This is a guest post by David Miller, a technical writer & edu-tech enthusiast currently pursuing research in project management software. You can find him on Twitter, or writing for the ProProfs Project.

If I ask you to select a few colleagues in your company and take a survey of how well they understand their company’s culture, how do you think they’d score?

Not so sure?

Now, think about remote teams.

Teams you don’t even talk on a regular basis – how sure are you that they know your company’s values or culture?

Let’s take an example.

According to a PMI study, 83% of respondents spend at least an hour or two working remotely every day. Among which the percentage of remote employees stand at:

• 47% – Business Owners
• 47% – Managers
• 50% – Executives
• 36% – Team Members

Now, as you can see that most upper-management employees are usually working remotely with the company, and if they themselves don’t possess a firm grasp on company culture – how will they pass it on to their team members?

Usually, remote team members are simply assigned tasks with a due date and it is all professional.

But, what most companies don’t realize is that it is really crucial for everyone who is part of a company to understand their values and culture.

Continue Reading

What’s the worst that could happen? Risk management is one of the first things you should be thinking about when planning for pretty much anything in your business.

The truth is, risk inescapable; success of your business is not determined by your ability to avoid risk, rather by your ability to accept, plan for, and take advantage of the varying outcomes risk might present to you.

It might sound negative, but risk management is actually more optimistic than it seems.

The key takeaway is that successful risk management strategies are proactive, as opposed to reactive.

By thinking ahead, you can prepare for and prevent risks before they even have a chance to arise.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can use Process Street to streamline and automate your risk management approach, including:

• Getting started with the basics of risk management
• Common risk management misconceptions
• Risk management standards
• The risk management process
• Key principles of risk management
• Benefits of risk management
• How to automate risk management
• 30+ risk management templates (free!)
• More useful risk management resources

Hopefully by the end of it, you’ll have a better understanding of how to focus your risk management efforts into a forward-facing, proactive approach.

There are lots of ways to approach and prepare for risk, and this article will give you the tools you need to master risk management.
Continue Reading

This is a guest post from Brayn Wills, knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.

When customers deal with businesses, they expect a great experience. This means that some kind of customer support needs to be available to them, around the clock.

Of course, providing quality customer support with real human agents managing helpdesks 24/7 is an expensive proposition.

On the other hand, companies need to make it easy for customers to access information to solve common queries – this is a vital factor in the journey towards consistent, high-quality customer satisfaction.

Many organizations are now implementing customer self-service via traditional and online platforms to ensure that neither the business nor the customer suffers.

This helps them to deliver a double whammy of maintaining their overheads while improving their efficiency in customer service, both of which result in improved customer experience.

With the adoption of digital services, self-service is gradually minimizing the burden on live agents too. It is also allowing businesses to successfully meet customer expectations with regards to servicing queries in a more timely and regulated fashion.

However, going overboard with the automation of customer support self-service can be a risky move for businesses. While it may help in curbing expenses, it may take an adverse toll on customer satisfaction and the overall reputation of the business. Therefore, the key is to hit the right balance between man and machine.

Continue Reading

This is a guest post from Kyriaki Raouna, a Content Writer at LearnWorlds writing about marketing and elearning. She is an experienced career consultant and a content writer for SaaS.

User onboarding is one of the hottest topics of discussion amongst SaaS companies. You start thinking about it on day zero of your launch and continuously improving onboarding as your business grows.

Welcoming and educating users on the use of your product is a priority for software businesses, and while you scale, you will want to automate the onboarding process.

In fact, the quicker you do so, the better. Customer onboarding is a huge opportunity for every SaaS. Especially if you are working to increase sales and reduce churn rates.

When onboarding is combined with customer education, it becomes the ALPHA and OMEGA of activating users and ending up with loyal customers who are experts in your product and advocate for you.

Indeed, the biggest software companies with a highly valued brands use education as marketing and for user onboarding, but more on this later…

Continue Reading

We analyze and manage risks every day.

From crossing the street, correctly preparing food, fastening seat belts, to coordinating a journey via public transit. Each of these is an example of a risk management process happening in our heads; sometimes the result of “common sense”, sometimes these decisions are made unconsciously.

When it comes to business management, a more rigorous, formalized approach is needed.

One such strategy for managing risk is to utilize standards for risk management, like ISO 31000. This approach is useful in pretty much any situation, for organizations of all shapes and sizes, to manage risk in their everyday operations.

Managing risk effectively is essential to ensure businesses succeed and thrive in an environment of constant uncertainty. This post covers everything you need to know about ISO 31000; here’s a quick rundown of the article structure:

• What is ISO 31000?
• Benefits of ISO 31000
• Principles of ISO 31000
• ISO 31000 framework
• ISO 31000 process
• Importance of risk management leadership
• ISO 31000 and continuous improvement
• Automating ISO 31000

Continue Reading

If you want to grow your business, you need to know how to allocate your resources to make it happen. How do you figure out the steps you need to take, or the processes you need to implement to make it happen?

You conduct a gap analysis.

Simply put, the gap analysis is a tool designed to help you understand where you are, and what you need to do in order to get to where you want to be.

In this article, I’ll be breaking down the basics and running through a process for getting started with performing your first gap analysis.

Here’s what this Process Street article has in store:

• What is a gap analysis? In simple terms
• Common use cases for gap analysis
• Different types of gap analysis
• The gap analysis process
• Gap analysis tools
• How to streamline the gap analysis process

Let’s get started.

What is a gap analysis?

Continue Reading

What exactly is an “audit“?

The International Organization for Standardization defines it as:

“[the] systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.” – ISO, from ISO 19011:2018 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

That’s another way of saying someone takes a look at what you’re doing, gathers some evidence, and compares that evidence to what you’re supposed to be doing (in other words, a set of clearly documented requirements).

