A Business Manager's Guide to Implementing Fair Approval Processes

As a business manager, you are probably responsible for managing and monitoring the approval processes within your company. While often overlooked, implementing formal processes can be a great way to improve your organisation's productivity. 

Done right, these systems keep everything moving smoothly and are crucial to avoiding workflow bottlenecks. What’s more, by continuing to refine your approval processes, you can make sure that they’re not just efficient but also transparent and fair.

In this practical guide, we’ll explore fair approval processes in more detail and examine steps to creating a truly effective approval process in your organisation. Keep on reading to find out more!

Understanding Approval Processes

Approval processes can include a wide range of requests, whether that’s a formal document that needs to be signed off by a supervisor or a request that deals with an HR issue. However, you need to make sure that you have a systematic and streamlined workflow for dealing with each of these requests.

Here are some of the most common scenarios where you usually need to verify approval:

•  Document approvals. Drawn-up documents, like contracts or agreements, will often need to be approved by multiple staff members before they can be turned into an official policy or sent to external stakeholders. This is often done by a manager, but a more detailed workflow may be needed in bigger organisations or for more sensitive documents.

• Design approvals: Whether it’s a new website or sales collateral, new designs must be approved and agreed upon. As a more subjective area of business, fairness and transparent criteria are important to ensure consistency while nurturing creative thinking.

• Procurement requests. When departments or employees need to make a purchase, they usually have to get this approved by the finance director or accounting department. This approval process will usually include checking for affordability and proof that the purchase is necessary.
• Leave approvals. Employees looking to book annual leave will often have to go through a specified process that is outlined by the HR team. It is not unusual for managers and other leaders to have to verify that this leave is approved.
• Project plan approvals. Before a project can be undertaken, its plans usually need to be approved. This helps managers to organise the right resources and allocate enough of their budget to the project.

Your approval workflow should treat all requests fairly. This means that decisions in your organisation are made objectively so that everyone feels valued and empowered to succeed.

Fair approval processes are also transparent ones: everyone should be able to see the criteria and procedures that make up the workflow, helping to build trust throughout the organisation. Ultimately, if you don’t have a fair approval process, you’ll have a workflow that is set up to fail.

Steps to Implement Fair Approval Processes

Think about all of your business operations. If someone in your organization wanted to get a request or a document approved, what steps would they have to take? Is there a formal procedure in place? And now, how efficient and understandable is that process?

Whether you have a system in place or are looking to create a new one, here are six simple measures that will soon improve your approval processes:

Assess current approval processes

As with any form of operational improvement, it’s crucial that you know exactly which aspects of your existing approval processes you need to prioritise. Look at the approach to approval operations across your entire organisation to identify weak points and areas for development.

Start by listening to employees. You could use survey software to get an insight into the common pain points within your current approval processes. This qualitative response will be especially useful for identifying issues with fairness, as individual employees are often best placed to recognise unfair operations – especially if the survey is anonymised.

You’ll also want to identify any inefficiencies in your approval process, as this might also affect the fairness of the process and create frustrations. 

For example, an online retail business might find that there are delays to new products being approved because of a convoluted process that requires the sign-off of multiple managers across different departments. These delays are likely to cause frustration, or even misplaced blame for lost opportunities, as well as inconsistencies as different managers have different opinions. 

Define clear criteria for approval

One of the most common causes of unfair approval processes is when each supervisor or manager has their own criteria for approval, meaning that employees get treated differently across departments. Once you’ve identified the areas to improve, it’s important to create clear criteria that everyone can apply.

One of the challenges with this is the fact that different types of approval requests will require very different criteria. This means that you’ll have to work collaboratively with a wide range of stakeholders when crafting your criteria.

Let’s take the example of leave approvals. If you want to create a set of criteria that could be applied consistently in all departments, work with your HR manager, who will know that aspect of your business more than anyone else.

The best criteria for approval are ones that are simple and easy to apply, explicitly setting out what meets the requirements for approval and what doesn’t. This criteria should then be communicated to all staff, minimising the likelihood of requests failing to be approved and speeding up the workflow.

Choose the right tools

Thankfully, doing all of your approvals manually is a thing of the past. Automation and other digital approval tools can run the approval workflow for you, meaning you can focus on other tasks while monitoring these approvals. This can also help to improve compliance and security, as all of this is also automated, reducing the risk of human error.

That said, you shouldn’t just choose the first automation tool you find. Take time to choose the right tool by working collaboratively with leaders across your organization – find out which specific features would speed up their workflows and focus your search on these features.

Sector-specific tools can make all the difference, especially in areas where transparency is key and they’re likely to have unique requirements. 

By using nonprofit accounting and management software, an organisation can monitor their financial and non-financial data per project or grant and use real-time reporting to fairly assess whether new projects are feasible and can be approved.

Alternatively, invoice approval automation tools can be a great tool for companies that manage a lot of freelance employees. This is helpful if you need to approve requests for payment from your external contractors.

Standardise procedures

Achieving truly fair approval processes will mean that your procedures will have to be standardised across the organisation, implementing the criteria and improvements that you’ve already set out.

Inconsistency can impact the ease with which teams can adopt productivity-boosting automation software for their approvals, while they can have the unintended consequence of increasing unfairness across the company.

You might want to start by standardising procedures for just one type of approval process, helping to spot any issues along the way. 

For example, a graphic design company might want to start by standardising project plan approvals, which is crucial to the business and likely takes some time to get right. 

Implement training programmes

If you want to make sure that your approval processes are as fair and effective as possible, you’ll have to support those employees responsible for approvals to have the necessary skills to thrive in that role. 

This means that you should design and implement training programmes that can support colleagues in performing approvals more effectively.

This will also be closely linked to the changes that you’ve made as you’ve implemented more fair and effective procedures. You might have to work with your IT department to design training modules built around any new automation software that you’ve started to use.

In addition to this, your training programmes should focus on the issue of fairness. Give examples of requests and allow colleagues to practice using your criteria to accept or refuse requests. Building consistency through collaborative practice of the criteria is a great way to improve the fairness of your approval processes.

Measure the effectiveness of your processes

With such big changes being made to your approvals processes, it’s absolutely vital that you measure the effectiveness of your processes. This will require returning to your first step: what did you hope to achieve when you first assessed and evaluated your original processes?

You might want to measure the impact of your changes by using a set of KPIs, such as time spent per approval. Monitoring this will be useful as it will let you see the productivity cost that approval processes are having across your organisation.

This is where the tools you’ve selected to streamline your approval processes will really start to shine, as they’ll also enable you to report and measure your system's efficiency. 

On top of this, whether you’re using HR or purchase order software, you should now have access to an overview of how your improved approval process is affecting your wider business and whether any other improvements can be made.

Finally, you should also use employee feedback to measure how fair your new approval processes are. Use the same survey tools to see if improvements have been made with regard to equality and consistency.

Summing up

Approval processes are a very common part of the day-to-day operations of any business or organisation. This means that it’s crucial that you make them as fair and effective as possible, helping to create a more equal and productive workplace.

With our steps to improving approval processes, you can quickly boost the fairness of your approval operations. However, this is a difficult task to complete manually. That’s why automated approvals software is a great tool for any business looking to boost its operations, automating and simplifying approvals processes across your organisation.