Unlock Business Success with Standard Operating Procedures: Part Two

Chip Schweiger: 0:00

But here's the thing keep your operating procedure short. Tiktok limits videos to 3 minutes and Twitter caps post at 280 characters, for most of us. We live in a time where less is more and our attention spans have seriously shrunk. Therefore, when you're creating SOPs, aim to make the short videos of less than 2 minutes in length. Show your employees how you want them to perform a specific task and if you need more than 2 minutes, just break your instructions up into a few shorter video steps. Chip Schweiger here, and welcome to another edition of Things Entrepreneurs Should Know. The business podcast for entrepreneurs, founders and business owners who want to build lasting financial value and supercharge the growth of their business. Hey, does your business lack organization around basic tasks? Do your employees seem dependent on you and could they benefit from being more autonomous? Are you wondering what you can do to improve your growing business and its value? If you answered yes to any of these standard operating procedures just might be what you need to solve your problems. So today on the show, we've got part two of everything you should know about SOPs. Now, if you missed part one, when you finish this episode, it's the one just before this, so you can go back and check it out. In this episode, though, we'll talk about what to document in your standard operating procedures and I'll give you the tips to create a great set of standard operating procedures. After the episode, check out the show notes at teskpod.com. Hi and welcome back. So let's talk more this week about standard operating procedures. Now, this is part two of our two part series, and that's really because there's just so much to unpack here. This week, i'll reveal what to document in your SOPs and I'll give you the tips to create a great set of standard operating procedures. But first let's get level set from the last episode. So, as a reminder, standard operating procedures or SOPs, are a set of instructions used to train and onboard your employees to complete a task. Now, last episode, i talked about why they're important, how they're the secret to happy customers and how they can make everything more efficient, because you're training really confident employees. So let's shift gears just a bit and talk in this episode about what to document in your standard operating procedures. One of the most common misconceptions about SOPs is that you should have some sort of grand strategic plan and months of thoughtful planning, but it's really not like that at all. In reality. Employees of your business need practical thinking for getting stuff done. So my first piece of advice when it comes to documenting your SOPs, stick to tactical instructions. At a minimum, consider creating an SOP for the following items. First is your way of serving customers. So restaurants refer to the place where the customer experiences their food as the front of the house. Regardless of what industry you're in, you probably have a way you want customers to be treated in your most common interactions with them. Create an SOP for your most important moments with your customers, so that employees know what you want and how you want your customers treated. You also might consider an SOP for email communication. So brands are built on consistent communication. So if there's a specific way you want your employees to create their email signature, or maybe a font that you want them to use, create an SOP. You also might think about an SOP for using your company's logo. Like reputations, brands take years to build and only seconds to destroy, and that's why it's critical your logo always appears in the same way whenever your employees are using it, so create an SOP to show them how you want your logo displayed. You also want SOPs for things that we'll call behind the scenes functions, so think about, maybe, an SOP for entering a customer into your database. It's important that critical customer information is kept organized and that it's formatted consistently, which is why you should create an SOP for creating new customers in your systems. Also, maybe an SOP for billing your customers. Cash is king for any small business, and you've heard me say this before, so consider an SOP for generating invoices or for billing customers, so that anyone can follow your process when your bookkeeper is away. Also, consider an SOP for collecting cash, like billing, if you give your customers time to pay, developing an SOP for collecting receivables is super important. And maybe an SOP for onboarding a new employee. So first impressions matter for customers and they're even more important for your employees. Nail the first few days of their time with you and you'll create a loyal employee. So create an SOP for how you'll onboard them, considering things like how your team can set up a new employee in your payroll and employee benefits system. And it doesn't have to be just these examples. Just brainstorm on what you think you may need. And a word of advice here avoid generic templates when creating SOPs. Your business is unique, so avoid generic templates that lump you in with everyone else With limited resources. You set yourself apart by offering unique experiences to your customers. Templated SOPs, by their very nature, are just generic and boring, and they can be used by lots of companies. With an SOP template, you're just commoditizing who you are. You're just doing what everyone else is doing, and that really doesn't set you apart from your competition. Instead, there is a special way you approach your business, which is why leveraging templates to create your SOPs undermines your point of differentiation, so you're going to want to create an original SOP here that illustrates how unique your company is. Now if you're asking yourself okay, Chip, I get it, but how do I create these SOPs? How do you actually do it? Well, i'd start by considering your own preference for learning. Think back to the last time you purchased a new gadget or a tool or some piece of technology or downloaded an app, did you read the instruction manual? Maybe you did, but if you're like most people, you probably went to YouTube for a first so that you could see if somebody else created an instructional video on it. YouTube has become the default learning center for most new products for a very simple reason It's much easier to learn a new task from watching a video than it is from reading instructions. