With the market size of enterprise performance management expected to grow from $6.44 billion in 2017 to $11.72 billion by 2023, you know that to ignore it is to ignore something monumental.

Enterprise performance management lets you plan, structure, track, and improve your performance across the board. This isn’t something you want to ignore. 

You might want to know what’s going well and where the biggest improvements can be made. Otherwise, you may want to create achievable goals that don’t leave you overreaching or improve your tracking metrics with apps like Process Street. Either way, enterprise performance management is essential. 

That’s why, in this Process Street post, I’ll be breaking down precisely what it is, why it’s useful, and how to use it:

• What is enterprise performance management?
• What makes a good enterprise performance management system?
• Enterprise performance management benefits
• How to carry out enterprise performance management
• Process Street: The perfect addition to your enterprise performance management software

Let’s dive right in!

“What is employee engagement?“

I’d been explaining the ins-and-outs of my job to my family for a while but here I had to stop to give more detail. That’s when it hit me.

To most people, employee engagement is jargon.

They see it as an airy concept that doesn’t have a solid definition – it’s something that marketers point at to sell products and nothing more.

The reality couldn’t be further from that.

Employee engagement is a vital statistic to show the overall health of a business at every level. If you can better this statistic, it can result in massive benefits such as a 67% lower employee turnover rate and 21% higher productivity.

In this Process Street post, I’m taking you through what employee engagement is, how to measure it, and what you can do about it to get those lower employee turnover and higher productivity levels. 

• What is employee engagement?
• Reaping the benefits of an engaged employee
• Employee engagement: Can you put a number to it? 
• How to improve job satisfaction and increase employee engagement
• Stop, drop, engage! 

Let’s go!

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

It’s a subjective area that’s hard to measure definitively. As a result, there are those who view the concept as pure nonsense. Granted, there are those who throw the term around higgledy-piggledy, which certainly doesn’t help.

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:

• Why employee engagement matters
• Employee engagement strategies
• Mastering the recurring workflow
• Communication is king

Engage!
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Even tech giants have humble beginnings.

In the halcyon days, when Google was making the transition from a bedroom to a rented garage in Menlo Park, it won’t surprise you to learn they didn’t have a tight onboarding process in place.

For years, Google ran on a single, sprawling spreadsheet including a ranked list of the company’s top 100 projects. The projects were confusingly graded on a scale between “far out” and “skunkworks”, and the founders handled the process with a ‘who cares’ attitude.

Since that point, everyone knows Google has made leaps, not only in the Internet space, but also in the workplace. The company is the #3 world’s most valuable brand and the #3 best employer in America. They’ve made extremely effective tweaks to their hiring process over the years, but what isn’t reported as often is their approach to new employee onboarding — the process of getting a new hire equipped with everything they need to integrate into the company culture, work effectively, and succeed.

The wackier aspects of Google’s orientation process are widely known. We’ve heard about the Noogler beanies with motorized propellers, and the Mountain View all-Noogler TGIF meetings where the founders “just come in and make some dad jokes”. The inner workings of the process, however — the parts that make it so notoriously effective — aren’t as obvious.

In this article, I’m going to run through the nuts and bolts of Google’s ‘just in time’ employee onboarding process, and some of the supporting events that happen during.

• Google’s ‘just in time’ onboarding checklist
• Why Google’s checklist is laser-focused on company culture
• Hosting a series of intense lectures
• Educating about company culture
• Adopt Google’s onboarding process in your own culture

Let’s jump right in!
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No process is perfect; there’s always room to improve. Unfortunately, many teams have no way to identify, test, and deploy the changes they make, meaning each tweak is a roll of the dice.

The savings can be massive, but you need a continuous improvement program to make sure that the changes you make won’t make your operations a whole lot harder.

“1 in 10 improvements save money… [each saving, on average,] $31,043 in its first year of implementation.
1 in 4 improvements save time… [each saving, on average,] 270 hours in its first year of implementation.”
– KaiNexus, The ROI of Continuous Improvement

Most successful changes will also make your employees’ jobs easier (and more enjoyable) to perform. You’ll be saving time and money, but you’ll also be getting far better value out of your current efforts and operations.

However, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the top.

• What is continuous improvement?
• Incremental vs. breakthrough improvements
• The benefits of continuous improvement
• How to deploy continuous improvement
• Improvement resources to dive deeper

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Project management is the key to sticking to your budget and deadline, whilst keeping the most important tasks at the forefront of your company.

Without it, you leave the future of your business at the mercy of your teams and employees (which, in case you weren’t aware, is not a good business model).

For such an important process, the project management steps are a little muddy, with sources citing differing numbers of steps, timelines, etc.

Then again, it’s a massive topic with a huge margin for error; how the hell do you convey these steps when the project could be anything from “get winter clothes in stock” to “grow to $220,000 monthly recurring revenue”?

