Streamlining Office Operations: Seven Tips for Efficient Workflows

When it comes to your office operations, working to achieve optimal efficiency should be an ongoing process. Of course, this is much easier said than done for a few reasons:

• General unawareness of available technology and how it can be applied to your existing operations,
  
  
• The resource required to keep up-to-date with new technologies, while assessing their potential compatibility with your current tech,
  
  
• Ensuring these new technologies are reliable and cost-effective, and won’t cause operational, financial, or reputational damage,
  
  
• The cost of implementing new technologies to your current processes,
  
  
• The fact that employees may resist changes to their established day-to-day processes if benefits of these updates haven’t been effectively communicated.

Each factor poses a significant obstacle to streamlining your office operations with new technologies – but for businesses who’ve managed to overcome them, the benefits have come thick and fast. Workflow automation software, for example, has become downright crucial for HR, customer service, and finance departments, due to its ability to remove unnecessary burden on staff and maximise the output from employee hours.

Information channels benefit enormously from automation; since data from inbound invoices, customer correspondence, and personnel updates – once verified – is extracted and automatically updated into all their relevant systems and databases. This ensures that records are accurate and up-to date: not just allowing workforces to communicate, collaborate, and deliver service cohesively, but also providing always-updating proof of compliance for data auditing purposes.

Clearly, the utility and convenience of automation will make it a cornerstone of business operations well into the future. But how do you implement it smoothly, with minimal disruption to your day-to-day operations?

1. Use automation templates: Templates help manage processes and improve efficiency. This further reduces the “human” risk factor by defining what data is required and the format the information needs to be presented in.
   
   
2. Define responsibilities: Clearly define the role of each team member to reduce confusion and assign accountability. This ensures that individual tasks are not lost or left un-actioned, with clear lines of responsibility.
   
   
3. Define your business goals: Use your current information processes as a benchmark to define your future goals, such as improving throughput or reducing cycle time. It’s difficult to drive engagement with your employees without a defined target, as processes can potentially seem abstract with no value.
   
   
4. Communicate well: Ensure that everyone involved in the workflow is aware of what automated and for what purpose, as well as their role in the process. The clearer this is communicated from the start, the more likely you are to avoid problems later down the road.