Establishing business processes is one thing. Getting your team to follow these processes and keep them up-to-date is another.
It’s easy to get excited about implementing something new in your business, but remaining consistent and ensuring the systems you’ve built are used day-to-day requires more than excitement. It requires dedication to complete the implementation of processes and procedures within a company.
Often, this dedication comes from experiencing small successes along the way.
In one case study that founder and CEO of Business Success Consulting Group, Adi Klevit, shared, she talks about how one of our clients created processes and implemented them. It started with systematizing one area of her business that consistently caused issues. Once a sense of order was established, and the area was running smoothly, she built processes in another area of the company. As the business grew in an orderly fashion, the business owner and her staff saw the benefits of using processes and procedures. This got the whole team on board with utilizing business processes throughout the company.
This successful case study demonstrates how one company went from no business systems to a fully systematized business over time, with full buy-in from the staff.
However, what does one do when an executive wants to implement systems immediately, and the staff are not yet on board?
Read on!
How to Get Your Processes Implemented and Followed by the Team in Five Steps
Here are five steps you can take immediately to get business processes implemented and followed by your team:
1. Change your mindset
Take a top-down approach and dedicate yourself to using processes and procedures to manage, lead and run the company. Demonstrating that you are dedicated to implementing processes and procedures by sticking to them and applying them yourself will encourage your team to do the same.
2. Assure accessibility
Everyone in the team must be able to find and use procedures once written. One way to make this easy and assure accessibility for all is to use a process documentation platform like Sweet Process, Whale, TaskTrain, or Trainual. These platforms have many advantages including:
- Task assignments to ensure staff read and understand each process.
- Providing a variety of media for training, including text, video, and images.
- Version control that ensure staff are trained on the latest information.
- Search capability to make it easy to find the documentation needed for a task.
Whether you utilize a documentation platform or train staff on something more basic, it’s vital that all employees involved in the process have access to the latest documentation and supporting policies.
3. Follow this rollout process
Roll out your business systems by:
- Have the team read what other team members drafted and provide commentary. This gives everyone a chance to give input.
- Assign training on the system to anybody in the company who will use the procedure. Assign a specific timeframe for study and ensure each person to whom it is assigned reports back after they’ve completed the training.
- Administer a survey to ask what they learned, what’s missing, and how likely are they to use the procedures.
- Repeat the above three steps as you implement processes and procedures throughout the organization.
- Ensure specific positions understand how to implement the appropriate systems in day-to-day operations. It is vital that the whole team know and understand the systems and how they interconnect. Without this knowledge, proper implementation will not happen.
- Conditional: If someone says they are too busy to read the process assigned to them, you must get creative. One great solution is to call a group meeting where everyone involved can learn about the process together.
4. Use processes to resolve issues
If a challenge is encountered after processes are implemented, discover if a step is missing in the system itself or if someone has failed to execute a part of an existing process.
Let’s say in a construction company, sales slow down. The manager can review the processes leading up to a sale to see if there is a step missing. In our example, let’s say that the step of assigning estimates to the estimator is missing. This would cause potential sales to stall.
By referring back to the processes and procedures, we can identify where the issue is coming from.
If it’s a missing step that is at fault, the process can be revised.
If it’s a failure in communication that is the issue, find out why the process is not being utilized. It could be that the employee needs to retrain on the process or needs to talk with their team to ensure everyone is on the same page.
5. Regularly review the systems
The last thing you want is processes or procedures to become obsolete because they are not being used. These business systems are living documents that change over time. Therefore, they must be reviewed.
Schedule a regular process review within your process documentation system, or add a quarterly review to your calendar to ensure the systems are being utilized and kept up to date.
This can also help you see the need for new systems as your business pivots or scales. So be sure to monitor this essential step in process implementation.
Summary
How to get your team using business systems
1. The best way to implement processes is to start implementing them from the top down. This shows you and your team the benefits of business systems.
2. Make sure processes and procedures are accessible to everyone who needs to use them.
3. Follow a rollout process to ensure the whole team gets a say in the process documentation, and then all are trained on the result.
4. Once processes are implemented, review them when things aren’t going as planned. There may be a flaw in the process itself, or the employee implementing the system may not be utilizing every step as listed.
5. Review processes to ensure they remain current and useful.
Are you ready to get started, but want some extra support during initial implementation? Get in touch with the Business Success Consulting Group. We are here to help!
