What is Workflow Management?

What is Workflow Management?  Why is it important to understand its definition?

Workflow management focuses on the structure of work within organizations, and how various teams collaborate to complete this work. The process involves mapping, planning, and coordinating all the different parts of an organization’s structure.

While WfMS are often used interchangeably with business process management (BPM), they are distinct. BPMs focus on the organization’s entire set of processes as well as individual ones, while workflow management systems focus on clearly defined tasks that make the overall big picture possible.

The best workflow management systems today are SaaS solutions that easily automate workflows, providing you with the benefits listed above.

The benefits of Workflow Management

Improved accountability and collaboration

Mapping out your workflow in a clear manner may be more beneficial than you would expect. Miscommunication and micromanagement can cause employee dissatisfaction and, as a result, overall inefficiency.

As Forbes mentioned in a recent article:

When supervisors micromanage employees, they diminish employee performance and underutilize available employee talent. This means that the organization doesn’t get the benefit of hiring great people with experiences, skills and creativity. Employees tend to shrink in their roles when their bosses micromanage them by doing this.

A large part of this issue can be eliminated by having a clearly laid-0ut workflow. Every employee knows what task needs to be completed, who is responsible for it, and when it needs to be done. With this increase in accountability, the chances of micromanagement are significantly reduced, which results in better relationships between managers and their teams, and higher employee satisfaction.

Along the same lines, workflow management enables greater collaboration among stakeholders across the organization. Real-time collaboration improves teamwork as employees can simultaneously contribute to projects, edit documents and more.

The right solution can provide flexibility and make the processes faster, while keeping sensitive information secure.

Increased transparency

While worker morale can increase productivity, another powerful benefit of workflow management is increased transparency into your processes.

In terms of employees, sharing the steps and flow of your internal processes can help everyone understand what is being done at a given time, who is in charge of the task, and what happens next. This can help build trust both within the employees and between them and the organization as a whole, can help make employees feel empowered and can encourage them to take a more active role in their work.

However, by mapping out your workflow, you also have the opportunity to understand where the weaker points of your organizational processes may lie. Greater insights allow you to identify which parts of your processes are delivering results, and which could be improved to be more efficient and profitable.

Improved compliance

A workflow divides business processes into smaller steps, which can then be passed to or divided up for various employees (or, in some cases, for people outside the organization).  This can involve a lot of paperwork and back-and-forth before it moves onto the next stage.

By implementing workflow automation, you can use software to streamline the process, accelerating your workflow, mitigate risk by reducing human error, and increase your ROI. The right software can embed best practices and compliance into every workflow to ensure you’re taking all the necessary steps to comply with relevant regulations. Tracking and monitoring your workflows and checkpoints ensures that information is not incorrect or omitted.

Cost reduction

All of the benefits mentioned above work together to lower your organizations’ costs. By improving employee relationships, workers have higher job satisfaction and deliver better results. Automation reduces human error and ensures employees are not spending excess time performing redundant tasks, and streamlining work processes increases efficiency and bolsters your ROI, delivering more value to all stakeholders.