Process Standardization: An Important Step to Scale-up and Grow Your Business
By: Abhilash Khalkar
Tags: Standards, Process, B2B, Business Strategy, Business

Imagine, what might happen if the support employees and customer support representatives in your organizations have no checklists to simplify the process of standardization for safety measures? Can you say with certainty that the employees will do a great job without checklists? Employees represent your firm’s brand and should be armed with the appropriate tools to accomplish a task perfectly.

Owing to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic businesses across the globe today, are working tirelessly to bring safety to their operations. More often than not, having a checklist for process standardization in place can help businesses ensure their business safety and continuity. Now more than ever, it is required for businesses both small and big alike, to have an organized structure in place and work relentlessly towards a strong recovery.

In an organization an array of tasks should work in tandem and in the best manner possible, to ensure optimum efficiency. When a firm skips formulating checklists for standardization, they often come across a mediocre end product. In the absence of checklists for guidance and organization, chaos often reigns.

Each operation needs a series of guidelines that instruct all workers, the procedures required to achieve outcomes of top standard. Not only does formulating checklists for standardization processes, help streamline everything that the staff does, it also allows you to supervise service and communicate more efficiently with customers, and effectively resolve their issues.

Process Standardization

Fundamentally, process standardization lays down a set of guidelines to be followed by employees and individuals to accomplish a certain task or a sequence of tasks, successfully and seamlessly.

Standardization can be utilized for an array of procedures, tasks, and processes. The might include keeping track of tasks, noting client information, conducting payroll, answering the phone, processing the logistics, and delivering goods, among others.

Benefits of Utilizing Checklists for Process Standardization

Standardization often means a way to offer your employees a time-tested and established process to achieve a set of tasks efficiently. When carried out perfectly, utilizing checklists for standardization can assist in achieving the following:

Improves customer service — Utilizing checklists for standardization ensure that every order and ticket is handled with precision

Enhances employee satisfaction — Standardization permits employees to master their skills and get well versed with the processes

Increases productivity — With checklists for standardization, your employees will spend less time seeking answers and more in getting the job done

Assures quality — Standardization ensures that the task is accomplished in a pre-defined manner

Improves clarity — Checklists will eliminate the need for additional research or guesswork

Concerns Regarding Standardizing Processes

Creating a checklist for process standardization allows organizations to ensure business safety and continuity, as well as a set of tasks that the organization aims to accomplish. However, some people have raised some concerns regarding the standardization of processes. These are as follows:

Process Standardization Brings About Monotony

One of the most common concerns regarding the adoption of process standardization is the perception that it brings about monotony. Although doing a certain task, in the same way, might be monotonous for employees, it does result in better productivity and efficiency in delivering the end product. The perfection in the result is often much more rewarding to both employees and organizations and brings in a wave of positivity.

Process Standardization Affects Creativity

Some people opine that process standardization affects creativity adversely. However, an organized structure or process permits the expansion of creativity leaps and bounds more than chaos. A constant struggle to get ordinary things done properly, error correction, and confusion will not aid an individual to arrive at a fresh thought. Process standardization assists in clearing the important things first to provide ample time to arrive at novel views and thoughts for improvisation.

Final thoughts

Even though the processes are standardized via checklists, there is always room for further improvisation by streamlining by incorporating new thoughts and viewpoints. Checklists can thus simplify the process standardization to achieve business safety and continuity, and at the same time provide leeway for innovative ideas and thoughts.