Editorial
Efficiency and effectiveness are crucial for achieving organizational success and sustainable growth in today’s competitive business environment.
According to the Boston Consulting Group, companies that fail to meet their cost targets underperform on total shareholder return by an average of 9 percentage points. In 2024, respondents achieved only 48% of their cost-saving targets and struggled to maintain efficiencies beyond two years.
To move beyond reactive cost-cutting, companies are streamlining operations and developing competitive capabilities that sustain a cohesive and productive employee experience. Cultivating efficient workflows is a powerful strategy to help achieve business goals and reduce employee frustration to enable more focused, meaningful work.
Defining Workflows
Workflows are structured sequences of activities with defined inputs designed to produce specific business outcomes. They are the backbone of organizational processes, ensuring that tasks are completed in a logical, efficient and consistent manner by assigned actors, whether human or agentic AI.
Workflows have evolved significantly over the years, transitioning from manual, paper-based processes to sophisticated, automated systems. This digitization enables greater precision, automation and scalability, and results in faster cycle times, reduced errors and real-time tracking.
For example, employees once filled out paper forms for leave requests, which were manually passed to managers for approval and then sent to HR—a time-consuming and error-prone process. With a digital leave management system, employees submit requests online, which are automatically routed to managers for approval and then updated in HR and payroll records.
Workflows are increasingly incorporating autonomous systems, which can independently execute tasks, make decisions and adapt to changing conditions, further enhancing efficiency and effectiveness. Some examples include smart inventory management systems, automated customer response and support, and autonomous scheduling systems.
Developing Workflows
To develop effective workflows:
- Identify the process and outcome to streamline.
- Visualize steps and inputs using flowcharts.
- Define roles and responsibilities.
Following these steps helps you build an understanding of the work so you can identify areas for improvement. Often, this exercise is limited within one’s functional or organizational span of control, leading to siloed workflows.
Workflows should be developed within the context of the end-to-end employee journey, free from organizational or user-driven boundaries and constraints. This approach allows you to anticipate needs and address potential issues before they impact employees.
“Too often during design, teams miss the opportunity to re-imagine end-to-end workflows with the focus on end outcomes and employee experiences,” said Deepika Sharma, head of data and AI US at Kyndryl Consult.
She held up an Order-to-Cash (O2C) process for a food manufacturing company, which spanned multiple teams and systems, as an example. Without a well-defined workflow, inefficiencies like order holds and invoicing errors can occur. A unified O2C workflow proactively connects these functions. This ensures upfront credit validation, automated inventory checks and seamless invoicing upon shipment with accurate pricing and tax calculations.
Measuring key metrics like order accuracy, fulfillment speed, and dispute resolution rates helps refine the process over time. A well-structured workflow before ERP implementation prevents reactive fixes and creates a foundation for automation, efficiency and a seamless experience for employees, distributors and customers.
Refining Workflows
Workflow refinement requires a commitment to measurable processes and a culture of continuous improvement. As the well-known management principle states: “You can’t improve what you don’t measure.” By tracking key metrics such as cycle times, error rates and process costs, organizations can make data-driven decisions to enhance their workflows.
Integrating continuous improvement into performance management ensures that the quest for better processes is part of daily operations. This includes test-and-adjust rollouts, user training and workflow automation tools to eliminate inefficiencies. A prime example is Toyota’s application of the Kaizen philosophy, which focuses on incremental improvement and involving employees at all levels. In 2024, Toyota’s Kaizen practices led to a 15% reduction in production cycle times and a 20% increase in manufacturing productivity.
Workflow automation platforms that support process modeling, execution and measured optimization can help sustain these continuous improvement efforts. Platforms like Camunda, Flowable and others offer features such as Business Process Model and Notation for visualizing workflows and Decision Model and Notation for embedding rule-based logic. These tools help teams to document, analyze and refine processes while orchestrating execution and monitoring in real-time. By using such tools in their operations, organizations can enhance efficiency, responsiveness and scalability.
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Key Steps for Core Principle #3
- Invest in workflow development: Allocate resources to develop and refine workflows. By following these steps, organizations can ensure their workflows are efficient, integrated and continuously improving.
- Pay Attention to Workflow Boundaries: Boundaries that define workflows can often lead to a siloed perspective. Ensure that workflows are unified and integrated across the organization to avoid fragmentation and inefficiencies.
- Use metrics to measure efficiency & effectiveness: Metrics such as cycle time (the time it takes to complete a workflow) and error rates (the frequency of mistakes within a workflow) are crucial for assessing the performance of workflows. These metrics help identify bottlenecks and areas where improvements can be made.
- Anticipate Needs and Create Delightful Experiences: Unified workflows can reveal opportunities to anticipate employee needs and create delightful experiences. This involves pre-service, where potential issues are addressed before they arise, enhancing the overall employee experience.
Investing in well-designed and continuously refined workflows not only improves efficiency but also helps create a seamless, integrated experience for employees. This, in turn, leads to better business outcomes by breaking down silos, enhancing collaboration and anticipating employee needs.
In our next article in this six-article series, we'll delve into Core Principle #4: Connect Platforms for Humans, which will explore how to integrate beyond data. Stick around!
Editor's Note: Read more thoughts on how to improve the digital employee experience below:
- 7 Product Mindset Principles That Changed My IT Leadership Journey — The lessons I learned from product design helped me consistently generate operational excellence and business value. Here's what you can take away.
- A Comprehensive, Actionable Model for Employee Experience — A common approach to employee experience tells you to improve the "moments that matter." I suggest you should pay attention to the other 90% of employees' time.
- Creating Exceptional Employee Experiences: Where HR, Communications and Technology Unite — Employee experiences cross departmental boundaries. So to create exceptional EX, multiple departments must work together – with internal comms in the lead.
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