Your business can change a lot within a year. That's why we've developed a simple process that you can use to dial in your Hub no matter your team size — large, small, or just yourself.
Today, we're going to give you a simple framework to facilitate your reviews — setting the stage and framing the conversation with your team around:
Your firm's immediate and upcoming priorities
The Workflows that will create structure to support these priorities
What's working, not working, and what is missing from your Hub today
Where To Start
You have a lot of Workflows! It can be difficult to know where to start when pruning and reviewing your Hub. This is why we recommend creating some order through regular, structured reviews that get your team aligned and in sync while allowing everyone the opportunity to identify what works well in your Hub, and what needs to be improved.
Looking Around The Corner
It's important to pause and look around the corner at what's ahead. By honing in on the priorities of the upcoming quarter, it will be easier to identify where your team's focus will be.
Whether you're anticipating a wave of new business, a wave of review meetings with existing clients, or something else, determining this will make it easy to reflect on which Workflows will be important to support you and your team along the way.
If these Workflows already exist, start by reviewing what has already been put in place. Identify what is still relevant (and working well), and what is not — and make the appropriate changes and adjustments. Don’t be afraid to change what already exists! Iterating on your process over time allows you to streamline and work more efficiently as a team.
If the relevant Workflows do not yet exist, here’s your chance to build out a new process to create greater visibility over your client work. Follow our Simple 3-Step Approach to planning better Workflows!
Getting In Sync Over Long-Term Goals
When you start in Hubly, we always focus on your 1, 3, and 10-year goals for your firm. It’s always a great idea to reflect back on your short, mid, and long-term goals during every review to ensure that your team is still aligned on the direction your firm is heading.
Reviewing how next quarter's priorities will bring your firm closer to these goals makes it easier for your team to see what impact their actions have, and spot opportunities that they may have otherwise missed or overlooked.
We recommend facilitating these discussions regularly, on a quarterly basis, to help your team stay in step and move your firm closer towards your goals. Meeting regularly builds muscle memory, minimizing the effort required to plan and facilitate them, allowing you to reinvest that time to focus on your client experience.
The more you include your entire team in the Hub review process, the more empowered they will be to make changes as they go! This will minimize the need for costly overhauls, as your Workflows will be kept up-to-date incrementally as your business grows.
What Changes To Make
Your Workflows should support your team, rather than create extra work. That's why you should always start by identifying where the bottlenecks are today. Here are our recommendations for identifying and eliminating some of the most common bottlenecks.
Smart Reminders:
By creating reminders for only the most important and time-sensitive tasks, your team will be able to identify what needs to be prioritized, rather than getting overwhelmed with a pile of overdue work.
Missing or outdated Links and Descriptions:
Ensure that forms and external software are bookmarked right into the Tasks that will require access to them, and that all of your Links link out to the right place!
Utilize task descriptions for more detailed instructions, to provide a template for note-taking, and communication on required inputs for the Task at hand.
Task assignments:
Instead of manually assigning tasks to users over and over again, update your Workflow templates to pre-assign the Task.
Workflow Rules:
You may need to adjust existing (or set up additional) rules to help categorize your Clients or add specific groups of Clients to the Workflow, kicking off the activity based on their individual needs.
Outdated Tasks:
Tasks are meant to help your team track their progress, so if you find there are tasks that you are always checking off that aren't really guiding your work, we recommend removing those Tasks (and potentially recording those as Task Details instead) to save you time and streamline the Workflow.
Merging Workflows:
Workflows in the same Process that are always worked on concurrently can sometimes be merged, this could help simplify the Process but could also reduce visibility.
Reviewing Your Streams and Tags:
Once you’ve been using Hubly for a while, we recommend looking back to ensure your categories still make sense and identifying Tags that might be helpful to support the upcoming quarter's priority.
Time to get to it! Open up your team's calendar and schedule in your next review. Doing the work now will help you ensure that your Hub is in top shape and your team is ready to take your firm to new heights!
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If you've checked out the Help Center and still need some guidance, you can use the in-app Live Chat to send us a message. You can also reach your Implementation Lead directly. We're here to help, just ask! 🙋♂️
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