In the case of ISO, these requirements are known as standards. ISO 9001 is a standard. ISO 14001 is a standard.

Importantly, this understanding of audit implies that there are a few main things being considered by the auditor:

• What’s documented by the company (e.g. internal processes, policies, and SOPs)
• Evidence gathered to support how these policies, procedures, and SOPs are implemented in practice
• The requirements defined by the ISO standard being audited against (e.g. ISO 9001)

Audits performed by companies to assess and analyze their own management systems are known as internal audits. Many resources for guiding companies on how to perform internal audits exist, and foremost of these is the ISO 19011 standard.

For most management system standards, internal audits are an important requirement. Even guideline standards like ISO 26000 for social responsibility depend on reports to evidence the success of their implementations.

As such, ISO 19011 defines a set of guidelines; a framework for companies to plan, implement, and improve upon their audit programs, for auditing the implementation of management systems.

Since the first edition of ISO 19011 was published in 2002, many new management system standards have been published.

These standards often share a common structure, including certain requirements, terms, and definitions being used. That means ISO 19011 can be used to devise highly economic audit programs, wherein knowledge and processes can be shared and applied across various management systems.

By considering how they might take a broader approach to management system auditing and integration, companies implementing ISO management systems stand to save time, money, and confusion when preparing for and implementing internal audits.

The goal of this post is to provide a spring-board for understanding ISO 19011, and how to get started with internal ISO auditing. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is ISO 19011
• 7 principles of ISO auditing
• Different types of ISO audit
• Key elements of an ISO audit
• 8 free ISO audit templates

If you just want the free ISO audit templates, then here they are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Checklist for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 9001:2015 Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
• ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility Performance Assessment Checklist
• ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISO 27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9004:2018 for Sustainable Success in QMS Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist

Continue Reading

This is a guest post by Adlin Sherley, an enthusiastic writer specializing in social media marketing techniques. She has a healthy obsession with writing, reading and catching up with her friends. Her passion is to help people in all aspects of marketing through the content she provides.

If you have a product, service or even just an idea that is worth selling, how would you do it? How would you let people know?

In the world of business, certain principles have been relevant for centuries. The concepts of promotion and marketing have existed for as long as humans have been trading.

Humans have always used their voices to communicate, tell stories, and spread messages, which is why word of mouth is still one of the simplest yet most effective ways of marketing something.

Before the internet or advent of the printing press, marketing moved slower. Person A used or came across something that caught their attention, and then they went around spreading the word to B, C, D, and whoever else was along the way. Arguably, it was a lot easier to convince people back then.

One thing that has changed with the advent of digital technology, is the speed and reach of marketing and advertising tools.

Enter the digital era

As we enter into the age of information, technology has made reaching large numbers of people as easy as a single click.

On the other hand, this means that competition in the attention-economy is fiercer than ever, with the coveted-yet-fickle attention span of individuals the shining prize.

“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” – Lori Taylor (@lorirtaylor)

Analogies aside, marketing today is a matter of strategy; well-planned, well-implemented, and continuously improved upon. If your marketing strategy is bang-on, then there’s nothing stopping you.

Conversely, a single wrong move could set you back tremendously, and that’s why it’s important to establish a process.

Breaking down digital marketing

Continue Reading

Organizations exist to create value for their stakeholders. By setting objectives, developing strategies, following through and continuously improving processes, value is created.

That’s the ideal situation, at least. In reality, it’s not always as simple as making a plan and sticking to it. There’s always the risk that certain events could affect the success of these plans.

It’s the job of management to make adequate preparations to ensure that systems are in place to continue hitting objectives, even when the beast of unforeseen circumstance rears its head.

Enterprise risk management (ERM) is a direct solution to these kinds of uncertainties, allowing management to oversee the continual creation of value on a complete, integrated, organization-wide level.

By utilizing an effective ERM system, you can rest assured that the organization will see a consistently high success rate in terms of hitting objectives and KPIs.

Stakeholders of all kinds, from customers, suppliers, government and regulatory bodies are all increasingly interested in how businesses are implementing ERM. A well-implemented ERM system could set the foundation for many high-quality, long-term client relationships.

Equally, not having a proper system for enterprise risk management could mean your business is perceived as less competent, and could even result in loss of clients and damage to brand image.

In this post, I’ll discuss:

• Introduction to and basics of enterprise risk management
• Benefits of a well-implemented ERM system
• Core ideas of ERM
• Examples of different ERM approaches
• The enterprise risk management process
• Implementing ERM
• Automating ERM

To begin with, I’ll start by breaking down the full scope of an ERM system, and some basic definitions.

Continue Reading

In today’s business world, owners are constantly grappling with concerns and surmounting obstacles, the least of which is actually staying afloat financially in what can be an unforgiving economy.

However, the struggle to turn a profit pales in comparison to some of the harsher consequences of failing to comply with certain regulatory requirements.

Take HRIS broker Zenefits for example. Failure to comply with several licencing regulations issued by the California Department of Insurance landed them a $7million fine.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg; more severe penalties extend to include government bodies compelling you to dissolve your company, and ultimately the endangerment of the lives and well-being of individuals your organization is servicing.

“On a global scale, we are all being asked to do more with less—and for less. At some point soon, the current internal systems will not be able to hold back the deluge, and companies will be faced with a stark decision—consistently improve or perish” – Erik Myhrberg and Joseph Raciti, Practical Field Guide for ISO 13485

Often, these kinds of requirements take the form of the ISO 13485 standard for medical device manufacturers.

In this article, I’ll break down the ISO 13485 standard, from a basic introduction to suggestions and resources for implementing it in your business or organization.

Continue Reading