“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who watches the watchmen?)” – Decimus Junius Juvenalis (Juvenal), Roman satiric poet

We’ve spoken before about the importance of meeting high standards with your work.

We’ve also covered, in detail, how failure to comply with industry standards and bad processes cost Zenefits $7,000,000.

This all happened because they weren’t meeting the standards they should have been with their internal processes.

To help stop you from falling afoul of the same fate, we here at Process Street will be covering compliance audits in this post. These are the guidelines that you will need to follow to avoid penalties from external sources for not doing your work satisfactorily.

It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – compliance audits are there to make sure that your customers are getting a satisfactory (or, at least reasonable) service.

We’ll cover:

• What is a compliance audit?
• Why is audit compliance important?
• Compliance audit types
• How to prepare for a compliance audit
• Process Street: The natural compliance audit software

Let’s get right into it.

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Business is forever changing and evolving. The things you need to do to stay up to date can be daunting but the alternative is falling by the wayside.

Plus, when 78% of millennial customers won’t give you a second chance, your day-to-day interactions count more than ever.

That’s why you need a solid knowledge management system. It’s the only way to reliably manage the resources available to your team and make sure that everyone can perform to the best of their ability.

So, today on the Process Street blog we’ll be covering:

• What is knowledge management?
• Why does knowledge management matter?
• The history of knowledge management
• Types of knowledge
• How to build a knowledge management system
• Manage your knowledge effectively with Process Street

Enough dawdling – let’s get started!
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When your average pitch is worth $5,800 per second you can’t afford to get things wrong.

You have an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds to convince potential investors that your business potential is worth their money.

Oh, and that you know what on Earth you’re doing.

That’s a lot of pressure for any business owner. So, we here at Process Street have taken our own experience pitching to 2,500+ investors, venture capitalists, and business owners to give you the ideal formula for creating a winning pitch deck.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a pitch deck?
• How to make a pitch deck
• Why should you believe this works?
• Pitch deck examples

Let’s get started!

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“… 71% [of organizations] said their leaders are not ready to lead their organizations into the future. Only 25% of organizations said they had a ready and willing successor identified for one out of 10 critical leader positions.” – Brandon Hall Group, State of Leadership Development 2015: Time to Act is Now

Great leadership is like electricity.

Without study, it’s a one-shot, lightning-in-a-bottle event. However, with a solid theory to explain how it works and how to harness it, you can use it to power your team like a well-oiled machine.

That’s why it pays to know your leadership theories, and why this post from the Process Street team will teach them to you.

Using these theories of leadership you can analyze your leadership style and find out what kind of leader you are and how to more effectively manage your team.

We’ll be covering:

• Great man theory
• Trait theory
• Behavioral theory
• Contingency theory
• Transactional theory
• Transformational theory
• Situational theory
• Leader-member exchange theory
• Power and influence theory

However, before we get stuck in, let’s have a quick recap on why these theories matter…

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“To put it bluntly, goals are for losers… goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.” – Scott Adams, Scott Adams’ Secret of Success: Failure

Matching up systems vs goals might seem odd but the truth is that you should be using one and not the other.

Let’s be honest – we’ve all set goals that we’ve never met.

From broken New Year’s resolutions to a failed career as the next big rockstar, goals have a nasty habit of not being met.

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert thinks much the same in his book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life.

He identifies that everything wrong with goals can be solved by instead applying a regular system to complete your tasks.

I scoffed at first but then realized that I’d done precisely that to lose 70 lbs in six months and learn the piano.

That’s why today I’ll cover:

• What are goals?
• What are systems?
• Systems vs goals
  • Systems replace motivation with routine
  • Goals are hard to follow up on
  • Systems are consistently rewarding
  • Goals carry a more negative mindset
  • Systems are more realistic and flexible
• Turning goals into systems
• How to build systems

Let’s get started!

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Sometimes the full range of process management features can be overwhelming.

We here at Process Street know that we can’t please everyone. However, if you’re going to use a Process Street alternative, we’d rather tell you about them from our own accounts than throw a bunch of marketing at you.

That’s why we’re covering some common Process Street alternatives in today’s post.

To skip to a particular section, use the links below:

• Process Street (for context)
• Process Street alternatives
  • Office 365 (Microsoft Word)
  • Google Suite (Google Docs)
  • Airtable
  • Trello
  • Asana
  • LucidChart
• What’s your choice?

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“I realized I had a challenge… [people] didn’t think they needed to be trained as a leader.

I realized I had a real uphill battle because people thought leadership was a noun.”

– John C. Maxwell, John C. Maxwell Defines Leadership

Not all leaders can lead effectively.

You might be a manager in name but that won’t inherently make your team like you, respect you, or do what you tell them to.

That’s why today I’ll show you the 10 main schools of thought for the behavioral theory of leadership.

By the end of this post, you’ll be able to identify what kind of leader you are, what kind of leader you want to be, and how to bridge that gap through your behavior.

If you’d rather skip to a particular section, go ahead and use the links below:

• What is the behavioral theory of leadership?
• The 10 types of behavioral leader
• The skills and behaviors of effective leaders
• How to build your leadership style into your processes

There’s also a free process template based on Ray Dalio’s methods up for grabs, so let’s get started.
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The following is a guest post by Priscilla Tan, a freelance content marketer for SaaS and Tech companies that care about making small businesses successful. Certified by SmartBlogger, her works have been spotlighted on places like Forbes, Inc Magazine, and CNBC Make It.

Did this happen to you?

You spent brutal months building your product solely based on your gut.

In a bid to keep your head in the game, you assured yourself, repeatedly, that success is just around the corner.

And yet, when you released your product to the public… it tanked. Sure, you had a few sign-ups, but no one stuck around.

As you slumped your shoulders in defeat, you questioned yourself, what went wrong?

You tweeted for help, hoping to find comfort. And you did. In fact, your tweet even went a little viral.

Founders, developers, and marketers in the SaaS space flocked in to share similar experiences. You read every single one of them, nodding your head along to their demoralizing tales.

Then… horror struck.

It hit you: you built your product based on false assumptions. And so did they.

Just as you were about to close Twitter, you stumbled on this tweet and it straight up punched you in the gut:

And there it is, the guilty culprit of unsuccessful products: the lack of customer research.

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Can you afford to lose $185 million?

That’s what Wells Fargo had to pay in fines after failing to apply a working risk management process.

Their lack of attention to the risk and pressure that they exposed their employees to led to sales practices that were bad enough to cause 5,300 employees to be fired and the penalty fines mentioned above.

Risk is inherent in everything we do – from conventional ideas of the risks in gambling to the chance of collisions while traveling. In business, risks can come from any direction and can severely impact your output.

Whether you wake up late and get less work done because of it or someone doesn’t get their work done on time and holds up the rest of the team, you need to be able to predict, prepare for, respond to, and monitor the things that can go wrong.

That’s why our post today will examine everything you need to know to build a risk management process to make your work watertight. We’ll even throw in a free, fully-built risk management process for you to use!

If you want to skip to a particular section then feel free to use the links below:

• Why you need a risk management process
• The risk management process
  • Set and align your objectives
  • Identify and document risks
  • Assess documented risks
  • Respond to risks
  • Monitor risks
• How to deploy a risk management process
• Your free risk management process template

Let’s get stuck in.

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Employee engagement is the key to having a productive team while also making them happy and motivated.

It’s also often thought to be a load of old rubbish that doesn’t exist.

I’m not about to defend how frequently some bandy about the term, to the point that it loses all meaning. It’s less of a hard factor that can be measured and more a collection of aspects that enhances your team.

However, considering that disengaged employees cost US companies $450-550 billion every year, it’s not something that can be ignored.

That’s why this post will show you what employee engagement is, why it matters, highlight 8 core strategies for how to improve employee engagement, and why communication is so vital.

If you want to skip ahead, you can do so using the links below:

• What is employee engagement?
• Why employee engagement matters
• Employee engagement strategies
  • Set clear values and goals
  • Show why their work matters
  • Communicate clearly and frequently
  • Create a solid, friendly company culture
  • Help employees with their problems
  • Give room for personal growth
  • Give recognition where it’s deserved
  • Set hard limits on work hours
• Communication is king

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