Businesses around the world are settling into a new normal, which has dramatically changed the way they interact with customers, foster collaboration among teams, and support employees. Many businesses have already had strong flexible work arrangements, but there is now more of a focus on the value of a virtual workspace and the need for the tools and processes to enable remote employees to work effectively.

Although the realities of this new economy can present many hurdles to overcome, solutions like rules-driven workflow software can help businesses have more control of disparate teams, cloud-based applications, and ever-growing datasets, no matter where they are.

So just how can rules-driven workflow software support your virtual workforce and even prime it for more success?

What Great Rules Engines Deliver

A great business process management solution adds value to your business by enhancing what it already does best. Whether it is onboarding new employees, moving a project from the design stage to delivery, tracking customer satisfaction, or collaborating on a report, workflow software breaks down the parts and pieces, inputs and outputs, and key decision points and visualizes and operationalizes them to increase communication and maintain momentum.

In other words, no matter the size or scale of your business—or even where your employees are—a great rules-driven workflow solution can make it easy to capture and improve the business processes that make your organization operate.

At the same time, processes that may have been informal—from tracking employee onboarding to invoicing to performance management—can benefit from the process mapping and rules creation exercise so each data point, employee, application, and step in a business function is documented. With this information in hand, end users can highlight speed bumps and directly suggest improvements.

Finally, all of this functionality needs to be packaged in a solution that is intuitive and user-friendly, yet powerful. Decisions’ solution builds off an end user portal with feature-rich design studios, customizable dashboards, and plenty of pre-built rules, templates, and business process mapping tools to enforce policy and trigger action.

Adding Value for a Virtual Workforce

Perhaps more than ever before, it is important today for teams to communicate, share knowledge, and identify ways to streamline their work. And this is exactly where workflow solutions shine.

Increasing Communication

With staff spread out geographically and even across time zones in a virtual environment, it can be easy for collaboration to fizzle. But with the help of an automated workflow solution, when each person knows exactly where and how they fit into a business process as well as how their work influences that of their colleagues, roles become clearer and expectations become focused. When issues arise or snags are encountered, process owners and internal stakeholders are able to quickly identify how to step in and clear a log jam.

Supporting Knowledge Sharing

Even under normal conditions, making business operations hum can be challenging. However, a business process designed and managed by the experts that make them come alive each day means the knowledge, experience, and components of each workflow are documented and made more visible. So, as roles change, new systems come online, and staff members retire and are replaced by new hires, the workflows that got your business to where it is today are accurately captured.

Streamlining Processes

In the hustle of daily operations, it can be easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. However, a workflow solution that is capable of handling multiple business processes can help businesses identify instances of duplicative effort or opportunities to streamline processes.

Does each department have its own method of tracking employee training? Does one division have a novel method of taking a project from idea to delivery that can change how the rest of your business works? Workflow software can help to bring these otherwise-informal processes to light so the rest of your business can benefit from the work your staff is already doing.

Want to see Decisions in action for yourself? Contact Decisions to see a demo of how our solution can optimize your business processes and to learn more about how your organization can try the platform for free. Once your staff sees just how flexible and powerful our solution is, your business will never be the same.