This is a guest post written by Alexis Humphrey. Agency owner turned business coach, Alexis Humphrey is on a mission to help freelancers and agency owners maximize their potential by showing them how they can earn more and work less so they can create a life they love. Connect with her on Linkedin or join her private Facebook group.

Steve Jobs built his empire around one clear principle – simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

In his own words:

“Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” – Steve Jobs, Apple’s Steve Jobs

And Warren Buffet agrees…

What does Buffet look for when he invests in a business?

The answer: Something that is simple and reproducible, like Coca Cola, McDonalds or Gillette. These businesses work like machines – the production process is repeatable, and the output is always the same.

In this Process Street article, you will learn how to fine-tune your service-based business into simple and reproducible processes, building a remote agency machine.

This transformation requires consistency and the consistency of processes. With Process Street, this consistency becomes easily attainable. Learn how to set up Process Street processes and establish a solid ground to build your remote agency machine. A remote agency that works on automation, documented processes and requires very little of your time. A remote agency that brings in money, whilst you lay back sipping pina colada’s on a Brazilian beach.

Sound appealing?

Of course it does.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say.

• Building a remote agency: Maintaining consistency and documenting recurring tasks
• Building a remote agency: Treating your service as a product
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos
• Building a remote agency: Repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Customized chaos vs repeatable systems
• Building a remote agency: Business processes
• Building a remote agency: Why do business processes matter?
• Building a remote agency: How to get started
• Building a remote agency: Embedding processes in your business
• Building a remote agency: The secret sauce

Let’s get started!
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The global economic cost of anxiety and depression is $1 trillion per year.

That is a substantial cost to an issue that is predominantly ignored.

1 in 5 adults in the U.S. will experience a mental health issue each year, with 1 in 6.8 people experiencing mental health problems in the workplace on a weekly timescale.

Work anxiety is one such mental health condition which evokes a sizable economic cost from lowered employee wellbeing and sick leave.

In this Process Street article we explain what work anxiety is – and in that sense, anxiety in general. We then provide information on how you can take action on anxiety from a personal level and at a company-wide level.

Click on the relevant subheaders below to jump to that section. Alternatively, scroll down and read all we have to say.

• Work anxiety: Mental Health Risk Assessment
• Work Anxiety: Anxious meaning
• Anxiety explained: Understanding anxiety and the biological causes
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as an individual
• Work anxiety: Take action on anxiety, what you can do as a company
• Work anxiety: Take action with Process Street

Capes at the ready, let’s conquer workplace anxiety!
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Consumer Reports publishes an annual reliability survey, which includes data on over 470,000 cars.

In this report, owners of Tesla’s Model 3 experienced a number of problems, including chassis hardware, paint and trim related faults, indicative of a build quality that fell far shorter than expected standards set across the automotive industry. The Model 3 represents Tesla’s first real attempt at a mass-market electric vehicle, and the issues surrounding its launch created much frustration and controversy among electric vehicle enthusiasts.

This lack of quality assurance has lost at least one major $5 million order of Model 3 vehicles from a rental company, in relation to problems with the service and performance of previously purchased vehicles.

In an email, NextMove wrote:

“Tesla Model 3 vehicles, which NextMove was supposed to take over after payment and only a short examination, sometimes had serious defects: defective tires, paint and body damages, defective charge controllers, wrong wiring harnesses or missing emergency call buttons. Such quality defects would have endangered the safety of the customers and the profitability of NextMove.”

Stefan Moeller, Managing Director of NextMove, went on to say:

“We had to insist on compliance with general quality standards and processes in order to protect our renters and our business model.”

Why did Tesla have so many problems? Crucially, Tesla made the decision to deliver the product to market and sort out the issues later.

Basically, they didn’t have a strong enough system for managing quality.

We call these Quality Management Systems (QMS) – and they work.

The rest of the auto-industry follows a specific quality management system structure. It’s called ISO/TS 16949:2009 and it’s a variant of ISO 9001.

People follow quality management systems for various reasons; they improve quality first and foremost. But they also have a positive impact on the bottom line.

