Workflow Process Improvement Tips: A Guide For Growing Agencies

Speed up, streamline, centralize and deliver. That’s the motto of every workflow improvement hack.

Businesses, corporations, organizations, startups and agencies all run on processes. Some love and live by them (think banks). Others loathe, sidestep, and keep them to a bare minimum (think startups). But all businesses, whether they like it or not, depend on workflow processes. The difference is, some choose to refine and evolve them. And that’s what workflow improvement is all about.

Now there are loads of blog articles on workflow improvement, but few apply to agency businesses. So we thought we’d be the first to break the ice and help our agency folk out. In this article we tell you what workflow improvement is, why it’s important for agencies, how to recognize it, and we give you five real-life hacks from our very own marketing agency pro, AKA ActiveCollab’s Head of Marketing & Sales, Marko Herman.

What is Workflow Improvement?

Workflow improvement is revamping the entire series of activities it takes to complete a task your team does regularly, for the benefit of greater efficiency and productivity at your organization. You could apply workflow improvements to one particular task or initiative, or you could do an entire overhaul of your sets of processes for a client, account or project.

When we talk about workflow improvements, most people assume it's all about automating processes and giving your people and teams the best tools to manage their work. But this is only one element of the entire puzzle. Sometimes much of the improvement you will achieve lies in changing the approach you choose to take in the way you collaborate and interact with your teams and customers.

No matter which types of improvements you focus on, every workflow improvement should achieve one or more of the following:

Workflow Improvement vs. Workflow Management

Workflow improvement is sometimes confused with workflow management but these are two separate concepts and their main difference is the purpose they serve.

• Workflow improvement aims to change and streamline a repetitive path and approach you take to deliver a product or service continuously. It’s about coming up with a new, more efficient way to work.
• Workflow management focuses on overseeing and coordinating your teams through the path that is already in place to deliver a product or service. It’s about making sure your end goal is delivered, no matter how efficient or inefficient the process flow is.

What is a Workflow Process?

A workflow consists of a series of processes and a sequential order of steps required to accomplish a task or goal, collectively referred to as the workflow process. It can be a simple task, like sending an invoice, or a complex one like onboarding a new client.

No matter what type of business you’re in, you’ll have workflow processes which help you provide deliverables. For some you might have formal Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) documents which you use to follow the steps you need to take. Others might be ad-hoc processes that have become routine and while they have set steps, they are not officially documented.

The Link Between Processes and Workflow Improvement

Processes make up a large portion of your workflows. And that’s why improving processes or automating them plays a large part in achieving workflow improvement. This is why businesses across the board have increased their focus and investment in process automation. From process management to workflow management and resource management software tools, small and large organizations are turning to digital automation platforms like ActiveCollab to help them simplify and streamline their processes.

According to Forrester’s A Buyers’ Guide To Digital Process Automation 2024, the top three use cases for these tools include simplifying processes linked to :

Now there’s no shortage of these types of tools on the market. In fact, there may be too many to choose from. In the process of workflow improvement, some businesses risk signing up to too many tools. In their goal to automate as much of the manual processes as possible, they may end up making the workflow a complicated one because employees end up with multiple platforms they need to work across to get things done.

To avoid this type of backfire, much of workflow improvement is about streamlining and centralizing. What you want to do is find one tool that provides all or most of the automation features your business and clients need.

Say you’re a boutique marketing or SEO agency looking to improve your entire client workflow. Some of the key features you’d be looking for in a process automation tool would be:

• Client management
• Project management
• Resource and time tracking
• Invoicing

A workflow management tool like ActiveCollab, which is specially designed to cater to digital marketing businesses, would be a good fit because it gives you all four features. You can set up your team and external clients on the platform, create and manage projects from start to finish, manage your team's capacity, have them track the time they spend on each task or content piece, and send your clients an invoice when the work is done.

Tell-Tale Signs Of Processes Yearning For Workflow Improvement

Nothing speaks louder than your client’s unhappiness and your team’s low morale and burn out. And both will be revealed in your bottom line. To find tell-tale signs of bad processes, and workflows yearning for change, all you need to do is check in with your customers and people and ask them what they think and how they feel about the way you deliver work.

If your workflows are rocky and in dire need of reform, you’ll notice it by four key metrics in your business.

Broken Deadlines

If you're constantly breaking deadlines, it could be because you don’t have a quality team on board, but it could also be because your processes and workflows are too long or complicated. Quality time and effort which should be put towards producing the goods, is probably being wasted on long preparation tasks.