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and if that's true, a video must be worth an entire library. So Rasmussen University reports that there are actually four different types of learning preferences. There's visual learners, who absorb information best when they can visualize relationships and ideas. Maps, charts and diagrams, and even essays, work well for visual learners. When instructors illustrate or diagram their lectures on a whiteboard, visual learners may find that they remember the information much better. There's also kinesthetic learners, so these folks are the most hands-on learning type. They learn best by doing, and they may get fidgety if they're just forced to sit there for long periods of time. Kinesthetic learners do best when they can participate in activities or solve problems in a hands-on manner. Sometimes even being physically engaged, like tossing a ball or knitting, will help these folks retain information better. Auditory learners are all ears. They tend to prefer listening to information and to be linear thinkers that may repeat things that they hear out loud. When it comes to studying, an auditory learner might remember material best if they talk about it with somebody else, since it'll be easier to recall a conversation than a visual image of words on a page. And finally, there are reading and writing learners. So reading and writing learners are extremely comfortable with the written word. They prefer to consume information by reading text and can further absorb information by condensing and rephrasing it. So I really think about it as the way of the traditional college textbook and, when you're taking notes, that process works well for the reading and writing learning. Now notice how written instructions really only engage one of the four learning styles, whereas a video engages three of the most prevalent learning styles. With a video, a visual learner can see your instructions on screen, an auditory learner can hear your instructions and a kinesthetic learner can learn by doing the task that you show them on the screen. And that's why employees are 75% more likely to watch a video than they are to read a document, an email or any written source. In fact, 69% of employees say that they would rather learn a new skill from video than from a written document. Now, these data points are compelling on their own, but consider the context your employees grew up in. If you have anybody under 40 years old on your team, they grew up in an area where YouTube has been far more dominant median than the local newspaper. Younger people today spend more time watching videos on TikTok than they do even reading books. Video has become their dominant medium for consuming information. The average attention span of a millennial is about 90 seconds and by 2030, they'll make up 90% of the workforce, so video is absolutely something to take seriously. But it's not just millennials who prefer video. Most of us would rather watch a quick video than pour over a detailed set of written instructions, and viewers remember 95% of a video's message, compared with just 10% when they read text. Even better, shooting a quick screen flow of you performing a task on your screen is infinitely faster than trying to create a written guide for employees to follow. Video is faster to create and easier for users to absorb, which leads to higher adoption rates. Therefore, instead of writing up your SOPs, use video as your primary medium for explaining how you want to get things done. Now another thing. You've likely heard the terms like Six Sigma and ISO 9000, and I really think these just often serve to complicate the process of creating SOPs. While these programs have merit in larger businesses, i think they're really just too complicated for most small companies, which leads many owners and managers to simply go without creating SOPs, and I think that's a big mistake. Rather than spending days planning out a complicated workflow of interdependent steps. Simply record a video of how you want the task completed. Whatever you do today works. It's got you where you are now and it's going to work fine. So simply shoot an instructional video of the way you want it done. It doesn't need to be perfect. Done now is better than done perfectly later. Once you have a rough video, then just break the SOP into different steps. If it's an SOP that employs complete using cloud-based software, a good role of thumb is to create a step for each new screen that you load in demonstrating your instructions. Also, you can create a new step when an SOP involves passing the baton from one person to another. But here's the thing keep your operating procedure short. Tiktok limits videos to three minutes and Twitter caps post at 280 characters. For most of us, we live in a time where less is more and our attention spans have seriously shrunk. Therefore, when you're creating SOPs, aim to make the short videos of less than two minutes in length. Show your employees how you want them to perform a specific task and if you need more than two minutes, just break your instructions up into a few shorter video steps. Show your employees how you want them to perform a specific task, and if you need more than two minutes, just break your instructions up into a few shorter video steps. And two other things. One, the best SOPs are structured so that an individual only touches the process one time. If a process involves handoffs from person A to person B and then maybe back to person A, try to streamline it so that an individual only needs to touch each process one time. And two, no double entry here. If an SOP requires entering data, make sure that it's a single piece of data or a field and it's only populated once by a single person. If you can pre-populate data from another system or procedure to avoid dead entry, then I recommend doing that. If the same information needs to be completed more than once or by different roles, you expose yourself to human error and inconsistencies, and really I have a theory about this. If you let human beings touch something, the more chances we give them to enter a field or click a button or toggle a field, the more chances that will innocently, with a pure heart, screw it up. So this is really something to consider. Only have people do things one time, and if you really want to create an effective set of SOPs, make sure it's clear who is responsible for each step. Now, a good rule of thumb is that a step should never be owned quote unquote by more than one person or role inside your company. If you have a step that involves multiple people or roles, break that step into smaller steps so that each step has an owner. And my last piece of advice standard operating procedures should always be available where employees need them the most. Gone are the days when you could hand a new employee a binder and just feel confident that they would learn their way around. Many employees have moved to remote work permanently and most of your team likely work from home at least some of the time. This makes storing your SOPs in a binder pretty impractical. Ideally, your SOPs should be cloud-based and appear where your employees do their work, so that they can access them just in time without having to sift through a massive Google Drive or Dropbox folder. So there you have it Anything to know about standard operating procedures that we covered in Part 1 and Part 2. Whether you're trying to improve organization around operational tasks, make employees less reliant on you, or are looking to increase your business value, creating standard operating procedures is really the answer. Well, that about wraps up another edition of the Things Entrepreneurs Should Know podcast. Be sure to check out our website at teskpod.com, where you can find the show notes, an archive of our past episodes and other resources to help grow your business. That's teskpodcom, and if you haven't done so already, i'd really appreciate it if you'd take one minute to give us a review on Apple Podcasts or rate us on Spotify. It helps out a ton to get this into more entrepreneurs and business owners. And if you've already done that, please consider sharing the show with families and friends who you think might get something out of it. As always, thanks for your support. This is Chip Schwager, reminding you that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. We'll see you next time.