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5 Reasons Why Your Team is Drowning in Mundane, Repetitive Tasks and What You Can Do About It.
My team spends half their day on tasks that could easily be automated. It's frustrating to watch. If I had £1 for every time someone complained about doing the same things over and over again, we'd be rich.
Sound familiar?
You’re not alone, many businesses, particularly those that rely on knowledge workers, end up in this position. They want to automate and streamline those mundane, repetitive tasks but how and what can be hard questions to answer.
This newsletter looks at 5 reasons why you and your team are bogged down by time-wasting tasks and practical strategies to address each one.
Let's dive in!
Bloated processes can include tasks that no longer serve your clients or your business. They were added for good reason but no one remembers why. Let's work out what matters to your clients and get rid of the rest.
Categorise tasks into three buckets:
Value-added activities are those clients will pay for, which directly enhance your deliverables.
Business value-added tasks are necessary for operations, like invoicing, but are not directly billable.
Non-value added activities increase costs and time without adding benefits.
Then optimise and standardise the value-added activities, reduce or automate business value-added tasks, and eliminate non-value added tasks completely.
Processes exist to transform inputs into a new desired output. Over time team members face new challenges or come up with better ideas and add bits to the process. Often the process's "desired output" becomes a distant memory and there are a lot of "no one knows why they are are there" repetitive tasks to do.
Do each of your processes have a goal? Do they honestly still achieve those goals? Are there tasks that are being done that aren't in line? Always do this exercise as a team, the collective knowledge is often required to understand each step.
Very few businesses have no automation in place but identifying what else could be automated and then creating that automation is harder than it sounds.
Automation relies on clarity, it relies on exact instructions; you can automate any task where the output is (or can be) well defined and where the computer has (or could have) all of the inputs. Brainstorm all the tasks that fall into this category. Define what output you want when an input is triggered; make sure this is crystal clear.
Easy automations are ones that live within a single app which can be Googled for instructions. If you want to automate between apps investing time in a low code platform like Zapier or Make.com is well worth it. For high complexity - hire someone.
Task hand off points are tricky. Tasks can be requested of other teams and then become redundant and no one lets the original team know. Teams can also be blind to what the next team does and therefore can't sensibly guess what is and isn't important to them.
Sit down as a team and discuss the impact of each task in the process. Which tasks matter to the next team, which ones don't? I often find these upstream/ downstream conversations lead to a lot of deleted tasks (and tweaks that create huge improvement impact).
Some repeatable things can't be fully automated as they require specific human input. As they can't be automated, they are left as labour intensive processes.
Often more of the task that we realise is repeated and has the same output or at least one of a selection of predetermined outputs. Use templates and checklists for the bits that are always the same. A little upfront effort saves a lot and you get the added bonus of consistent quality.
I am also a fan of Custom GPTs. If you are not familiar with these essentially you can build your own mini program using human language rather than coding AND you can use the power of AI to summarise, or improve language, or elaborate on. Great for creating say proposals, create a program that asks sales staff the relevant questions and inputs polished answers into a template for them to quality control.
... not only save time you will improve employee satisfaction, morale and therefore effort AND better align with your customer needs.
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