do it. And if you were then going to have your team member document process from that video, then Okay, that’s fine.

But what I also want you to do is to make sure that you have workflows that are pulled together. And the reason behind it is because having a workflow in place means that you have a bird’s eye view of that journey from start to finish. So you are able to look at that journey that’s taken.

Generally, I would say one page for workflows.

I know people will panic here because they will say I don’t understand really complex workflows. But I don’t want you to have complex workflows, I want you to just have a full bird’s eye view of the journey that that that process is going through. Because you are then able to see how all the moving parts connect together. You are then able to see or pass that to your team member when you hire one.

So then they see the actual overall aim of the workflows.

And that’s what can sometimes be missing when you just have your documented process. When you just have a video and the documented process, it doesn’t quite connect in our heads as it should in connecting that journey together. So by briefly looking at the journey, and the workflow means that you can see if there are any gaps, if anything, has maybe been duplicated.

If anything is missing, if anything could be automated, if there’s any particular part of the workflows that are not working

So if you have a part of the journey that you know, isn’t connecting up, you can see that in the workflows view. As an example, if we have our prospects dropping off at a certain point in the workflow. We can see what that gap is because we can look and we can say, Okay, well, the journey goes from this step to that step. But between that step, the prospects drop off. So they’re wanting something else in that step. And we can then see what we can add, or what we can amend to correct that.

So the prospects are not going to keep dropping off.

It’s also a lot easier to see those things that are being done, which is not necessary. A lot of the time, what you can do when you have documented processes, is you can see if steps are duplicated, or you can create steps.
It’s making sure that you can see clearly what that journey looks like.

And it helps you to then be able to make improvements to correct any gaps that might be there or might be occurring.

It’s also a really good idea to do your workflows and then document your processes.

And of course, you can have that video there as well. That gives a real full version. But the problem here is if you just have that video, and say, for instance, you are relooking at your strategy, which you probably do every quarter, and maybe there’s a part of the strategy that isn’t working.

So maybe in the instance of our prospecting. Maybe that the prospects are dropping off at that certain part. If you don’t have the workflow there, and you just have the screen recording.

It means you’re going to have to redo the whole thing!

Because it’s not going to make sense at anytime you edit the workflow or the process, you’re going to have to do the whole thing again. Whereas when you have a workflow and processes set up, you can just edit that part. So just taking that into account that if you are creating videos when you’re documenting your processes. Just make sure that you are doing more than the videos because and be aware that you may have to recreate them.

So I hope that’s helped. And I hope that it’s explained my reasoning around why I really don’t agree that having a screen share is documented processes or a sustainable and scalable way of doing it. It starts with workflows! 
If you want to find out more about systemising get in touch and ask away!