STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES gembadocs.com
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STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES Business Leaders often like the idea of having processes documented in order to become less reliant on tribal knowledge which is so easily lost, making business continuity difficult to maintain. Global staff shortages and short term people availability shocks due to issues such as COVID restrictions exacerbate the problem. However these benefits are only a fraction of what well implemented SOPs can deliver and the fact that these benefits are underestimated is a significant reason why most businesses are not sufficiently motivated to put living, breathing, useful SOPs in place.
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES They don’t understand the benefits properly, so they don’t allocate the time and resources necessary to make it happen. In addition, up until now current methods to create and maintain SOPs have been super cumbersome, meaning that for most businesses, they don’t see the effort vs reward equation stacking up. So to understand how this situation can be improved, let’s look at some questions. First of all,
What is an SOP? (Standard Operating Procedure) “Standard Operating Procedures are detailed descriptions of the prescribed method that team members must follow in order to carry out a given process in a particular organisation.”
Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? 😉 Here is an example of a “step by step” SOP that we generated in our GembaDocs software.
It sounds like we are placing a set of handcuffs on our team members rather than providing a useful tool to help them be more successful in their work.
Therein lies half the problem as to why there are so few successful SOP implementations. For SOPs to become truly useful in an organisation, the team members need to feel that THEY OWN THEM, not that they have been imposed on them. Nobody likes being a slave. They need to be understood to be tools that make work life easier and better, not milestones around their necks.