A standard operating procedure (SOP) gives you the step-by-step instructions needed to perform specific tasks consistently and efficiently.
The purpose of SOPs is essentially to be a go-to guide for solving problems, ensuring safety, and maintaining high performance across your company.
What is Standard Operating Procedure?
Standard Operating Procedures or SOPs is a fancy way of documenting your day-to-day processes to make them repeatable. Inside your organization, you would have called it with different terms like Process documents, Blueprints, Business Playbooks, Training Manuals, Employee Handbook and User guides.
But at the end of the day, it all solves the same problem of educating your employees or customers about a certain process.
Standard operating procedures will be present everywhere within your organization whether you are small or big. The bigger the organization, the number of SOPs will increase significantly. It is a good practice to bring the culture in the organization to document your routine tasks so that the knowledge is not residing in someone’s head and it’s available for anyone to execute.
Types of Standard Operating Procedures
Standard operating procedures can come in multiple forms, it comes down to common sense and how that process can be represented. Certain SOPs can be in a simple documentation format (online, Word, PDF), some could be in the form of Checklists, and some could be in the form of diagrams and flowcharts.
The result is how can we educate users in the shortest possible time to make them perform that activity reliably and consistently.
Standard Operating Procedures are investments
The amount of time we spend on producing SOPs might look overwhelming at the beginning, but definitely over the period, you’ll start seeing the benefits.
It’s always easy to just carry on performing the activities without documenting it or educating someone else to do it. Especially founder’s and senior managers’ thought processes will be something down the lines of
- “I know better than anyone else, no one can perform this task”
- “I can quickly perform this activity within 10-15 minutes rather than spending 2 to 4 hours documenting/explaining the process to someone.”
- “I wouldn’t ask my people to do anything that I wouldn’t do.”
If you want to scale your business and make it into a process-oriented organization, you need to come out of the above thought process.
Any complicated tasks need to be split into smaller tasks so it can be performed by anyone without knowing too many dependant systems. The tasks that might look small in 10-15 minutes will all quickly add up and eat your day.
Example: the real cost of a 15-minute task will be over 45 minutes, time allocation on both sides of the task, and the cost of context switching. Soon you’ll be bombarded with too many such 10-15-minute tasks.
SOPs first identify and summarize a task, describe its purpose, and specify when and by whom it is to be performed while simultaneously defining uncommon or specialized terms and addressing potential concerns (e.g., necessary equipment, health, safety, etc.).
They then describe the sequential procedures to be followed, often utilizing activity checklists and graphic illustrations (e.g., charts, tables, photographs, diagrams, etc.) to help ensure that the procedures are being performed accurately and in order.
FAQs
Benefits of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)?
SOPs can also provide many benefits, such as minimizing the chance of miscommunication, affording comparability, and ensuring regulatory compliance. Here is the list of tangible benefits of having well-structured SOPs
- Enforcing best practices
- Making processes scalable
- Onboarding employees
- Ensuring regulatory and standards compliance
- Preventing process failures
- Reducing errors and corrective actions
How to write an effective Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)?
1. Define the scope
Before starting any SOP document clearly define the scope of the document, your SOP must solve a specific problem and be easy to understand. Example: “Employee onboarding”, the scope of this document is very clear just by looking at the title. The document should only cover the essential details about this title.
2. Gather information
Once the scope is defined gather as much information as possible. Most of the time a Standard Operating Procedure document is created to streamline existing work. So you’ll know exactly how that’s done currently, once you have all the data it’s easy to put it together in a structured format.
3. Choose the format
Decide the best possible format for the topic. The majority of the cases it will be either documenting the process in the document (Document360, Google Docs, Microsoft Word) or in the form of a Checklist.
4. Complete the draft
At this stage, you are good to complete the first draft of the SOP.
5. Review with stakeholders
It’s important to get the buy-in from all the stakeholders involved for that specific SOP. If we take the same example “Employee onboarding” you might have a few departments and people involved in that process, your Recruitment team, HR team, IT assets team, and Facilities team.
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