5 Reasons Employees Don't Use Your SOPs (and how to fix it!)

I'm the business owner, I'm the team leader. I've spent so much time creating these beautiful SOPs, these policies, these procedures, and then no one uses them. Does that feel like something you can relate to? If it is, I feel like we need to take a moment, step back, and regroup. Because if you are creating SOPs and they are not being used by your team, there is probably a few things happening under the hood that that can help make you less frustrated and your team a little bit happier as well. In this video, I'm going to talk through five different ways we can get your team to actually use your SOPs. And no, it's not going to be by strong arming them or making some kind of punitive system if people don't use the SOPs. Instead of any of that junk, we are going to look at five common reasons why your team might not be using your SOPs, and then from that outcome, try to figure out what the root problem might be and give you a tactical way to solve it. For each problem, we're going to give not only a strategy for how to approach that kind of problem, but also a specific tactic that you could go out and implement this week to help your team if they're struggling with these kinds of issues. Now, before we dive into the actual types of issues we could be solving today, let's make sure we're on the same page as what we mean when I say sop. Sop, or sop, if you want to call it that, is an acronym or initialism that stands for standard operating procedure. And basically all that means is a fancy business term for a recipe. Okay. How you do something, you all probably have a recipe from your grandparents for making pancakes or something. That recipe, if we were to put a businessy spin on it, is a standard operating procedure. So if you have people who you need to follow a recipe and they're not following the recipe, that's what we're talking about in this video and that's what we mean when we say sops, we good? Okay. Given that, let's start on the first reason why someone might not be using the recipe you have so painstakingly made. Reason number one is your team views SOPs to be optional. They're there, but they don't have to use them. They're just kind of something the business owner, the team leader, likes to have. Optimistic. Obviously, this is no good, because if team members don't think there's a reason to use something and they don't see the value in Using something, then they're not going to use it. So to solve this kind of issue, we need to look to ourselves in our communication and consistency. If we say today that SOPs are important, SOPs are not optional. We need to live and breathe that through the next months, years, decades of our team operation. So our, our strategic objective to solve this issue is to make it clear to everyone that SOPs are not optional and that they are important. Now, that all sounds great, right? Yeah, they're important. Woo. How do we actually do that? Well, one tactic I would suggest that you implement inside your business this week, if the optional issue is one that you're facing, is to give yourself a restriction. Limit yourself and all other team leaders or advisors or people who are, you know, reviewing projects to only give feedback on work through the lens of an sop. So rather than saying, hey, I noticed.

That you used title case on the YouTube video title, but we always use sentence case. Can you fix it to sentence case?

Great, thank you. Instead of doing that, what I want you to do is, hey, the title.

For the YouTube video looks off. It's not following step two of the SOP. Here's the link to the SOP. Could you fix it?

Do you see how that's a subtle difference? Rather than repeating yourself and regurgitating the sop, you just say, hey, this isn't right. Use the SOP to make better decisions. All of a sudden, we've demonstrated why SOPs are not optional. And we've also demonstrated that we as leaders, we as people giving feedback, are using SOPs every time we think about performance. Now, before we move on, I want to highlight the fact that this reason number one of SOPs being viewed as optional if is the reason leaders usually think SOPs are not being used. It's the most common thing leaders think when they're like, ah, my team just doesn't understand how important these are. In fact, in reality, in my experience, this is usually the least common reason. It's the one leaders think of the most. But it's actually very rare to find in a real business. And the problem is, if we think this is the issue and we start responding with this kind of mandate presence of making it clear that these are not optional, requiring SOPs for different things, we might actually make other issues worse if this isn't actually the root reason. So let's go over the four other reasons why your team might not be using your SOPs. Reason number two, your team is not using your SOPs, is because they don't know they have any. This is super common for teams where the team leader or the business owner gets into a flurry and all of a sudden they create all these loom videos or these Google Docs and they throw them all over the place in different tools and they're surprised when those videos they created in one afternoon two years ago aren't being used by the team. Because the team has no idea that SOPs exist, let alone what they exist for and where they are. If a team member doesn't know that an sop, that a recipe exists, how.

