From putting together flat-packed furniture to avoiding nuclear war, we’ve talked at length on why processes are important.

They’re the lifeblood of any consistent business, allowing it to repeat its successes, avoid mistakes, increase efficiency, and create effective to do lists. Without them you have no hope of even knowing what you’re doing right or wrong – you’ve more chance of putting together IKEA furniture with no instructions than of improving your situation and growing your business.

However, without standardizing processes you make, anything you document will do more harm than good.

Different layouts will make it hard to distinguish what the correct version of the process is, varying language across your teams will make working together a nightmare, while multiple naming and storage methods make it impossible to search for the process you need.

So, today I’ll show you how to standardize your processes by creating a documentation style guide which suits your needs. This guide can then be followed whenever anyone in your business needs to document a workflow.

It’s time to unify your company and cement your success.

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Processes are our deal. It’s what we do.

Unsurprisingly, it’s what our users do too. They use Process Street to manage their internal processes and keep their teams working at maximum efficiency.

In our constant attempt to understand our users’ needs, we asked the community what their biggest pain points were. We wanted to see what obstacles hampered the process management of companies and how we could help them combat that.

Our research across 83 respondents gave us a great deal of insight but one key takeaway stood out:

42% of respondents said they had no time to create processes.

Even worse, a further 54% of those (23% of the total responses) say they are currently taking no steps to remedy this situation!

This post will attempt to tackle this problem and present actionable ways you can ramp up your process production and save yourself time.

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Communicating the right things at the right times is vital in all walks of life.

Within a complex business with multiple moving parts, the value of this communication is high and the effects of poor communication are potentially catastrophic.

As Professor Allen Webster puts it:

Without communication and the team effort it permits, the successful completion of any important project can be jeopardized.

There are two elements of communication here to be addressed:

1. How effectively we are understanding key concepts and terms
2. How effectively we are utilizing and communicating those concepts and their effects to our teams

The three concepts we’re going to tackle specifically in this article are processes, policies and procedures.

What are the differences between them? How do we effectively utilize each? How do we, at Process Street, utilize these concepts within our organizational structure?

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Apple is well-known for being innovative and immensely successful, to the point where the company is worth $750 billion (and counting). However, without a healthy dose of workflow analysis they would’ve crumbled under their own business model back in the late 1980s.

“We could no longer afford the limitations that went with our product development processes… The lack of a formal new product development process led to confusion, wasted time, and often caused project teams to ‘re-create the wheel’” – Jackie Streeter (then VP of Engineering at Apple), Apple Rethinks Core Process: Improves Cycle Time

The simple truth is that any company (no matter the size or success) needs to regularly review its workflows and processes in order to keep them up to date and efficient. Tasks should be updated, improved, and automated where possible to save time and money, but without using the best workflow management software around to analyze and improve your business practices, your entire business model itself can prevent your success.

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Don’t you just hate reading internal business documents? 

They’re stuffy, dull, and aren’t optimized for human beings to read. No one opts to pop a mid-morning sleeping pill at their desk, but diving into your library of internal documents is probably about as soporific.

Here’s the strange thing:

There’s no shortage of data on the importance of visuals and how to write content that gets read, but when it comes to internal documents, it’s naively accepted that they can be incomprehensible, unappealing walls of text.

However, with emoji, processes can be clear, memorable, and visually appealing. Here’s a basic example in Process Street using Kurt Braget’s PILLARS system, combined with Emojipoint (another system of his):

What’s the point, you may ask?

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Do you know how long a prospective candidate will spend reading your job ad?

Six seconds.

With more than three billion job listings online at any given moment, standing out from the crowd might mean the difference between finding the greatest team member possible or having to settle for the best of a bad bunch.

Data from 2015 suggests that 100 million startups are launched annually. And, as the number of competitors rockets up, the pool of available talent is diluted, leaving you with less choice.

The solution?

A clear and compelling job description. It’s more complex than it first seems, but in this article I’ll be sure to make it easy.

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Last week we failed to meet a big deadline for the second time in a month. Vinay (Process Street‘s CEO) wasn’t impressed.

“How can you forget something so simple? What’s going wrong?”

Then came the kicker.

“What was your process?”

From missed deadlines to widespread cyber attacks, things go wrong in businesses all the time. The vast majority of problems, however, are caused by following bad processes. Processes might be vital to your business’ success, but unchecked they can just as easily cause you to fail.

The only way to change these weak links in your own business is to have a system of process improvement – a way of constantly improving the processes that power your business.
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Uber is seemingly always in the news for something.

Right now the big stories are:

• An Uber-rival from China may be about to land $6 billion in investment from SoftBank.
• Uber wants to make 10% of its Oregon fleet electric by 2019.
• Uber aims for a future of driverless electric cars.
• Long distance haulage may be the next step for Uber’s expansion.
• Italy considers banning Uber in recent court case.
  and…
• Lyft capitalizes as Uber’s connection to Trump administration angers progressive voters.

It appears Uber is everywhere.

But how did Uber grow to such a large degree, particularly with laws and governments and embedded markets in their way? How did they end up with a potential valuation of $68 billion?

In this article, we’ll look at three key things:

1. Where did Uber come from and what is its philosophy?
2. How does Uber conquer a city?
3. What steps does Uber take to recruit new drivers?

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Recent elections have hogged the headlines due to their rhetoric and their politics.

However, one consistent theme across both the Trump victory and the Brexit success was their use of advanced marketing techniques.

These campaigns utilized the power of emotion to drive their narratives and leveraged the complexities of Big Data to direct those messages at segmented groups with devastating effect.

The recent victories were not merely political successes, but demonstrations of the immense potential of advanced marketing and advertising methods.

We’ll look at three key areas in this article:

• Why are emotions so powerful in decision making?
• What is psychometric testing – the Trump and Brexit campaigns’ marketing method – and what can it tell us about our audience?
• How do we turn theory into actionable techniques?

The world of marketing is changing. Don’t get left behind.

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For startups and small operations, virtual assistants can be vital.

The general idea is: instead of hiring a full-time specialist or wasting time on data entry, you hire a VA.

It sounds easy. You just hire a VA, right?!

But what happens after that is the hard part. Straight after hiring comes the onboarding and training. That’s the part where you get your new VA up to speed with how your company works, and how the tasks, rules, and responsibilities are going to be different from the other companies they’ve worked for.

You’ll need to explain how to use your stack of tools, and how they can work as efficiently as possible. It’s also a process for you: you need to remember to check in, make sure everything’s set up properly, and review their performance.

In this post, I’m going to go over some of the key things to keep in mind when onboarding a virtual assistant, and share two of our internal processes with you.

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