Give your organisation a boost: Reexamining the strength of your systems

As leaders, we are not responsible for the results of our organisations.

Rather, we are responsible for the people who are responsible for the results.

With only 7% of employees feeling productive in the workplace, how can we inspire them to focus on what they do best?

To increase productivity and success inside the workplace, we need to go back and reexamine the building blocks of your organisation’s infrastructure: your systems

How do you know if your systems are effective?

There are several signs or benchmarks that indicate the strength and effectiveness of an organisation’s systems but here are three of the most important ones.

1. You are meeting client expectations consistently.

You consider a system effective if it produces products and services that meet the standard and results become more predictable. Leaders don't need to remind teams what to do as they are following easy-to-understand procedures.

2. You can detect and fix problems in real time.

Problems are inevitable inside organisations. We can't stop them from happening but we can address them in real time. Your systems should make it possible for you and your team to spot errors and adapt quickly as if nothing happened.

3. Leaders don't micromanage their teams.

As a leader, you are responsible for guiding your team, not controlling their every action. Having an effective system increases trust inside organisations. Team members know what is expected from them and they can focus on what they do best without having superiors taking control of their actions.

How to strengthen your organisation’s systems

Here are my 6 simple tips for strengthening your organisation’s systems:

• Use flowcharts and diagrams to simplify complex projects and tasks.

• Transform paragraphs into checklists and bullet points to explain long procedures.

• Set goals and benchmarks to track your organisation’s performance.

• Create an operations manual. Log repetitive tasks you want to outsource to other team members.

• Test your systems regularly. This way, you’ll find out where most errors happen. Gather feedback to remember what needs to be improved on the next test run.

• Assign a team member to review and update the organisation's manual regularly. Give them the responsibility to tweak workflows to deliver the same results faster and better.