After
17 years of doing business turnarounds, I can tell you that most entrepreneurs
spend 25 to 50% of their day doing tasks that could be done by a staff
member. Instead of doing the work of
the president, these business owners get into the rut of doing clerical and
administrative tasks. The work of the
president is to focus on tasks that impact long term profitability and business
health.
If
you want to rid yourself of tasks that you should be delegating, make your
staff a lot more productive, and make your customers a lot happier, then
STANDARDIZE all the important tasks in your company.
Everyone
does things differently. There is something about human nature that pulls
everyone in a different direction. Every day you will see your employees start
jobs in different ways and proceed through them on different paths. Sometimes
this works and sometimes it does not. The problem is you have no way of
predicting exactly what result will be accomplished. You can't even predict
whether or not the job will get done or whether your people are even working
toward the right goals!
Now
there is a way to organize your work place so you know that everyone will be
working toward the same goal and moving along the same path. You need to
flowchart your workplace and your work process. This should be used as a
training tool to keep your employees informed as to the goal and the means of
getting there. The next time you see people pulling in opposite directions,
take the time to figure out why and you will see that they either don't
understand the goal in the same way or they have chosen vastly different ways
of getting there.
Let’s
Get Started
Then
the next time you decide on a project or task you want to accomplish, write
down the goal as clearly as you can. This will be your starting point and you
should now think about a path to get to that goal. After you know where you
want to go, list the first step in the process of getting there. You can then
list general headings of information and steps that you know you will encounter
on the way to your goal. Block each of these out as a sub heading on a path.
Connect these together so that people understand where you want them to go and
how you want them to get there.
You can use flowcharting on any sort of task that comes up involving a long chain of information or decisions. The next time you go into retail store with a return, watch how they handle it. If they are completely confused and disoriented, there probably isn't a standardized way of handling the process that the person you are dealing with can easily access and understand. This is the kind of task that can be flowcharted and thus easily used by almost anyone who has been familiarized with the idea of flowcharting. Flowcharting is a powerful tool when you need to standardize your workplace and train your employees. Standardizing your work place will save you time and headaches and in the end it will increase your profits by eliminating wasted time and unhappy customers.