5 habits to keep SOPs updated...easily!

Whether you're getting in shape or getting your business processes in shape, you go through three major phases. First, you kind of diagnose, where am I at today, where do I want to go? What are the different things I should work on? That diagnostic phase when it comes to process might be creating a process org chart. It might be watching our webinar in the description that talks about ways to create a process org chart. If you're thinking about it from a fitness perspective, this might be weighing yourself, figuring out what health risks you have, figuring out what you want for your physical fitness. All of that stuff falls in phase one of the journey of systemizing or, you know, getting in shape. If we're going to do that analogy, the second phase of the journey is starting to make those changes. This is usually when excitement is at its highest. You're ready to get going, you're going to get that new gym membership, you're going to start creating that first sop. In the second phase, you're taking all of the planning and thoughts that you had early on and starting to execute. If we're thinking about physical fitness, this second phase is when you start to have real tangible goals and you start chasing them, right? So you wanna be able to do a pull up. That's my personal goal right now. I wanna be able to do a pull up. So every single day I'm walking by and doing a few chin ups to try to get myself closer. And I'm counting it down, you know, three chin ups in a row, four chin ups in a row, five chin ups in a row, and it's really exciting. And when it comes to process in the second stage, maybe you're diving headfirst into ClickUp. If you're joining our membership and you're diving in and you're so excited to, to get your ClickUp build out, you're starting to create those standard operating procedures. You're starting to make new policies and guidelines for your team to help them organize their work. You are just so excited to change the way your business operates. Or in the fitness example, you're just so excited to get your health back. But the problem is both with the process world and the fitness world. Phase two is usually where we see people drop off. Now, just to drive this point home, let's imagine you and I are having a conversation. We're sipping on some tea or coffee. In that conversation, I'm telling you, I'm.

I've spent three months losing the weight, getting in shape, going to the climbing gym, and I can now officially do one pull up. I am so, so excited. So I'm going to stop going to the gym, stop trying to work out, and just watch a lot of Netflix from here on out.

What would your reaction be? Right, you'd probably tell the person if.

You did all this work to be able to do one pull up. Why would you stop now? Because if you just start watching Netflix all the time, you're going to lose that ability to do the pull up and you, you're going to be right back to where you started three months ago.

Aren't you just so wise? That is the same exact thing when it comes to process. If you do all this work through phase one and phase two of your systemizing journey, to define your business, to build your processes, and then you just kind of leave them there to collect dust, all of the work that you just did is going to be pretty much worthless. Unfortunately, this kind of systemize everything and then abandon it has become the norm in this whole process space. I don't know if it's New Year's resolutions or what, but we need to stop that. Because once we create one SOP in our business, once we create one ClickUp folder, once we create a few automations with Integromat that make our business run more effectively, you and I are going to make a promise to ourselves to maintain it. Because why would we want to redo the initial setup again and again? Because we let it get out of date. So in the gym example, that's pretty cut and dry. We're going to keep eating healthy, keep going to the gym, and keep doing a pull up every so often to make sure I'm building those muscles and keeping them strong, but in process. For some reason, we seem to be completely at a loss for how to maintain the processes we just built. So we're going to break it down in this video. In my opinion, the way to make sure that your recipes never get out of date is to make sure that process is woven into the fabric of how your business actually works. You should be mentioning processes every single day in some way, shape or form. You should be mentioning those SOPs. You should be updating those SOPs each conversations. Just like there are easy way to incorporate workouts into your daily routines, I'm going to go through five ways to easily incorporate process into your daily business operations. And let's just start now. The number one way to work process into your daily conversations is to respond to questions with a prompt to update the sop. This might look like hey Layla, I.

Really need to update the footer on the website. How do I do that?

Oh, no problem. Can we jump onto Zoom?

Sure, that'd be great.

Awesome. Okay, so I'm going to walk you through this, but as I do, can you write down an SOP for this?

Sure, that'll help me remember it.

