Nick Sonnenberg is an entrepreneur, columnist, guest lecturer at Columbia University, and the Wall Street Journal’s bestselling author of Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work. 

Nick is also the founder and CEO of Leverage, a leading operational efficiency consultancy that helps companies implement the CPR business efficiency framework.

It’s the culmination of Nick’s unique perspective on the value of time, efficiency, and automation, which stems partly from the eight years he spent working as a high-efficiency trader on Wall Street.

In this episode of The Employee Onboarding Podcast from Process Street, Nick discusses:

• How operational efficiency saved Leverage from bankruptcy
• The key to successful onboarding
• Creating a “wow” moment for new hires
• Come Up for Air

You can listen on Apple, Spotify, Google, Podchaser, Podcast Addict, Deezer, & all your favorite podcast platforms!

Would you eat a McDonalds Big Mac that was out-of-date, had been dropped on the floor, and made with a stranger’s bare hands?

No! Me neither.

Unfortunately, that’s what thousands of people in China, unknowingly, did.

Back in 2015, the Chinese meat suppliers for McDonald’s were secretly filmed and caught:

“Handling meat and chicken with their bare hands, taking meat that had fallen on the floor and adding it back on to the production line…and forging production dates on beef patties.” – ET2C, Lessons on the Importance of Quality Control Checks

Around 4,300 McDonalds beef patties were tested and found to be out-of-date and contaminated with bacteria.

As a result, over 2,000 McDonald’s outlets across Asia were dramatically affected. The reputation of McDonald’s and their meat supplier was irreversibly damaged, and McDonald’s saw a 7.3% drop in sales.

McDonald’s was definitely not ‘lovin it’.

If only they’d used Enterprise Quality Management Software (EQMS) to regulate their supplier’s meat handling processes and control the quality of the produce they were delivering.

Companies who use EQMS to manage quality, experience fewer product quality issues (less than 1%), and improve their productivity by 20%.

Keen to find out more? Join me in this Process Street post as we run through the following:

• What is EQMS and how does it work?
• Who uses EQMS?
• Is EQMS it just for regulated organizations?
• What are the bottlenecks of EQMS?
• The best EQMS alternative (+free templates)?
• Top 8 EQMS software

Let’s make our way through the golden arches and get started!
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For a decade, we’ve been on a mission to revolutionize recurring work. 

We’re proud to have helped teams like Salesforce, MIT, Colliers, and Hartford Healthcare streamline their business operations, and our innovation has attracted funding from renowned investors like Accel, Salesforce Ventures, and Atlassian Ventures. 

We built the world’s easiest-to-use business process management platform, accessible without engineering support. Then we made it available on Slack, Teams, iOS, and Android, empowering teams to work from anywhere with one-click approvals, quick-fill forms, and powerful automations.

Now, we’re excited to announce the next phase of our journey, the evolution of our product from a workflow management tool to an AI-powered process platform. 

Introducing Process AI, a next-gen process management platform powered by AI and ChatGPT.

P.S. We’ve just launched Process AI on Product Hunt, so feel free to support us over there!

In this blog post, we’ll look at:

• Why traditional process management is hard
• Process AI: Next-gen process management
• What Process AI can do
• The future of process management 

How do you name a new server, export config data, or fix that one really annoying bug that keeps popping up every 2nd Thursday? Well, create a runbook!

For prepared IT professionals, that information is stored in a runbook. A runbook is a set of standardized documents, references and procedures that explain common recurring IT tasks. Instead of figuring out the same problem time and time again, you can refer to your runbook for an optimal way to get the work done. What’s more, you can also delegate tasks and onboard employees more effectively if you have documentation to train them with.

Whenever you do a task, think of this quote:

“Will you remember how to do these things 6 months from now? I find myself having to re-invent a process from scratch if I haven’t done it in a few months (or sometimes just a few days!). Not only do I reinvent the process, I repeat all my old mistakes and learn from them again. What a waste of time.” — Tom Limoncelli, The Operations Report Card

In short, the less time wasted figuring out how to do a task, the better it’ll be for your business efficiency, productivity, and sanity.

This post will look at:

• The 2 types of runbook
• How to create a runbook
• Running your IT processes with Process Street
• Transfer workflow information into Pages

First, let’s look at two example runbooks to give context on what I’m going to talk about.
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“Don’t micromanage!” you may have heard. But what if your team’s errors destroy the business!?

It’s hard watching someone make mistakes, especially if you already know how to avoid them.

Staying silent while they slip up (or even do things in ways you would not) is harder.

That doesn’t mean you have an excuse to micromanage them.

Micromanagement is the ultimate controlling management style. It’s demoralizing and counter-intuitive, as the desire for control to make sure everything goes to plan only creates more problems in the long term.

That’s why in this Process Street article, we’ll be looking at the following:

• What is micromanagement?
• The pros and cons of micromanagement
• How to spot a micromanager
• How to offset micromanagement with OKRs
• Using process management to remove the need for micromanagement

Let’s get started.
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Mobile Business Process Management (BPM) has become an essential aspect of the modern business world. With the increasing need for remote work and rapid decision-making, organizations require a more flexible and efficient way to manage their business processes. 

To address this need, we’ve made our leading BPM software available in the palm of your hands. Your Android phone or tablet can now access the same data inside of Process Street as your browser. But what does that really mean for you and your organization? 

