Trust me, You NEED an SOP Manual

SOP manuals are one of my favorite things to talk about. So I would love to hear your feedback: Do you already have your processes documented? Have you already started building an SOP manual in your business? If so, let me know how far you are along in the process. If not, why not?

Why do you need an SOP manual?

While it takes a bit of time and effort to get it set up in the beginning, an SOP Manual will save you money because it takes a lot of time and effort to find relevant information about data in your business. Instead of constantly searching for the processes and just wasting the time on things that are repeatable (hello to those of you that are constantly trying to research the how-to steps again and again), having your processes documented will set you up for success. Having an SOP manual really promotes consistency in your work and helps to reduce mistakes on the job which benefits you and your business by saving you money because it saves time.

Having an SOP manual and having SOPs also decreases errors in your business. Performance leading to errors adds no value to a company, and inefficiency by your employee could be something really bad for your brand reputation as well. That’s what makes us all nervous about hiring and delegating to somebody else because we know that their work reflects on us. But if you have an SOP manual, it’s equal to having yourself duplicated. Essentially we are telling our staff, “This is how we do things in the business, this is how I would deliver the project, the product, and this is how you can follow the steps to do the same thing.” Voila.

Having an SOP Manual is going to help you with consistency in performance and how things are delivered to your clients. As a result, collecting all of these benefits will help your business to save money and provide you with better results. The SOP is going to cut down on these kinds of errors and improve work efficiency as well. It’s not going to leave your team members feeling confused about what’s expected of them or how they should deliver a process either. So again, consistent results.

The primary role of having an SOP is to bring everybody onto the same page. Keeping a tab of action plans will help your team members to be updated about what each other is doing in order to give a constant update about the task. And without the SOP, it really becomes difficult for your team members to create that kind of action plan and then move forward strategically. Because of that, they may try to approach new methods and that’s time-consuming because they’re always trying to answer, ‘how should we be doing this?’ That’s expensive because you’re paying them to figure those things out.

Having that proper planning will actually cut these costs out and minimize those errors. Creating an SOP manual will also help you to easily train and onboard new employees or team members. I said easily as the keyword because yes, we can bring people onto the team but have you ever done that when you felt like you didn’t even know what you were going to be able to delegate to somebody or how, and you were constantly being pulled back into having to explain and record and give messages and clarify? When you have an SOP manual, you give them the SOP and the task and they can get it done, no questions asked. (P.S. – speaking of delegation, I have a freebie for you here)

Yes, training or onboarding new team members does take a lot of effort and resources. However, the expense of training new team members can be easily cut if you have the right strategy in place. And that’s why having an SOP Manual is always so helpful for onboarding new hires. They help in training or creating the route for basically the steps that this person needs to take to learn and grow in their job. So by following these simple steps, building out your SOP manual is going to help to save you a lot of time, money, effort and hair, because you’re not going to be pulling your hair out at the end of the day trying to onboard these people that are supposed to be helping you.

So now that we know the importance and can see the benefits of an SOP Manual, now what?

There are different kinds of SOPs. Probably the most common is going to be your step-by-step instructional document that just shows exactly how to go from point A to point B to actually complete a task. Some SOP’s we actually refer to as master docs, they’re not necessarily instructional so much as informational. These are kind of looking at the hierarchy from the top down, or basically showing things in the simple overall view for policy, documentation, guidelines, procedures, etc. Once again, not so much instructional as it is informational.

A lot of people use flowcharts also to explain to their team members how the process should go but in a more visual way. So yes, there are different kinds of SOPs with the most popular or the most common being those step-by-step instructional SOPs. (i.e. “This is exactly how you’re going to do this thing and these are the resources that you need to be able to complete it”)

If you have any questions about what we talked about today in terms of SOPs or how you can build an SOP manual, send me a DM on the gram.

SOPs are my love language because I’m that person, so I’m always happy to talk about them. If you want customized tutorial videos on the how-to’s of an SOP Manual, you should be on my email list. Sign up here.