The heck are they supposed to use it?

Yeah, luckily this is a very easy one to fix. What we need to do here is approach our SOPs. Just like any other data, we should try our best to centralize our information into one place that we know where to go so we know where to find things. One easy way to think about this is to picture yourself trying to cook something, right? And you have spices in your kitchen. Imagine you had some spices in your kitchen, some in your closet, some in your garage, some in your basement, and you were trying to cook a chili and you're trying to find all the different spices you need. How likely is it that you would go looking in all five different rooms to find the spices you need? If you're as lazy as I am when it comes to cooking, you'd probably just find whichever spices are close enough and say, you know what, we're just making a chili with just, just paprika this time around. And you'd make do because it's so inconvenient to go look in all of these places to try to find the things you need. Let's not make it that inconvenient. Let's give your team a spice cabinet, one dedicated spot for all of your SOPs to live. Bonus points if whatever that spot is is easily searchable. Now, it's easy for me to sit here and say, you should have all of your SOPs in one cloud based, centralized, easy to access and easy to edit spot. And I could even tell you that, hey, I think ClickUp is a great tool for that. That's what we teach our clients to do in the description. But that's a really big ask, right? That's a lot of work to get everything all centralized. So for this video, for this quick win for you, the tactic I want to recommend is even smaller. We know ultimately centralizing our SOPs is going to be really good for everybody. But short of doing that, one tactic you can implement to make sure that SOPs are not unknown is whenever you have a task that has an SOP for it. Let's imagine you had a task for sending a weekly newsletter and an SOP for how to send that newsletter. Link them together, put a hyperlink to the SOP inside the task. Whether your tasks are created inside a project management tool like ClickUp, Asana Trello, or whether your to dos are literally just a piece of paper you can write down, you know, go to Google Drive to find the SOP here, it doesn't matter where it is, but as long as you make that link, you ensure that your SOPs will not be unknown. Because whoever sees that task is going to know, ah, there's an SOP. Now, that brings us to number three. What happens if your SOPs are known? People know they're important, yet they don't want to use them because they're not helpful. This is perhaps one of the most painful ones for people to come to terms with, because especially if you're the person writing SOPs and you give this beautiful document over to your team, you think it's, you know, God's gift to man. It's this amazing piece of material that you've spent so long on. And if someone were to tell you that, you know, I'm not using it because it doesn't help me, that could be kind of hard to hear. But you need to hear it. The main reason SOPs are viewed as not helpful is usually because the SOP and the needs of the worker are not aligned either. We're creating an SOP for work where we really don't need one, such as creative knowledge work. If someone wrote me an SOP for how to consult about ClickUp in a strategy session, that would be a little bit hard to swallow because there's so much skill and, you know, kind of making things up as you go, in some ways thinking on your feet. That happens in that that an SOP would not be that helpful to me. At the same time, the opposite can also be true. We could create really complex SOPs that are so broad and sweeping and general that someone who's trying to do that task doesn't even understand what it's trying to say. And so it's kind of like reading an encyclopedia. It's just so much information that they don't know what to do with it. At the end of the day, an sop, just like a recipe, is there to help someone accomplish something. And if it's not at the right level or the right level of detail to help that person do something, then what's it for? Then it just becomes bureaucratic paperwork. And we don't need that at this stage of business that you are when you're watching this. So to get beyond this not helpful SOP stage, strategically, what I want us to start thinking about is making sure that SOPs are made by and for doers, not leaders. Now, to be clear, SOPs absolutely help leaders, business owners, managers, absolutely. Because just like we talked about before, they become a tool for guiding feedback. They become the way you live out your strategy and vision and purpose and values. It's really the embodiment of all the strategic stuff that you do as that kind of person in your business. But that is secondary to the primary purpose of SOPs. And that primary purpose is to make the worker's life easier, set them up for success, help them do a great job, help them know what they need to do. Whether they're the first week on the job or they've been there 10 years, those SOPs are, are for them. It's for their ability to take