Miscommunication and Confusion

If your team and clients are never on the same page and don’t have one source of truth for information and documentation, then something is off. Too many touch points, going back and forth to different individuals and having multiple versions of content causes frustration and confusion and they are both signs of undefined and inefficient workflows.

Client Churn

Clients rarely leave because you made a small error or one campaign didn’t go so well. They leave because of fundamental and foundational issues which they experience over a continuous period of time. And bad workflows will push them to look for another provider.

High Cost & Effort, With Low Return

Finally, if you’ve got more than enough team members who do a good job, who put their heart into the work and yet you still come out with a low return, this again could be a reflection of bad workflows. Your quality resources are being wasted somewhere and that somewhere could be in your complex workflows.

Why Efficient Workflow Processes Are Vital For Agencies

Efficient workflows are vital for any business but they are particularly important in agency settings which work to constant deadlines. Unlike large organizations, where projects generally have more team members and longer delivery timelines, agencies are smaller teams which work in fast-paced and high-pressure environments.

Smooth Tracking & Delivery of Campaigns

Lean processes and clearly defined workflows make tracking and delivery of marketing campaigns easier to manage and see through to the end. With content marketing, in particular, there is a lot of back and forth between the agency staff and clients.

Learn about Working with Tasks in ActiveCollab!

Workflow and project management tools like ActiveCollab can help you manage entire client project timelines by:

• Setting and assigning tasks with due dates so whoever is responsible can see their activity log of duties within the platform and action it based on priority.
• Upload documents and link to Google Docs and Dropbox folders from within the platform so everyone references and uses one document instead of sending off links in emails which might be hard to track and find when needed.
• Monitor project budgets for campaigns throughout the entire project so you never exceed it or underutilize the funds you have to work with.

Cost-Effective Use Of Time & Resources

Because agencies run a tight ship, you need to make sure you’re making the best use of your team’s time and resources. If not always, then at least most of the time. But keeping track of this can be hard and time-consuming. If you plan to do this manually, or through guess estimations, that will be an inefficient workflow.

People and resource management features which productivity tools like ActiveCollab offer can completely revolutionize the way you track and manage your team’s time and capacity.

Here’s how:

• Time tracking can be used to log in the amount of time it takes individuals across your team to complete certain tasks.
• Set up daily work capacity defaults to manage your team allocation for specific deliverables and keep an eye on overtime.
• Get a snapshot of your entire team’s availability by having them enter vacation and days off so you have a birds-eye view of the number of people you have to work with at any given time.

Employee Retention

The backbone of any marketing agency are the people that do the work. When your workflows make life hard for your creatives, they’ll bear it until it all becomes too much. When this time comes, some might put their hand up and let you know that things are out of whack and changes need to be made. Others will just leave the company.

So if you want your best people to stay and keep doing the great work they do for your clients, you’ll need to make sure your workflows are at a level where they are not causing more stress in an already highly tense environment.

How To Run A Workflow Improvement Audit

Now that you know the what and the why of workflow improvement, let’s get to the action part: How do you run a workflow improvement audit for an agency business?

You can make it as simple or complex as you like. If you wanted to go with standard project workflow methodologies, you could turn to process mapping. But because agencies are stuck for time, we’d suggest you go with the simple and direct approach. This is also the common-sense approach because it focuses on getting insights and feedback from your two most important audiences and workflow participants: your clients and your people.

#1 Ask Your Clients

Asking your clients for feedback on the workflow you have in place is one of the best ways to not only improve your processes, but also to show them you genuinely care and want to deliver the best service possible.

If you have a long list of clients, you can send out a simple online survey. These take minutes to create and send out. To make it more enticing you can include a small reward or voucher.

On the other hand, if you have a dozen or so clients you can set up a quick 15-minute meeting to get their thoughts, but make sure you give them time to come up with notes and speak with their teams so they gather their feedback also.

#2 Ask Your People

If you’ve got an open workplace culture, chances are you won’t need to ask your people anything. They’ll tell you what they think straight up when they come up against a workflow process that’s off. But if you want to run a real overhaul of your workflows, set up a brainstorming session for the entire team. Have everyone come up with their top, most irritating, frustrating, and wasteful processes and practices, and any suggested improvements.

The other thing you can leverage from your people is Stand Operating Procedures from past employers. Every business does things differently. Some find super efficient ways that deliver great results with minimal friction. If you don’t ask your people to share and showcase how they’ve done things in the past at other agencies, you let good knowledge stay hidden instead of being invested into your agency.

5 Real-Life Workflow Improvement Tips From Our Head of Marketing

If you’re after some real-life advice from someone who’s managed and done workflow improvements in a marketing agency landscape, we’ve got you covered. Marko Herman is our Head of Marketing and Sales. He comes with over a decade experience in managing and keeping clients happy across paid and organic campaigns.

