This article is a guest post from Isaiah Jackson.

Team collaboration is not a new thing.

However, team collaboration is so poorly practiced within many organizations that we need to find new ways to facilitate it.

In the modern digital world, team collaboration is incredibly easy and can be achieved from in the office or in the home.

In this article, we’ll explain how effective team collaboration can allow you to operate your business either with remote staff or with staff being given the freedom to work from home flexibly.

Having home-working opportunities can unleash employee satisfaction, retention, and attainment. Modern approaches to team collaboration enable this.

In this Process Street article, we’ll look at:

• Why the traditional office dynamics are in decline
• The benefits of working remotely
• How team collaboration tools make remote work possible
• The key team collaboration tools used by the team at Process Street
• Why you should encourage your employees to work from home
• Team collaboration tools help in achieving a work-life balance

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Whether you’re writing a blog post or building the world’s largest commercial aircraft, you need to be able to rely on your systems. To do that, your platform has to have a set of basic workflow system features.

That is unless you want to follow Airbus A380’s example and waste massive amounts of time and money because of a few simple oversights.

“Building the Airbus A380… required production facilities from across the globe to build individual parts of the airplane… During installation, they discovered the parts designed by different teams didn’t fit together.

This cost the company $6 billion to put right and set the project back two years.” – Greg Bailey, 4 Famous Project Management Failures and What to Learn From Them

Here at Process Street we’re no strangers to what makes workflow and bpm software effective. That’s why we’ve collected a list of the 14 essential workflow system features that every team (and individual) needs to be useful.

Let’s get started.

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“How did I forget to follow up with that client?”

There was a time when I used to think that as another golden opportunity passed me by. It’s tough enough being a freelancer and having to both find clients and secure them in such a competitive scene without adding human error into the mix.

Nowadays, I’ve largely mitigated the frustration that comes with making avoidable errors, letting me massively boost my consistency and productivity, and it’s all thanks to process documentation.

Having a documented process to work through is insanely useful. I’m here to tell you exactly why you need to be using processes in your work and give some freelance tips on how you can start noticing the benefits in no time. Let’s get started.

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It’s easy to fall prey to the pursuit of productivity.

All too often we’re too preoccupied with finding the “perfect” productivity software to see that we’re wasting time doing it.

“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done” – Bruce Lee, 30 Productivity Quotes I Wish I Knew 10 Years Ago

You don’t need to test 101 apps. All you need is a solid base to go from and tweak your performance.

That’s what this post will give you.

From time-keeping software to writing apps and process management, read on to see how to see which business apps everyone should use to stay productive without pulling their hair out.

Let’s get started.

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Renegard uses Process Street to enable manual, on-the-ground workers to execute tasks more efficiently and enable their managers to oversee all activity in real-time. They also use process automation to streamline the hiring and onboarding process. We spoke to their CEO, David Martin, about how they are using Process Street, what benefits they are experiencing, and how Renegard sees their usage of the platform progressing in the future.

The Renegard Story

From pickup trucks to boats and large-scale construction equipment, Renegard provides its customers with high-performance protective coating for a range of vehicles.

Ultimately, their mission is to help you get the most out of your vehicle by applying coatings that are guaranteed to protect it from wear and tear as well as more significant damage.

Their two trademarked products, Alphagard and Solargard, are extremely tough coatings that can be used for both interior and exterior applications. They are available in a variety of colors and can be custom color matched.

Given that they apply their coatings to vehicles all across the US, Renegard employs a large number of contractors to perform the manual-intensive work. These individuals need to follow strict processes in order to ensure that coatings are applied in the proper way each and every time.

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Client Onboarding for Professional Services

When a new client signs up, it’s not enough to leave them alone to jump into your service by themselves –  you’ve got to have a clearly written process to make sure they know they’ve made the right choice.

Settling a new client into your business and establishing a good relationship is one of the best ways to reduce churn.

 ‘If you hold a customer’s hand for 90 days, they’ll be loyal for life’. – John Jantsch

The process of perfect onboarding differs depending on your business, but the essence is the same. Of course, you’re updating your CRM and complying with legal regulation, but that’s not going to make the customer think you’re the best choice and quell the buyer’s remorse. You’ve also got to build a relationship, get to know the customer’s individual needs (once they’ve signed up, they’re not just a vague profile or target audience) then integrate them into your existing business process.

Bonus: Looking for a real example use case from the super-successful DoubleDutch team? Click HERE to unlock it.

