For 99% of organisations, providing a high quality customer experience is a top priority. The challenge countless leaders face however, is making their team follow a process that consistently enables them to deliver.
Whether you operate at a single site or across multiple locations, a lack of adherence can open the door to missed opportunities and costly mistakes.
“Consistency requires a commitment to making a lasting change.”
BrightWork
Such risks can leave leaders awake at night, worrying how to get everyone aligned to improve consistency and elevate experience.
Showing Your Team How To Follow A Process
Ensuring process adoption doesn’t simply happen overnight.
It takes time to learn what is working, what needs improving and what tools need to be put in place to hit your targets.
Only then can a process can be effectively introduced, controlled and followed.
“Processes shouldn’t be operated with a set and forget mindset.
You need to be consistently evaluating what is or isn’t working and use that information to build more ideal systems.”
Wrike
Implementing a standardised, best practice approach to common tasks and procedures takes more than finding the right templates.
Your team also needs time and stability to improve project outcomes and measure overall progress.
The benefits of achieving consistency are innumerable.
The challenge is how to make your team follow a process in the first place.
Here are 3 simple steps you can follow, to introduce consistency at scale.
1) Pick & Document Your Process
The first step in any process journey is to focus your efforts. In that regard, it’s critical to concentrate on one process at a time.
“Developing consistency goes against human nature.
It’s burdensome, especially at first, and takes a lot of energy.
Don’t make the process even more challenging by trying to do too much all at once.
The trick is to pick one goal to focus on at a time.”
Workforce
Initiating change, receiving a positive reaction and securing adoption takes time. Too much at once can become disorientating.
Embarking upon a period of discovery can help you isolate the process most in need of improvement.
Take the time to collect all the relevant data, and discuss varying approaches with all contributors.
This helps identify what best practice for that process actually looks like.
Once that has been ironed out, it’s time to formally document your new approach and begin rolling it out.
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2) Implement & Scale Your Process
The next stage is implementation. A top tip is to start small and scale up.
This will ensure any roadblocks are removed and everyone understands what is expected of them.
“When everyone on the team can access the necessary information, you’ll find more consistent performance from employees.”
The Balance
Once your process has been tested via real world application, you can not only demonstrate success, but explain to any concerned employees how following the process will be of benefit to them personally.
Having each individual, store or region working to the same format means fewer gaps.
Accountability increases and transferable insight elevates the abilities of everyone involved.
Rather than stumbling at the first hurdle, a consistent process ensures your teams can adopt a winning formula for maximum performance.
3) Manage & Engage Your Consistent Process
Research suggests that it could take months to permanently change your behaviour. The key to a successful adoption is to benchmarking.
“If you’re not benchmarking your performance, you’re just playing with yourself.”
10 Essential Skills For Process Management Success
By celebrating the small wins you achieve along the way, you can keep everyone engaged whilst proving the positive impact.
With your process selected and implemented; there is only one real way to ensure your team follow it consistently.
A way to guarantee that, no matter what, everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet and presenting your customers with the best experience available.
That is to create a culture of engagement.
“When conducted effectively, streamlined processes can revolutionise a business, setting it on an upward trajectory to outperform all competitors.”
PROCESS MANAGEMENT 101
Investing the time in discovering your best practice workflow, implementing it’s application across the team and managing it’s ongoing operation is the only way to deliver the best version of your business, 100% of the time.
And it is through communicating the value of consistency to each contributing actor that engaging with process, and effectively managing actions on an operational scale, becomes second nature.
Effective process management allows for the same experience to be delivered irrespective of how, where or why a client interacts; no matter how dispersed your teams.
It is through consistency at scale you can begin to see wholesale improvements for the better.
Updated 20/9/2022
Ready to explore how Anthill can help your team follow a consistent process? Schedule a demo today.
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- September 20th, 2022