According to the American Management Association, one-quarter of workers seem to avoid responsibility on the job on average, and 21% of companies believe that the figure is as high as 30-50%. From these stats, it’s clear that low employee accountability is wasting company money on a massive scale.

At the same time, almost two thirds of employees believe their company does not have a strong culture. The link between these two factors is strong, argues management consultant and author Roger Connors. Connors blends The Wizard of Oz with now-influential writings on employee accountability in a series of best-selling leadership books including The Oz Principle and Change the Culture, Change the Game. In the latter, he says:

“Our experience proves that accountability, done the right way, produces greater transparency and openness, enhanced teamwork and trust, effective communication and dialogue, thorough execution and follow-through, sharper clarity, and a tighter focus on results. Accountability should be the strongest thread that runs through the complex fabric of any organization” — Roger Connors, Change the Culture, Change the Game

To paraphrase Connor, a business’ employee accountability depends on leaders creating a transparent culture where responsibility is clear, transparent, and owned. One way to bring clarity to the way your business operates is to use standardized processes and leverage technology that helps track activity, assign tasks, and facilitate hand-offs.

In this article, we’ll go through the links between processes, accountability and company culture, and give you tips on how to improve your business in those areas. But first, let’s look closely at the ties between accountability and culture.

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Automation is all the rage right now.

We at Process Street can’t stop going on about it.

Automation can save time and money while taking the monotonous tasks out of your employees’ days.

It’s a win-win.

But, in order to approach automation properly, it’s best to understand the development of automation over time and what best practices are used in order to deliver effective automations in your business.

That’s why this Process Street article will look at the core Toyota principle of Jidoka, including:

• What is Jidoka?
• What are the related concepts within the Toyota Production System?
• 3 examples of Jidoka in practice

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It’s one thing to identify errors or weaknesses in your business, but it’s another to actually fix and improve them.

The crucial step in fixing an error is deciding the right solution to implement. Pick the wrong one and you create a different problem.

When you’re in a massive company, you want to make sure you’re picking the right solution before you start implementing across a whole corporate structure.

Because of this, investigating the problem as thoroughly as possible should be paramount. And this leads us to Genchi Genbutsu; part of the Toyota Production System conceptual toolkit.

In this Process Street article we’re going to look at:

• What is Genchi Genbutsu?
• How Toyota revitalized their minivan thanks to a road trip
• 3 academic approaches to guide your investigation

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As an analyst, you spend your day designing your organization’s processes, measuring their performance and ironing out the fine details. You focus on the “how”. You’re very good at it, but maybe you’re more interested in the “what”? If you want to move past the nitty-gritty of processes and devise end-to-end models and strategies instead, then you’re looking make the leap to business architect.

The necessity of architects is a byproduct of digital transformation.

“There’s a growing need for talented pros who can reduce complexity, establish solid technology processes and ensure tech’s used consistently across business units and functional areas.” — Sharon Florentine, CIO

What is a business architect?

As a business architect, you will design the structure of the business as a whole by looking broadly at systems design and requirements. Your aim is to improve the business’ operations in line with goals and strategy. Architects do this by theorizing and testing the components of a system (the technology, the flow of work, the deliverables) and overseeing the implementation of the systems by someone in a business analyst role.

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If you want to employ approaches like business process management in your business it’s best to have a solid understanding of how these theories work.

One crucial aspect of using these theories correctly is understanding their development.

It’s common for managers to want to employ cutting edge ideas in their business, but without a deep understanding these methods can be misapplied.

These errors will reduce the effectiveness of your process management and hold your business back.

It’s not just business where process improvement efforts are regularly being undermined! In a recent meta-study from the British Medical Journal, researchers found only 2 out of 73 studies had applied the PDSA process improvement methodology in a way which fully met criteria. Commenting:

To progress the development of the science of improvement, a greater understanding of the use of improvement methods, including PDSA, is essential to draw reliable conclusions about their effectiveness.

In this Process Street article, we’re going to look at some of the fundamentals and pick out key historical thinkers whose work we can trace from in order to better inform how process improvement methods should be done. Including:

• Who is Frederick Winslow Taylor?
• What is Taylorism?
• What W. Edwards Deming can teach us about continuous improvement
• Why Taiichi Ohno helps you cut waste in your business
• What Ludwig von Bertalanffy tells us about systems
• How Bill Smith changed the way we view defects
• What Ray Dalio can show us about company culture

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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 employee’s jobs easier (or more pleasant) 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.

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The A-Team Lending is a California-based mortgage broker with over a dozen full-time employees and 20 commissioned salespeople. The A-Team hired process consultant Cary Wan to handle their marketing and improve their business systems

Within the first month Cary has already managed to fully automate a large chunk of their HR systems which would otherwise require them to cover at least $30,000 extra in staffing costs to do manually.

A-Team Lending is rapidly scaling up and adding new salespeople to its team. This level of growth drove the firm to make big changes to the way they approach the onboarding process.

Why the A-Team needed Process Street

Instead of bogging the new hire down in a stack of forms to scan, sign and print, Cary uses Process Street as a trigger for form automation, allowing both him and his new hires to save hours per week on repetitive data entry.

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Slack has changed the modern workplace.

No longer do we have to deal with the clunkiness of email for internal communications.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can use Slack for external communications too. In fact, you can use Slack for a whole load of different things from automation to analytics.

If you’re using Slack (if you’re not, you should be) then it’s worth making the most of it. That’s why we’re going to run through 22 key tips to help you see how to use Slack to maximum potential!

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at 3 key sections in tackling Slack and becoming a pro:

1. The basics of Slack and how to start with best practices
2. How Slack can boost and smooth your daily workflows
3. How to turn Slack into a stats and monitoring dashboard

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Research indicates that inefficient workflows can cost up to 30% of your total revenue every year. That’s a third of your enterprise’s earning being wasted on everything from a single missed email to a stock of excess inventory.

Imagine what you could do with that money. You could hire new employees to scale your business even further. Department budgets could be expanded to allow better equipment to be used.

All of this and more can be achieved with business process automation.

To demonstrate, let’s go over three core automation examples for processes which often include many of those typical inefficiencies, such as:

• Customer success (client onboarding process)
• HR (recruitment process)
• Support (customer support process)

All of these processes will be given in full, and by the end of this post you’ll know how to eliminate inefficiency by using basic, process, integration, and robotic automation.

It’s time to take back that 30% of your revenue.

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Only 9% of information security professional believe their organization has effective incident response processes. The biggest issue? Well, you’re reading Process Street so you probably guessed it: the lack of standardization. Almost half of the respondents to the SANS Incident Response Survey said that their lack of a formal incident response procedure was holding them back and causing security issues.

It’s not even like preparing for serious security incidents is wasted time or that you’d be going overboard with precautions; 61% of companies have experienced critical incidents in the last two years — that includes data breaches, unauthorized access, and denial of service attacks.

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