Merry Christmas and a happy new year from all of us at Process Street!
2017 might have been a mixed bag for most of the planet, but we had a lot of fun writing content for you, our blog readers.
We published 151 blog posts between us this year, with a little help from fantastic guest writers like Pascal van Opzeeland from Userlike, and Sam Suthar from Tagove.
Here are our top picks as well as the posts you, the readers, liked the most.
So, you want to know how to beat procrastination? Well, here’s the simple answer.
You can’t.
At least, not completely.
No matter how hard you try, it’s impossible to completely eliminate procrastination. There will always be tasks you put off, and there will always be projects that get shelved in favor of others.
You can, however, learn how to use procrastination to your advantage and make what many see as a chronic issue into one of your greatest strengths.
First, however, you need to know your enemy. That’s why today I’ll be covering:
It’s time to stop stalling and get stuck in.
The following is a guest post from Pascal van Opzeeland. Pascal is CMO of Userlike, software for website and messaging support. He and his team share tips about customer service and communication on the Userlike Blog.
In school, everyone looks forward to the day they can stop learning and start doing. But once inside hamster wheel of working life, many long back to the times in which they had the time to invest in their personal development.
At Userlike, we see this lack of time for personal learning as a serious challenge. The world is developing faster than ever, and the pace is only accelerating. To stay competitive, we need employees to keep up; to keep learning and stay up-to-date with their craft. Other benefits from having a culture that stimulates continuous learning include:
The best employees have an innate desire to grow, but it’s hard to free up time when your daily tasks and duties mess up your schedule. Learning is one of those high importance – low urgency tasks that easily gets pushed aside.
Saying “employee feedback” conjures images of awkward conversations with managers and meaningless buzzwords during performance reviews, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Feedback cycles shouldn’t try to force comments out of your team, but instead support them and let them know when and where they can raise any issues they encounter.
Doing this lets you see the flaws in your business and figure out how to take action in order to improve it for everyone involved.
It’s also a great way to get a second opinion on issue that you have lost all context on. Veteran and new employee alike offer vital second opinions and can really help to highlight where your processes are weakest, and that’s not even mentioning other benefits such as helping to make your employees feel valued.
“69% of employees say they would work harder if they felt their efforts were being better recognized” – Lindsay Kolowich, 11 Eye-Opening Statistics on the Importance of Employee Feedback
We talk a lot about business processes here on Process Street, but today we’re going to do things a little differently. Instead of waxing lyrical about business efficiency, I’m going to show how surgical checklists have evolved over history, and how they continue to save lives today.
From prehistoric humans poking each other with sticks and rocks, to the Ancient Greeks, the discovery of germs and antiseptics, up to modern day medical marvels, surgical procedures make a great case for why documented checklists are vital for continued success.
Not only that, but by looking at how major theoretical and technological breakthroughs have affected surgical checklists, we can better show why documenting and maintaining your processes isn’t as hard as you might think.
Alternatively, if you’re just interested in medical history, stick around for the ride – I’ll be making this interesting for all.
We all like to know about the broader philosophies behind process improvements, but sometimes we need to knuckle down and look at some of the more technical details.
One of the core techniques behind any process improvement, particularly in Six Sigma, is DMAIC.
This handy approach, pronounced duh-may-ik, is the key to employing Six Sigma and beginning your journey to being a process hero. We’re going to cover each step in the process and detail how to effectively enact every section.
This guide will lead you through from start to finish and get you ready to start employing lean Six Sigma within your business!
The following is a guest post from Sam Suthar, the CMO of Acquire.
Scaling your business is almost impossible until you know your customer’s value. Whether you’re going to scale a brick-and-mortar business or an online business, it doesn’t matter; it’s vitally important to understand what each customer is worth to your business.
Statistics by Unicom Group show that 50% of customers naturally churn every 5 years. Sadly, this number can increase if you fail to understand what the customer who signed up last night is worth.
Can you reduce your churn and increase customer retention rate?
Yes, it’s doable. Although very tricky. In the rest of this article, I will show you how to scale your business by first knowing the value of each customer.
In 2016, Process Street went from using a basic Bootstrap theme to a custom-branded website, complete with a logo change and full aesthetic overhaul. We did it to avoid looking dated, and to make the site consistent with our app.
Like many startups, we focused on building a great product first, and rightfully overlooked the importance of a brand until the time was right.
A brand is the often low on the list of startup priorities. Startups develop in a fast-paced, cutthroat environment and are concerned primarily with attracting early users as beta testers, building disruptive products, and iterating based on feedback. Tech is a mercurial industry; many companies start out with a solution to a problem that could be adopted by everyone from individuals to large corporations.
Over time, by stabbing in the dark and following growth over all, a tech startup could find itself with a brand that doesn’t match its product. That’s something we grappled with in 2016, and it’s something even big tech companies come up against every couple of years.
Simple as it may be, Little’s law is an incredibly powerful tool in the arsenal of almost any team. From performing back-of-the-napkin calculations to showing the performance of a system over time, this formula is one of the key building blocks to running an efficient business.
Without Little’s law, Lean and Kanban wouldn’t exist, and key elements of America’s nuclear deterrence would be left up to chance.
After all, you can’t fly B-2 stealth bombers into action if they’re all under maintenance due to bad queue management.
Continue Reading
One of the key strengths of top companies is the employees inside them.
Who they hire and how they hire them helps determine employee attainment, employee satisfaction, employee accountability, and employee turnover.
Small changes to recruiting processes can have a surprisingly large impact on the day to day life of a company. According to the Glassdoor Economic Research (2015) report, a 10% harder interview process is associated with a 2.6% higher employee satisfaction later on.
Loads of our clients use Process Street for managing their recruitment processes and we know all too well how important it is to get that process right.
That’s why we’re going to explore how 3 top tech giants manage their recruitment and see what gold standard techniques we can pass on to you. We’ll explore:
