When working with your staff and setting them up to work within your office (or in a remote setting), it’s important to know how you can streamline their workflow. Their times is just as valuable to you as their employer as it is to them, and if you’re to ask them to work hard and with intelligence, you must give them the tools to do so.

This means that every now and again, it can be useful to inspect their workflow, listen to feedback, and implement solutions to make frustrating tasks easier to deal with. Note that this doesn’t mean reducing the volume or expected standards of the work they are given, rather that improving their tools to help them help you is crucial.

But where are you supposed to start with a task like this?

It’s all very well and good to discuss platitudes, but when you have to come to some hard conclusions, that’s when you must consider each decision wisely. Workflow is hardly comprised of separate elements also, so one decision could have united knock-on side effects.

With all this in mind, let us begin:

Give Them What They Need

Give your staff what they need. What do they need?

Don’t assume unless you talk to them. Also note that your staff needs aren’t always the most expensive or intensive requirements to grant. It’s rare for staff members to demand that you replace the entire office’s furniture with the new and more ergonomic range of office chairs just released. They might wish for the best options to manage print services however, to ensure their paperwork is routinely neat, tidy and easily produced.

It’s these little elements of productivity in a day that add up to the long-term workflow of your staff, and the time they spend chasing up tasks productively or in a frustrated fashion.

So – give them what they ask for provided they are reasonable requests, and see what the most repeated conversations are. Furthermore, balance the needs of the office against one another. A visual designer may need the office tailored to them in a much different manner than a social media manager, and so it’s important to understand how your decisions have a cohesive impact on your team. That’s a great place to start.

Train Them In New Software Suites

When new software suites come around, it’s very important to train them as appropriate. You cannot expect them to conform to the new standards, understand new plugins, and operate all of the new features without time to understand what those are. We must give them the chance to understand how to use their skillsets in the best possible manner.

Sometimes, an entire industry can be upended when software changes turn out to be worse than the methods we had relied on.

For instance, FinalCut Pro was once a very popular video editing program for MacOS. It then underwent changes that heightened accessibility, but truly removed the ability for professionals to work to an expected standard through that suite. Overnight, an entire industry switched to various other means, such as Avid Media Composer or the Adobe suite. And it’s not just media companies that need to consider this, changes like this can happen in call centre software, CAD design utilities, or even in the cloud suites you use to host your entire team’s documents backup resource.

For this reason, we must always work with staff to understand and learn the best measures going forward.

Alternate Working Opportunities (Remote Work)

If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it’s that the hard and strict limit of daily office attendance is anything but set in stone. If your business can slowly transition to offering staff more options for remote work, that could be a great idea. Meetings, for example, are becoming streamlined and more effective over Zoom and programs like it, industry wide.

To a degree this makes sense, in 2020, why does every attendant staff member need to be in the same office to communicate ideas when face-to-face online and encrypted communication can work well?

Alternate working opportunities like this can present your staff new possibilities for development. It might even be that you’re happy to invest in devices for them, or you allocate a fund to help your staff operate from home without having to worry about bootlegging their own set up. This will become the way of the future.

With this advice, we hope you can more easily take the artifice from your staff’s workflow, and ensure they become more productive as a result.

© New To HR