Tips to Simplify Team Workflow

Ever feel like your team is stuck in an endless loop of manual data entry? (Automation Tip Tuesday 👇) That’s exactly where one of our clients — an education consulting firm — found themselves. They were juggling a whole tech stack of tools that didn’t “talk”  to each other, creating inefficiencies and double work. We started with a look into their sales workflow. 🔹 Sales data lived in HubSpot, but once a deal closed, someone had to manually update Asana to track project progress. 🔹 Internal teams worked from one Asana board, but clients needed visibility into their own project timelines — cue more manual updates. 🔹 With so much repetitive data entry, valuable time was being wasted on low-impact admin work. Here’s what we did: 🔗 HubSpot → Asana automation: We created an integration that auto-generates project tasks in Asana when a deal reaches a certain stage in HubSpot. No more copy-pasting! 📢 Internal and client boards sync: Internal progress updates in Asana now automatically reflect on client-facing Asana projects, reducing the back-and-forth. Less busywork, more productivity. By eliminating duplicate data entry, the team saved 10+ hours per week — time now spent on strategy and client success. When your tools work together, your team can focus on what really matters. Where is your team losing time? Drop a comment below! ⬇️ -- Hi, I’m Nathan Weill, a business process automation expert. ⚡️ These tips I share every Tuesday are drawn from real-world projects we've worked on with our clients at Flow Digital. We help businesses unlock the power of automation with customized solutions so they can run better, faster and smarter — and we can help you too! #automationtiptuesday  #automation #workflow #efficiency

Last week, I cut a team’s delivery time from 14 days to 3. No new tools. No new hires. Most “best practices” are just busywork. I proved it in under a week. This was inside a global consumer brand. The kind where 6 departments want signoff before anything moves. The team thought every step was necessary. But most were just legacy habits. They were clinging to steps they couldn’t even explain. ___________________________________________ So I mapped out the process with them: - We looked at every step, one by one. - I asked: “Why do we do this?” - No clear answer? We cut it. What I found was that most of the 14 days weren’t spent prepping assets. They were spent waiting on feedback, file uploads, people to open emails and approvals from multiple departments. Once we stripped the unnecessary steps, here’s what the new flow looked like: One portal. One timeline. Inline comments. Instant download. Done. ___________________________________________ We removed 7 steps. Seven. Gone. Just by fixing the flow. Now the work, flows. The team moves faster. And no one’s gasping for air by Thursday If your workflow feels heavy and slow, try this: → List your steps. → Ask: “Does this actually move us forward?” → If not, cut it. You don’t need more time. You need fewer steps. Keep it lean Was this helpful? ___________________________________________ PS: I share the juicy stuff in my comment section

🚀 As a Product Owner boost Efficiency & Free Up Time for Strategic Leadership. Use these AI-driven prompts to streamline your daily work as a Product Owner, eliminating time-consuming tasks and focusing on what truly matters—strategy, decision-making, and delivering customer value. Use this AI Cheat sheet to: 🔗 Clarify Roles & Responsibilities: Need to delegate tasks effectively? Try this: "Create a RACI matrix for [Product Name] to define team roles and responsibilities. Suggest a structured approach to ensure Product Owners, Engineers, Designers, and Stakeholders understand their contributions at every stage." AI helps establish clear accountability, ensuring everyone is aligned and focused on their key tasks. 🔗 Define & Align Product Goals: Ensure your product vision supports business success: "Craft a clear and compelling product goal for [Product Name], ensuring alignment with both user needs and business objectives. Break it down into quarterly milestones, using SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals and KPIs to track progress and success." This helps you maintain focus and alignment across teams with measurable, actionable goals. 🔗 Prioritize the Backlog Efficiently: Overwhelmed by an ever-growing backlog? Try this: "Use the WSJF (Weighted Shortest Job First) framework to prioritize backlog items for [Product Name]. Provide a scoring model based on business value, time criticality, risk reduction, and effort to ensure efficient prioritization." This transforms backlog management into a data-driven, objective process, helping you focus on high-impact tasks. 🔗 Optimize Agile Processes & Sprint Planning Need a structured sprint execution plan? Try this: "Outline an Agile sprint success framework for [Product Name]. Define sprint planning, key deliverables, acceptance criteria, and stakeholder feedback loops to ensure iterative progress." This helps create a smooth sprint workflow without manual effort. 🔗 Engage Stakeholders with Tailored Insights: Struggling to keep diverse stakeholders aligned? Try this: "Generate a stakeholder communication plan for [Product Name] using the Stakeholder Matrix. Categorize stakeholders by interest and influence, and suggest the best communication approach for each group. Ensure clarity, engagement, and strategic alignment." This helps you deliver the right information to the right people-without wasting time on unnecessary details. 🔗 Optimize Release Planning & Execution with Clear Roadmaps: Struggling to communicate release plans clearly? Try this: "Develop a high-level release roadmap for [Product Name] covering the next [X] quarters. Include major features, dependencies, risks, and key milestones, ensuring alignment with business objectives and user needs." This delivers a structured, easy-to-follow plan to keep all stakeholders aligned and informed throughout the release cycle [More in comments..] ⚡ Embrace AI & save time 🙋🏻♂️ 𝐅𝐨𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰

