An organization is only as good as its processes. Processes determine the difference between efficiency and waste; productivity and unrealized potential; happy customers and dissatisfied customers.
If your own processes are convoluted, cumbersome, or nonexistent, you’ll see a real difference in your business after implementing operational change.
Operational change is the process of modifying existing processes or introducing new processes and technologies to see improved business outcomes.
By accelerating operational change, you can streamline your business and deliver results by better enabling your team.
Why operational change benefits your organization
Some stand-out benefits of operational change include:
- Improved efficiency. Identifying and eliminating redundancies and bottlenecks in your company helps you accomplish more with the same resources. Increased efficiency helps reduce operational costs and enhance your bottom line.
- Increased agility. Midsize organizations must adapt quickly to market shifts to remain successful. Improving operations through process improvement and automation makes your business more agile, allowing you to respond more quickly to everything from customer requests to pressure from the competition.
- More sustainable growth. As your company grows, streamlining operations helps you handle increased production volume with ease—without a proportional cost increase.
- Improved employee satisfaction. Optimizing your processes means eliminating inefficiencies that frustrate your employees, and automating tasks lets you take mundane, repetitive tasks off their plates. This leads to a more satisfying work experience and better retention.
- Happier customers. Improving processes means you can maintain quality while delivering products more quickly. This leads to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Better risk and compliance management. When you optimize your current workflows, you can find and fix vulnerabilities in your processes. This helps mitigate risk and ensures you remain compliant with industry regulations.
5 actionable ways to enable operational change with your team
With the many benefits of streamlining and optimizing your operations, you might want to dive head-first into process mapping and automation. And while processes and technology do play a pivotal role, focusing on your people is perhaps the best way to drive operational change.
Let’s take a look at five actionable tips for putting people first while streamlining operations:
1. Make it easy to work remotely and on the go
If a little flexibility goes a long way, imagine how far a lot goes. The easier you make it for your people to work from anywhere, the more productive they can be.
In the post-pandemic world, maintaining productivity away from the office is more important than ever. A Pew Research Center study shows that 35% of workers who can work entirely from home do just that. And an additional 41% of people with these types of jobs follow a hybrid schedule.
One way to make it easier for employees working at home is ensuring they have access to fast, reliable communication services.
Voice over IP (VoIP) services—like Microsoft Teams or Zoom Workplace—allow employees to make local or international business calls anywhere, using any device. These platforms often come with integrated video conferencing so employees can meet people face to face without the expenses and downtime associated with travel.
Many communication platforms also offer additional AI-enhanced productivity features to save your employees additional time. Look for features like:
- Automatic meeting transcripts and summaries
- Customizable workspaces or whiteboards
- Optimized video feeds in meeting rooms
- Noise suppression to selectively reduce or eliminate background noise
- Schedule sharing to coordinate meetings effortlessly
“You need to help operationalize your people, no matter how they work or where they are,” says Leila Shamas, Culture & Employee Experience Leader at Nintex.
2. Encourage and enable collaboration
Choosing the right communication tools is important—but it’s not enough on its own. To drive operational change, you have to help colleagues connect whether they’re at the next desk, in another office, or across the globe.
Sometimes you might create live, synchronous opportunities, such as virtual meetings or celebrations. If funding allows, you might also provide employees from around the world the opportunity to experience a shared in-person team-building event or professional development. Creating live opportunities helps employees get to know each other and build rapport, making collaboration easier.
It’s also important to encourage asynchronous collaboration opportunities through email and messaging platforms.
“The Nintex product team, which has more than 300 people, does an async period once a year where they avoid wide meetings,” Shamas says. “They try to do everything functionally for a week or two through async communication—Slack messages, emails, etc.”
Asynchronous opportunities like these not only create a broader culture of collaboration but also help employees explore ways to improve their task completion when they experience meeting fatigue.
3. Provide constant access to information
For successful collaboration and smooth operations, you need to make it easy for employees to share information like documents and access business resources in a single place.
