Can you afford to lose $185 million?

That’s what Wells Fargo had to pay in fines after failing to apply a working risk management process.

Their lack of attention to the risk and pressure that they exposed their employees to led to sales practices that were bad enough to cause 5,300 employees to be fired and the penalty fines mentioned above.

Risk is inherent in everything we do – from conventional ideas of the risks in gambling to the chance of collisions while traveling. In business, risks can come from any direction and can severely impact your output.

Whether you wake up late and get less work done because of it or someone doesn’t get their work done on time and holds up the rest of the team, you need to be able to predict, prepare for, respond to, and monitor the things that can go wrong.

That’s why our post today will examine everything you need to know to build a risk management process to make your work watertight. We’ll even throw in a free, fully-built risk management process for you to use!

If you want to skip to a particular section then feel free to use the links below:

• Why you need a risk management process
• The risk management process
  • Set and align your objectives
  • Identify and document risks
  • Assess documented risks
  • Respond to risks
  • Monitor risks
• How to deploy a risk management process
• Your free risk management process template

Let’s get stuck in.

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Marie Kondo has managed the impossible. She’s rallied a large chunk of the population into getting excited about tidying up.

That’s right. Tidying up.

And there are clear benefits to decluttering – from being able to donate to thrift stores more to having improved mental health, to having better financial management and even boosted rates of productivity.

But how did Marie Kondo revolutionize the act of tidying?

With a simple process called the “KonMari Method”.

In this post, you’ll find out who Marie Kondo is, the science behind the lauded KonMari Method, why the method is beneficial for everybody, and you’ll even get your hands on a (free) KonMari Method checklist!

Read through the following sections to get the complete rundown on Marie Kondo:

• Who is Marie Kondo?
• What the KonMari Method is and how it helps with tidying
• Rules of the KonMari Method checklist
• Benefits of following the KonMari Method
• Use the KonMari checklist yourself to spark joy!

Now, let’s spark some joy.

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In this post, we’ll be looking at and learning about performance appraisal.

While we won’t be praising performances of global stars à la the judging panel of the Oscars or Golden Globes, we will be using performance appraisals to assess the conduct of the stars in your workplace.

After all, performance appraisals can be hugely beneficial.

For instance, 68% of employees who receive consistent, accurate feedback are more fulfilled in their jobs, in turn boosting employee engagement. Additionally, 92% of employees believe feedback – including negative feedback, if delivered appropriately – is effective for improving performance, resulting in increased employee output.

For performance appraisals to be successful, however, certain rules and procedures must be followed diligently.

Otherwise, the appraisal could backfire and have seriously detrimental results, including distrust and demoralization.

From a business perspective, this can be devastating.

So, to learn how to provide effective performance appraisals, read through the sections below:

• What is performance appraisal? And what are the objectives of performance appraisals?
• The different performance appraisal methods
• Why a performance appraisal needs to be done correctly
• Using Process Street’s performance review templates

Let’s begin.

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What’s the worst that could happen? Risk management is one of the first things you should be thinking about when planning for pretty much anything in your business.

The truth is, risk inescapable; success of your business is not determined by your ability to avoid risk, rather by your ability to accept, plan for, and take advantage of the varying outcomes risk might present to you.

It might sound negative, but risk management is actually more optimistic than it seems.

The key takeaway is that successful risk management strategies are proactive, as opposed to reactive.

By thinking ahead, you can prepare for and prevent risks before they even have a chance to arise.

In this article, we’ll take a look at how you can use Process Street to streamline and automate your risk management approach, including:

• Getting started with the basics of risk management
• Common risk management misconceptions
• Risk management standards
• The risk management process
• Key principles of risk management
• Benefits of risk management
• How to automate risk management
• 30+ risk management templates (free!)
• More useful risk management resources

Hopefully by the end of it, you’ll have a better understanding of how to focus your risk management efforts into a forward-facing, proactive approach.

There are lots of ways to approach and prepare for risk, and this article will give you the tools you need to master risk management.
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Yahoo! lost $350 million to their sale price after the reveal that a security breach had caused 3 billion accounts to be compromised. They learned the hard way that if you have sensitive data you’ll also need measures to protect it.

You need an easy way to secure your processes without providing extra hoops for your team to jump through and get confused over.

That’s why we here at Process Street let you set task permissions in your checklists.

This feature lets you hide tasks from viewers with variable permission levels within your checklists. You’re left with a checklist that shows different tasks to different people based on what you think they should see.

The best thing? It solves your security and clarity issues while providing a singular location for your data to be stored, making it easy to review.

Enough dilly-dallying, let’s get to it!
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In 2018, we saw more than 3.8 billion email users worldwide. 3.8 billion and increasing. That is almost half the worlds population on email.

From this statistic, Process Street gives to you both good news and bad news. The good news is that you have a fantastic method to communicate with your customers.

The bad news?

Business and consumer emails sent and received per day will exceed 293 billion in 2019, which is forecast to grow to over 347 billion in 2023.

Email after email multiplied into the billions loses your line of communication to the spam folder.

How do you make sure your emails are noticed and stand out from this crowd? The answer, by sending follow up emails.

In this Process Street article, we will look at the basics of follow up emails. We provide email templates to help you get started and processes for follow up email campaigns.

We will help you stand out.

In this article you’ll find:

• Who needs a follow up email?
• How to write a follow up email.
• Why do you need to write follow up emails?
• Five follow up email templates.
• How to write an email campaign.
• How you can use Process Street to help your email campaign.

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What exactly is an “audit“?

