How to avoid rework and productivity loss in your business?

Imagine you have spent days creating a project, changing it and thinking about how to please the client, and in the end they regretfully inform your work is great, but it must be redone using another methodology. It’s frustrating, isn’t it?

Rework is one of the situations that most causes dissatisfaction in an organization’s employees, and this type of situation can be stressful, frustrating, and detrimental to business profits.

After all, time is money, and when a team needs to perform the same action more than once, it consequently decreases their productivity.

But don’t despair. In this post we will give you some tips to avoid this type of problem So stick with us!

Main losses from rework

Rework – that is, the need to redo a task – causes a lot of harm to your business. Check out what it is:

Strain on staff and client relationships

Reworking creates discomfort for those who are performing the activity again and also for those who are asking for it.

The team in charge of changes gets strained and frustrated by having to do the same thing more than once.

A designer, for example, needs time and a lot of creativity to develop a brand’s visual identity.

Now imagine the strain on this professional by having to rethink these ideas for the fifth time. It’s almost expected that the effort will not be the same as at first.

At the same time, the client will not be comfortable asking for a fifth time for some changes and will begin to question the ability and credibility of your staff.

Workplace Stress

Reworking has a number of compounding negative effects. The client is frustrated with the result, the manager has to ask for the work to be redone, the team is under stress because they need to finish this activity in addition to all the other daily activities at the same time.

Thus, with deadlines approaching, teams must be relocated, employees have to work overtime, and the manager has to pressure more. In short, this ends up generating a lot of unwanted stress in the workplace.

Additional costs

Reworking can become so much that it is no longer viable to continue making the changes.

When a budget is made, the commercial department calculates and measures how much the business spends to provide a particular service at a specific time.

It will be calculated how many hours the team will need to work to complete the project, as well as fixed expenses included, such as electricity, Internet, meals, among others.

Therefore, when this completion time begins to exceed the initially determined time, the amount paid for the service ends up proportionally smaller, and your business begins to suffer losses.

In addition to all these situations, there are always lingering questions about who is the one to blame for the rework.

These questions cause insecurity and anxiety for the team and the client.

Therefore, once the problem exists, it is best to look for solutions, not to find someone to blame.

5 ways to avoid rework in your business

It is almost impossible to completely eliminate reworking from a business routine, as the work done will not always match exactly what the customer wanted.

The intention should be to make big requests into small changes, and there are a few simple actions that can be put into place to do so. Check out the tips!

1. Focus on planning actions

To avoid rework, the first step is to build efficient planning.

It is important to get as much information as possible about the work to be done and to plan the process in advance, thus avoiding surprises during the production phase.

Many managers make the mistake of trying to speed up the planning phase and get stuck in the execution due to a lack of ideas to accomplish what’s been requested.

Creating efficient planning makes it clear what the customer needs are and how the manager can offer a service to meet them.

Therefore, data must also be documented, meetings should be held regularly, and there should be well-defined phases and delegated actions for each employee.

2. Establish phases in the process

After planning, you need to establish phases in the process. By organizing this way, the manager can identify processes that require more time and more people and which processes can be eliminated or reorganized.

In addition, this is where actions can be delegated to people with clear delivery times. This will avoid excuses like: “My delivery is delayed because the person responsible for the previous phase did not send me everything that was necessary.”

There must also be a formal agreement, described in the client contract, about the rules for changing orders, as well as the time limits for orders and deadlines.

For example, establish that, upon final project delivery, the client will have three days to submit all necessary changes. For changes beyond this date, there will be an extra charge.

3. Conduct periodic training

Often, rework arises from an incorrect or obsolete way of doing something. With technological advances, the way of working in many industries has drastically changed.

To avoid this lag, the best thing is to conduct periodic training for yourself and your team.

Training can motivate teams and open the minds of employees to new ways of getting even better results, while spending less time doing so.

These alignments also help the parties involved to understand every part of the process and they can now act collaboratively rather than individually.

4. Automate some actions

Rework can also occur when there is disorganization in the distribution and delegation of tasks. It is therefore important to use platforms and systems that automate and standardize some actions.

This way, the whole team can look for information in one place and centralize the progress of the processes.

This process automation is especially necessary in businesses where multiple employees perform the same functions.

In addition, these systems automatically provide reports and data analysis, avoiding calculation errors and incorrect data entry by employees.

Another advantage is that this technology reduces costs by redirecting human resources to perform the most important activities.

5. Keep communication open and clear

The truth is that a lot of rework could be avoided by focusing on one very important part of every job: communication.

When it comes to taking project information from a client or wanting to resolve issues or get work done quickly, people often neglect effective communication.

This may be one of the greatest causes of rework; the lack of clear and open communication has the power to undermine the whole process.

It is therefore important to value the questions, as simple as they may be, to describe planning and tasks to the fullest. But also, it is essential that the team be in tune and share information about the project.

In addition, the client communication channel needs to be direct and efficient. It needs to be available to make answering staff questions and give faster feedback possible when needed.

Changes in your business routine

We realize that an efficient team management and organization system can eliminate most rework.

By properly planning a project, gathering all of the needed information, and keeping communication channels open, the chances of needing to rework the process are much less likely.

After these tips on how to avoid rework, it is important to keep deepening your knowledge to improve the management of your business!

How about reading our post on task management?