Check out Marko’s five top tips for agency workflow improvement.

1. Standard Operating Procedures Rule

If there’s one thing you do it will be to create Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for all the agency workflows that you expect current and new team members to do consistently and on repeat.

“I would say this is the most important thing. During my agency life we had too few SOPs, and if there were any, they were not detailed enough or often they would become obsolete without being updated. Also, new team members should be onboarded in a systematic way so they can actually learn the relevant SOPs and know where to find them if unsure about the next steps with their current task”.

2. Lean Processes & Minimal Touch Points

Next, you want to minimize the number of different team members working on one task or deliverable. This helps you keep individuals accountable for the end-to-end delivery of a piece of creative work. Also, when the content rocks you know who the credit should go to, so it’s a great way to recognize your people and keep track of your star writers or designers.

“Say you have three different team members take a blog post from brief to publish, take it down to two. So instead of getting a content manager to write the brief, a writer working on the blog post, and a website manager publishing it, teach writers to brief the designers and to publish their own blog posts, especially if the CMS is user-friendly (and it should be for the content team to be productive)”.

3. Assign Work By Individual Strengths

Another sweet hack is assigning work by individual strengths. When somebody is particularly good at something (say writing), they’ll do a better job in a shorter period of time than someone who is average or OK. So keep an eye on your team members greatest strengths.

“Maybe somebody from the team is excellent at asking the right questions to collect information from the client and prepare briefs. And others are good at planning the actions needed to execute a campaign or a project.

In another instance, maybe there is a team member good at running martech tools, setting them up and managing them, but others are good at preparing assets to be used such as emails or in-app messages.

So divide and set your workflows in a way that leverages strengths. That way you’ll get the best content out and deliver the most valuable work output you can as one untied front”.

4. Jump On a Call Instead Of Going Back & Forth

Sometimes, the best thing you can do to improve and speed up your workflows is to jump on a call. Rather than going back and forth, whether it’s via emails or chats, you can avoid miscommunication and delays by setting up a quick meet.

“In general, most time in the agencies is lost in communications with the clients. They might be slow to respond, don't provide quality briefs and feedback and a lot of the time, they expect the agency to know them better than they know themselves.

Although I hate meetings, sometimes instead of exchanging dozens of emails, a short catch up might be better, especially for information clarification and collecting feedback”.

5. Adopt Silent Approvals With Caution

Finally, something you can try to adopt but apply with caution is silent approvals. What it involves is including a disclaimer along the lines of: If we don’t hear from you by such and such date, we’ll take the silence as approval to go ahead.

This can save agencies loads of time lost in the waiting game. It can also push people to respond quicker if they see an issue.

“Silent approvals could be helpful, but it never happens in practice unless you have a really good relationship with a client and they rely on the agency expertise as they should. In reality, most things don’t go through without client approval and if they did, it could cause a problem for the client-agency relationship. But if the process is clearly outlined from the get-go and the client knows that this will happen if they don't chime in, it might be a great time saver.

On the other hand, internal processes are the perfect place to implement this. It would not only streamline workflows, but would also force managers not to micromanage, and to hire people who are capable of doing the job autonomously”.

Another thing Marko points out can help improve and streamline workflows is keeping all information and communication in one place or on a centralized workflow platform like ActiveCollab.

How ActiveCollab Simplifies and Streamlines All Your Agency Workflows

Improving workflows is all about finding better ways to work and deliver the goods to your clients. While great workflows remove friction and save time, bad ones demoralize your entire team and drag out campaign schedules and deadlines.

As a workflow management platform specially designed for agencies, ActiveCollab comes with all the features a growing agency needs to manage multiple clients and their campaigns from one spot quickly and easily.

With instant client and project setup, you can onboard a client and create projects at the click of a button. Assign tasks with deadlines for your teams, and send them off to clients for approval with all the links to copy and creative designs. See how your content is progressing via Kanban or Gantt views, and track them to the end when you send the final invoice for payment. All from one tool.

Now, because clients will have their own tool stacks, it might be hard to get them to agree to use your agency platform. However, sometimes, they won’t know what they’re missing until they give it a go. When agencies use project management and workflow tools that provide all the functionalities the agency and client needs to manage various content and collateral pieces, it can be a lifesaver for both parties.

Want to find out what you’re missing in your current agency tool stack? Sign up to ActiveCollab’s 14-day free trial (no credit card needed), or book a demo for a guided tour to see firsthand how we can improve all your agency workflows. From initiation to invoice. Just like that!