Your current team can’t handle any extra work. You’ve exhausted your process automation opportunities. You’ve got no choice but to bring in a fresh face.
You could hire a specialist, but they can be expensive and limited in the work you can hand off. You need to hire a virtual assistant.
According to Atlassian, unnecessary meetings cost the US economy $37b a year in wasted salary costs.
In fact, per the same study, half of all meetings are considered “wasted time”.
What differentiates a successful meeting from a failed one? How do we make sure our meetings are consistently successful?
In this article, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of how to run a successful meeting; the 7 key steps advocated by MIT professor Neal Hartman.
And we’ll share with you our internal method for running meetings in a structured manner with Process Street.
Efficiency is vital for startups to scale and survive. To be efficient you have to document your processes to make everything repeatable and scalable.
All of which means nothing if your processes are bad.
“Process innovation” is a fancy term for improving your business’ processes. Instead of haphazardly solving external issues, you focus on improving your core processes and standard operating procedures to make your business efficient and able to grow.
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It’s not always easy to know whether your team is doing everything you ask them to. How do you know everything is on track? Are you sure your team is taking care of every responsibility?
Here’s the worrying thing:
According to the American Management Association, 21% of companies believe that 30-50% of their employees shirk from their responsibilities. This is stupidly high. So, we need to see how it can be resolved and take action right now.
Accountability in the workplace, in short, refers to your team members taking responsibility for their actions and for the tasks they’ve been assigned.
In this post, I’m going to cover 4 key areas which pertain to managing the accountability of employees:
I know, you want to cut out admin work. You want to cut out time wasted on bullshit that doesn’t directly impact traction.
It’s hard to pull yourself away from product and marketing for any extended period of time to focus on how efficiently your startup runs internally, but it does have to be done.
Srinivas Kulkarni, writing for ZDNet, reports:
“While it’s very easy to say that when startups are founded, there’s a lot of freedom, liberty and access in terms of work and building the product, technology or service that they offer, it is also important to realize that most startups fail because they don’t learn from their and others’ mistakes. It’s imperative that the experience comes from a process.”
A lot of the problems processes solve can seem like they’re easily fixed on the day they crop up, and it can seem like there’s no point in writing down how you do work when you’re too busy to even get it all done…
But any good startup will scale, analyze the ways it gets work done, and will try to improve its efficiency — that’s just what organizations that succeed do.
The day I adopted my dog I learned a brutal and immediate lesson about myself and my daily habits.
Nothing makes you analyze your life like a 60 pound furbeast jumping on your face at 6 in the morning immediately after she decided to redecorate your living room with your most recent bulk toilet paper purchase from Costco. (The good stuff, might I add).
The first week of having this dog was hell.
Workflows are the building blocks of your business.
Whatever business you’re in, workflows are your business.
They act as representations of your whole operation. They can be used to smash inefficiencies and increase profits.
…But what are workflows, and why do they really matter?
Why should they be documented, and how can Process Street help you optimize them?
Let’s find out.
From September 1st 2015 to June 23rd 2016 the polls were clear that Britain would vote to remain in the EU.
According to the Financial Times, there were only two weeks over that period where the Leave campaign were ahead.
Yet, when the results came through, British voters had opted to leave the EU with 51.9% voting out.
How did the leave campaign strategy overcome the clear gap held for the year leading up to the vote?
A clear narrative and a range of big promises?
Well, yes. But also by selling those narratives and promises through a slick targeted marketing campaign powered by social media and big data.
According to the Laboratory for Social Machines from MIT Media Lab, Donald Trump was the most influential force on the 2016 election.
More than any television news stations, newspapers, or other public bodies. Donald J Trump, as an individual, was the most powerful influencer on the nation.
This influence was driven by his huge social media following. In March 2016 he had 6.8m Twitter followers, 6.3m Facebook likes, and 4.1m views on his YouTube channel. Now, he has over 22m Twitter followers.
But his eventual success lay deeper than just finely crafted tweet storms.
According to the Powering Productivity report from Planview and Loudhouse, poor processes are the primary cause of company inefficiencies (44%).
Even the largest companies in the world struggle with poor processes, resulting in poor performance and lost revenue.
But these problems are not always the fault of design.
Bad processes don’t just come from poor process management, but often evolve naturally within companies over time. From NASA to SpaceX, processes can become corrupted without anyone noticing.
This phenomenon can be known as the normalization of deviance.
