Master Your Business Workflows with These SOP Maintenance Hacks

What's another word for outdated procedures? What a giant waste of time.

And you don't have time to spare. So in this video, I'm going to.

Go through three tips to ensure this baby stays up to date and useful for all of your team members, both now in the future, without costing you a lot of time, a lot of money, or a lot of headache. And to help me with this, I'm actually going to be joined by two members of my own team here at ProcessDriven to share their best tips as well. Tip number one relies on us revisiting where we actually put our SOPs. And it's something my teammate Mariah shared in this clip.

I feel like typically the SOPs are only opened when you're like, wait, something's changed uploading this video and something has changed on the platform. Let's just double check the sop. So you look at it and, well, the SOP is not up to date either. It's like, oh, no, what happened?

So is your suggestion to change that definition of when you need it? It sounds like you're saying it should, it should always be open or how far do we go? Because I know some teams are make a policy where they say, you know, you have to have the SOP open at all times.

How do you draw that line?

I noticed what helps me is the little blurp in a description that's like, hey, did you remember to open the SOP as your double checker? But I agree with Sarah if the SOP is lengthy, it's daunting and really overwhelming to be like, oh, it's that SOP again. You know, and it's like, I've been doing this for however many weeks or years or whatever, and it's like, the process has never changed. It'll be fine. But then once we get into those habits, then we start noticing, hey, this email went out to the entire list. What happened? Oh, I didn't catch that. They did an update. My bad. You know, it's those. When we start skipping out on those checklists, but if they're not consumable, then it's too daunting to really keep tabs on them.

Yeah, well, I'm just thinking of something that I do frequently. So if once a week I am pulling a video down and timestamping it and turning it around after so many weeks in a row, I might not think that there's a value in pulling that up. And yeah, we want our SOP to be skimmable. We want it to be easy to read but if it's something that I'm doing out of rote memory, I might need a reminder to, hey, you need to check this. Like kind of some in between of recognizing that we are humans and we don't want to always have a checklist open when we're working. So where's that balance?

Yeah, I really like that point. And you mentioned Sarah, which is something we'll probably talk about later on, is the SOP itself can help us here if it's skimmable and simple. I. The story I always tell is my husband at one point had, he was in his carpentry job and they were, they were getting really big on Six Sigma and trying to be super systemized. And he came home from work and he's like, layla, my work is trying to systemize. They had us all write SOPs. And I was like, oh yeah, how'd that go? And he's like, well, it was great. I spent the entire workday building this 27, I kid you not, 27 page long, 8 point font. It was like super tiny SOP outlining everything you need to know about cutting wood or whatever it was. And I remember just being like, oh gosh. I think one of the things that you kind of just alluded to here is if we make our SOPS short, skimmable, bite sized, built for actual consumption versus library books, that will also help.

And just a heads up, if you struggle with writing standard operating procedures or you're not even sure where to start, check out our soptember celebration we host every single year where we're celebrating the art of writing those damn SOPs.

Link is in the description below if you want to check it out and.

Hope to see you at the next one. Our second tip comes from my colleague Sarah, who emphasizes the importance of demonstrating as a leader that the exact kind of behaviors you want to see.

Sarah, you know, when you're talking about a culture component, you have to see other people on the team doing it. So if I was brand new to the team and I see an issue task come in and mariah, I'm going to pick on you. But maybe it was related to something with the pipeline. If you can then identify, you know, be honest about where the mistake was. If it was you not throwing other people under the bus, identifying what the preventative measure is, you know, how you respond to that tells me a lot about how safe of a workplace I'm in. Right? How safe is it for me to make mistakes, to own mistakes, suggest preventative action, you know, really Identifying that by watching you.

Agreed. I'm going to spin off of that because unfortunately, it's not a normal culture thing. No matter where you're at, like, you make a mistake. Oh, great. Well, you're fired. You know. Yeah. In a really sad way, that. That's kind of the truth. So really building that culture and understanding. Oh, okay. Well, Mariah just did that and she didn't get fired, so it's probably okay. Like, no, it was a mistake, but. But it's important to learn from it and grow from it and improve from it. And so building that culture, I think can be difficult depending on. Especially depending on where people are coming from, because that is not the norm, which is so unfortunate. It should be, but it's not.

