In a world where “business as usual” prioritizes profit over everything else, it’s really easy to fall into some pitfalls that will hurt your career or business in the long run.
Knowing this, in this post, I’m bringing you some practical tools and tips to help you avoid these situations and level up your career or business.
Hang on because this post will be longer than usual, but it is packed full of truly valuable information that will get you doing good business. Here’s a list of all the amazing things you’ll find (with some nifty links to help you go directly to what you’re looking for 😉):
- How to audit your processes
- Mapping your workflows and guaranteeing buy-in
- Save time by automating (even without a separate software system)
- Recognizing your zone of genius
- How to hire someone that’s the right fit
- How to align your services and better support your clients
Remember, you don’t have to make any sort of drastic change right away.
You don’t need to go and totally revolutionize the way that you’re doing business and turn things on their head. You can make small, little incremental changes to a process or a system in your day-to-day, as you put in the work and understand what’s working for you and what isn’t.
So, make sure to BOOKMARK or PIN this post and refer back to it as you go about the process of taking your career or business to the next level.
How to Audit your Processes
There are many different angles that you can take when auditing your processes and all of them are KEY to making sure that everything in your career or business is aligned and on track with the direction that you want to go in and to provide the information you need to make the best decisions to move the business forward.
Doing this will ultimately help you to sell more, and to get more products or services out there.
Here, I’m providing some questions that can guide you in better understanding your career or business and starting out on the process of auditing your processes
- From a leadership perspective:
Does your career or business align with you? Are you doing the things that you’re supposed to be doing? And how does this serve the business? And how does this support your clients? Is all of it aligned with your personal and organizational values?
- From a team perspective:
Is everyone here, not only a right fit for the company, but in their right role? Are they contributing the best they can? Is there any way or anywhere that someone could maybe contribute more if given the opportunity?
Is there someone who is maybe overstretched and running to burnout? How can we support them? What can we do there?
- From an offerings perspective:
What are the offers that you’re putting out there? Whether it’s a physical product, service, or digital product… Do they align with your values? How are you creating and delivering it? Are you creating it, manufacturing it, sourcing it, and distributing it in a way that is scalable? Are your processes running your team into the ground? And if so, how can you change that?
- From a supply chain perspective:
Are you being conscientious with your supply chain? Is everyone along the way in order to deliver your products and services being taken care of properly? Are you trying to mitigate or reduce any sort of negative impact that you have on your communities, on the environment, and on the people around you? Are you proactively trying to create a healthy and good environment, both environmentally and for the people involved in your processes?
So, look at the systems that you have in place, all the way from an idea and strategy through to actual delivery, and make sure to look at them through the lenses provided by these questions. This will help you get a holistic auditing process from a business perspective.
Make sure to do this frequently to keep your career or business aligned and where you want it.
Mapping your Workflows and Guaranteeing Buy-in
- Get VISUAL
Using either pen to paper or some cool whiteboard tool, like Miro, you should visually map out every single step of your workflow.
- Take your time
A lot of times when we first map out a workflow, we normally forget something. So, it’s okay to go slow, step away, and come back to it later.
- Consider EVERYTHING, don’t be one-sided
You want to map out what the tasks are or what actions need to happen, as well as, who’s doing that action. Take into consideration both the people in your team, your client and leads, always making sure to define who each task is assigned to.
- Guarantee BUY-IN
To make sure that at the end of this process, the new workflows you’re defining, or the roles you are redefining in different processes aren’t completely new to your people and that they’re something they feel they can get behind and actually implement, you need to:
- Get everyone involved, so that EVERYONE has a part in this
- Get everybody’s input from as early a process as possible, and bounce feedback off of them throughout the entire process
- Get your people to contribute and develop the necessary assets
- Keep everyone focused on the end result, and clear on what you’re all working towards
- Identify what’s necessary for EACH action
You’ve finished mapping your entire workflow. Go you!
However, the work’s still not done. Go back to it and identify what assets or tools are needed to support each one of the steps you have mapped.
For you to get an idea of what we mean by this, here’s an example:
What’s the very first step in the flow? It’s going to depend on what the process is, but maybe your client inquires, or submits their audit information. So, what do you need in order for that first action to take place? In this case, you need a form that they’re going to submit their information to. And then from there, I need an email that’s automatically going to go out to acknowledge that we received the form. This way your client’s not sitting there wondering what happens next, and there’s no need for a back-and-forth exchange between you because you’ve already thought through it with your process and the client’s journey will flow smoothly from start to finish.
Save time by Automating (even without a separate software system)
When you finish mapping your workflow and processes, especially after step 5, you’ll have a better grasp on what assets or tools are necessary for each step of the way to go smoothly.
With that in mind, I know that lots of us are expected to do EVERYTHING when it comes to Health and Safety (or within our departments) with little or not as many resources as necessary and that we all have different backgrounds and aptitudes. But, that’s where the magic of having systems and automation comes into play.
