Fix Your Workflow: 5 Tactics to Improve Efficiency

Ever wish you could just take the process you have for something in your business, look at it and figure out, aha, that's how I can make it better. There's no magic wand for process, but there are some proven strategies you can apply to just about any process to make it just a teensy bit more efficient. There are probably hundreds of such strategies, but for the sake of YouTube and your attention span, I'm going to focus on just five today. Now, I know this probably isn't the most exciting of topics for most. So to make progress, process improvement a little bit more exciting, we're going to go over to the dark side. All right, so we have made it. Welcome to the dark side, my friends. Now that we are here, let's start thinking about our process toolbox. And yes, I realize this toolbox looks a lot like a mailbox because of my limited artistic abilities, but let's just think about what we might put into this mailbox toolbox thing when it comes to process. For me, the first tool I would add into this box if I was just getting started is one you've probably heard of before. It's often called batching. So let's just add this into our flow right here. Batching is referring to taking things that you do and doing them in greater quantities at one time. And let's just break that down a little bit first. When we think of batches, most often folks have a particular association in mind. Batch cooking, batch content, creating. Usually thinking of some kind of artistic pursuit. But at the very basic level, batching just refers to taking things you have to do. So you maybe get all these different boxes and triangles and other things, instead, do them in one big chunk. But in and of itself, putting things into a bigger chunk doesn't really feel all that exciting. How does this have anything to do with process? Well, when we look at something in smaller pieces, let's just put this as so. And we think about how we do work as human beings. And here's what typically happens. We go into the day ready to do the first thing. We have to take a few minutes to get acclimated, figure out what we need to work on. We start working on it, and then we're interrupted by something else. So we go back out. Then later on, we have more time to work on it. So we go back in, we start working on the circle phase. We have to forget what we did in the square phase, and then we work until we are done. Then we go back out, and we keep repeating this exercise for each step. Or chunk of the work that we are doing. And to be clear, by itself, there is nothing wrong with this approach. In fact, many popular productivity methods, such as the Pomodoro method, actually recommend you take big projects and break them down into little chunks. However, for many projects and many types of workers, this is actually going to produce a less efficient outcome than if we took things in bigger chunks. Not sure whether or not that's the case for you. Pay attention to the time it takes you to go in and out. Okay. If you're working on a project where getting into it and out of it doesn't take you very long, that context switching time of getting into your inbox or getting out of creative flow is very fast, then you probably will not have any issue doing exactly what's here. But if you're someone who needs to kind of get in the zone, and for you, this journey of going in to the project takes you 5 to 20 minutes every single time. Adding that up over this entire chunking process is going to be less efficient than if you were to take things in bigger chunks and have fewer context switches. So, erasing all of that here, what is our alternative? Well, rather than having these kinds of lines here in the middle, where we are taking and breaking things up into these smaller chunks, instead let's do a bigger batch. That means rather than spreading this out over four sessions, in this case, instead break things into bigger pieces. So you might work on the first half and then the second half in two larger work sessions rather than four sessions. Smaller work sessions. This means you only need to go in and out of the process two times rather than four times. And if you are someone that needs to really get into the groove, this will overall make the process more efficient for you. If you have a process where context switching is really time intensive, this could be a great strategy to try out. Just make sure you keep an eye out for your energy level. Okay, so your energy level is going to matter here as well. It can be very tempting to look at the project that you have here and say, hey, I'm going to be more efficient by batching, so I'm going to do this all in one giant chunk. And while that's great in theory, we need to also protect quality. An example here is that at ProcessDriven, I usually record two videos in each film session. But if I try to do any more than that, unless I'm particularly expired, the quality usually dips. And so for me, two batches is usually what I can handle to implement this. You could send Five emails a week rather than one email a day. Record two videos every other week rather than one video every week, and so on and so forth. Find ways to cluster like tasks together. Incorporate batches into your process. The next strategy you have at your disposal is what I call fewer batons. Now, let me just move this around a little bit here. What I'm referring to here is kind of a metaphor of a relay race. Now, if you haven't gathered, I'm not exactly athletic, so for anyone who did do track, excuse this probably butchered metaphor, but when I think of batons, I think of a relay race. You've got these steps you need to go through, and you've got a few checkpoints where the baton or the, you know, agency is handed off to the next person in the line. You've got a person here who's running to the finish line, and he's got a baton in his hand. And when he gets to the next checkpoint, he hands that baton off to the next person who runs the next leg. In a lot of the process inside our businesses, we will have batons that are being passed. For example, an approval process is a really common example of a baton pass. You might have one person who drafts, that's your person A. You have another person who proofs, that's person B, and you have yet another person who schedules, which is phase C together. Rather, A, B and C take you to the finish line as they pass the baton not once but twice to get you to that result. But what does all of this have to do with fewer batons in process? Well, not