The end of the year is the perfect time for teams to audit processes and evaluate what's working and what's not.
Auditing existing processes helps companies assess, understand, and plan process-based transformations. It's particularly important for companies with hybrid teams—which, let's face it, is most of us these days.
An annual process audit keeps new employees informed about existing processes while ensuring that all necessary team members are involved in planning, creating, and documenting new processes.
Let’s define a process audit and why it's so important to do one at the end of the year.
What is a process audit?
A process audit evaluates whether a process and its resources are being managed effectively and achieving its desired results. A process audit is collaborative and focuses on facilitating agile workflows. Auditing processes includes:
- Identifying objectives: Process audits identify the business objectives you want to achieve, including factors impacting success, and help establish the process for achieving these objectives.
- Defining competencies and capabilities: A process audit defines what competencies and capabilities your business needs in order to deliver the desired results, and it ensures those competencies are effectively evaluated.
- Examining results: The primary outcome of any process audit is that it clarifies what results your processes are achieving, and it determines how to measure and verify the integrity of those results.
Ultimately, what you take away from a process audit is thorough documentation, a review of the processes that are essential to your business, and a plan to pursue process improvement, if needed.
Why you should do a process audit at the end of the year
Regular, year-end process audits are crucial to help businesses stay competitive and ensure that their processes remain efficient and effective. A year-end process audit can also determine if your processes are achieving specific goals.
Here are some important reasons why your organization should embrace a year-end process audit in your annual to-do list:
1. Incorporate new team members into existing processes
Hiring trends are constantly changing and shifting, but the reality is that employee tenures are getting shorter. In 2024, the US Labor Bureau reported that the median tenure of employees ages 25 to 34 was 2.7 years. It was just 3.9 years for all employees, regardless of age.
This makes it very likely that new people have joined your organization in the past year and some crucial employees have left. Year-end process audits are a good way to align processes with changing staff and shifting roles.
2. Identify inefficient or ineffective business processes
While it may be human nature to avoid change, keeping the status quo isn't always good if your processes aren't working well.
Sometimes it's a matter of being better able to scale and communicate, like when DocuSign discovered the process they used for increment planning was inefficient. Their quarterly planning process involved using a grid of sticky notes connected by strings taped to a conference room wall. It was difficult to update and only accessible to on-site employees.
DocuSign ditched the physical planning board and pivoted to Lucidchart. This allowed distributed teams and employees across DocuSign to access the quarterly planning diagram and get more people involved in the planning process.
