In a rapidly changing digital world, hundreds of business processes are managed through employee workflows that automate manual tasks to improve efficiency and reduce the time taken.

Workflows help efficiently utilize resources to execute various processes, becoming integral to the digital transformation strategy. They ensure business outcomes are met. The purpose of employee workflows is to simplify complex projects and empower employees to be productive.

According to a study by Salesforce, the vast majority (95%) of IT and engineering leaders say their organizations are prioritizing process automation right now—including 21% who say it’s a high or top-priority initiative.

This trend underlines the fact that many business leaders are looking to automate their workflows on a priority basis.

A business might have so many workflows that managing them might be hectic. This article explains how to create employee workflows, automate them for various business needs, and manage them optimally.

An employee workflow is a set of steps designed to streamline simple or complex tasks by eliminating manual and repetitive steps. It ensures efficiency and consistency across business functions. 

For example, new hire onboarding involves multiple steps requiring an HR member to guide new hires and help them execute onboarding activities manually. Employee workflows provide a simple and integrated solution for the new hire to complete each task, such as updating profiles in the HR system, filling out a sheet for new tools and apps, and setting up email and communication channels independently using an onboarding link. 

Some examples of employee workflows include incident management, updating the knowledge base, employee performance management, budget approval, travel reimbursement, accounts payable and receivable, etc.

Employee workflows can be categorized into three types based on how progression is made to the next step:

• Sequential workflows: These workflows involve sequential execution of steps. Sequential workflows suit any task that has dependencies. For example, a leave request usually includes a series of employee input regarding the days, type of leave, and reason.

• Parallel workflows: They involve executing multiple steps independently of each other. For example, in quarterly reporting, various departments, such as finance, HR, and IT, need to create different reports that can be executed parallelly.

Mixed workflows: These workflows are a hybrid of sequential and parallel workflows. Some tasks proceed in a sequence, while others can occur concurrently. For example, in purchase management, the IT department provides purchase requests for IT assets, while the finance department must undergo several approvals. Within the department, it’s sequential, but from department to department, it’s parallel.

The purpose of managing workflows is to make them easier for employees to follow. It also eases the administrative work of senior-level employees. Lack of clarity, miscommunication, and improper configuration can hamper the output of employee workflows. This can lead to a loss in data integrity and involve additional time in fixing incorrect workflows.

Let’s take a look at some of the challenges in managing workflows:

• Complex or redundant processes: Complex or redundant processes can consume valuable time. For example, a small step in a workflow might be a performance bottleneck. Hence, it is important to optimize all existing processes. Documenting processes makes it easier to optimize them. 

• Technological limitations: It's important to invest in the right tools because sometimes, the technological platform fails due to massive limitations in critical abilities, such as integrations, modularity, flexibility in feature implementation, etc. Using a dedicated platform makes it easy to manage your daily workflows.  

• Resource constraints: Limitations of time, budget, and people can act as a barrier to managing workflows. When different teams are present in silos, that can also be a problem. To mitigate these issues, it’s important to plan well in advance.

Lack of visibility: Sometimes, capturing in-depth visibility across organization-wide processes and operations can be difficult with multiple workflows. Trying hard to discover information and navigating workflows can make them counter-productive. There is a massive need to streamline these workflows. Transparent workflows help employees understand the purpose and implication of each step in the workflow.

Manual workflows are usually based on traditional methods such as paper, calls, emails, etc. They take more time to execute and are challenging to manage.

Automated workflows are more efficient than manual workflows. They use automation and Gen AI to improve workflow efficiency and accuracy. By removing redundant steps and automating repetitive tasks, they optimize time consumption.

Here are some common problems of manual workflows and how automated workflows can help solve them:

Scope for errors

Manual workflows are easily prone to errors due to incorrect data entry. It is also difficult to track which workflow step is having errors. The financial consequence of an error is huge, as even a minor mistake can lead to a major loss. 

Automated workflows greatly reduce the scope of errors. They can help precisely track steps in the workflow.

Inefficient collaboration

When using manual workflows, employees collaborate on various tasks manually, leading to miscommunication and hampering productivity. Manual delegation of workflows can also affect their completion.

Automated workflows facilitate collaboration through employee approvals and input. They also make it easy to delegate or assign tasks.

Delays in workflow execution

Due to redundancies, workflow execution might take more time than expected. Sometimes, the delays can be indefinite, leading to missed deadlines. Moreover, it’s difficult to track the progress of workflows.

Using automated workflows can decrease the time it takes to execute them. It’s also easy to track workflow progress in real time, reducing the chance of missed deadlines. This can improve the organization's operational efficiency.

Communication gaps

Communication gaps might occur between different departments when executing workflows, leading to a lack of accountability. For example, communication might occur through different channels, such as calls, chats, or emails. Inconsistent communication can become a bottleneck for the entire workflow.

Automated workflows help streamline the communication between employees and enforce better accountability.

Difficulty in analyzing data

Manual workflows do not support the generation of reports containing insights about workflow performance, making data analysis difficult. Consolidating data is time-consuming, and there is a risk of data inaccuracy.

Using automated workflows, you can easily create insightful reports that can help optimize workflows and make key business decisions.

Let’s summarize the key differences between manual and automated workflows:

Organizations can reduce errors and significantly boost productivity by transitioning from manual to automated workflows. Automated workflows simplify processes and add value to the digital workplace by providing real-time tracking, improved collaboration, enhanced accuracy, and actionable insights.