The return on investment (ROI) of a quality management system is typically impressive:

As a guide, a recent study undertaken through the American Society for Quality (ASQ) showed that for every $1 spent on your QMS, you could expect to see an additional $6 in revenue, a $16 reduction in costs, and a $3 increase in profits. On average, they saw that quality management reduced costs by 4.8% – ASQ

In this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at how ISO 9001 can be used to assure quality control across all types of organizations, with benefits like improved company performance, higher demand for products, and a competitive advantage towards increasing market share.

What we’ll cover:

• ISO 9001: Free templates!
• What is ISO 9001? A simple introduction
• Anatomy of ISO 9001: 2015 for Quality Management
• Quality management: What is it & why does it matter?
• ISO 9001 for continuous improvement
• Agile ISO
• What does it mean to be ISO 9001 certified?
• ISO 9001 audit
• Implement ISO 9001 with Process Street
• Related ISO standards

For the uninitiated, what is ISO 9001, as simply as possible?
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This is a guest post from Mile Živković, a content writer and work-life balance expert at Chanty – a simple and AI-powered Slack alternative. When Mile isn’t busy writing epic posts on productivity, work-life balance and time management for Chanty blog, he’s probably driving somewhere. His hobbies include cars (huge fan of Alfa Romeo), photography and collecting pocket knives. You can catch him on LinkedIn.

What do you do when there’s work to be done, email communication simply doesn’t cut it anymore and tapping your colleagues on the shoulder is not the ideal solution for communicating in the office?

You use a chat app to collaborate with your team.

With email becoming clunky and outdated and the need for rapid, instant communication at work, the market for team chat apps is ever-growing.

However, with so many options out there, making the right choice can seem impossible. Pricing, the number of users, integrations, searchable history, these are all elements to consider when making a choice for your team.

To make the process a bit easier, we’ve singled out some of the best team chat apps out there with our honest feedback. These are some of the best workplace chat apps out there and we hope we’ll make it easier on you to make a good choice. Let’s dig in!

Team chat apps: The quicklinks!

• Slack
• Chanty
• Typetalk
• Flock
• Fleep
• Microsoft Teams
• Ryver
• Glip
• Process Street

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Workflow approvals are a bottleneck of the worst kind.

Projects get delayed waiting for approval, and those reviewing the work spend more time searching for the piece than they do reviewing it.

“Professionals take 18 minutes on average to locate a document manually––20% to 40% of their time––and spend 50% of their time searching for information.” – Ashish Deshpande, 50+ Key Statistics to Help You Automate Smarter in 2020 and Beyond

That’s where we here at Process Street come in.

We know how important it is to have an effective method for organizing your workflow approvals. Heck, everything our content team does goes through at least two rounds of review before it goes live.

Check out task five in the following free process template for a snapshot of how we handle workflow approvals with Process Street!

That’s why today we’ll be covering:

• What is a workflow approval?
• Workflow approval benefits
• How to create an approval workflow
• How to supercharge your approval process
• 21 free approval templates

Let’s dive right in.
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This is a guest post by Kristen McCabe, a global marketer. She has marketing experience extending from Australia to Chicago with expertise in both B2B and B2C industries, specializing in content, SEO, and events. Kristen spends her time outside of work acting, learning nature photography and joining in the #instadog fun with her Pug/JackRussell, Bella.

We have one reason marketers host and sponsor events.

Whether you want to get more leads, increase brand awareness, or meet with current customers to upsell and build customer lifetime value, marketing events ultimately leads to the same destination: increased revenue for a greater Return On Investment (ROI).

Despite this common goal, according to The Event Marketing Evolution, a research report by the Harvard Business Review, only 23% of companies can track event ROI.

Notice here that we say can rather than do track ROI, making these results even more concerning and surprising.

So our question to is this: How will you ensure you’re in the elite group of marketers who:

• Can track the success of their event sponsorship?
• Regularly track event results, and improve their strategy as needed?

In this Process Street article we will answer these two questions, and walk you through the steps that ensure you aren’t throwing your previous marketing dollars down the drain.

To start at the beginning, we find our selves before the day of the event.

With that, let’s not waste any more time, and get straight to it. Click on the subheaders below to jump to the relevant section. Alternatively, scroll down to read all.