Are there some, like, tactical. Let's just go tactical for a second. Some things that you think can help towards this. So you mentioned demonstrating it and we mentioned just making it okay, like, not firing people for making mistakes. Those are two really good tactical pieces. Are there any other components that you think might be helpful for this? Because I feel like this is actually probably the hardest part of this whole machine is when the output is not quite there yet.

I am going to shamelessly plug our team meeting.

Ah.

Because we have a portion in there. Like, what were your ups? Like, what went so great, great. Now what was a down? We all know we have them, but we kind of. I don't want to say we celebrate them, but we.

It. We do.

It's not like we're like, shame on you, bad job. You know, we all are learning from them. So I think that is one way, at least here we embrace that. Like, it wasn't just Mariah who messed up. It was also Sarah Layla.

You know, like when Layla cost us $300 by having a zapier loop by accident. Yeah, that was a fun week.

But also, like, identifying that preventative measure, like, hey, I. I know I recently had one where I was like, I grossly miscalculated how long it was going to take for me to do this customization and lost brain cells over it. But I was able to build it into the template for next time as a warning. Like, hey, this is way harder than you think it is. You know, that is all cultural component. And maybe it isn't a meeting structure. Mariah, I think that's good.

Yeah, I. I know when I first started at ProcessDriven, I was like, dude, I'm not gonna say because it was so new and so, so foreign. It was like, well, the manager knows what I messed up because they told me I messed up, you know, and so it's like, I don't want to be embarrassed, but now it's more like, okay, this is what happened. Yes, I'm the one that sent that email to everybody and this is what I'm going to do next time so I don't do that again. You know, I think exactly like Sarah said, having that, acknowledging it, embracing it and then learning from it is really what's going to make it change.

And don't forget to update the damn SOP so it doesn't.

Yeah, don't forget that.

Quick heads up.

If you are a member of the IndieOps Network, you can actually access this full process improvement plan, including our full length process mapping brainstorm inside the PIP.

Lab inside your account and if you.

Are not in the IndieOps network, you.

Can join in the description below to.

Get the full length of this. Our third tip is making it super easy to monitor for things that are becoming out of date so you can proactively update those operating procedures.

How do we keep this whole sequence of events that we just went through, all these steps and how do we make them a little bit more proactive as a whole? Do we either, you know, keep with this state of just changing things when we notice they're out of date and just do it faster and better, or is there some kind of preventative action or routine we can establish to keep SOPs up to date? I know we have two ideas on here, which is maybe every quarter have a task to review all of your SOPs and update them. I've heard clients suggest having every SOP have their own date saying every, you know, however many days we need to be updated. I've heard other clients where they say, you know, any SOPs that haven't been updated in 90 days, you, you have to update.

I mean, what do we think we.

Could commit to in this PIP to make this a little bit more proactive in the future?

I really like that. Yeah, that one, the last one that you just said, you know, let's take a look at our SOPs and sort them and any SOPs that have not been in use the 90 day time frames have not been updated in 90 days. Just review them and give them the stamp of the approved of approval. A simple note like I reviewed this, it is still accurate done because maybe it doesn't need to be updated. You know, we don't want to be updating things just for the sake of updating them, but having somebody have on them. I think is valuable.

I like it. So this would almost be like a routine task.

Would this be per individual or do.

You picture like an operations person going through this checking?

No, I think it's per individual because again, we're focusing that ownership on the person. I think the routine task for management is hey, go through. And any SOPs that are not assigned, you need to, you know, dilly them out or whatever. And maybe the manager's goal is, hey, if you notice this trend with your team not updating their SOPs on this regular cadence, than maybe have a conversation.

When you implement these three tips, not only are your standard operating procedures going to be a whole lot more usable than some giant policy binder, they're also going to be something that you can actually rely on and trust. And when you can rely on them and trust them, so can your team members as well. Which is just exactly what we want to see when it comes to building out a process driven business. But wait, there's actually one more problem we need to solve. Once we have our sobs being perfectly up to date, we we still need to make sure our team members are actually using them. And to do that, we need to avoid the common mistakes that lead to team members ignoring your standard operating procedures.

And just so happens we have a video on that right here on the end screen. See you in the next one. And until next time, enjoy the process.