That is it. When you are asked a question, especially as the business owner, the team leader or the supervisor, respond to the question. Be courteous, but always follow it up with the expectation that whatever you say is going to be interpreted and put into an sop so you will never need to repeat it again. Adding can you update the SOP into your daily conversations? Can be a great way to demonstrate to the team that process is top of mind to you while also saving you a lot of time. Because you do not have to create the SOPs in that space. You're actually having the person who'll be doing the work creating the SOP in their own language so it'll be easier for them to understand. So not only does this keep process top of mind, it also puts the SOP in the person who's doing the tasks language. And it saves you time from having to create SOPs from scratch or repeat yourself. If there was just one habit you started to implement from this video, this would be the one. Because it is so valuable and so easy to incorporate into your daily flow, especially if you have a team. The second way to incorporate process into your daily culture, into your daily operations is to pull in process during your performance reviews. So I'm not sure how your business operates, but I'll share a little bit about ours for us. Every single month, each supervisor and supervisee pair meet to review each person's role. How are they doing? What questions do you have? How's your workload? That kind of stuff. But one of the items discussed during every one of those one on ones is what processes are you in charge of? How are those feeling? Is anything something that's not worth your time that we should hire somebody else to do? Is anything challenging or unable to be done because of some issue that has come up? Because we define every role in our business, every job title has specific processes they're in charge of. We walk through this list one by one in every single one on one in order to ensure that process is not only top of mind in daily work, but but also top of mind when it comes to roles and responsibilities and the success of an individual in their role. In past few months, these one on ones had led to some pretty meaningful conversations around Processes. In one application, I was talking to a team member who said that they had a bunch of processes that were important but didn't actually feed into the KPIs of their role. That was a lot of jar. So for example, this particular person, they are valuated based on how many testimonials they earn from our customers, how many people rave and love our service. That is the main number we're using to quantify how good they are at their job. They had a good number of processes on their plate that didn't actually correlate to that end result that they were in charge of. So they felt kind of torn. They wanted to maximize that metric that they were in charge of, but a lot of their time was being spent on this thing that wasn't reflected in the metric. So we had the option to either change the numbers that we were using to evaluate her success in the role, or remove those processes and give them to somebody else. Another example that came from these one on ones is a conversation with a teammate where we were going through his processes and he was saying, you know, honestly I'm spending most of my time on these three processes here, but honestly, these feel pretty low skill. It doesn't feel like the best use of my time. So looking at those processes and looking at what else that he had on his plate, we ended up splitting out his role, taking those three major processes and building a whole nother job description around them and hiring somebody new to take on those responsibilities. By having these processes part of these one on one reviews, we're helping everybody think about their jobs in terms of processes. And when we're delegating or writing job descriptions, we're using these processes as well, making it very clear who's in charge of what. And so habit number two here is defining the roles in your business based on processes and working that into your one on one conversations with each of your direct reports. Now, the third habit you can have for keeping process a part of your culture is so, so simple it almost doesn't need to be said. But every time you do a process, you should have the SOP open. And if you notice something that's off, change it, right? If you see a screenshot that's out of date, change it. If you see text that's out of date, change it. And when I'm saying you in this application for this habit, this is really collective. You, you all, everyone on your team should feel capable and responsible for updating SOPs as they use them. There should be no excuse for sops getting out of date. Because every time that process is done, the process should be getting updated. A word here, a picture there, a clarification there. This is the best way to make sure that SOPs don't get out of date is actually use them. This is one major argument for why we like to use tools like ClickUp or Google Docs to store SOPs, rather than centralized SOP storage systems like, say, Process street or Trainual. Especially for the small teams who watch this channel, I view it incredibly important that every person that is doing the SOP has the ability to modify the sop. This should not be something that's under lock and key. Even though there is the risk that someone will delete something by accident or maybe they'll make a mistake in the sop. Even though there is that risk, the benefits of having people be able to update the SOPs on their own more than outweigh the risks of having someone potentially delete something. So to make this habit possible, make sure that you, technically speaking, have a tool where people are able to edit, right? Just a technical capability. And secondly, you make it clear that you expect your team members to edit SOPs, particularly when it comes to subcontractors or team members who are a little bit more casual. I found it pretty common for people to feel a resistance that they should just take the SOP you've written as, you know, gospel and never change anything. You want to be very clear that that is not what your expectations are. You can do that through ongoing conversations, as we mentioned in Habit 1, or by just having written at the top of the sop.

