Get Your Team to Improve Your SOPs

Today's question is how can we solicit feedback? Now, before we get to the answer to that question, let me be clear about kind of some of the stuff you're going to see here. This video clip is going to be a clip of the office hours that I actually hold twice a week live with all clients of ProcessDriven. So if you'd like to join this conversation live, you will need to become a processdriven client. However, I highlight the best questions and the best answers, at least in my opinion. This is something I think is going to provide a lot of value out here to YouTube and, and repurpose that out here for the YouTube video. So that is what I'm about to show you. Brace yourself. Let's flip over to office hours. So a lot of the times we're working with businesses who are in a growth stage, but they are still very much have the owner, founder, leader pushing forward a lot of the innovation. And if you're trying to have a self managed team, you also need to have a self improving team. And so a lot of the ways to solicit process feedback is going to depend on your team culture. One of the easiest ways I've seen work for teams for soliciting feedback is to first within the team have a time and space to do this. So whether it's huddles where you have a question, every single huddle where you say what sucked, what didn't work this week, if that is brought up there, whether it's having, if you have an asynchronous scrum, if you use like a dashboard like we use here, maybe one of those questions in your scrum is, you know, do you have any ideas for how things can be better? Maybe it's in your task template for your client project. At week six, halfway through your 12 week project, you, you have a prompt saying, hey, take a moment now and think of anything that could be better. Submit your ideas through a form here. The idea is just elicit feedback without being like what? Ideas, ideas, ideas. You know, without being that kind of way. The best and most effective way I found for soliciting feedback is to just have prompts make the space for the feedback to be there. And if you have the right people doing the right things in the right way, like they're going to take that opportunity and spew ideas. Sometimes it can be hard to, to provide unsolicited feedback. There's a lot of people will not be comfortable doing that. They'll feel like maybe they're an imposition but if you are inviting them, if you are acknowledging and encouraging people to point out how things are not good, but also ideas for making them better, that will make it easier. Another thing I've seen people do and actually just read this in Radical Candor I was reading last night, just haven't finished it, so don't, don't quiz me on it. But Radical Candor called out the idea of hack weeks but also fix it weeks. So hack weeks, if you're not familiar with that, I think Google started it, perhaps not sure, but I know a bunch of companies do it now where basically maybe it's once a quarter, maybe it's once a year, but the entire company is given the opportunity to take some time off, join a hack team and basically perform an internal hackathon or startup weekend or improvement event basically to invent something new that could entirely change and innovate the company and push things forward. That's the idea of a hack week. But what Radical candor. Kim Scott, I hope I have the name right, what she was putting forward and I'm not sure if this is her IP or someone else's, but the idea of a Fix it week where you create a dumping ground for feedback and ideas, whether that's a ClickUp form dumping into a space called Feedback, whether it's an ongoing ClickUp doc where people continue to jot down ideas, whether it's a group chat that's just called Ideas for Improvements, whether it's an anonymous again form that dumps things in whatever the way is you're collecting them at all times, constantly soliciting to it, soliciting those ideas. And then at a set interval you kind of promote inside the company. Like hey guys, first quarter of Q3. First week of Q3 is our leadership fix it week. And what that means is leadership is going to look through all the ideas for improvements, triage them and pick the top whatever, and in one week fix as many things as we can. So by doing this you're giving people hope that you're actually going to make a change and you're also bringing more attention and you're basically internally marketing for the idea of process improvement. So making an event and promising a solution period can also help encourage feedback, adding to scrum, adding to rituals, adding reminders into your templates, all of those things providing anonymous and non anonymous ways to do it. Mixed medium is also helpful. So I know a team we're working with right now. If you're watching this guys, you guys are very focused on communication in person so everything is face to face, talking through things. There are other teams we're working with which are completely the opposite. Everything is texted. You guys know who you are. Depending on how your team works, that's probably the best way to solicit feedback is to actually work in the way that you're already working. So whether it's a Slack channel or whether that's a face to face chat, but whatever it is that you're using to gather that information, it's probably going to be best to end up centralizing those ideas somewhere. Probably ClickUp just so that they're not lost. The worst thing you can do is solicit ideas and then not act on them or not at least acknowledge that you've heard them and keep them on your radar. If people are giving ideas and they're not taking action on or at least not being discounted, there's no way to show that the ideas are actually mattering. It can be hard to continuously get that feedback because people are going to feel like, well why bother? They rejected every idea or they haven't done anything in 15 