To maximise your business potential, you must establish process-driven business systems to manage your workflows, marketing, and operations. If your business highly depends on you to resolve administrative and service-deliverables matters, it is a clear indicator telling you to systemise your business.
In this post, we will explore the step-by-step process to systemise your business and examine three areas in your business that you can build on to free up more time for yourself, as follows: –
- Customers
- Money
- Onboarding
But first.
What is systemisation?
It is the activity of establishing a structured operational process to automate productivity: knowledgebase, P&P, SOP, checklists, How-to Videos, Operational Manual, FAQ, Resource portal, flowcharts, and more.
The objectives are to manage and optimise operations, marketing, and workflows.
Systemisation can also involve implementing efficient processes that can help streamline day-to-day operations, automate certain tasks, and increase overall productivity. It also provides businesses with valuable insights into their customers and operations so they can better meet their goals. By systemising your business, you can free up your time and avoid non-productive processes while improving customer service and satisfaction.
Why It Pays To Systemise?
The benefits are priceless.
- It helps to free-up time by empowering your business to be less reliant on you through delegation.
- It helps convert repetitive, cyclical, and monotonous tasks into process automation.
- It helps identify gaps and weaknesses, thus optimising your profit and productivity.
When systematically approaching your business with an Auditor lens, you create a point-by-point perception of doing things that any employee can replicate.
An overview of business systemisation.
To perform basic systemisation, you typically write a set of “how to” in your cloud-based documents. Or, if you prefer the classic style, you can print it out and house them inside the departmental manual called Standard Operation Procedure (SOP) yeah.
This written instruction set provides a guide to follow, enabling an intelligent employee to perform essential tasks without prior training from the business owner.
Creating a written process for every task your business does may sound daunting, but once they exist in print, you will make your life easier by having your staff follow the guide like an instruction manual.
Provided the role is elementary, anyone can quickly fill in for the payroll clerk, receptionist, or customer support, simply by following the step-by-step instructions in the position manual. You no longer have to explain every task to someone who needs to fill in for another person. This strategy will make you less stressed when managing your business.
And occasionally, you may have new staff members who prefer the one-on-one onboarding experience rather than reading a set of manuals. We will leave that to your prerogative to keep or fire them.
Success lies in choosing which procedures to tackle for business systemisation. Instead of creating written systems for every task simultaneously, you start with the most significant yet repetitive tasks. Let’s look at the first step of making your business systems.
The Step-By-Step Process.
They were right if your parents said you should tackle the arduous assignment first. This applies to business processes, too.
Here are three tips for documenting and systemising your business.
- Identify your day-to-day business activities that: –
- Continually go wrong,
- It takes up a lot of your or your employees’ time,
- Create the most business stress.
- Diagram each activity in six different ways:
- idealised results,
- amount of workflow,
- accountable positions,
- appropriate timeframes,
- necessary resources,
- measurable performance standards.
Use a banner that lets you overlay one diagram onto another, so you can see how the six activity methods work together.
- Determine what you can delegate and to which positions.
Always use the name of each position, not an individual’s name, when authoring procedures, processes, and systemising. The point of systemising your business is that when the staff changes, you have a smooth transition of transference of knowledge due to your documented, step-by-step way of doing each primary task.
Systemisation Tools
You can use the following tools to make systemisation a breeze.
- Lucidchart to create flowcharts and diagrams
- MS word, excel, and PowerPoint
- Video recording App
- Offshore Software Development Services
- Offshore talent.
- Knowledge Base Software.
Our team can set up a knowledge base system for your business to consolidate everything above. Click to learn more.
Here’s a tip: You don’t have to wait until your business establishes itself to create processes.
Let’s look at three top business processes or activities to kick-start your business systemisation activity.
CASE STUDY 1: CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Prioritise your customer relationship activities. The customer forms the heart of every business. Without customers, your business closes.
Here are some queries to kick-start your documentation.
- Create your morning, afternoon, or evening checklists for rostered customer support team members.
- Explain the steps to greet, serve, and execute customers’ orders in the office, store, or phone.
- Describe the fields to include in your customer relationship management (CRM) database. Automate entry of any fields possible.
- Define the deliverable process, and use Lucidchart to draw flowcharts.
- Map out the grievance resolution process.
- Write out the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and solutions.
Your frontline customer-support personnel are the best to document and create the above steps for you.
CASE STUDY 2: MONEY
Your accounting processes make sure that you have the money. Your budgeting process ensures you know how much money you need to succeed. Financial activities document your cash flow so you can measure business success and illustrate to banks and investors the health of your business.
When you systematise the MONEY (Budget, Accounting, and Finance) category, you should address: –
- How to properly bill and automate each customer for a product or service,
- How to obtain timely payment from customers,
- Record customers’ information accurately in a ledger,
- Analyse financial data for improved decision-making.
The above fundamental points are for illustration purposes to jump-start your creativity to systemise your money elements. You will need to create your extensive list.
CASE STUDY 3: ONBOARDING
In the Great Resignation era, nothing is certain anymore. Your highly passionate staff member, who was once enthusiastic and eager to learn everything under the sun, now bid farewell to seek the next level of career growth from another company.
Every stage in the business growth cycle requires onboarding and training systems to systematically streamline your human resources protocols.
Here are some systems to establish in your HR section.
- Organisational Chart
- Job description, pre-requisite skills and competency for each position
- Salary range and Award
- Pre-interview Questionaire
- Set of qualifying Questionaire
- Point system
- Performance Appraisal Sheet
- Onboarding steps and instruction, and much more.
Proper onboarding and job training increase retention by 82 per cent (Kallidus, C. Slattery) and improve employee performance and productivity by 11 per cent. Instead of a one-day process, a systematic approach includes continuing education that improves employee performance.
FINAL THOUGHTS
For a start, you don’t have to systemise your entire organisation all at once. That would be overwhelming for most small businesses. Instead, pick the two or three business activities that currently cause the most headache for your business. Solve these problems by analysing current methods and creating a system that works like the proverbial machine.
By planning for continuous improvement in systemising repetitive tasks, you address significant business problems and create a platform in which team members learn. They follow the procedure to the letter so each employee can obtain the same great result every time.
To learn more, attend the Business Growth Workshop