Employee workflows help reduce the scope of error and decrease the time spent in manual processes. It helps in optimal resource utilization for the best ROI. There are multiple benefits of employee workflows that can improve the cost utilization in your organization. Let’s take a look at some benefits of using employee workflows:

Improved employee experience

Through streamlined team communication, employees can manage repetitive tasks that consume time. This leads to employee retention by creating a unified digital experience for employees throughout the organization. Using structured workflows, employees can easily execute tasks through enhanced collaboration, which helps boost their morale and productivity.

Standardized processes

Employee workflows, when automated, help centralize processes and translate them into a standardized process over which everyone can collaborate and unify. Standardized processes can ensure data accuracy, reduce the scope for errors and delays, increase accuracy, and lead to better output. Moreover, they help achieve better adherence to compliance and security standards.

Enhanced operational efficiency

Using employee workflows can lead to significant cost savings and improved operational efficiency. By reducing manual effort and automating repetitive tasks, employees can focus on higher-value tasks, work more efficiently, and contribute towards business goals.

Optimized workflows

Employee workflows often contain unnecessary steps that consume valuable time. Identifying and eliminating these redundancies enables the optimization of workflows to better align with business needs. This helps streamline various business processes.

Employee workflows can be used to address the needs of different use cases in departments like IT support and HR. They can help ease the administrative work and reduce the time taken, whether it’s approval or employee input. Let’s take a look at some of the workflows in IT and HR support:

IT support

IT support workflows can involve tasks that help the IT support team, such as efficiently handling and resolving IT tickets, troubleshooting IT issues, resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, and user provisioning.

Let’s take an example of user provisioning, where a request is made to add a new user to a specific group.

An employee requests to add a new user with the specified role. The workflow changes the department in the HRMS tool and adds the employee to a group. It then emails the HR and IT teams. Additionally, the workflow creates and resolves a ticket in the ITSM tool. After the user provisioning is successfully performed, the employee who made the request is informed.

HR support

HR workflows primarily involve optimizing the department's day-to-day activities, such as employee onboarding, employee offboarding, payroll inquiries, and leave management.

For example, let’s look at leave management, where an employee applies for leave and seeks approval.

A software system with pre-built employee workflows for leave management allows the employee to raise a leave request. The workflow then asks for the duration and number of days. It then checks the employee leave balance through the HRMS tool and applies for leave. Finally, the workflow notifies the reporting manager and HR for approval through mail and chat. It also notifies the employee who made the leave request that the request has been sent for approval.

Different workflows in an organization - a case study

Goto provides software as a service (SaaS) and cloud-based  remote work tools for collaboration and  IT management products for SMBs and enterprises. 

The GoTo team uses over 50+ applications in its environment, including Adobe, VMware, SolarWinds ITSM, Office 365, SharePoint, NetSuite, Monday.com, Slack, and others.  

Their IT support team struggled to keep up with the growing number of requests from their global employees. The problem was that employees were left waiting for long hours when IT support agents were unavailable.  

Calls and ticket volumes increased as the number of employees increased. Workativ wanted to enhance the employee experience and modernize the service desk model by creatively using chatbots and app workflows.

Here are some of the repetitive employee workflows that Workativ automated for the GoTo team:

• Reset password

• Unlock account

• Install printer

• Install software

• Disable MFA

• Create distribution list

• Manage distribution list

• Update user phone number

• Search for information or help article from knowledge base

• Create support tickets and get the ticket status updates

The result of using efficient employee workflow management.

There are a lot of factors that you need to look at before finalizing an employee workflow. Each and every step in a workflow is important. Together, all workflows help complete the process. Workflows need to be optimized so that redundancy is removed and the overall flow is employee-friendly. They should be easy to configure and change as needed.

Let’s take a look at how you can build and automate employee workflows:

Identify the objectives of workflows

Find out what the day-to-day activities are under different processes. Analyze how they can be optimized and what problems are intended to be solved. Also, analyze which tasks are repetitive. Understand all processes and map the objectives. 

Implement the workflows

Provide an intuitive interface to make it easy to create workflow steps. You can use any tool like Workativ to implement the workflows. Contextual guidance is essential. Documentation, including SOPs, is also important for the smooth functioning of processes.

Define the workflow steps

Configure the workflow step. You can automate certain tasks in a step. Use integrations to perform activities related to various other apps. Create a structure that prioritizes roles and permission-based access control.

Monitor and refine the workflows

Continuously optimize workflows based on employee feedback and performance data. Check for workflow turnaround time and average time taken for each step. Track the behavior of end-users. Accordingly, refine the workflow steps to make them more efficient.

By reading this far, you can understand the importance of employee workflows and how to build workflows to solve business problems.

Workativ provides a suite of no-code tools that enable you to create workflows easily without writing a single line of code. These tools can automate app workflows through marketplace apps for various use cases. Using the employee experience platform, businesses can instantly implement different employee workflows, such as employee onboarding and offboarding, leave management, user provisioning, unlocking accounts, and so on, through LLM-powered chatbots that enable automation.

To learn more about how Workativ can help automate your employee workflows, book a call today!

What’s the purpose of employee workflows?

The purpose of employee workflows is to provide a structured approach to managing day-to-day activities within an organization.

What are the advantages of using workflows?

Employee workflows save time and cost, help improve productivity, and enable teams to make better decisions.

How can I automate my employee workflows?

You can automate employee workflows using a tool such as Workativ, which provides app workflow automation.

List some examples of workflows.

Some examples of employee workflows include leave requests, unlocking accounts, password reset, creating IT tickets, employee onboarding, etc.

How do I choose the right tool to implement employee workflows?

Choose a tool that provides app workflow automation and the required app integrations. These can help your employees solve different business use cases. The user interface should be employee-friendly, similar to Workativ's chatbot.