10 ways to create more flexible business

Flexible business means adjusting to changing circumstances and improving your organization holistically. It is essential during a crisis, when external factors, such as inflation, force companies to undergo sudden changes to adapt. Businesses that fail to be flexible lose more revenue and take longer to recover.

 

How to become a more flexible business?

A few factors could be considered when deciding on improving their company’s flexibility. Some elements can’t be changed due to compliance or specific industry needs, while others might be modified immediately. Let’s explore 10 ways of creating a more flexible environment at work.

 

1. Develop a business flexibility strategy

For your business to become more flexible, first create a strategy that outlines the goals, benefits, and boundaries for your organization. Adding the strategy to your company policy will increase your manager’s effort to create a more adaptive atmosphere and ensure that every employee follows it.

 

2. Become more goal-oriented

An organization that focuses on goals and accomplishments instead of hours worked by employees, creates a healthy approach to task management. If the pressure is on working long hours, employees won’t look for optimizations of their work, and effectively of the organization. Allowing your employees to focus on the final product and manage themselves when and how they accomplish that will attract better ideas and move the company forward.

 

3. Decentralize decisions

Previous economic crises have shown that companies that decentralize are much more adaptive to rapid changes. Decisions are made quicker and become more local-oriented, whether that means the local customer base or just the team/department.

 

4. Trust your team

When you create an atmosphere of trust towards you as a leader among your employees, they will be more likely to share their ideas and insights. Many companies hire outside consultants to optimize their organization and share feedback on improvements, whereas your team most likely already knows what could be done.

 

5. Encourage work-life balance

How can proper work-life balance influence the flexibility of a company? Recognizing that your employees have lives outside of work and engaging in conversations about their hobbies and interests shows that you care about them as people and boosts the overall atmosphere of flexibility.

 

6. Allow remote work

During the pandemic, almost half of US employees worked remotely full-time. Against a common fear concerning productivity, statistics show that remote workers are in fact more efficient than people working from the office (the percentage varies depending on various factors). Since 2019, remote work has become a new standard. Allowing your employees to work from home will create an atmosphere of flexibility that will influence the whole company.

 

7. Pilot changes

Crucial changes in business might be worrisome. If anything goes wrong, the operations might be affected for a long period. A great way to become more flexible with optimizations while minimizing the risk of failure is to launch pilot programs, for example for a certain department. You might also conduct a small-scale process in a regular way parallelly to the new solution and compare the results.

 

8. Shift to the cloud

Cloud solutions, known as SaaS, improve workplace flexibility in a couple of ways. First, they support remote work, as the documents and tools are accessible via the internet, instead of the company’s on-premise server. Additionally, they enable quicker communication, sharing work with other teams, and improving the security of the data, as it wouldn’t be lost due to a hardware issue. Finally, SaaS doesn’t require such a financial and timely commitment as on-premise tools, thus when you need better software, it’s easier to change it.

 

Read more about SaaS vs. on-premise software.

 

9. Automate workflow

Workflow automation reduces the number of check-ins via e-mails or meetings, saving your employees time to accomplish what matters. Moreover, workflow software takes care of repetitive tasks, so your team wouldn’t be swamped with them, focusing on creative solutions.

 

Read: What is a workflow?

 

10. Use Floway for ultimate business flexibility

Floway is a no-code SaaS that automates business processes and manages workflows. It enables decentralization, becoming more goal-oriented as a company, and decreases the time spent on mundane tasks.

 

What’s special about our software is that it has built-in optimization templates that encourage all employees to suggest improvements in everyday operations. Thanks to Floway your company could save up to 40% of the time, and effectively money. It helps with becoming a more adaptive organization that thrives.

 

Read more about Floway and try our 30-day Free Demo

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