always, but often. Reducing a handoff, reducing a baton exchange moment will actually increase the efficiency of your process. Because every time a baton changes hands from A to B, from B to C, there is always a small chance that the baton is dropped, that you end up missing a detail, not sharing proper information, miscommunicating, or simply forgetting something that should have been known from an earlier stage in the process. Basically, the more handoffs, the more potential problems. The need for communication and the potential for miscommunication can increase with each handoff. So what's the strategy here? Well, let's take the process we have now of, say, draft, proof and schedule. And rather than having A, B and C three separate people working on it, let's get rid of one of the baton exchanges is let's get rid of this second one. So rather than two parts where we have to pass the baton and inform somebody else of what we've done in the past, there's only one time where that's happening. So in this case, rather than a person C doing the scheduling of the post, we instead have person B do both the proofing and the scheduling at the same time. This feeds into the same strategy I talked about before of batching, because technically now these two things can be done at the same time. But it has an additional benefit of also not needing to have communication happen because it's the same same person involved in both steps. Just like with our batching example before, though, this is a strategy to be used in moderation. You could, in theory, take this to the extreme and say, oh, if I want to have no handoffs, let's just have person B do all of these things. But as I'll talk about in the next strategy, there is a real value in having people be specialized in their space. And the checks and balances that come from having multiple people involved is often worth it up to a point. So that's the second tool for your tool belt when it comes to process, identifying baton handoff moments and eliminating the ones that aren't serving a purpose. The third strategy I want to talk through today is what I'm calling specialization. Kind of the opposite of what I just talked about before. Sometimes there can really be value in making sure that each phase of a process is done by a specialist, and this can actually result in a more efficient process. So once again, let's go back to that relay race example. We've got these different phases we need to go through in order to arrive at the finish line. Now, given that, let's pretend we have a person who needs to get us from point A to point B to point C. If we go to the extreme of the last example and we want to avoid baton passing, we might just say, okay, well, this person named Suzy, Suzy's pretty good. So, Suzy, just figure out how to get us from A to B to Z, figure out how to draft, proof, and schedule this social media post. Cool. Well, let's just say Suzy here, Suzy is really good at A to B. She can draft and proof posts like the best of them. So she's like, right there gets you to point B. But when it comes to scheduling, Suzy's not so great with technology. She's more of an artist, a creative, a storyteller. And so getting things scheduled accurately is a bit of a roundabout journey until she reaches the destination. Making the overall mileage of getting through that process, the overall efficiency lower than if you had somebody who was great at each leg. To solve this, we might Introduce a second person into the process called Matt. Matt is someone who has different strengths than Suzy because we want to hire chess pieces and not checkers on our team. And Matt is really good at getting from B to C. Given the task, Matt can get us from B to C super swiftly with no issues or errors. In this case, it might actually be more efficient for us to have a baton pass at point B, where Suzy hands it off to Matt to get a faster and higher quality result than if Suzy just did everything herself. In many cases, new business owners start off as Suzy. They're doing every single step of every single journey. And some of them they're great at, some of them they're okay at, and some of them they are just absolutely terrible at. And when it comes to early stage delegation, identifying these moments where you're just not getting to that result as well or as quickly as you could are usually the first areas where team leaders or business owners are going to want to delegate. But regardless of whether you're a business owner or not, identifying these moments can be an opportunity to introduce specialists for the overall efficiency of the process, because that efficiency gain is going to outweigh the cost of having a baton handoff. Now, these next two examples are ones that are going to be particularly helpful to service businesses out there, particularly this one, silent approval. Now, I'm sure many service providers out there are already familiar with this concept, but for anyone who's not, let's just go over it real quick. Silent approval is referring to what happens if there is silence when you're waiting for an approval. Yeah, I know, it's very good name. So let's just paint the picture. Let's say we have a beautiful file of a person's smiling face that we, as a photographer, want to send to the client for final approval. We send it via an email and we expect the client to get back to us. But one day passes, two day passes, three day passes, and still no response. In a normal service scenario, if the client does not respond by day three or all you do is panic, you don't know what to do, so you freak out and you hope that this client eventually gets back to you. You put their project on hold and you just kind of twiddle your thumbs until something comes back. But if you want to avoid the chaos of this feeling, you can introduce a silent approval at the time of giving the proof or and probably both in your client contract. What these kinds of clauses will say is something like, if I send you something to review, such as this and you do not respond as we saw here, then I assume it has been approved. So in other words, silence equals approval and I will move on with the project as I see fit or as we would normally do. This allows us to eliminate the panic and chaos phase of the journey and gives us clear parameters for when we're ready to move on, prevents us from being in a stalemate with a client and gives the client an incentive to to provide a timely response if they have a timely opinion. The thing to watch out for with these silent approvals, if you are going to move