What takes up most of your time during the day?
We naturally think about the little things, like being interrupted by calls and emails (yes, and social media!). Those do suck away a lot of time, but whether you’re running a business or managing an association, I believe the worst offenders are relatively unseen: the time we spend fixing mistakes, reinventing the wheel and missing opportunities.
For businesses, I’m talking about the delayed payment because of a glitch in invoicing, the sure-thing client who wasn’t followed up with in time, and the team member who’s struggling because they weren’t trained properly. For associations, it might come in the form of a member who didn’t renew because they didn’t get a reminder, the educational event that wasn’t well-attended because the word didn’t get out to people on time or at all, and the harmful regulation that was passed because the legislative committee was understaffed and disorganized.
Whether these situations result in lost money or lost opportunity, what they all have in common is that they result in more stress for you and less success for your business or association.
The solution is automatic processes.
What Automatic Processes Are and Why They’re So Important
That phrase automatic processes doesn't sound very sexy, but processes are the workhorse of any organization. They take complicated tasks—like following up on leads, onboarding new members or new employees, planning a meeting or event, or completing a job—and transform them into a set of neat, reliable, repeatable steps that anyone with the right training can follow.
Processes guarantee that the work of your association or business gets done smoothly, well and on time and that your members or clients have an amazing experience that makes them want to keep being members and clients and also refer you to others. They save you and your team time and energy. They make the work you do feel less like work and more like the mission you’ve always dreamed it could be.
Sound too good to be true? It’s not. In fact, processes are so powerful that there’s even a process to make designing them easy.
The Process of Designing Processes
Whether you’re designing a process for invoicing, gaining members, running a job or planning an event, this four-step process is the key to making the process of designing your process smooth and effective.
Let’s take those one by one.
Step 1: Prioritize
You can’t, and shouldn’t, try to create processes for all of your functions at once. Some have a bigger impact on your business or association than others; rank ordering will give you a sense of which ones are most important. To do this, assign each function in your list a number that signifies its impact on your association or business:
- 1—Functions with the biggest impact on your bottom line, client or member satisfaction, or team effectiveness
- 2—Functions essential to the running of your organization but that have a lesser impact on finances and on your clients, your members and your team
- 3—Functions that have to get done but aren’t critical to the running of your association or business
Step 2: Design and Document
Now that you have your rank-ordered list of functions, it’s time to lay out the steps required to achieve those functions. There are three steps to designing and documenting a process:
- Decide which process you want to design first.
- Design the process.
- Document the process.
Decide Which Process to Design First
Go back and look at your list of priorities and select one function to build a process around. The point of prioritizing was to help you get a sense of the functions that have the biggest impact on your association or business. That doesn’t mean the function with the biggest impact is the first function you should design a process for. It might be, but it also might be a lower-ranked function that creates a painful bottleneck, preventing other functions from getting done. You might even design a much less impactful administrative task first. By designing a process that an assistant can follow, you get that task off your plate so you can focus on the more important functions involving complex processes that will take more time and attention to design.
If your business or association is struggling financially, I recommend that you start by creating a process for a function that will bring in more revenue quickly. That doesn’t necessarily mean sales; finding and closing new business takes time. I find that a lot of businesses and associations lose money through attrition: that is, customers don’t pay in a timely manner and current members don’t renew. Designing a process to streamline invoicing (and following up with non-payers!) or membership renewal (and following up with non-renewers!) can have an immediate, positive impact on your bottom line.
Design the Process
For each function, list the distinct steps required to perform it, like when you had to write How to Make a PB&J Sandwich in grade school. Be sure to include who is responsible for each step, and if there’s a deadline or timeframe it needs to be done in. Get detailed! Don’t skip a step just because you think it’s obvious. A well-designed process is detailed enough that it can be used to train someone new who has no idea how the process works.
Be sure to draw on the expertise of the people who are already doing it. Your team members, whether they’re employees or your association’s board, committee chairs and volunteers are an incredible resource. Not only do they know how the job is done now, they probably have great ideas for how to make it better. You can also reach out to people who are on the receiving end of the function: For instance, if you’re working on a process to streamline communication, survey your best clients or your membership to learn what they do and don’t like about how they receive messages from you.
Document the Process
The difference between design and document is significant: You might design a process that is going to transform a function for your organization by making it easy, consistent and impactful, but if no one knows about it or implements it, it’s not going to do a darn thing for you.
So, formalize that list of steps you made above. Make sure the process includes all of the details someone will need to implement it. A flowchart can be a helpful visual aid. This one is a work order process flowchart showing the steps one needs to take from the moment a work order is received, all the way through doing the job, invoicing and following up with a customer satisfaction survey. Click on the image to expand it.
Share the document with the people who will be responsible for implementing it, and ask for feedback. Their questions, concerns and points of confusion will be invaluable in the next step: Implement.
Step 3: Implement
In order for processes to work they way they should, you need to make sure that the people who will be using them see their value and that they have the training and support they need to use them.
Please don’t skip that first piece: helping people see the value of a process. If a team member doesn’t see the value in a process, they’re not going to waste their time changing how they do things. If you were able to involve your team in the design and documentation, they probably already see the value. If the process is new to them, help them understand how it will make their job easier, better and more effective.
Then, provide the training they need to implement the process smoothly and easily. Finally, provide support as they start using the process in the real world. Even the best-designed process won’t be perfect out of the gate, so tweak as necessary and, after a period of time, take some time for Step 4: Revise and Improve.
Step 4: Revise and Improve
Processes are not one-and-done. As your organization and your team grows and changes, as the economy and your industry shift, and as you and your team learn about what works best for your association or business, your processes need to keep up. Set up a schedule for revisiting your processes; solicit ideas for improvement from those who use them most and those who are affected by them most. Don't forget to provide training and support when you make changes, to ensure the best buy-in and implementation.
Rinse and Repeat
The four steps above are the same four steps you’ll take for all of your processes:
Step 1: Prioritize. Rank order the functions of your business or association by the impact that they have so that you can prioritize which functions to design a process around first.
Step 2: Design and Document. List out the steps that need to be taken to smoothly, efficiently and effectively accomplish a function, consulting with team members where you can. Formally document those steps to share the process with others; where appropriate, include a visual aid like a flowchart.
Step 3: Implement. Get buy-in from your team on the value the process will bring to them and the organization. Help them succeed by providing through training before implementation and support during implementation.
Step 4: Revise and Improve. Revisit your processes on a regular basis to make sure they’re accomplishing what they should, and make improvements where you can.
Once you’ve taken those four steps with your first process, go back to your priority list and pick the next two or three to design, document and implement—or to assign to others to design, document and implement. Once you—and your team—get the hang of it, you’ll really start to see the powerful impact that processes have on the success of your business or association. You’ll also find that you’re getting more done, in less time, with less stress, and that your clients and members are benefitting, too.
Don’t Wait to Tap Into the Power of Processes
Over more than two decades of running associations and my own businesses, and studying and coaching other businesses and associations, I’ve found that for every one hour you work on your business, you save three hours or more in your business. When I talk about working on your business, I often talk about big picture things like getting excited about your vision and mission, remembering why you’re doing what you’re doing and putting together a Strategic Plan (read more about this in my blogs Leveling Up Your Business and How to Start Dreaming Again). Processes are a highly tactical way of working on your business. They can tap into the power of the excitement you have for your vision and mission and help turn that into true success.
Even if you have to start small, start designing processes for your organization now. Each process you put in place gets you one step closer to developing a system that creates a great experience for your clients and members, your team and yourself.
