How Process Mining Drives Team Engagement and Alignment

A successful business needs a robust strategy, great execution, and a thriving workplace culture. Let’s face it—without any of that, you won’t be operating as effectively or efficiently as you could be. But perhaps of those three core components, the working culture and your teams’ engagement may be the most important.

Without the right culture, you may hit your short-term goals, but sustainable success will be a much more difficult challenge. Building a great culture is not easy either. It isn’t something that appears. It grows and evolves. However, one of the best ways to make a lasting culture is to unite and engage your employees around a shared purpose: transparency and honesty.

The importance of engaging your people

Engaged employees are happier, less likely to leave, more productive and more efficient. Conversely, unhappy employees can damage your company’s culture, resulting in a poor working environment which can directly translate to reduced profit margins and a toxic atmosphere amongst other dispirited employees. Keeping your teams engaged, therefore, is critical to hitting your broader business objectives.

As leaders, working with happy and engaged teams makes our roles easier, but handling disgruntled team members is where we test ourselves, earn our stripes, and prove our worth. More often than not, frustrations amongst employees are born from an inability to do their job to the fullest of their ability or a feeling that they aren’t adding value to the business. And for senior managers, it can be hard to answer these frustrations. How do you know where your teams are struggling or demonstrate the individual value they deliver?

Process mining boosts employee engagement

At a recent Operational Excellence event in London, 62% of the attendees said that managing and improving their people was their most significant challenge to creating sustainable, continuous improvement for the business. Speakers from the BBC, Lego, Travelport and Siemens talked about creating an environment within which your teams are free to do what they need to do, but with rules in place to keep them headed in the same direction. “Think of it like the rules of the road,” said Peter Evans, Director of Continuous Improvement at Lego. “If people started going the wrong way… everything would grind to a halt.”

To give your teams this freedom and guidance, you need transparency and visibility—visibility into what’s going on and transparency into how the work is being carried out. Process mining is the perfect technology to give you both, providing you with a framework within which to manage your teams and improve engagement.

Deep insight into your processes and operations illuminates areas of rework, bottlenecks, and other frustrations which can be damaging your employee engagement. Highlighting areas for improvement and demonstrating to your teams that you are working to eradicate them and make their working lives more manageable, is a guaranteed way to make your teams happier.

Displaying your processes in a simple-to-understand visual way, process mining technology also helps you spot areas to implement automation. This can help you release your teams from monotonous, low-value tasks, freeing up their time and energy to add value further up the chain on new, more exciting projects.

3 ways process mining helps you bring teams together

1. Work together based on the truth

Once implemented, process mining provides you a more detailed, truthful evaluation of what is really going on. Now, team meetings and monthly reports are fact-based, accurate and definitive. Heated, opinion-based arguments become a thing of the past as you galvanize your team behind the truth.

2. Identify quick wins to build momentum

Transparency into individual and team performance makes it easy for you to identify core areas for improvement as well as your quick wins. Once you start making those strides forward, eliminating smaller challenges, your people will feel energized and ready to tackle more substantial obstacles and feel more valued as a team member.

3. Show people the difference they make

One of the biggest contributors to employee turnover is a feeling of apathy toward work; a feeling that the work they are doing doesn’t matter. Process mining gives you the chance to clearly demonstrate to individuals and teams the value of the work they do. This will give your teams a sense of purpose and unite them behind shared objectives.

To find out more about how process mining technology can help your business, download our ebook.

Southard Jones

VP, Product Marketing (former)

Southard Jones is the former VP, Product Marketing for Celonis. Prior to Celonis, Southard held various executive product and marketing roles at enterprise software companies in the Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Data Science market, including Domino Data Lab, Birst, Right 90, and Siebel Analytics.