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Writer's pictureMiranda Ubong

Driving Employee Performance through Effective Internal Business Processes

There is only so much your team can deliver if the internal operations process is not flexible, friendly and workable.


While there are other important metrics that drive employee performance; your business operations process must be allowing for good performance to happen.

Let’s see a few of these:



Know your Team’s Pain Points: Always learn from the team, what their pain points are with the process. You can do this by finding out at what point during the business operations, that they get overwhelmed and frustrated.


Paying attention to this detail is beyond important as it affects the employee’s ability to perform on the job. Have regularly scheduled weekly general meetings; discuss the business operations for the previous week, the problems and how to permanently fix them.


For instance, a sales person may not like the fact that he or she has to seek mobilization allowance approval from first, the Supervisor, then Human Resources and then the Accountant. This may get too tiresome that in some cases, they’d rather not go out



Resources Allocation: Having to allocate resources to your team comes with its hiccups. You want to be assured of optimum utilization of that resource and at the same time fear the mismanagement of it. Well who’s to say which one is a given?


You can handle this by attaching expected performance metrics to to any resource allocated, clearly spelling out the consequence of wastage and judiciously requesting expense plan and report of the resource utilization.


For example, you want to be sure approving a mobilization allowance for your sales person going on a marketing exercise will yield results. Get your sales team to know what the returns on such resources should be (or not go below) and get them to agree on what the consequence for a mismanagement will be.



Troubleshooting: Have a dedicated team/office for troubleshooting. Customers want immediate response - they react most times to how their complaints are met rather than the cause of the complaint itself.


A prompt and efficient troubleshooting system can make up for an inefficient product or service. Have a team or member dedicated specifically to troubleshooting and regularly train such employees on the job


Where you have this function mixed with one or more, you will find response time increased and quality of response depreciated.



Eliminate the Bottle Necks: Or middle men. These are the ultimate frustration prompters. Nothing gets more discouraging than layers of obstacles in the form of processes. Bottle necks are time wasters and efficiency stranglers.


Group similar tasks/processes together to be sorted in one stage and grant a certain level of autonomy to your team to handle certain tasks and give certain approvals. This allows for urgent operations to go on even in the absence of certain individuals.


Be careful however with the autonomy sharing. Be sure you are allowing this to your trusted and competent hands who understand the gravity of such autonomy.



Promote standardization: May be in contrast to our point above. But it is needful to find a balance. Your team will lose a lot of time on tasks that they don’t do repeatedly because they lack mastery of it.


How about taking those similarly grouped tasks/processes and assigning them to individual team members. This will allow for mastery - reducing error and time spent on the tasks.

People can only improve on what they repeatedly do and not scarcely do.



Have an Accountable Head: Creating a system of accountability eliminates the grey area. Every member of your team knows who is to be held responsible for the execution of individual tasks.


It is more effective to have one member responsible for a task than two or more having such responsibility. In the latter case you will find that people either select the tasks they’d rather do, or unconsciously leave out some tasks in the hope that another team member will handle it - eventually leaving it undone.



Job Rotation: Not to replace standardization, but it is best practice to ensure every member of a team has adequate knowledge of each other’s individual tasks. This can be done during an employee’s on-boarding program.


This will allow for operations continuation in the case a member responsible for such operation is unavoidably not available at any given time. A member of the team can always fill in the vacuum for as long as is necessary.




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