Bureaucracy is essential to ensure the smooth running of companies. This is because well-defined and organized processes allow scaling tasks, directing actions and minimizing the incidence of errors. In addition, managers gain confidence and are able to decentralize the decision-making and ensure more effective processes and procedures.
However, the performance of a corporation tends to drop when standards, forms or documents do not have logical and practical strategies, becoming a barrier to the fulfillment of activities. In other words, when the cost factor and effort employed in this bureaucratic process or behavior hinders the agility, efficiency and speed in which employees are able to carry out their objectives, it will certainly be necessary to reassess these procedures.
Thus, managers need to know how to identify whether the form of management of internal services is generating productivity or negatively affecting the time of professionals and increasing expenses. If you have difficulty dealing with this topic, we have prepared this article containing the main information on how to reduce bureaucracy in your company. Read on and stay on top of it!
Bureaucratic processes involve sets of activities that must follow a logical sequence in order to fulfill a certain objective. They determine the guidelines that must be met when carrying out a given task. However, commonly the flows of these procedures are not properly planned or linked to other departments of the company. As a result, the management ends up losing efficiency, as there is a greater consumption of resources and time.
In addition, this fact can generate little history and negative evaluation regarding the quality of the activities carried out. We can take as an example the purchasing procedures of a company. Several use the common model in which a type of demand is requested, various budgets are researched, approvals are sought and, after all this analysis process, the purchase is made. Companies that still perform this type of procedure waste a lot of time and efficiency.
This is because there already are integrated systems that make these and other tasks much easier. In some automation tools, there are portals in which business partners list all their offers in the same environment. That way, the approval flow is evaluated by hierarchies more quickly, with orders being registered directly in accounting, which allows the business to have a more practical and efficient operation.
There are several ways to reduce bureaucracy within the company and stimulate business growth. Below we will give 4 essential tips to help you avoid the bureaucratic excess that hinders your enterprise’s productivity. Check it out!
Rooms full of files, folders and documents are not synonymous with a productive business. Quite the contrary: the large volume of information may in part be unnecessary for the company, causing a delay in carrying out activities due to disorganization. Furthermore, tables and folders full of paper are a thing of the past, as currently, digital tools have made it possible to fully optimize the data flow, ensuring that managers have greater ease in performing their work, which allows for an increase in internal production.
Therefore, invest in the digital transformation of your company, giving preference to digitizing documents, spreadsheets and contracts, as well as notes and other content that can compromise the physical organization of the space.
Excessive meetings can prevent ideals from being achieved due to a lack of objectivity, which contributes to eroding the company’s internal communication. For this reason, meetings need to be objective: issues should be previously thought out strategically in order to achieve the purpose of the specific topic. When discussing issues, if problems are addressed, it is necessary to focus on their main causes and find possible interventions.
At this point, leaders should focus on the main topic and avoid talking about issues that are not relevant at the time. A simple “joke” may compromise the objective, drawing the team’s attention away from it and making the meeting unproductive. One way to increase the efficiency of these meetings is to create agendas, as well as set times for each content covered, marking the beginning and the end of the meeting.
In addition to optimizing the number of meetings, they should only include those who are actually involved with the topic that will be addressed, as this will avoid losing focus and all attention will be directed to what really matters.
Entrepreneurs should be aware of the technological innovations available on the market. Nowadays, new solutions are created all the time and you should always try to adapt your business to the new service demands in order to reduce the internal bureaucracy, as well as to succeed before the competition. Various activities that used to require a lot of time and effort from professionals can now be carried out with much more agility and efficiency. An example is management software, which allows automating many functions integrated in a single system.
Finally, one way to achieve efficiency amid internal bureaucracy is to invest in training your team. In this regard, in any business situation it is extremely valid to have a well trained staff, as this allows you to have greater confidence in the team to resolve deadlocks and make the right decisions.
In addition, employees become better able to follow the procedures assigned to their activity, which facilitates the service order and the reduction of problems in carrying out the processes.
Therefore, these were the main information on how to reduce bureaucracies and stimulate innovation and productivity in your company. It is worth mentioning that the advanced features of ERP management software can be decisive in minimizing bureaucracy. In this sense, we can mention the services of MyABCM, which offer a software system focused on providing strategic analysis on topics related to costs, profitability and performance, ensuring the optimization of various tasks in the company’s financial sector.
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