5 Ways to Drive Process Adoption Across Your Team

A business process is essentially a series of steps carried out by a team to achieve a shared goal. The goal could be assembling products, managing deliveries, onboarding employees, and so on.

Every step in the business process signifies a task assigned to every member. And every process is triggered by a specific event, such as receiving an order or an alert that inventory levels are low.

Business process management and process automation are building blocks to ensure other related endeavors are successful. A business process should be repeatable. However, you can build processes until you are blue in the face, but if your team doesn’t adopt or follow them, then all your efforts are wasted, and your team will end up working in silos.

The good news is that you can change all that. In this article, we will provide some ways to drive process adoption across your team to boost the performance of your business.

Why Driving Process Adoption is Important

Without a business process or a concrete series of steps for team members and cross-functional departments to follow, this increases the risk of errors, miscommunications, duplicate work, and the formation of silos—all of which lead to wasted time and money. Embracing structured business processes is the most efficient way to run an organization and keep a culture of order and productivity.

Examples of Business Processes

Here are two common examples of business processes:

Customer Onboarding

You need to define your client onboarding process to ensure that your business exudes professionalism, organization, and expertise, and that you are providing an exceptional client or user experience.

Your step-by-step process may look like this:

1. Welcome email
2. Onboarding questionnaire
3. Contract and payment
4. Assigning and setting up the project
5. Internal meeting
6. Kick-off meeting with client
7. Thank you email and welcome package

Content Marketing Process

Content marketing can be a huge job, and it can easily go messy without a clear business process in place. You need to set your content marketing process thoroughly to mobilize your team the best way possible, reducing downtime and inefficiencies that can harm or slow down your campaign.

Here’s an example of a well-thought-out content marketing process:

1. SEO team providers writers with topics and content briefs.
2. The marketing lead gathers the contact information of influencers and other platforms to help publish/market content once complete and finalized.
3. Content editor reviews content drafts, and requests edits and revisions, as necessary.
4. Writers make edits.
5. Content is reviewed and sent to SMEs and/or stakeholders for review and approval.
6. SEO specialist reviews content.
7. Content then moves in line for staging and/or publication.
8. Content is published, sent, or shared.

These are just two of the many examples of business processes. Identify which areas of your business need processes or could be streamlined, and build a strong process to bring more order and efficiency to that area. Building, improving, and optimizing processes doesn’t just positively impact one team or department—it impacts the entire organization and stakeholders.

Why Documenting Your Processes is Important

This step is often overlooked—yet it is one of the most important. It’s one thing to discuss new processes and workflows with your team during team meetings or conference calls, but unless it’s shared with the team in a written format, it might go in one ear and out the other.

Furthermore, documenting your processes and procedures not only provides great resources and references for your team but also serves as great training guides for onboarding new team members in the future.

Additionally, once you’ve built a dedicated resource hub to “house” all your flowcharts, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and other supporting documentation related to your processes, you can adopt a workflow or process management tool to put those processes into action.

5 Ways to Drive Process Adoption

All this might sound great, but what do you do with it? How do you make sure your team adopts and follows the processes you’ve put time, effort, and energy into building and implementing?

1. Drive Awareness and Accountability. The first steps must be awareness and accountability. Without making all team members aware of process changes and establishing a level of accountability for follow them, you are decreasing the chances that teams will follow your processes.
2. Communicate the Value. Once you’ve communicated step one, the next step is to communicate the why or the value behind the process. For example, explaining how a new process will help make team members’ jobs easier, or how it will improve the experience for customers. No one likes change, but when team members understand the value behind a change, they are more likely to adopt it.
3. Build a Business Process Map. This step relates to the previous section about why process documentation is important for driving team adoption. Building a process map will immediately provide a visual guide for team members to follow. It will also allow you to identify gaps, bottlenecks, and areas that can be simplified, which brings us to the next step…
4. Simplify Processes. In the cases when processes exist already, there’s a good chance that those processes can be simplified. By keeping processes simple and easy to follow, you are increasing the chances your team will adopt them.
5. Automate. Double or even triple your performance, productivity, and output by not only simplifying but putting those simplified processes on autopilot. By streamlining menial tasks, you not only improve team morale and productivity but drive team adoption.

Put Your Business Processes on Autopilot with Business Process Automation Software

Business processes serve as the core building blocks of your business. Regardless of the size, business type, industry, or scope, driving process adoption across your team can help you achieve your organizational goals and boost customer satisfaction again and again.

Invest in business process automation software that makes a difference. By selecting a process management tool that is easy to set up and use, without any coding, training, or learning curves, you boost the likelihood that your team will adopt and follow your new processes.