Well, we here at Process Street hate making things complicated, so we’ve simplified the project management steps of any and every undertaking to five easy stages:

• Conception and initiation
• Definition and planning
• Launch or execution
• Performance and control
• Project close

If you’re looking to structure your next big push, or you just want to set and track realistic deadlines, then this is the process for you. Then again, feel free to skip ahead to any particular step you’re after.
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Whether it’s regular stand-up meetings with your team, customer communication, delivering feedback, demoing a new feature, or leading a webinar, screen sharing apps are so useful in the remote workplace that finding the best fit for your needs is an important task.

Well you’re in luck, as there are many offerings to choose from, not least due to the recent explosion of remote work around the globe.

In this Process Street article, I’ll be covering all of the best screen sharing apps (including those with remote desktop access), with advice on price, features, and what each tool is best used for.

Here’s a quick list of the screen sharing & remote desktop software I’ll be looking at:

• Zoom (for a popular, secure, intuitive, feature-ful remote team choice)
• Google Meet (for more cloud storage)
• Microsoft Teams (for a focus on internal communication)
• Slack (for convenience if you’re already Slack-centric)
• Screenleap (for sharing screens with anyone)
• Join.me (for frictionless new user access)
• GoToMeeting (for better security & encryption)
• Whereby (for better control over who enters your rooms)
• Mikogo (for a quick, simple, browser-based solution)
• Demodesk (for sales calls and presentations)
• Drovio (for creative collaboration)

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Having an operations manual may not be glamorous, but preventing the disasters caused by human error and bad processes can save your business and even (in extreme circumstances) millions of lives.

If you’ve ever seen Dr. Strangelove, you’ll know it’s ridiculous. You’ve got a mad scientist, a cowboy pilot riding a bomb as it falls, and a nuclear holocaust brought about by a series of overblown human (and mechanical) errors.

Yet, despite being criticized as unrealistic, at the time it was entirely possible for human error to cause a Third World War. Hell, human error has already caused the worst nuclear accident to date.

“A perfect storm of 6 human errors — culminating with staff thinking it was ok to turn off the emergency cooling system — caused the Chernobyl disaster, costing an inflation-adjusted $720 billion, 30 deaths and an extreme amount of unsafe radiation.” – Ben Brandall, How Processes Protect Your Business From Crashing and Burning

The truth is, the only way to prevent such errors is to document workflows and processes, and the only way to make sure your employees know what they have to do, how to do it, and have the resources to do it is to create your own operations manual.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be covering:

• What is an operations manual?
• Why is having an operations manual important?
• What to include in your operations manual
• How to create an operations manual

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To do lists shouldn’t take hours to set up, nor should they be complicated. Every second you spend setting up your task list and preparing for the work ahead is time wasted instead of getting out there and eliminating items from your schedule.

You should be able to jot down your tasks, have just enough flexibility to work how you need to, and then get on with it. After all, aren’t to do lists meant to help improve your productivity?

Well, we here at Process Street decided to save you even more time by providing you with your ultimate to do list template list, including printables and interactive schedules.

• What is a to do list and when do you need to use one?
• Basic daily to do list templates
• Running a process to upgrade your to do list
• Weekly to do list templates

Let’s jump to it!
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Elisabeth Swan is the co-author of “The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit” and co-host of “The Just-in-Time Cafe Podcast.” She’s been a process improvement consultant, speaker, and innovator for over 30 years. She’s the Chief Learning Experience Officer for GoLeanSixSigma.com, a former cast member of ImprovBoston, and – if asked – may still be able to ride a unicycle.

Surgeon Atul Gawande made headlines when he told the world that a simple checklist could drastically reduce unnecessary deaths in The Checklist Manifesto.

Yet, checklists conjure images of forklift drivers on loading docks with clipboards counting boxes. How could they transform healthcare?

“He has… produced a 90-second checklist which reduced deaths and complications by more than one-third in eight hospitals around the world – at virtually no cost and for almost any operation.” – James Clarke, reviewing The Checklist Manifesto, Ulster Med J. 2011 Jan; 80(1): 54.

Aviation was transformed decades earlier when management and engineers at Boeing Corporation created the pre-flight checklist after the 1935 crash of the prototype Boeing B-17 at Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. Checklists have become so essential to the airline industry that most crashes can be traced to the misuse or failure to complete a checklist.

A New York Times reviewer noted, “no matter how expert you may be, well-designed checklists can improve outcomes”. Since the purpose of process improvement is improving outcomes, Lean Six Sigma and checklists are natural companions.

To prove that, this Process Street blog post will show the relationship between checklists and lean six sigma, and provide you with a free DMAIC Improvement Project Tollgate Checklist that you can use right now.

Use the links below to jump to that section of the post:

• Lean Six Sigma and the role of problem-solving
• Lean Six Sigma & the checklist
• Introduction phase
• Define phase
• Measure phase
• Analyze phase
• Improve phase
• Control phase
• Checklists and Lean Six Sigma
• Use Process Street to reduce error

Or, if you just want the checklist, check it out below!

Let’s get started.

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