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How To Design Impactful Company Procedures That Your Team Doesn’t Ignore
Does your team despise your procedures?
They actively force themselves not to look at them because what they see is too painful. It’s not because they’re not helpful, but because most procedures are wordy, confusing, and outdated.
One of my sales reps asked me how to enter a type of sales order, so I referred him to one of our procedures. But silly me didn’t review the procedure in some time, and it was how we conducted the activity in our recently replaced ERP system. Fail.
Procedures are living documents that help your team stay consistent while using their brainpower on higher-level activities.
They should never guess how to do something that’s done regularly, so make sure all your procedures follow this template:
1/ Purpose
At the top of your procedure, articulate its purpose.
Answer, “why is this procedure so important?” Here’s the beginning of my Procedure for Procedures:
“We base Skylink’s mechanical functioning on Working Procedures (or simply, “Procedures”). With hundreds of human and mechanical operating processes in action at any one time, keeping Skylink organized in any other way would be impossible.”
2/ Guidelines
Guidelines are the initial overview of how to execute a procedure.
“Is there a recurring problem or task? Then a Working Procedure is necessary. Or if there is already a procedure and a problem arises, we will modify the existing procedure to eliminate the problem. If there is no problem, let’s streamline the procedure to make it as efficient as possible.”
3/ TL;DR
Your team shouldn’t have to re-read the procedure thousands of times.
After they adopt how to do something, they should reference a simplified checklist as a guide. For example, I add a section to all my procedures called Too Long; Didn’t Read or TL;DR.
It gives whoever needs to execute the procedure a simple checklist to reference.
