At the heart of every lasting business is a killer documentation process!
You perform them every day, but have you ever taken the time to actually map them out and document them? Using a process flowchart to represent your workflow offers a number of benefits for your business. One of the most important benefits is that it makes onboarding and training new team members much easier.
Representing Your Business Processes Visually
The best way to document your processes is to diagram them. It’s much easier for a new staff member to understand the workflow from a diagram representation than from a piece of text content.
Business processes are basically mapped out in flowcharts. A flowchart shows each step of a process in a square or other shape connected by lines or arrows. It illustrates how the task moves from start to finish.
Tips to Consider
Seek Team Feedback Writing down your processes isn’t just about documenting them. It’s about making sure they’re clear, comprehensive, and easy to understand. Having input from your team, especially for processes they know really well, is crucial. After documentation, you’ll also want to solicit feedback to make sure the documents are clear.
Start with the Big Picture
When teaching new employees a process, you have to start by giving them the big picture view of the task. Explain where this task fits into your overall business and what specific goal it’s meant to achieve. At the beginning of the process, give them the resources and tools they need and what other preparations there are, if any. For your documentation, you may start with a brief summary that explains this.
Create an Archive of Resources
Create an archive of all your business processes and make it available to our team. Encourage them to refer to these protocols as they learn. It will take some time before the job becomes second nature to them.
Why You Should Document Your Business Processes
Documenting your business processes helps you to train new team members, but it also helps in other ways. By investigating each process closely, you can look at ways of streamlining or improving. Sometimes, small things can have a big impact.
While perfection may be admirable, it’s also unrealistic. And needless. Your business flow of administrative tasks doesn’t have to run manually. There are ways to make many of these processes run more smoothly by standardizing, delegating, outsourcing, or automating.
Do you want to learn more about improving your business processes?