weeks. Like why would I try to give a suggestion? Another thing here, I'll just keep going since we don't have many questions. There's a few other things you can do for this process piece. KPIs, KPIs and metrics. This is another client's working on this right now. So just going to share this in case this helps the group. But the idea of having ownership over a process, this is a scaling up back there. Scaling up is back there. Scaling up has this idea of in their philosophy of having an owner of each process, that person is charged with the KPIs related to that process. So if it is the sales process, it might be the time to close. If it's the cash management process, it might be the cash conversion cycle metrics. If it's social media, maybe it's the number of followers you have or the number of engagements. Whatever the metric of success is for that process, the person who owns that process is responsible for counting that metric, but perhaps also for making sure that metric is being optimized. So assigning ownership to processes can be an effective way to solicit more feedback. This is more pinpointing for management, not so much team, but I think it's still helpful here. So customer service ticket, response time, client services could be NPS score or number of testimonials. Defining those metrics and connecting them back to a process and a role is effective. Is an effective Way to get more process improvement that's not just from the owner. Another thing I'll say on this is that a philosophy, if you haven't heard, is the idea of the kind of divisional org chart, the siloed org chart is kind of antiquated. So the idea of sales, ops, finance, whatever, whereas most process stuff goes this way. And one of the reasons for having this accountability chart is because when things go this way and it's crossing through all these different divisions, it can be very easy to say, oh, the number of testimonials. The client experience is owned by nobody because everyone contributes. So therefore nobody really cares because everyone's saying, oh, they're in charge. No, they're in charge. So by having this accountable person, even if it's sales, in charge of the whole experience, even though sales only covers a small piece of the overall process, you're giving a little bit more accountability and transparency on that and giving a sense of ownership. We are more likely to improve and care about something that we feel in charge of versus something, you know, the tragedy of the commons feeling like everyone should be helping, therefore no one is helping. We can avoid that by giving a little bit of ownership around process stuff. Yeah. So prompts, feedback, different mediums, accountability and ownership. Let's just go one more here too. The fix it. We kind of mentioned this or alluded to this, but another great way to solicit feedback is to actually cross pollinate. So marketing might look at marketing's workflows and say, I mean, I think we're doing it pretty well. I've had a lot of conversations with this, especially with people who have been doing their roles for 10, 15, 20 years. They look at their position, they're like, yeah, this takes me 5 minutes, 10 minutes to send 4 emails manually and to create an invoice. Like that's very common, especially for the office manager admin role to feel like things are really, really easy and fast and efficient. But if we brought in someone else in the team to look at how they're doing it, not only would those other team members notice inefficiencies, they might also say, oh my gosh, if Susie gets hit by a bus, we are screwed. No one else knows how to do this stuff. We can start. What I'm trying to say is we can really start identifying improvements by cross pollinating from outside industries, but also from within your company. Getting marks, peak or marketing peeking into operations or operations peeking into engineering. There are things that each team can do that can help the other teams, but until you have them in the same room looking at the same process. I would recommend visually with the flowchart, but use whatever you want till it happens. You're not going to get that. And there is a lot of things opposite teams can contribute. I was in a just a one off call talking about process mapping a few weeks back. The team had set up a fully automated sequence for one team and the other team was doing almost the exact same process manually, having no idea that there was a way to automate it using the existing tools that they had. And that conversation was not planned. But we were talking through team number two's workflows and they're like, yeah. And then we manually send this and that team one spoke up saying, whoa, what? We automated this, you know, months ago and we just have it set up through this and that and the other and it's zapped together. And that conversation would not have happened if we had not gotten into the weeds in one team while the other teams were there weighing in in a constructive way. So there's some ideas for you. Yeah, there's probably so many more, but I'm just going to throw those there. All right, so that was a clip from Office Hours. If you like this kind of information, be sure to give it a thumbs up to let YouTube and the algorithm know that you enjoyed it. If you'd like more videos like this, be sure to hit subscribe. And as always, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them in the comments area below and I will get back to you. Thanks so much for watching. Creating documentation is like the gym workout of business. We all know it's good for us, but some of us could use a little bit of accountability and support to make sure we get things done. If that sounds like you consider reaching out every quarter. I work with a group of small businesses who are looking for accountability and support to build their business instruction manual in ClickUp. Find out more at ProcessDriven co.