⚡ Employees with fewer than 2 hours of workday overlap with close collaborators take 3x longer to respond to messages. That’s not just an inconvenience...it’s a breakdown in collaboration efficiency. The shift to distributed and asynchronous work has fundamentally changed how teams operate, but the data reveals serious challenges: 📉 Low workday overlap = decision-making bottlenecks. When employees have limited shared working hours, response times lag, project cycles slow down, and real-time collaboration becomes near impossible. 💬 After-hours messaging isn’t a solution—it’s a problem. Employees who receive 15+ Slack messages after-hours report higher burnout and disengagement levels, showing that async work needs structure, not just flexibility. 🤝 Teams that fail to maintain strong cross-functional connections are 30% more likely to experience collaboration breakdowns. Lack of structured interactions leads to knowledge gaps, missed handoffs, and duplicated work. How do we optimize async collaboration without sacrificing speed and effectiveness? ✅ Set Clear Collaboration Hours 🔹 High-performing hybrid teams structure 2-3 hours of daily overlap for synchronous work. 🔹 This ensures essential decisions happen without forcing unnecessary meetings or 24/7 Slack availability. ✅ Leverage AI for Smarter Async Workflows 🔹 Automated note-taking & meeting recaps help reduce redundant calls. 🔹 Threaded Slack conversations (vs. direct messages) allow for flexible, non-disruptive collaboration. 🔹 Clear response expectations—not all messages need an instant reply. ✅ Monitor & Strengthen Network Health 🔹 Employees with fewer than 3 strong collaborations per week are at higher risk of disengagement. 🔹 Use ONA to identify disconnected teams and reinforce strategic connections. ✅ Rebalance Synchronous & Asynchronous Work 🔹 Target 30-60% async collaboration (document sharing, Slack threads, project boards) to protect focus time. 🔹 Cap meetings at 30 minutes and default to async updates when possible. 🔹 Monitor meeting-to-focus ratios—teams spending over 60% of their time in meetings struggle to execute effectively. Collaboration isn’t just about where we work...it’s about how we work. Want more collaboration insights? Make sure to check the comments for our full report. What strategies is your team using to optimize async collaboration? #PeopleAnalytics #HRAnalytics #Collaboration #HybridWork #FutureOfWork

Project managers, if you're always chasing updates, you're managing the wrong way. I get it, your week is busy. → Pings for updates → Follow-up on follow-ups → Scheduling (and rescheduling) meetings → Trying to piece together and keep track of everything going on Your job isn't just to manage the project. You're managing chaos. Hard truth: if you're constantly chasing updates, it's not a team problem. It's a system problem. Great PMs don't rely on memory or micromanagement. They build structures that run themselves (and give up-to-date info at all times). Here's how to fix your system to manage AND update effectively: ☝ Build update rituals/tools/dashboards Statuses shouldn't be a surprise. Create recurring check-ins, dashboard, and async updates that TEAMS own. This ensure up-to-date info at any given time, plus accountability. ✌ Make blockers visible quickly If you're chasing down issues, you're doing it wrong. Design workflows where red flags surface BEFORE they turn into crises. Report on them regularly to ensure alignment. 🤟 Create a culture of accountability rather than dependency Teams shouldn't need a daily nudge to move forward. Empower them to update, escalate, and decide without being asked. Put tools/docs in place to help them raise up the right info and dependencies to other teams. The best PMS don't spend their time chasing updates. They spend their time driving outcomes. PS: what's one system/habit that helps you keep from chasing updates? 🤙

The right workflows win. Here are the 7 you need as a manager. High-performing managers work smarter, invisibly, and strategically. They use these 7 hidden workflows that make their teams faster, smarter, and stronger, and prevent burnout. Here's a deeper dive 👇 1️⃣ Execution Readiness ↳ Before work begins, great managers define what "done" actually means, align every resource, and set launch deadlines(not just "start dates"). ➔ Without clarity upfront, execution turns into chaos later. 2️⃣ Priority Realignment ↳ The best managers ruthlessly prioritize weekly, killing low-impact tasks without apology. ➔ They don’t let old priorities hang around out of nostalgia. 3️⃣ Feedback Circulation ↳ They don't wait for formal reviews. Feedback flows constantly, positive, corrective, and strategic. ➔ Great teams treat feedback like oxygen, not a luxury. 4️⃣ Escalation Acceleration ↳ Managers who scale don't solve every fire themselves, they create clear escalation paths and normalize fast surfacing of problems. ➔ 24-hour targets to resolve roadblocks keep teams unclogged and confident. 5️⃣ Workflow Efficiency Audit ↳ They constantly look for bottlenecks. ➔ Any process with more than 3 steps should be audited, simplified, or reimagined. 6️⃣ Team Pulse Monitoring ↳ Anonymous surveys. 15-minute check-ins. Simple daily questions like: "What's blocking you?" ➔ High performers manage morale like a mission-critical metric 7️⃣ Cross-Functional Sync ↳ Managers who build durable organizations pre-align dependencies,  and sync across teams before it’s too late. ➔ Silos aren't destroyed by chance, they’re systematically dismantled. Managers scale through invisible systems, not visible heroics. They aren't just "great at meetings" or "good communicators." They design better operating systems for their people. They build for resilience, not just results. If you’re serious about becoming a world-class manager, build these 7 essential workflows. Not later. Not someday.  Now. Start Which of these workflows do you want to master first? Which do you already use and find most helpful? Which do you think your team wishes you would adopt? Drop it in the comments. 👇 Do. Fail. Learn. Grow. Win. Repeat. Forever. ___ ➕ Follow me, John Brewton, for content that helps. ♻️ Repost to share with your colleagues and friends if you think this would help. 🔗 Subscribe to Operating by John Brewton via the link in my bio.