The International Organization for Standardization defines it as:

“[the] systematic, independent and documented process for obtaining objective evidence and evaluating it objectively to determine the extent to which the audit criteria are fulfilled.” – ISO, from ISO 19011:2018 – Guidelines for Auditing Management Systems

That’s another way of saying someone takes a look at what you’re doing, gathers some evidence, and compares that evidence to what you’re supposed to be doing (in other words, a set of clearly documented requirements).

In the case of ISO, these requirements are known as standards. ISO 9001 is a standard. ISO 14001 is a standard.

Importantly, this understanding of audit implies that there are a few main things being considered by the auditor:

• What’s documented by the company (e.g. internal processes, policies, and SOPs)
• Evidence gathered to support how these policies, procedures, and SOPs are implemented in practice
• The requirements defined by the ISO standard being audited against (e.g. ISO 9001)

Audits performed by companies to assess and analyze their own management systems are known as internal audits. Many resources for guiding companies on how to perform internal audits exist, and foremost of these is the ISO 19011 standard.

For most management system standards, internal audits are an important requirement. Even guideline standards like ISO 26000 for social responsibility depend on reports to evidence the success of their implementations.

As such, ISO 19011 defines a set of guidelines; a framework for companies to plan, implement, and improve upon their audit programs, for auditing the implementation of management systems.

Since the first edition of ISO 19011 was published in 2002, many new management system standards have been published.

These standards often share a common structure, including certain requirements, terms, and definitions being used. That means ISO 19011 can be used to devise highly economic audit programs, wherein knowledge and processes can be shared and applied across various management systems.

By considering how they might take a broader approach to management system auditing and integration, companies implementing ISO management systems stand to save time, money, and confusion when preparing for and implementing internal audits.

The goal of this post is to provide a spring-board for understanding ISO 19011, and how to get started with internal ISO auditing. In this post, I’ll cover:

• What is ISO 19011
• 7 principles of ISO auditing
• Different types of ISO audit
• Key elements of an ISO audit
• 8 free ISO audit templates

If you just want the free ISO audit templates, then here they are:

• ISO 19011:2018 Checklist for Auditing Management Systems
• ISO 9001:2015 Audit Checklist for Quality Management Systems
• ISO 26000:2010 Social Responsibility Performance Assessment Checklist
• ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 27001:2013 Information Security Management System (ISO 27K ISMS) Audit Checklist
• ISO 14001 Environmental Management Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9004:2018 for Sustainable Success in QMS Self Audit Checklist
• ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 Integrated Management System (IMS) Checklist

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This is a guest post by Adlin Sherley, an enthusiastic writer specializing in social media marketing techniques. She has a healthy obsession with writing, reading and catching up with her friends. Her passion is to help people in all aspects of marketing through the content she provides.

If you have a product, service or even just an idea that is worth selling, how would you do it? How would you let people know?

In the world of business, certain principles have been relevant for centuries. The concepts of promotion and marketing have existed for as long as humans have been trading.

Humans have always used their voices to communicate, tell stories, and spread messages, which is why word of mouth is still one of the simplest yet most effective ways of marketing something.

Before the internet or advent of the printing press, marketing moved slower. Person A used or came across something that caught their attention, and then they went around spreading the word to B, C, D, and whoever else was along the way. Arguably, it was a lot easier to convince people back then.

One thing that has changed with the advent of digital technology, is the speed and reach of marketing and advertising tools.

Enter the digital era

As we enter into the age of information, technology has made reaching large numbers of people as easy as a single click.

On the other hand, this means that competition in the attention-economy is fiercer than ever, with the coveted-yet-fickle attention span of individuals the shining prize.

“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” – Lori Taylor (@lorirtaylor)

Analogies aside, marketing today is a matter of strategy; well-planned, well-implemented, and continuously improved upon. If your marketing strategy is bang-on, then there’s nothing stopping you.

Conversely, a single wrong move could set you back tremendously, and that’s why it’s important to establish a process.

Breaking down digital marketing

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Becky Holton is a journalist and a blogger at BestEssays. She is interested in education technologies, best term papers and is always ready to support informative speaking at Brill Assignment. Follow her on Twitter.

Today, we are experiencing unexpected and surprising rise in artificial intelligence. At this point, AI and automation are slowly taking over every industry we have, shaking all our departments, and automating almost everything.

Machines have replaced humans in so many tasks, but simultaneously created various new job opportunities.

The changes happen so fast, it’s really hard to keep track of them. However, by following the progress of AI and using it to our advantage, we can do masterful things with its help, even in the HR department.

Artificial intelligence today

Just think of how far we’ve progressed in this area by now. Automation has taken over the lengthiest administrative assignments that took HR managers hours of every day. AI helps us manage and recruit people, and the myriad of modern automation resources grows by the minute.

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Accounting processes and workflows are at the core of any business. Sadly, 82% of businesses fail due to bad or negative cash flow.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

At Process Street we recognize the pivotal role small business accounting has for survival, profitability, and growth. We have therefore utilized our checklist approach to organize key accounting processes into a series of dynamic, efficient, and clear process templates.

All of these are free to use, ready to go, and can be edited to your needs, so there’s no reason to leave the failure of your business’ accounting up to chance.

This post will provide you with the following templates:

• Environmental Accounting Internal Audit Checklist
• Cash management process
• Small Business Budget Process
• Financial Plan Template
• Financial Planning Process
• Financial Audit Checklist
• Tax Preparation Checklist

This template pack can be used in conjunction with our other accounting processes template pack.

Let’s dive right in and organize your small business accounting.
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