Fundamental to the success of every business is the efficient delivery of your products and services to your customers. To create successful delivery, you need to focus on reducing the bottlenecks within your business that block activity and slow down your execution.
Bottlenecks Reduce Effectiveness
Bottlenecks are the small number of people, practices, or attitudes that limit an entire system and are often the reason why things stop progressing in your business. Interestingly, bottlenecks are also a big driver for employee dissatisfaction.
A great way to identify bottlenecks that I recommend is through daily 15-minute meetings or ‘team huddles’. The daily team huddle promotes transparency about any potential problems and empowers your teams to deal with issues collaboratively and efficiently.
The daily habit of being one step ahead, identifying potential bottlenecks before they arise, creates a proactive culture and means you and your teams are prepared to respond quickly and strategically in a crisis situation.
Reducing Bottlenecks Increases Employee Satisfaction
Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi coined the term ‘flow’ to describe a state of feeling pleasure or happiness when you are productive. In his TedX talk, he explains how ‘flow’ is the secret to happiness. His fascinating study is quite intuitive and gives you even more reason to work to reduce your bottlenecks – it will increase the happiness of your employees!
Benefits of Achieving Flow
Here are the eight employee benefits to achieving ‘flow’ in your business.
- Complete concentration on the task
- Clarity of goals, reward in mind, and immediate feedback
- Transformation of time (speeding up/slowing down of time)
- Job satisfaction – intrinsically rewarding
- Effortlessness and ease
- Balance between challenge and skill
- Actions and awareness merged
- Feeling of control over the task
Create Change This Week
What would your life be like if your business operations experienced better flow? How much time would this free up for you to focus on managing your business? As an experienced growth business consultant, I cannot stress enough the importance of implementing the regular work habit of daily team huddles.
Senior Gravitas Impact Business Consultant Leigh Paulden explains the concept in more detail in his excellent article “How a Communication Rhythm Can Solve Problems In Your Business”. Have a read and think about how you can implement this in your business.
A focus on reducing bottlenecks and increasing flow in your business operations will increase employee happiness as well as create a path for growth and profitability.
