Save the drama for your mama ðŸŽ
Welcome to We Make Systems Sexy! Hi there. Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. Today we’ll talk about SOPs.
You know that SOPs are my love language if you have been around here any amount of time. So, I want to talk to you about why SOPs are so important and how you can use SOPs to stop team confusion and to direct your team in a way that feels authentic and organic.
Let’s start with a few interesting points. I have 5 listed out here that we’re going to discuss.
Why are SOP manuals so important for you and your business and how can they truly take the drama out of running the business and working with your team?
1. When you bring on new hires, SOPs are the go-to for training and should be used as your tutorials rather than having someone sit around and watch a bunch of videos that are easily outdated and often long-winded (I’m guilty of that too).
SOP manuals can be concise, but very clear so you would use your SOP manual to make sure you’re training your team members on how to perform these specific tasks and processes. And it serves as the guide that your onboarding team members go through.
You have that consistency within your team with an SOP Manual… which brings m me to the next point:
2. Consistency across your team. No matter who is assigned to these tasks, they’re always going to be doing it in the same way because they have the written way with images, with videos linked if necessary, showing exactly how the task should be carried out. It’s not every man for themselves.
It’s going to be very clear how you want things done, which means it’s going to be to your standard each and every time.
3. SOPs are also really important as a reference tool. It can be serving your team as a reference guide to check if they know the process, but maybe they’re unsure about one little detail. And again, that’s the disadvantage of having these stored as videos as opposed to something that someone can just skim through really quickly is then having to find where that one little doubt is in that 20 minutes video. Right?
It’s so much easier to scan a document when they’re really familiar with the process, but they’re just missing that one thing. This is also really great when someone takes leave, maternity leave, sick leave, surgery leave – they’re out for whatever reason and somebody else needs to take up the slack.
Maybe they’ve done that task before, but it’s been some time and they do need that quick little refresher.
4. SOPs are also really great serving as your KPI for your team member evaluation. You can use your SOPs and your SOP manual to evaluate your team’s performance against what’s actually documented.
- Are they doing the thing that’s documented?
- And are they making mistakes?
- Is it because the SOP needs to be updated?
- Or is it because they’re not following the SOP?
That gives you a whole lot of information to be able to process that information and do a really clear evaluation of your team members and your processes!
5. The last point would be process improvement. In this edition of our email series, I’m going to be doing a video about this, about why I love using my SOPs for process improvement. But I do want to make clear that when you’re getting started, you should document first and optimize later.
“You should not go and document and then try to optimize because you will never get done and you will never get these things documented.”
Basically, once you start documenting your SOPs, one thing that I would recommend (and I’ll show you this in the email video so if you aren’t subscribed yet, jump in here), is to then set up an automation to remind you to review those SOPs every 3 months (quarterly).
Have the person who’s responsible for doing that actual task go in and just review and make sure that it’s up to date, that the software hasn’t changed, that your process hasn’t changed, etc. and then that’s when you can start thinking about, how can we optimize this?
Once the thing is documented – once you’re seeing how it’s actually working – then you can come back and do your optimization. So, again, document first, and optimize later.
If you are a person who is really scaling your business, trying to hire, or you’ve hired and maybe you feel like you still have that drama in the team and team confusion, you need to talk to us about our SOP Manual VIP Day.
There are some major benefits to having this SOP manual VIP day, but here’s just 2:
- You get that instant gratification of getting your most important SOPs built out in one day – the ones that are most going to benefit your team and the new team members coming in.
- You get a roadmap for the SOPs that I would recommend by doing a mini audit of your business that need to be taken care of next down the line and you’re going to be taught how to keep these things up to date, and how to then go in and optimize your SOPs for continued growth.
I highly recommend it if you are at that stage in your business where you need to grow and you feel so held back because it’s all on you, or you’re so concerned about the making of mistakes, which we all are.
Alternatively, if you are looking for somebody to come in and actually do a full audit of the SOPs that you currently have, or the processes that you have, maybe you don’t actually have SOPs and you’re wanting to build out that SOP manual, please contact us because an SOP audit is also something that we do offer.
Even if you have a team member that you want to build it out for you, SOP audits are something that we also specialize in as well.
