Many companies you come across will refer to themselves as startups, even after they cross five years. But sometimes, your business grows beyond the ‘startup’ status and becomes a Small Enterprise.
When this happens, you begin to change operations. You now begin to divide roles more strictly, you separate departments and introduce company rules and laws that shape the company culture. This is called standardization.
Often, standardization is a two-step process for many companies.
Business Process Delivery
When beginning to try and streamline operations in your business, you want to identify the best process possible to achieve a given outcome. This means analyzing the existing processes of how you have been doing things across the organization, checking for duplicates, and working out a singular solution to help get to the goal faster and more efficiently.
For example, perhaps everyone did everything when the company was a startup. There was no clear division of roles, perhaps because the employees were few and thus, everyone needed to put their hands on everything for efficiency. So, in your analysis, you will look at how many employees you have. Also, how well they do in different fields and determine the best place to put them.
Implementation
The second stage of standardization is implementation. Once you have analyzed the changes that you want to make, it is time to inform the staff of the changes and of their new tasks.
You can do this by first breaking down your employees into teams. Then, appointing team members who will be in charge of overseeing the staff implement their new roles effectively.
Then, you can build a culture of incremental improvement to the process, meaning you make small changes to the tasks and targets for your employees across time until they are giving you the output you want.
Standardization will improve efficiency in the company but most importantly, it will improve customer satisfaction. When a business grows, it means the customer base grows too. Thus, everyone now has a specific task to complete. They will be able to easily meet the customers’ needs as the optimum route to creating products or delivering services is being followed across the company.
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