Sunday Story: Introducing Workflow

Welcome back everyone! We took a bit of a break from Sunday Story to maximize our family time over the summer and we’ve had lots going on, but we’re incredibly happy to be back writing and this week we’re sharing with you a new product and service that we are incredibly proud to launch: Workflow.

This is very much a case of “scratching my own itch” - anyone in a leadership position knows that their operation has a bunch of tasks that need to get done daily, weekly, monthly or annually. These tasks are things like payroll, onboarding, software updates, cash out procedures, and more. Usually, these operational processes have a bunch of steps that need to be completed, and the order of those steps matter - imagine making a cup of coffee for example. You’ve gotta get the coffee beans out of the cupboard before you grind them, so those steps have to be in a particular order.

However, most of the time, we don’t do processes intentionally - they grow over time, like a barnacle on a ship. Eventually the ship has so many barnacles that it stops being a very good boat - the barnacles slow the boat down, cause it to burn way too much energy to reach it’s destination than should be necessary. As leaders, we know that it’s important to tackle these barnacles - or “capacity vampires”, as I call them - because that’s exactly what they are. When a staff member has to engage in 10 steps to achieve an outcome that could be achieved in 5 steps, then they are wasting time and energy on those 5 “extra” steps - time and energy that could go into doing more productive work.

The trouble is, it’s incredibly hard to carve out the time to evaluate and examine our workflows. It’s a Catch-22 - We know we have processes that waste time. We know that if we put in the time and effort, we’d be able to improve those processes and probably have more capacity and time for other work. But we don’t have time to put in that time and effort, because we’re wasting it on a superfluous process.

Of course, there are solutions. Big consulting firms will charge a typical small business a mid-five figure sum to show you and your team some powerpoint on the importance of process, and at the end of their time with you, you might have some of your processes written down. Odds are good though that they’ll just confirm it’s important, you’ll be poorer, they’ll be richer, and your people will be annoyed that you tried to bring in an “improvement” that took their time and energy away from their work but for minimal results…meaning they are even MORE frustrated by the time-wasting processes that they need to get back to.

And the reality is that we’re entering into a challenging and disruptive time for our global economy. Between tariffs and the rise of authoritarian governments who are steamrolling trade agreements globally, the boom of Artificial Intelligence that is replacing jobs all over the place, and so many more disruptors impacting all of us, our organizations are all facing major changes on the horizon. Change is hard, and most people - even people who love change - tend to have to put a ton of energy into making the change successful. If your people are already wasting a bunch of their energy on bad processes, where’s this change energy going to come from?

The fact is - nowhere. They’ll burn out. The disruptor will hit, and instead of that being a positive and transformative force for your organization, it’ll be a major barrier to your success, it’ll harm the people you lead, and that in turn will undermine your leadership.

The disruption risk is huge here - everyone has that star employee who knows how to do all the things. What happens when they retire, win the lottery, get sick, or find a new job? A number of business have totally failed because of a lack of documentation of key processes that are lost when the people responsible for that work changes. Even handling adding or transitioning of staff is much, much harder without clearly documented processes, which ultimately leads to more staff attrition and disruption for your team.

I’ve seen this same process problem everywhere I’ve ever worked, and so a while back I started working on a tool to solve this problem. But it’s not just me saying this is a problem - research shows that “poor quality processes” cost organizations anywhere from 10% to 40% of their total sales and revenue. Knowledge workers spend 19% of their time looking for information on how to do the work instead of doing the work itself. Uncertainty of processes and workflows are also impacting the most precious thing on earth - the life of people - because a meta analysis of 33 studies with nearly 20,000 participants in total found significant links between role ambiguity - such as unclear tasks - and symptoms of depression.

Clearly, bad processes are a problem, and we’ve all felt that barrier of time when it comes to turning those bad process into good processes, so we made a solution to help. Workflow by Authentik Consulting and Training is your digital business analyst, and it solves the problem we’re talking about quickly and easily.

The way it works is simple - you sign up with our platform and your entire team will be given access. The platform allows your team to capture their processes in a few different ways - they can engage in a question and answer experience that builds the process for them, or they can upload any existing process manuals to the platform for improvement and evaluation. The easiest and most popular method is audio recording input - simply clicking a button on the webpage allows the team member to talk through the process as they are doing it, and the platform will automatically transcribe the process and parse it into steps. The platform then generates an easy-to-follow checklist, process map, and key considerations for the team member. In other words, if you can verbally talk through your process, you can go from having nothing documented to everything documented in the time it takes to actually do each process for real one time.

Capturing your process is easy - voice or audio file upload (even a YouTube training video works!), document, or interactive interview can all be used to capture your process steps.

No need to book big Strat planning days, no need to bring in an expensive consultant to interview your people - they just sit, hit record, and do the job and the platform captures it for them.Of course, that’s not all. The platform also has a process enhancement function, and it will guide you through making your process better. It will analyze your steps and make suggestions about order, methodology, and more to help you find the best process for a given task.

Our platform relies on a combination of decades of lived experience and the supportive power of state of the art AI.

And we’ve even created a Best Practices evaluation mode where the platform will give you specific feedback using subject matter expertise on all of the best and most successful process management frameworks today like Six Sigma principles.

And finally - your processes aren’t just the work that you do. It is in some ways a driver of your organizations culture; processes almost always have a fundamental human component that absolutely must be considered when doing this improvement work. That’s why you don’t just get the platform when you work with us - but you get a platform and process expert who can help train your team and support them to get the most out of this experience.

An example output based on making a cup of coffee - but any process will work!

Workflow is live now, and we’re incredibly excited to be offering a Small Teams package (10 members, up to 100 processes) for a low introductory rate of $950for 60 days of access and 8 hours with one of our consultants. We guarantee that at the end of 60 days, you will have a process manual that capture your most essential functions, ensuring business continuity for your organization, enhanced workloads for your team, greater productivity and lower risk of disruption. If we don’t deliver on this, you don’t pay a dime.

To further sweeten the pot, we’ll be giving away access to Workflow to 5 lucky organizations who are eligible totally free of charge. That’s our way of saying “thanks” to people who have supported us over the years - we are grateful for you all!

Check out www.workflow.authentikconsulting.ca to learn more or to sign up! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you