• Process Street isn’t just for your laptop: Enter the Android App
• The benefits of mobile business process management
• Common use cases of mobile business process management 
• How can you get started with Process Street’s Android App?
• Effective process management has become even easier 

Let’s get into it!

Procurement management directly impacts an organization’s bottom-line and can be responsible for 70% of revenue. With this in mind, it’s important to get procurement right.

The world of procurement has undergone tremendous changes in the past couple of years. Changes of particular importance when thinking about procurement management include:

• Digital transformation: With 85% of organizations believing that this digital transformation will change the way they deliver services over the next 3-5 years.
• Thinking about suppliers beyond price: With a greater focus on supplier synergies. The importance of supplier visibility regarding the procurement steps is realized.
• Moving to effective change management: Organizations focus on a smooth change management plan, with procurement leaders agreeing change management is the biggest roadblock to achieving procurement goals.
• Risk management and preparing the unexpected: With transparent procurement systems reducing risk exposure. Only 65% of procurement leaders have little or no visibility in their supply chain.

With this in mind, in this Process Street article, we explain how you can create a procurement management solution that leverages a digital transformation (using Process Street as your procurement management software), thinks about suppliers beyond price, and incorporates effective risk and change management.

Click on the relevant subheader below to jump to your section of choice. Alternatively, scroll down to read all we have to say on procurement management.

• What is procurement? A re-cap of the basics
• Examples of procurement gone wrong
• What is procurement management (+ benefits)
• Procurement management best practice
• Procurement management plan in 7 steps

Let’s jump to it!
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Readers, I’ll let you in on a little secret…

Between you and me, I was hacked; by my best friend no less! Thankfully, it was just an irritating prank, but it served to teach me a lesson.

Despite my grandiose beliefs that I knew everything I needed to know about all things digital, I hadn’t the faintest idea about how to spot a fraudulent message from a legitimate one. And this kind of threat is one of the biggest risks businesses face today.

In 2005, 157 data breaches were reported in the U.S., with 66.9 million records exposed. From 2005-2014 there was a 500% increase in data breach frequency.

That number almost doubled in 3 years to 1,579 reported breaches in 2017.

Although data breaches have since declined (1,506 issues were reported in 2019), IBM’s 2020 Data Breach report filed a 12% rise in data breach costs over 5 years, increasing to ~$3.92 million per incident.

The growing number of breaches and associated costs seems to be consequential of continuously changing hacking methods and an expanding number of entry points (that comes from digitization).

Security audits allow organizations to set up tougher walls of safety, as an adaptive defense against data breach threats.

With this in mind, Process Street created this article as your ultimate security audit guide, with access to our free security audit checklists and processes.

We’ll be covering:

• What are security audits?
• 4 security audit checklists for preventative risk management
• Security audit best practices
• Security processes for tighter security safety

Let’s get started!
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SOC 2 has a reputation for being difficult and complex. You could argue that this is by design, since you need help from a small group of top-notch, pricey experts to be compliant. 

A kinder view is that it’s just how info security operates (there’s no one-size-fits-all fix). 

To set up the right protections, a company has to either create them according to the risks they face, or narrow down a huge list of possible controls, again, considering the risks. 

In a nutshell, SOC 2 goes with the first option: it sets broad criteria and lets each organization come up with controls to meet those criteria, based on their unique risks. Sounds reasonable, but it’s not exactly a walk in the park for those who aren’t experts.

That’s where both workflow automation and compliance automation software can come in handy.  

In this post I’ll introduce you to Drata and Process Street, two essential tools that, when used together, provide a complete solution to help you speed up and simplify your yearly SOC 2 compliance.

What is the ikigai concept for business?

Ikigai, which means “a reason for being”, is a Japanese word that has gently risen to the forefront of the business world, like a whale coming up to greet the dawn. It is a welcome wave of thoughtfulness and quiet in the face of a usually loud, blustering, profit-at-all-costs model.

The Ikigai concept beckons to us, asking us to consider the question: What do I get up for in the mornings? For most of us, the answer is not “money”.

Money, for most people, is a means to an end. If you ask people at the end of their lives what they wish they could have done differently, the answers are not usually “I wish I’d made more money”. They’re along the lines of “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends”.

Heart matters, both in our personal lives and in business. It seems a bit short-sighted to assume otherwise or to see business as totally apart from our personal values. The industrial revolution saw people exchanging their labor for money and becoming increasingly alienated from the joys of pouring their hearts into their creative endeavors and trade. They became cogs in the wheel of the factory that is capitalism.

We still have a top-down structure in many work environments today, but some companies have begun to embrace a horizontal knowledge approach, where managers and employees are on the same level and treated as equals. The more we learn about what makes employees happy, hopefully, the more we will move towards those models, of which the Ikigai concept is a prime example.

While ikigai is generally applied to finding purpose in your personal life, this Process Street post will look at how the same 4 concepts can be applied to your business as well:

• Ikigai for business: The need for meaning & purpose at work
• Ikigai business concept #1: How are you helping the world?
• Ikigai business concept #2: What lights your fire?
• Ikigai business concept #3: What are you good at?
• Ikigai business concept #4: How can you generate profit?
• Look inwards for your purpose – even in business

Make sure you’re sitting comfortably. Let’s begin.
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