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 It's not because they're not helpful but because most procedures are wordy, confusing, and outdated.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.

4/ The Procedure

Now you get into the meat of documenting your procedure.

Be clear, concise, and break procedure steps down into subheadings.

Use the 1-2-3-step format as often as possible, but this may not always be the case.

5/ Continuous Improvement

This isn't a section in the procedure but a reminder that your procedures are living organisms within your company.

Your team's success depends on them. That's why you must always adopt the mindset of continuous improvement.

Look at your procedures monthly to see what waste you can remove or what areas need updating or improvement.

Working procedures are rarely set it a forget it. You will maximize your team's effectiveness (sanity?) by constantly improving your processes.

And remember, anything you do 1x per month gets a procedure.