At Process Street, we’ve put together 14 templates you can use to get new clients settled in with minimal hassle. The templates include sample documents, ready-to-send emails and industry-specific advice for criminal lawyers, marketing agencies, and financial planners.

Want to get straight to the checklists? No problem! Here they are:

• Client Onboarding Checklist for Financial Planners
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Marketing Agencies
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Criminal Law Firms
• High Touch Client Onboarding for SaaS Companies
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• Landlord Onboarding Checklist
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Accounting Firm
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Dental Clinic
• Patient Intake Checklist for a Medical Clinic
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Real Estate Sales
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Managed Service Provider
• Client Onboarding Checklist for a Software Development Company
• Client Onboarding Checklist for Management Consulting
• Client Onboarding Checklist for an Insurance Broker

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Part of the reality of trying to manage operations in organizations of any size, is understanding that sometimes things go wrong.

In an ideal world, we don’t want anything to go wrong. We want our processes to run smoothly and all tasks to be easily completed.

But that isn’t just something which happens. It is, however, something we can work towards.

The first step is to create a critical culture where people can identify when and why a process has had a problem. From there, you can track problems, investigate them, and improve processes to stop those problems occuring.

But you need that first step.

That first step needs to be done each and every time, it needs to be done with the right amount of detail, and it needs to be quick and painless to take.

This is the art of an exception report.

Done well, this can illuminate your problems and be a crucial linchpin in a broader effort to improve processes and, in turn, outcomes.

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at:

• What is an exception report?
• Why you should use exception reports in your business
• How you can record exception in Process Street
• How to use Zapier to generate an exception report

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Web design is more than how something looks. It dictates everything from your audience’s initial impressions to how easily they can navigate your site, and can be easily messed up entirely if you don’t have the right processes to prevent mistakes and remember key tasks.

That’s why we’ve collected this pack of web design process templates.

“… a well-designed user interface could raise your website’s conversion rate by up to a 200%, and a better UX design could yield conversion rates up to 400%.” – Goran Paunovic, covering this Forrester report in The Bottom Line: Why Good UX Design Means Better Business

Over the course of these 13 templates we’ve provided documented processes to make the most common web design processes, tasks, and actions run smoothly every time. These include:

• Animation Design Process
• Social Media Image Design
• Usability Test Plan
• Usability Testing Template
• Blog Image Design Process
• Web Design Process
• Website Design Client Onboarding Template
• UX Design Process
• Brand Identity Design
• Header Design
• Graphic Design Process
• Logo Design Process
• Website Launch Checklist

Better still, all of these are free, ready to use, and can be edited to suit your needs should you want to customize your processes. Let’s get right to it!

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 The following is a guest post by Uwe Dreissigacker. Uwe is the Founder of online invoicing software InvoiceBerry. InvoiceBerry helps small business owners and freelancers to create professional looking invoices, get paid online and keep track of unpaid invoices. In his free time, Uwe travels a lot, explores new cultures and loves trying new spicy dishes.

As a business, if you want your operation to run smoothly, managing productivity and your workflows is one of the best ways you can stay on track.

Before you even get started on a project, you should first take a step back and plan out your approach.

What methodology will you use? How will you manage productivity and stay on track? SCRUM? SWOT?

Decisions, decisions…

The choices can be overwhelming. Not to mention, over the course of the actual project, you’ll have to make hundreds of other choices.

If you’re not sure where to begin, it’s best to think about your project as a whole and then select the right methodology you’ll follow – Waterfall or Agile?

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Bullet journals are an amazing way to boost your organization and productivity, and to just de-clutter your mind.

Using bullet journaling can really help when it comes to reducing stress, being more efficient, and generally getting more done.

I’ve been bullet journaling for a while now and I want to share with you how I’ve used bullet journals to create order and structure in regular life and, in particular, in my professional life!

You see, I write about how businesses can better organize themselves and how to make sure the work which is being done is at a high standard every time.

In short, I write normally about something called business process management.

And it occurred to me that I could pull together everything I know about processes and my experiences with bullet journals to really accelerate my work.

I realized I could use my bullet journal to discover my most important repeatable processes, and then use the principles of business process management to improve how I approach these processes.

The two fit together perfectly.

That’s why, in this Process Street article, I’m going to cover:

• What is bullet journaling?
• What is process management?
• How you can turn bullet journals into processes
• Bullet journal ideas for work

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