• Event ROI: What it is and how to measure it
• Event planning: The pre-event strategy and planning stage
• Event partners: Your internal and external event partners
• Event ROI: Choosing an event that obtains a strong ROI, must-ask questions
• Event data: Capturing event data
• After the event: Measuring and building your success after the event
• Marketing events with Process Street

Let’s begin! Continue Reading

One of the most important things you can offer your customers and employees is consistency.

Your customers need consistency in your products and services, your employees need consistency to help them do their job efficiently, and your company needs consistency in order to continuously improve your policies and procedures.

The best way to make sure that you have consistency within your company is by implementing standard operating procedures (SOPs).

Most companies already have SOPs that their employees follow, but they’re either rarely updated, or they’re never even properly documented to begin with.

This is often because writing, reviewing, and regularly updating your SOPs can typically take a lot of time, especially when starting from scratch.

But thankfully, there are ways to make your job a lot easier.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll go over the general guidelines for the SOP format and other ways you can streamline your processes to help you get started building your SOPs.

We’ll be covering:

• What is a standard operating procedure (SOP)?
• What does the SOP format look like?
• Should your company use an SOP template?
• Using Process Street to build your SOPs

If you’re simply looking for a SOP format to get started with, then look no further!
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When defining, documenting, and delivering services to customers, it can be a little difficult (read: incredibly taxing) to keep on top of everything.

As Philipp Unterharnscheidt and Axel Kieninger at the Karlsruhe Service Research Institute both say:

“IT services supporting business operations are an increasingly critical factor for business success today (Guldentops 2003). The management of service quality, which is the central objective of Service Level Management (SLM), however remains a major challenge for many companies.” – Philipp Unterharnscheidt and Axel Kieninger, Service Level Management – Challenges and their Relevance from the Customers’ Point of View

To help companies keep on top of things – and manage their services, service levels, and SLAs and OLAs masterfully – there’s service level management.

This may be the point where you’re thinking “But what, exactly, is service level management? What are the benefits of it? The best practices so it’s done properly? And how would Process Street even help with service level management?”

Worry no more, reader. You’ve come to the right place.

Just read through these sections to get to grips with service level management:

• What is service level management (SLM)?
• The benefits of service level management
• Service level management best practices
• Use Process Street for SLM (and creating your OLA and SLA agreements)!

Let’s dive straight in. ⬇️

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This is a guest post by Sam Bocetta, a retired engineer and current freelance journalist who specializes in writing about cyber defense, data privacy, and online security.

Cybersecurity is a process, not an event.

Though there are some tools and systems that you can put in place to dramatically improve the security of your workflow, in reality the best way to protect yourself against hackers is to stay constantly vigilant for emerging threats.

For this reason, rigorous cybersecurity practices should be built into your general workflow. They should be an integral part of building a knowledge management system, and integrated into everyday business practices.

One of the most powerful ways of doing this, and one that will also ensure that you don’t miss anything important, is to use checklists to codify daily, weekly, and monthly security tasks.

This system should also clearly indicate responsibility for each task, and specify mitigation steps should any issues be found.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Building a security checklist
• Creating a security culture
• How to use Process Street to incorporate security into your workflows
• More information security resources

Before specifying the tasks that should be part of your security workflow, let’s look at why having a regular security checklist is so important.
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Your attention span is shorter than a goldfish’s.

This isn’t meant to be a personal insult. All of our attention spans are now pretty ba-… wait, how was I going to finish this sentence?

Blame it on what you will – the break-neck speed in which content is published on the internet, the various devices all vying for our attention, or a lifestyle that’s overly digitalized – but there’s no getting away from it. There’s only an 8-second window before concentration plummets.

For journalists, content marketers, and pretty much anyone who uses the written word to deliver information, this isn’t news you want to hear.

But with the inverted pyramid, you can quickly supply global audiences with the news they do want to hear – and quickly (read: before they move onto the next shiny, sparkly thing).

In this post from Process Street, you’re going to learn about the inverted pyramid, the benefits of using it, see examples of it in action, and discover how checklists can help you with getting the right information out there. Fast.

Read through these sections to get completely clued up:

• What does inverted pyramid mean?
• Inverted pyramid examples (from 1865, 2018, and 2020)
• Benefits of the inverted pyramid writing structure
• How to not bury the lead (by taking a systematic approach)
• Ensure your audiences get what they need with Process Street!

Now, what was the topic again? Oh, right – the inverted pyramid!

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