Almost exactly one year ago, I held my first workshop on NoCode automation in my team at the first company I worked for.
Looking back, that was the starting point for me later to co-found VisualMakers together with Alex - the online school for NoCode for the German speaking market.
I not only realized how much fun it is to show others what is possible with NoCode, but also saw the potential for the first time how NoCode can literally inspire a team and every single employee.
3 reasons why companies should adopt NoCode
From my experience at VisualMakers, workshops, and conversation with no-code enthusiasts, I’ve identified three main reasons why companies should adopt no-code right away.
1. NoCode empowers non-technical people to implement their ideas
You probably know this from yourself, or from conversations with other people: "I couldn't code, it's way too complicated." The fear of breaking anything when faced with code (even if it's just the HTML text of an email) is real in any business.
This fear of people who lack an understanding of how software works makes them dependent on developers and their opinions, which in turn limits their ability to develop their own ideas for automated processes and digital products.
That changes completely with NoCode. With NoCode, anyone, technical background or not, can build their own processes or products.
No matter how savvy you are with programming languages - everyone can start their first automations with tools like Zapier, later on create more complex automations with Integromat and then build completely individual workflows with n8n.
2. NoCode makes teams more creative and collaborative
The beauty of NoCode is that everyone can learn it. This improves communication within and between teams - everyone can have their say and contribute ideas, because everyone understands what is being talked about and quickly develops an understanding of what is possible.
In my experience, in all teams working with NoCode, the sense of responsibility for one's own work has improved enormously: there is much less talk about who’s responsible for what and above all, for what not. Instead, there is more collaboration, mutual help and working together instead of against each other.
Of course, NoCode is not the panacea for every team culture - but I have experienced time and again that the playful approach to software has helped teamwork enormously - simply and alone because everyone develops a basic understanding of how software works with NoCode.
3. NoCode increases productivity and growth across teams
NoCode helps teams save time and makes them more productive. You don’t have to wait for developers to program an application.
Salespeople can build their own landing pages or automate their processes, marketers can better plan their content and automate workflows, accountants can automate the entire invoicing process - without writing a single line of code.
With NoCode skills, every employee is able to automate a good part of their work to some extent, thus boosting their individual and team productivity.
How to start adopting NoCode in your company
Now that you’ve seen how no-code can benefit your company, it’s time to start implementing it in your team.
1. Learn the basics of no-code
It takes some time and courage to break down the mental barrier of thinking that every click can break something. So the best way to start is by showing people how easy it is to connect different applications with NoCode tools like n8n.
In our experience, one of the best ways for this is a workshop. If you already have a team member familiar with NoCode automation, you can ask them to host the workshop.
Otherwise, experts from the NoCode scene can help out. We at VisualMakers offer different types of workshops, from NoCode basics to complex business automations, in which we help you set up a productive workflow for your needs.
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For those who want to dive deeper into the possibilities of NoCode, you can check out the VisualMakers online learning platform or take the n8n certification course.
2. Decide what tasks and workflows you will automate
To automate or not to automate, that is the question.
First, you need to identify the tasks that decrease productivity in your company. The biggest advantage of having more people with knowledge about NoCode is that more people see opportunities to automate tasks.
If the “automation manager” has no touch points with accounting, for example, a lot of potential would be unused. But if the company enables more employees from different departments, they would know precisely what tasks would benefit from automation.
Next, you need to evaluate whether those tasks can or should be automated. Usually, these are repetitive, frequent, rule-based tasks. You can read more about the features of automatable tasks in these blog posts from VisualMakers (in German) and n8n.
Ingeneral, the NoCode scene isn’t industry-specific, so here are a lot of possibilities for automation in every role.
3. Assign a no-code specialist for every team
Before the NoCode workshop, I was the only person in the whole company (besides a developer) who helped with automation. I had good ideas about what could be automated, but for a long time I had no idea what the individual teams really needed - and they had no idea which tasks would have the potential to be automated.
There’s a lot of talk right now about how NoCode executives will be found in every company in a few years. I think that makes a lot of sense, however I would go one step further: there should be a NoCode executive in every team.
A marketing team needs different tools and processes than the accounting department, but the product team needs more complex tools and products than the HR department.
It is clear that NoCode solutions make sense for each individual team - solutions that the team members can operate themselves without having to rely on developers every time and "rob" them of valuable time that they need to invest in developing the next feature in the core product.
The future of NoCode
We are just at the beginning of a big wave of NoCode development. More and more companies are already using NoCode tools and there will be more and more in the future that will also link and automate these tools.
I'm pretty sure that the companies that promote and establish NoCode in their teams will have a huge competitive advantage, will be more attractive as employers, and ultimately, properly applied, will be able to develop better products.