You can now easily look to your workflow and identify what you can have prepared beforehand and keep in your back pocket for when you do need it.
However, you may well be thinking: “I’m wanting to go into a system, but Aimee, my company isn’t going to spend the money. I’m stuck on Excel spreadsheets, I’m stuck in Office 365, or Google Workspace. What then?”
Don’t you worry! According to Sarah Williams, the founder of Rebel Office and my first expert interview guest on the Transmit Safety Podcast: Episode 2 , if you can’t convince management or your clients to invest in a tool that’s going to automate a lot of tasks for you, that’s totally fine. There are definitely still ways where you can prepare as many assets as you can, whether it’s drafting email templates, or preparing documents that you can share if you’re in Google Suite or using Microsoft and you have those spreadsheets that are prepared.
The idea here is that you don’t need to be creating everything from scratch.
It may seem boring and pointless when you are creating these templates and “ready-to-go” materials, especially because they don’t necessarily apply to every situation, but remember that it’s WAY EASIER AND EFFICIENT to tweak and edit the material for your current purposes than start at the very beginning at every opportunity.
Give it a try and tell us at the @transmit.safety Instagram community how automating your processes has changed your work life 😄
Recognizing your Zone of Genius
Congratulations! 👏👏👏 Once you start automating your processes, all that time that you used to spend creating things from scratch and just generally “being busy” can now be spent in your Zone of Genius.
You’re probably thinking: “Okay. But what exactly IS that?”
Your Zone of Genius is not only what you do best, but what you feel the best while doing.
To find out what YOUR Zone of Genius is you need to go through a lot of experimentation, but you’ll definitely know you found IT when:
- you’re riding this wave of creativity or productivity and the rest of the world goes away
- you’re working on something and you just lose track of time
- you’re getting stuff done, and you feel like you’re in your true purpose and you’re just zoned in
Since not everyone has the same Zone of Genius, this opens up the opportunity for you to specialize in what you love, which is not only more productive overall it’s also more interesting and joyful for you.
How to Hire Someone that’s the Right Fit
Understanding when to outsource is a key factor in growing and scaling your business. But, so is recognizing when something is outside your Zone of Genius, doesn’t spark your joy, or you don’t have the skills to develop it.
Here’s also important to remember that:
“…someone who is actually happy at their job, who loves to contribute, who is a good cultural fit for your company, who likes showing up and putting their all into it, while maintaining their boundaries and living their own lives, because that’s important as well. They are going to output more for you than 3, 5, 10 employees who hate their lives working for you.”
Doing Good Business with Sarah Williams, Transmit Safety Podcast Episode 2
Ultimately skills can be learned, but being a good fit organizationally can’t easily or quickly be changed.
So, to help you hire someone who’s the right fit for you and for your business, here are some TIPS:
- Start with your values and culture.
In your job applications tell the candidate about the things that you believe and your values, and ask them: “Do you agree?” or “Where are you on these on a scale of one to five?”. This will make sure that organizationally they make sense for you, and your approach to doing things.
- Take a case study approach
When it comes to thinking about if they’re the right fit for the actual role, it’s a little bit trickier, because if you don’t have the technical skill asking those technical questions may not be the easiest thing to do.
So with that, it never hurts to offer or request a bit of a challenge or an activity for your candidates to complete. For example, as part of the hiring process, you can give them a task to do or ask them to “put a strategy together for this”, or say “here’s a scenario, what would you do”?
With these, you can start to gauge how they think about things, how they work, and how they approach the solution. All of these can give you a bit more insight into how they fit within your business or organization, even if you don’t know what to look for from a technical perspective.
How to Align your Services and Better Support your Clients
I know that actually utilizing these tools and implementing these tips can be a lot, especially if you do it on your own.
The good news is that you don’t have to! Rebel Office has been fantastic in helping me align my services and understanding how I can better support my clients, and they can help you too. So, if you’re ready to take your career or business to the next level but want some help along the way go check out the special offer provided for our Transmit Safety community by Sarah Williams, the founder of Rebel Office and my first expert interview guest on the Transmit Safety Podcast: Episode 2: 40% off on the Client Experience Audit from Rebel Office.
But, also feel free to connect with me, Aimee Arsenault – on LinkedIn, Instagram (@transmit.safety), or Twitter (@transmitsafety) – or Sarah Williams – on LinkedIn, Instagram (@rebeloffice), or Facebook (@rbloffice) – to continue this conversation or bring us your questions about the topic.
Thank you for hanging on through this entire post! 😁
Wondering how you can hear and learn more about this topic? You can find all of this amazing information in the first interview episode of the Transmit Safety Podcast: Doing Good Business with Sarah Williams, where Sarah Williams and I talk about all things “Good Business”.
To continue discovering ways to achieve a holistic approach to workplace health and safety, become an impactful Health and Safety leader, and do good business, make sure to tune into the next episodes of the Transmit Safety Podcast and The Do Good Business Podcast.
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