What do you need documented procedures for? Let me answer that by first reviewing the knowledge that is required to be communicated within an organization. This retail corporate flow chart illustrates all departments and connections required to deliver a product or service to the customer.
Within each department lies it’s own process with many procedures, and within the procedures are the standards and the most efficient way you have learned to complete each. In addition, each department manual would ideally include (bear with me for a moment this gets a little dry and detailed, but my intention is to show that this detail is what makes everything come together):
- A department process flow chart,
- A “Procedures Section”, which also includes for each procedure:
- Procedure Policy
- Standards that relate to the procedure
- The Procedure itself, which includes
- Quality considerations
- Environmental Health and Safety considerations
- A “Reference” Section which includes
- The forms used in the procedures
- Operating Systems Manual Excerpts
- Lessons learned from any employee engagement initiatives or any amendments that were unsuccessful
- Recorded amendments to all SOPs
This is a lot of information, and the larger that your human resource grows, the depth of the information that you need to communicate to new and existing employees grows, and not getting this very important information to them consistently can have far-reaching negative effects
So not having them can definitely have a negative effect on your business’ performance, but how does having them increase it?
#1: Documented SOPs Reduce your Training Costs:
The more that you can provide new employees classroom training, the more you will lower the effects on existing team members productivity, increase new members productivity at a faster rate, reduce impacts on Capital Capacity Utilization (CCU) and interdepartmental synergy:
- A trainer or mentor would now change their responsibility with a new hire to someone who “certifies” the employee on their ability to perform a procedure or a set of procedures, reducing the mentor’s administrative time in training and the impact on their productivity
- SOP training flattens the learning curve and gets new hires up to the teams’ average productivity at a faster rate
- Training new hires in the classroom also reduces the need to train with expensive capital items like trucks or forklifts and doesn’t take the capital away from it’s primary objective
- SOPs ensure more consistent training and compliance to company standards and methods, which reduces error rates that would affect the department itself or other departments within the process flow
#2: Documented SOPs Increase Customer Service and Improve the Customer Experience:
SOPs communicate your standards to your teams and metrics ensure the standards are met, making sure that your customers receive a consistent product or service. For example, in your sales process you may have a “After Sales Follow up Call” for your team to call their customer and ask specific questions. The procedure would then direct the team member to a reference form where the questions are detailed, and the standard would be to follow up within three days after delivery. Ideally, a metric tracking mechanism would be used to ensure compliance and help recognize the best employees
#3: Documented SOPs Improve Employee Engagement:
SOPs are the foundation for an effective employee engagement program and when it comes to an engagement program’s effect on business performance, the bigger your human resource the better. When you have the same department in multiple locations engaged, you have more process experts working on improvement. This also helps improve company culture by being able to recognize the employees that are helping the company increase its business performance
#4: Documented SOPs improve global corporate communication:
When a procedural amendment is initiated, SOPs ensure a seamless and thorough transition and by implementing a “sign off” standard, which could be old fashioned paper or cloud based forms, you have a strong control that communicates that all staff have been informed and are ready for the change
So plenty of negative results if you don’t, and 4 ways they will help increase your business performance if you do, now... HOW do you do it? Documenting your logistical policies, standards and procedures may seem like a daunting task, but just mapping your process is a good start. Use your map to create a procedure index and follow the structure I’ve laid out above. These don’t need to be written in a couple of months, in fact you will never stop changing them as your employee engagement program develops and recommendations for procedural amendments start coming in. A good first step is to be reactive to situations that have a negative effect on your business performance; document the standards that you require and use it to communicate to existing team members and to train the new ones. Combine this with engaging and interacting with team members for a few minutes of the weekly meeting agenda and you will be on your way with the foundation for a good knowledge management program
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