The Most Common Mistakes in Your Company’s SOPs
SOPs are essential to maintaining quality and efficiency in your team. They provide a resource for established and trained team members to refer to when they are unsure of something or when issues arise.
Establishing clear and lean processes can cut down on operational costs, boost productivity, and increase end-user satisfaction.
Though, despite knowing how valuable SOPs can be, many companies get it wrong. It’s all because of one simple thing.
Many managers do not engage the most important stakeholder in an SOP project: their employees.
A process stakeholder can honestly include anybody that is affected by the process. This could be departments that are simply informed about something throughout a process, the end-user (external client or internal customer), and so on. But the most important stakeholders to engage are the employees who are actually doing the work detailed in an SOP.
Many managers and supervisors understand a process and will somewhat discuss the process with employees. The difference in a strong, lean, sustainable SOP is in engaging employees in the process of development.
When employees are engaged in the development and improvement of a process, two things can occur: the real root cause of issues and inefficiencies can come to light, and employees feel engaged in the company’s success.
Let's break these down.
The Root Cause
When you document a process, you want to fully understand why things are done a certain way, not just how they are done. Understanding all the ‘whys’ of a process help us to pinpoint where inefficiencies, poor team dynamics, and other quality issues can come from. Otherwise known as the root cause of a problem.
Here’s an example: Let’s say an engineering consulting firm department is consistently racking up non-billable hours in rework. What’s your first assumption? Is it an unusual amount of complicated clients or poorly trained staff? It could actually be neither. A dive into their processes uncovers massive inconsistencies in their client intake, the scope of work, and the proposal process. While the problem is arising in the engineering department, it originates in sales and project management.
The root cause would have been missed if management didn’t take the time to truly discuss issues and processes with all stakeholders.
Engaging Employees
When management takes the time to chat with employees and then takes the time to evaluate opinions and make changes, those employees feel heard and valued. This is crucial to cultural engagement and making an employee feel like they are tied to the company's success. When an employee feels engaged and empowered in this way, their motivation rates increase and are 21% more profitable to a company than their unmotivated counterparts. Their motivation and increased productivity results in increased confidence and creativity leading to cost-saving solutions or new pathways for revenue.
On top of that, companies in the United States spend upwards of $750 million to boost engagement but only 30% of employees report feeling engaged. Finding meaningful ways to engage employees, like including them in process improvement discussions, puts these engagement dollars to good use with clear, positive results for the company.
Don’t let your next SOP project fall to this common mistake. Make sure to include your employees from the start. If you’d like to understand more about how to accomplish this, reach out to our team here.