a vacation. It's for their ability to get the job right every time. It's for their ability to make this stuff so easy that they can focus their creative juices on the stuff that they actually need it for. SOPs are for the team, not for the leader. And we need to address that at the strategic level before we can get tactical. But let's talk about tactics, because, you know, that's where I live. Anyway. What is our tactic where we can start implementing this in if we feel that unhelpful SOPs are our issue? Well, it's pretty simple. Allow the people doing the work to create the SOPs. That's an easy one. Most of the time, leaders and managers don't know enough about the boots on the ground experience to even write a good sop, to even know what the worker needs. So unless you are the person doing the work, get your butt out of that SOP writing seat and do not write them. Because if we have the people doing the work writing the SOPs, we guarantee it's written at a level of complexity that they understand and we know it's going to be written to emphasize the things that that person actually needs because they're the one writing it. Third, and perhaps most important, when a doer writes the sop, they have that sense of ownership, right? They're the person who wrote this beautiful work of art, so they're more likely to use it and advocate that others use it, whereas the leader, they already have that kind of intrinsic buy in by being a leader. They don't need that extra, you know, investment in the SOPs. Leave that to the doers. Now, I know many of you are probably listening to me say, let the workers create the SOPs, and you're freaking out maybe because you're used to a more top down approach to systemization. And we talk a lot about bottom up on this channel. If that is you, I definitely suggest you go up to the top and watch this video we have linked there. It goes over the steps that we suggest when it comes to systemization or SOP creation and it walks through in detail. What does it look like to have the team involved in SOPs and why is it so much of a time saver versus doing it all yourself? I promise as a leader, you still have some oversight here, but the results are way, way, way better if you can just get over that sense of giving up a bit of control. Now, related to control, let's talk a bit about trust, because that is the fourth reason why people are not using your beloved SOPs. They don't trust them. Maybe they think they're helpful, maybe they know where they are, maybe they know they're important. But maybe the last time they used the sop, it was out of date, it led them to do the wrong thing and now they're kind of resentful because the SOP is not something they have confidence in. And so in addition to that step we talked about in the first one of using SOPs actively in conversations to make sure SOPs are trustworthy, I think we need to start talking about our culture around updating SOPs. Rather than treating SOPs as these sacred documents, I really want you to treat them more as a communal workbench. Okay? And if something is wrong on that workbench, something is wrong in that shared tool. I want you to teach your team that it is okay to ask that it is encouraged to highlight the inefficiencies, to highlight the confusing parts, and not just treat an SOP as kind of like a bible that you can't alter or edit. You must just worship and follow everything that it says. That's no good. When we have a view only policy towards our SOPs, we get into a culture where SOPs are ignored because they are outdated, because there's no easy path to update them. The solution for this is fairly simple. Wherever you create your SOPs, make sure there is a way to leave comments in that same spot and give Whoever's using the SOP at least commenting access. So for example, if your SOPs are in a Google Doc, use the commenting features built into Google Docs to allow your users to comment on that document. If you have your SOPs printed out in a binder, allow people to put sticky notes on top of that binder to make changes or suggestions. And if your SOPs are video recordings like on Loom or on YouTube videos, well, please don't do that. That's a really bad idea. For this reason, I actually have a whole video up here ranting. It's an old one, but ranting about why Loom and Zoom videos are terrible SOPs. And this issue of being unable to update the video content is the biggest one. Guys, I am a video content creator and I will tell you firsthand, editing videos is a pain. And if you know a screenshot changed in a tool, if our SOP changed slightly, the last thing I would want to do is go update a 30 minute video to change one step of the process. So I'm not going to. I'm going to let it get out of date. You're not even a video creator, most likely. Would you want to do that? If not, and I'm assuming the answer is no, do not create your SOPs, which are meant to be updated constantly in a video. End of rant about video sops. You can watch more in that video I linked above because I'm tired of seeing that recommended. All right, next up, let's go to number five. Fifth reason why your SOPs might be ignored is because