This SOP is a work in progress. If you notice anything that is out of date or could be updated or could be more efficient, please go ahead and either comment to start a conversation about it or just change it in the SOP itself. Thank you.

Something as simple as that message will help your team know that they are expected and able to edit these SOPs as they're actually using them. The fourth habit you can do to keep processes a core piece of your culture is to actually report on them just like you would financial numbers. So one example of this that I can point to you for ourselves is I actually worked our reporting about SOPs into a video series we have on YouTube, which is kind of meta, but whatever, if you go here, you can actually watch one of the look back videos and in that look back presentation, I actually have a screenshot of our report inside ClickUp where it shows the number of SOPs and wikis and other things we have in our account and the growth over time. Just like I routinely check my finances, I'm going to routinely be checking on these sops and processes by having some kind of report made from them for us. We're actually using ClickUp dashboards for this, but you can use anything you have at your disposal. One easy way to remind yourself of this, so this doesn't go unnoticed, is to make yourself a recurring repeating task telling you to go check these reports. If, however, you want even more accountability, like I did, make some kind of public event, whether it's just public for your team or maybe it's public for your audience, where you actually disclose these numbers. I'll tell you what, having the look back event, having that thing to look forward to, is definitely going to hold me accountable to make sure I'm checking those numbers because I need to in order to actually produce that presentation each quarter. But the real takeaway here is to treat process and systemization stuff just as you would any other asset in your business. You want to keep an eye on the growth in value, the depreciation, if you will, and just the quantity of assets you have. If we think about each SOP or each process as an asset in our business now, the fifth and final habit we have here, to work process into your daily culture, is admittedly a pretty painful one. But if all else fails and none of the other four habits will work for you, this fifth one is kind of like the boot camp. If you're struggling to keep on top of processes just by doing these smaller habits We've already talked about, the fifth habit here is to actually make a recurring event for your internal company. So whether that company is one person, whether it's 50 people, whether it's 5,000 people, pick a day, a week, an hour, on a recurring basis, and make it the SOP or the process time. Some common ways to do this would be to block off one full week of work where you actually close down. You do not take any client inquiries during that period, and you take one week of the year where the whole team is just working on SOPs. Another opportunity, say you're a solopreneur. Just take one Friday a month, one full Friday, and just take that Friday to review all of the processes in your business once a month, that is 12 days a month that you dedicate to process and building your own business, which should more than pay for itself in the systemization you're able to create. If you have a larger team, but you're not willing to commit to the one full day or the one full week approach. Something as simple as one hour. Maybe Friday during lunch, everyone gets on a virtual call and you all try to knock out one or two SOP updates in one hour. While I know process happy hour is probably not the sexiest thing, we'll leave it to the marketer. Someone here in the audience come up with a better name for what your SOP happy hour could be. But while it's not the sexiest thing, seeing that on the company calendar and having that invite on your calendar is going to help you and everyone else remember. Oh yeah, processes are important. This is top of mind. Maybe I should update this now so I don't have to update it during happy hour. This is just one more slightly more intensive habit you can have in order to keep processes top of mind and not let them get outdated and become that stereotypical dusty policy binder. And by the way, I am serious. I would love to hear in the comments if you guys have any ideas for what we could call like a process happy hour. Maybe that could be like the lamest ever New Year's party SOP till you drop event for your team. Let me know in the comments if you guys have any creative naming ideas. But in conclusion, when it comes to SOP work, once you define it, once you create them, you are not done. Just like fitness, we need ongoing maintenance to avoid having to go back to square one in the future. I've given you five little habits you can do well. Four little habits and one not so little habit that you can do to keep process top of mind for your team. But of course, if I missed a habit here that you find really helpful, I would love to hear it in the comments below. Consider this your reminder to keep your processes in shape and otherwise. Thanks so much for watching. Until next time. Enjoy the process.

Sam.