Back-Office Breakthroughs is a newsletter for sharing ideas and tactics that back-office teams can use to thrive in today’s dynamic economy.
One quote:
"Goals are for people who care about winning once. Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly." – James Clear
One problem:
Back offices are viewed as cost centers despite their ability to create value.
One idea:
Back offices become value centers when they implement systems that show improvement through time, drive growth, and contribute to long-term profits.
Our thoughts in 500 words or less:
We can all think of a business that just had a great year. Sometimes these victories are due to luck, sometimes skill, and often a combination of both. To win and grow over decades, however, companies need systems for success. Developing these systems is challenging and entails answering hard questions like should I allocate more resources to winning new customers or invest in providing better service to existing ones? Back-office teams in finance, human resources, and legal are often the unsung heroes implementing and improving these corporate success systems. And yet, back-office teams are routinely viewed as cost centers because they themselves have not developed a long-term system for success. To be recognized as value centers, back-office teams need to implement their own systems which show improvement through time, positively impact sales, and provide a clear contribution to long-term profits.
To show improvement through time, back-office teams need a standardized approach to measure and track work. Standardized measures of work facilitate alignment and help ensure teams are doing the right things at the right time. In fact, the simple process of standardizing and tracking key elements of a team’s work is almost guaranteed to identify significant amounts of time being unintentionally wasted on low priority tasks. Once teams have a system that enables them to visualize and optimize higher priority over lower priority activities, meaningful improvements in performance and morale can be achieved.
After improvement through time has been established, back-office team leaders should then pursue opportunities to improve company sales. We often refer to this mindset as a “bias for growth” with the goal being to encourage team members to always think about how their work can help drive sales. For example, a contract management system may often work well with an existing group of customers but then create recurring problems with new customers. Back-office teams in customer support, legal, or finance with a bias for growth would attack this problem by developing a viable near-term solution and then dig into the root causes of the problem in order to develop a more scalable contract management solution. Shedding the cost center label is a lot easier if you can solve problems known to slow sales down while also communicating an ambition to help structurally speed sales up.
The final step in transforming a back office into a value center involves documenting contributions to near-term and long-term profits. This can be harder for some back-office teams than others. For instance, cost-cutting initiatives overseen by the finance team can have an easy-to-measure impact on near-term profits. On the other hand, a human resources manager may have a hard time documenting the long-term profit contributions of great versus good hiring. Regardless of the specific situation, back-office teams need frameworks and tools that help them clearly document their contributions to corporate profits. In conclusion, new success systems and tools are sorely needed for back-office teams to get recognized as value centers that speed companies up instead of cost centers that slow them down.
We’re here to help and have spent nearly two decades solving back office problems. Our unique software tools will allow you to overcome the challenges of hybrid work and enable your back office teams to thrive in today’s dynamic economy. If you are interested in discussing how to get your back office teams to stop missing their performance goals and start exceeding them, please reach out to our founder, Daniel Paik, to learn more.
About CuroWork:
CuroWork was founded to build trusting teams by clearly aligning all work around the right things at the right time.
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