Is your business running at its optimal capacity or is something holding back your team’s productivity? Just as a literal bottleneck can restrict the flow of your favorite beverage, a business bottleneck blocks and delays your regular business processes that result in poor team productivity performance.
If you are a startup that is seeing uphill success but is growing faster than what your team can keep up with, you are experiencing a bottleneck. Likewise, if your company is well-established, but is losing efficiency due to outdated tools, tech solutions, or general team operation practices, you have a bottleneck.
Addressing “bottlenecks” with strategic management practices can help improve workflow efficiency … [+]
No matter the age, industry, or size of your business, bottlenecks can negatively impact your team. By implementing specific management practices, teams can eliminate bottlenecks and improve their workflow, leading to increased productivity and efficiency.
1. Prioritization of Tasks
Consider all the individuals that play a role in each business process or workflow. This could be management, staff, consultants, freelancers, vendors, etc. From your perspective, how can their workflow or business process tasks be better prioritized and made more efficient?
What about approval workflows? Are smaller tasks taking too much prioritization and stalling the process on a consistent basis? Are communications being lost due to workflow overload?
Task prioritization should also consider the software and technologies that your business uses. The age and efficiency of the software, technologies, and applications may actually be slowing down productivity or re-routing priorities to low-level tasks.
Despite these common bottlenecks that impact time management and task prioritization, as a leader you want your team to focus on setting priorities effectively. This may include practicing timeboxing to complete tasks, in addition to leveraging the expertise of other professionals, and knowing when to say ‘no’ to time-wasting activities. As a result, your team’s productivity, accuracy, and job satisfaction will improve by helping individuals focus on tasks with the highest priority during the workday.
2. Streamlining Communication
Effective communication is essential for teams to work together and be successful. According to a Holmes Report, poor communication cost organizations $37 billion in lost productivity. Meanwhile, studies since the Covid-19 pandemic have suggested a decline in communications among co-workers that has impacted team cultures and the physical and mental health of employees.
Common communication bottlenecks can occur for any organization and at any level of its hierarchy, leading to limited flow of information that impacts scheduling efforts and use of resources. This creates an unnecessary loss of your company’s time and valuable resources in an already strained economic environment.
To combat this, leaders can execute communication strategies that are able to deliver a positive impact on team productivity and your bottom line. At the forefront, this means providing feedback to employees to evaluate their workflow proficiency and highlight key achievements. Next, prevent communication overload by streamlining communications into existing company channels. Look to introduce an ‘open door’ policy to eliminate communication barriers outside of regular meetings and performance reviews, while also being transparent by sharing company news.
3. Implementing a Workflow System
Just as your teams need to prioritize tasks effectively, your organization also needs a solid workflow system in place to remain productive. Workflow bottlenecks can occur when process management systems remain slow and outdated, resulting in process complexity and inefficiency.
Unlike performer bottlenecks that often pertain to individual employees, system bottlenecks can occur due to inefficient system processes, system malfunctions or failures, and application errors. Such often results in poor employee satisfaction due to a backlog of incomplete work and heightened stress, along with lowered customer fulfillment rates.
While hiring additional staff and outsourcing or delegating last minute tasks have the potential to deliver improvements, having an all-around effective workflow system can improve team productivity by creating a more focused and aligned work environment.
Take for example software companies that experience shared environment bottlenecks that lead to costly release delays. These delays can cost millions in lost revenue. Software development leaders could instead implement an ephemeral environment solution, like Uffizzi, that provides their developers with on-demand environments that have a purpose-driven life-cycle. With a workflow solution like this, DevOps teams can be freed to focus on higher level tasks while developers can automatically provision as many environments as they need.
Although the objectives may be different for different types of teams, the benefits of implementing a workflow system to heighten team productivity are the same. Teams see less workflow redundancy, greater budget accuracy, heightened team morale, and improved customer satisfaction.
4. Encouraging Collaboration
When it comes to staying connected with employees across varied work environments, organizations must encourage efficient forms of communication, use of business technologies, and task prioritization. This isn’t simply done during the orientation process or team meetings.
The key to encouraging collaboration means building and empowering a strong corporate culture to drive positive business outcomes. If people don’t feel comfortable enough to contribute to project outcomes or challenge an idea, this shows that organic collaboration needs to be built by cultivating a positive, open team culture. This includes having leaders and managers that value and nurture talent relationships and invest in virtual collaboration tools that encourage teams to connect.
With this, leaders should consider how they can help both in-office and virtual teams connect outside of the work setting. Arranging fun activities, such as local social events or virtual coffee meetings, can foster greater inclusion and networking, while reducing feelings of isolation or burnout in employees.
Solving Bottlenecks Requires Strategic Implementation
Bottlenecks in the business world tend to be inevitable at one point or another. Nonetheless, the strategic implementation of management practices can transform team workflows and production.
From prioritizing tasks to streamlining communications and implementing workflow systems to encouraging collaboration. Each provides teams with the necessary tools for improving efficiency and building a productivity mindset to drive motivation. To help your team capture this continuous improvement approach, think about what gaps exist to eliminate or prevent a bottleneck in your team.
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