How to Avoid Bottlenecking in Your Processes & Business
Our productivity is too closely tied to our profitability and scalability potential to let it go undernourished. Understanding how our teams are getting work done is critical to expanding services offered, scaling client acquisition, and maintaining high service quality.
When we ignore productivity and processes in our business, it can go bad as quickly as cold milk is left out on the counter. Collaboration can collapse, project timelines get drawn out, and dissatisfaction rates - for clients and teams - can increase.
When our teams operate efficiently, positive outcomes are relentless. Collaboration increases as bottlenecks and roadblocks dissipate, creativity and innovation are naturally reinvigorated by happy teams, and time waste is significantly reduced while service quality is maintained or increases.
To reach this dreamy state in our teams, we must recognize and eliminate bottlenecks. This means confronting issues in our processes and working to implement practical solutions.
Critical Feedback Times / Company Check-Ins
Our most significant and most often voiced piece of advice is always around communicating with employees. Ignoring our employees’ voices is a common mistake in process improvement and strategic planning. Leadership should frequently be checking in with employees in open team meetings like Critical Feedback Times or one-on-one check-ins to uncover issues and challenges, and address them.
It’s not uncommon to have teams that are not initially comfortable with voicing ‘complaints’ or calling out team members for possible bottlenecks. So, questions that initially focus on improving the employee’s day-to-day can have more impactful answers. Ask questions like:
If there was an assistant that only worked for you, what would you give them to do so you can focus better?
What’s something that you feel we could and should be doing better?
What’s a challenge that seems to keep popping up for you?
Block Off Back Log
Even with smart team capacity planning and timely hiring, the backlog can still occur with internal and client projects. Encourage your team to regularly block off time on their calendar to clear out overdue items. These should be standing times on calendars that teams should try hard not to reschedule. With severely long lists of overdue items, teams should schedule this time weekly. As backlog becomes less frequent, a monthly or quarterly time block suffices.
This is also applicable to management, not just lower-level employees. Often, management can become bottlenecks when items need their review or approval.
Create Lean Processes
Action should always follow critical feedback times or productivity check-ins. Evaluating the processes affected by the challenges that your team brings up is crucial to address a bottleneck.
Lean processes are focused on the quickest way to get the inputs in an approach to the outputs or objectives without sacrificing quality. This often means asking why a lot to determine the point of all the tasks that go into a process and the value-add of those tasks. Low-value add tasks can often be eliminated while medium and high value-add tasks can be evaluated for efficiency.
Evaluate Collaboration Approaches
Beyond executing tasks, teams need efficient ways to collaborate to keep projects and innovation moving forward. Conference calls and back-and-forth emails are not sufficient to facilitate collaboration that leads to timely project completion rates or innovative ideas.
Consider using collaborative task management systems such as Monday.com to streamline management reporting and provide teams with spaces to share information and track progress easily.
Bottlenecks are common. They aren’t signs of failure, they are simply signals for improvement. When we can learn to build in time to review, recognize, and improve these issues then we consistently move toward an efficient, scaling business.
To kickstart your path, consider booking a Productivity Analysis. We’ll listen to your business goals, objectives, team challenges, processes, and system utilization to determine your bottleneck root causes and create clarity around specific action items to eliminate them.