forward as so make sure that you're actually comfortable doing so. There's no legal or financial implications that this won't undermine the project and piss off your client. These are best used for intermediary approvals, not final project sign off. And make sure you're communicating it both in the contract and in the email. The absolute worst thing you can do is to ask for a review and then when the client gives the review, say, oh, never mind, I already moved on because I didn't hear from you. Oof, that's going to piss off a client and that's not the shit we want to be doing. So instead make sure it's in your contract with the help of your lawyer if needed and make sure you've got those pss, those reminders every frickin where that you have in front of your client's eyeballs and then you can enjoy the peaceful bliss of a silent approval. Sound interesting so far? Well, you're probably going to enjoy the last example we have here, which is carrot and sticks. Now odds are you've already heard this phrase before. The idea is, hey, you have carrots to encourage good behavior and you have sticks to basically beat people with if they do something that is not a positive behavior. Obviously all in a professional and ethical way. Silent approvals that we just talked about can fall into this stick category, but there's actually a lot more we can throw into this category if we really want to start thinking about this at a glance though, what sticks and carrots are when it relates to process is incentives. So if we have a process like this, we've got different phases we're going through and we're trying to make it more efficient in whatever sense that means all we want to do with carrots and sticks is to make sure that we are aligning the incentives of the people in the process with the incentives we have from a process engineer or business owner or leader perspective. For example, if your goal above all else is for speed. You really want to make sure that you are able to have all of your processes done super fast if that's the case for you. We want to make sure we have both carrots and sticks aligned to encourage that to be the shared goal, shared incentive of everyone involved in this process. For an example, let's think about something. Oh, what's a common process? Support tickets. Let's do that. So let's say we want to have timely support tickets resolution. We want to make sure when someone reaches out to us, we get a fast response. And as a team leader, that is the most important metric. If speed is our goal for the process, we want to make sure we're reviewing each step and each person involved in this process and ensure that their incentives are aligning with our overall goal of speed. Yes, we want some push and pull, but overall, if speed's what we're looking for, people should know that and should be able to measure their success or failure based on that metric. One way to do that would be to look at your process for handling support tickets and have a company wide key metric for the number of minutes, hours, whatever it takes to complete a support ticket. That could be just for phase one of how long it takes to reply, or it could be for the overall process of how long it takes to resolve the entire ticket. At each phase, we can report on this number to know which leg of the journey is speeding us up and which leg of the journey is slowing us down. With the goal being at all times that every single step of this journey people are thinking about the overall goal of speed. So what does this have to do with carrots and sticks? Well, once we've identified our metric, we can look at ways to reward or punish, for lack of a better word, meeting or not meeting a given goal for that metric. Maybe our goal is something like one business day response time. We could reward that behavior by giving a shout out to whichever representative was able to finish all of their tickets with none of them exceeding one business day. Or we could choose to punish folks who fail to meet that objective by maybe making a team wide call out to say, hey guys, we had three tickets last week that were not able to meet this one business day response time goal. Let's do better next week. Like this isn't acceptable as a group kind of rallying call. If you have a far more competitive culture, you could kind of combine these two and even do a scoreboard based on who has the fastest response times. However, if you're someone in a more collaborative culture like we have here. I would forego the competitive scoreboard approach unless that's your vibe, and instead stick to carrots for the most part. And if you are going to utilize sticks at all, make them team wide sticks and not specific to one person. So that's our final tool in your toolbox. The carrot and stick approach does not require us to change our process at all, but instead encourages us to use external factors like carrots and sticks that we are able to measure and quantify to motivate our team or motivate our participants to drive the outcome that we really care about most. By introducing incentives, excitement, competition, challenge, motivation, those human things into a process, we can actually see meaningful process improvement without ever having to whip out a process map or write an sop. So that rounds out my five Go to tips for when it comes to improving a process. I feel like I could probably make like a hundred videos about 100 different tactics. So if you'd like to see this number increase to maybe more than five, go ahead and write the word plus in the comments below to let me know that you'd like to see more videos like this. And if this was incredibly boring to you, well then yeah, you can comment that too. It's still good for the algorithm, so I'll take it either way though. Thank you all for watching this video and hopefully I will see you guys next week as we come back for our next one. And if you did enjoy this experimental new video type you don't mind me here on the dark side, please do let me know in the comments below because this was pretty fun to make to be able to just sketch along with you guys here. But understand if it's not for everyone or if you can't understand my cheesy graphics, that's all right too. Alright, so thank you guys and until next time, enjoy the process. I feel like I'm trying to draw like a friend for myself. Is that sad? I think that might be sad. There we go. Now I've got a friend. Like an Elvis hair kind of just looks like poop on his head. Okay, maybe we'll work on the hair for next time. Thanks for watching.