How Process Mapping Can Take Your Business to the Next Level

How are you verifying processes and procedures?

There are many moving parts in daily business activities and when its time to perform you want your best foot forward.

There are several steps to hiring and training.

There’s also much time and effort in making it through the hiring to performance stage.

When you’ve finally equipped a new employee with the materials needed for them to be successful, and you’re counting on them to perform at a certain level in-the-field, you must verify those actions are occurring.

Often times we use performance metrics to determine if a person is meeting expectations.

That is totally fine. But today we will take this a step further.

Today we will discuss process mapping.

Let’s get started.

Expectations

The first aspect of helping a person meet expectations is to provide your expectations to them.

This should occur within the training program.

While training there will be several questions, concerns and suggestions.

During the process of supporting someone to become most efficient, you want to make sure you’ve created a process that is comprehensive for the user.

• Also make sure that you are listening to suggestions in case there are more efficient ways to complete any task.

Explaining the reasons why a process should be done a certain way, will provide better understanding so any concerns are better comprehended.

Explaining “the why” behind the process can help people better understand more of the connecting parts that occur before and after the portion they are completing.

• After an employee understands the process more thoroughly, they are not only a better teammate, they will now expand their comprehension of the process to help you better identify other concerns you may not be aware of.
• Full comprehension starts with understanding their portion. But knowing the why behind a process to understand the customer before them and after them is highly more effective.

Helping them to perform at their highest level is all about information and follow through.

Your follow through is making sure everyone is staying on task.

Those with focus issues, as we all know, may need to be reminded of goals and expectations.

Especially if they are already not meeting expectations.

But, let’s take this beyond meeting performance expectations.

Process Mapping

It is one thing to make sure people are meeting their performance metrics, and that they are staying on task physically, but there is more to supporting high performance levels, than just these two.

The next step is to observe the common path of travel, common motions in proximity of their workspace, ergonomics of the tools and supplies needed to complete their tasks and the overall follow through of those following the process as trained and those who aren’t.

When you observe these motions, activities and travel paths, you must ask yourself:

• Is this the best process to support efficiency and effectiveness?
• Is the process being completed as trained?
• Is the process apart of training to begin with?
• Are there aspects of what was observed, that is better (or more effective) than how they were trained?
• What needs to be changed, omitted or created to maximize performance?

Capturing what is actually happening, in comparison to what the process should look like, is called process mapping.

Regardless of the overall performance of your team, there may be aspects of continuous improvement that can be achieved through process mapping.

Conclusion

The task of evaluating any process mapping requires high-level comprehension of any process, then critiquing what would yield the best results and then implementing change.

This exercise takes analyzing, documentation and even process evaluation.

You may come across procedures that you’ve set as expectations, that are incomplete, don’t make sense, or simply require updating.

The procedure of process mapping opens up a higher level of performance evaluations and can take your team to the next level.

Engagement is also important with key people on your team that can help you throughout the exercise.

Your team should always be involved and aware of team initiatives to help the team improve.

We hope this article has been helpful faithful readers – future leaders.

Love ya and continue to strive to exceed expectations.

Be sure to subscribe for weekly content here and get 15% off your first purchase!

Please comment if you’ve completed a process mapping exercise for your team.