When information resides exclusively on your on-site servers, it’s in a silo. But when information is in the cloud, all you need is an internet connection to access it.
Consider these types of cloud-based tools to allow your team members access to updated documents:
- Process management tools like Nintex Process Manager to serve as a central repository of company process maps for training, onboarding, and troubleshooting
- Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce or HubSpot to manage customer data and monitor interactions in real-time
- Workflow automation tools like the Nintex to streamline document creation, capture information, and accelerate processes with bots
- Storage platforms like SharePoint to facilitate file organization and management and drag-and-drop file sharing
Pro tip: Use Nintex for SharePoint to automate workflows and create and share digital forms from your SharePoint environment. This allows your employees to manage administrative tasks or provide customer service from the same place you store your data and content for streamlined operations.
4. Streamline the customer experience
Empower your customers and design smoother interactions with your organization by automating your onboarding, support, and self-service processes.
Automated support—like automated text messages, emails, or chatbot responses—can also provide customers with notifications at every stage until their issue is resolved. Keeping clients informed improves customer satisfaction. It also frees up time your employees would have had to spend on routine customer service tasks—so they can tackle more strategic tasks.
Another way to offer a great customer experience involves providing your end-user with customer service and support options. Provide options, such as:
- Calling a support line
- Emailing a representative
- Chatting with a virtual assistant
- Accessing a knowledge base
- Submitting an online request form
For example, process fluids manufacturer Quaker Houghton wanted to empower their end-users—customer-facing sales and service personnel—to initiate lab requests in an online portal. Using Nintex Forms, the company created a form with fields and drop-down menus to collect details about a user’s fluid testing request. Based on these inputs, Nintex Workflow routes the request to the relevant reviewers and approvers. In a year, the solution has saved the EMEA-based labs about 200 administrative hours.
5. Improve employee engagement
According to a 2023 Gallup poll, 50% of US employees weren’t engaged (a phenomenon called ‘quiet quitting’), and 16% were actively disengaged (‘loud quitting’). Only 33% of US employees feel engaged with their employer.
That’s a problem. Engaged employees are more productive and less likely to leave for another job. And if you ask your employees which part of their job is least engaging, they’ll likely say administration. Nobody likes bureaucracy.
If you can reduce the most repetitive, time-consuming elements in their workdays, employees are less likely to zone out and lose enthusiasm, and more likely to give their all and live up to their potential.
With the Nintex Platform, you can combat this issue by automating even the most sophisticated business process with easy drag-and-drop technology. This saves even more time and effort for people across your organization so they can focus on meaningful tasks they enjoy.
In addition to automating routine tasks, most organizations also benefit from closely examining their culture. “You need to understand what makes people tick,” Shamas says. “You need to align your culture around what people actually care about and what motivates them to do good work.”
Some ways to improve culture—and see increased engagement—include:
- Revisiting your organization’s vision, mission, and values. “Your core values underpin all the things,” Shamas says. “They set the stage for how you expect people to behave, how you expect people to produce, and how you reward and recognize.”
- Surveying or chatting with employees to learn what matters to them. You’ll help them feel seen and develop a connection and loyalty that inspires them to go above and beyond for you.
- Tap your HR team for data on why people leave. Learning from the exit surveys of disengaged employees can help you learn how to improve your culture and support existing and new workers.
- Create a recognition roadmap. Develop a strategy for providing high-impact, timely recognition—and make sure your employees know about it. Rewards and recognition help employees feel valued and motivates them to continue putting in effort.
“You can’t grow without employee productivity, and you can’t have employee productivity without engagement.”
–Leila Shamas, Culture & Employee Experience Leader at Nintex
Boost team-wide operational change with Nintex
Operational change can help spur growth, improve efficiency, and increase revenue for your organization.
By listening to your employees and customers—and empowering them with the technology and support they need to succeed—you facilitate operational change to stay competitive in the marketplace.
The Nintex Platform helps you define and automate processes to improve customer and employee experiences. Request a demo to learn more about how Nintex can enable you to change and optimize your business operations.