they're memorized, right? If you have somebody using an SOP and they've been doing the same process for a long time, it becomes pretty common that they'll stop referencing that SOP as they've started to just memorize the key steps. This, in and of itself isn't always a bad thing. I mean, there are times where you just know what you need to do and having that reference open is completely unnecessary because you're like a machine. You know exactly what your next move is. But when we are using SOPs from our memory, there's a risk in that our memory might falter. We might forget something. We might not see that the SOP was updated because we're not using it. Or we might change our process as we go organically and then not update the SOP for the next person. So as much as SOPs being memorized isn't intrinsically bad, it can be. It can lead to a risk later on. So there is a strategy I want to give you here. If this is Something you're facing. Now, I know this is probably counter to what many of you would think to do, but the reason I'm suggesting we make SOP skimmable is so that if somebody is very familiar with the process, they can still use the sop, but they only need to look at keywords. If we make our SOPs more like Buzzfeed articles, where there's a header, a header, a header, and then like, you know, you're done, that's pretty accessible. So even if I'm someone who knows exactly what I'm doing, I might pop open that SOP just to check on the big items. Even though I now know how to do each of those items, when I see people create SOPs that are long and endless and everything is formatted the same, this isn't very advanced, user friendly. It's pretty much great for beginners and everyone else is like drooling by the time they get to the bottom of the page. So when we are trying to solve this memorization issue, when we have people who are getting used to a process, let's focus on making the SOP timeless by making it easy to skim. Our tactic for this one is to implement sanity checklists. Now this could be per SOP or per task, your choice. But the idea is basically you make your SOP super easy to skim and at the very bottom you say you know you're done when, and then you have a brief checklist of like five deliverables or whatever result you expect. For example, if you had an SOP for uploading a YouTube video, you have a long SOP that goes through all the detailed steps of what you need to do. And at the end the sanity checklist just says, okay, you know you're done when the video's uploaded, the monetization is set correctly, the info cards are set correctly, the description is set correctly. We don't get into how to do any of that. It's just a last gut check to confirm that if you didn't read all that stuff above, you at least got the right result in the end. It's kind of like a quiz. Rather than reading the textbook, you just take the quiz and hope you get a good score. That's what the sanity checklist is all about. I will say, I have been doing so many processes in my business for years. Actually, one of the best examples is probably recording a YouTube video. And I have a sanity checklist for recording YouTube videos. And almost every time, miraculously, I seem to forget a step and I go to mark the task complete and ClickUp, which is what we use here. It yells at me and says, are you sure you're done? You didn't take a thumbnail image? Ah, shoot. Okay, go ahead, do it. Or Are you sure you're done? You didn't upload the file the right way. And it's still useful to me, having done the processes that I'm doing every single day, every single week, for how long? And I think it's kind of hard to over emphasize how helpful these are because they really are no matter what stage you're at. So something to try would be the Sandy Checklist. And you know, I kind of want to throw this in here as a bonus tactic if you're facing the memorization issue. Another one you can do Tactic number two bonus is change the process. Not, you know, menacingly, but, you know, if you find that people are falling asleep when it comes to your email newsletter process, start experimenting. It's probably a sign that you haven't done enough innovation in that process recently if people are falling asleep on it. So if you throw in a curveball like change your strategy around what you're using for subject lines and revise that sop, that's a good way to keep people on their toes because you're giving them something fresh to handle each time. But that, my friend, is five reasons why your team might not be using your SOPs. And for almost all of these, if you haven't gathered, there's nothing evil or menacing or, you know, bad employee about this. It's more so just your expectations and what the person's expectations are are not lining up in some way. So if we can just tweak and adjust and change our daily habits just 1%, 2%, I think you'll find that most of these issues will just resolve themselves if you make those tiny incremental improvements. If you suspect there's another reason your team might be ignoring your SOPs, please do leave it in the comment below. Maybe we'll do a part two video video. And until next time, enjoy the process.