Do you know why triathletes view focusing on their core muscles during workouts as one of the most important parts of their training? It’s all about maximizing their power and performance. The muscles in our core provide stability to our spine and pelvis, allowing us to control our position, generate optimal power, and transfer that power into our extremities. So, what does it mean to “focus on your core” for business?
The most important part of understanding how to focus on your business core is to properly identify it. Core activities are the reason you went into business in the first place; it’s where all the magic happens to innovate on behalf of your customers and what makes your company unique.
Activities such as payroll, claims processing, research, content moderation— though important to keep your business competitive, especially in a digital-forward marketplace— take away time and resources from your core. This time could otherwise be spent developing strategy to keep customers happy and encourage them to seek out your brand ahead of any other.
If you’ve ever seen NBC’s The Office, characters on the show refer to back-office services as “the annex” and typically associate it with punishment and hazing for new employees. (https://theoffice.fandom.com/wiki/The_Annex)
But, why such a bad rap for back office?
Well, the traditional back office can often look back on what has already been done, spending the majority of time on transactional work that is resistant to change and involves manual work, at a high cost. For this reason, these types of activities are usually lumped together and viewed as a separate, lower standing part of the business.
One response to this phenomenon has been to outsource these activities and let outsourcing companies take care of the transactional processes. This may work fairly well for some organizations and with the advent of digital transformation there is huge opportunity for back-office services to evolve into a modern, scalable operation that focuses on strategy, looking towards the future and gathering the appropriate data to allow for change faster than ever before.
By focusing on your core business and letting and outsourcing company make your back-office OUR core, you’ll generate strategy that will transfer power into your teams and allow you to control your position in the market.
At Workloop, we combine robust processes with technology, searching for the best ways to move away from a traditional solution by driving efficiency through automation and through this, creating more efficient processes and better experiences for you, our customers.
We all win!!