Without a doubt, you must have top-notch employees in order to deliver great products and services to your customers, but does the success of your company rest on the shoulders of these employees? What happens when highly-skilled employees leave your organization? Would the quality of your services or products suffer?
Delivering consistent services and products to customers, time and time again, is extremely important in running a successful business. Quality should not vary from employee to employee. Think about a restaurant where you like to eat. Do you know you can count on the restaurant’s standards of food, service, and atmosphere? While an individual employee of that restaurant might deliver your order, it is the restaurant’s work procedures that ensure that quality food is being delivered consistently to its customers.
All employees need to be supported by your company’s documented processes so that they can deliver their best results every time. In fact, your investment in documenting standard operating procedures and employee performance standards relates directly to your company’s competitiveness and profits. Once specific work procedures are in place, your business can provide appropriate training and support tools to all your employees, enabling them to perform more consistently. These procedures describe what needs to be done when and how to complete these tasks, and they can form the basis of new employee orientation, performance management, skills development, and targeted training programs specific to your company’s requirements.
So, where do you begin?
The most effective way to document your standard operating procedures is to organize them around the work that your employees perform. First, you need to identify the major functions and/or jobs in your company; you can then define the tasks and procedures associated with each of those functions. At The Competency Group, we have developed the SKILLRESET™ knowledge capture process to document the expertise of your top performers in order to create best practice standard operating procedures and training.
Your top-performing employees know their functions better than anyone else, so go to the source. They will be able to describe the specific steps that must be taken to perform each task well, and they will know common problems that arise and how to most effectively overcome them. You can embed their best practices into your standard operating procedures and training so that their successful approaches are entrenched across your company.
Most companies claim that their employees are their most important assets; but, if they don’t provide them with clear expectations of what they are expected to do and how to do it, top job performance is solely an outcome of an individual’s employee skill level rather than a company’s intent. With standard operating procedures in place, your business can support your employees in providing products and services of consistent quality to your customer and maintaining your competitive edge!
The Competency Group can help your company build standard operating procedures that embed the specific steps that top performers use to produce consistent results for your company. We work with you and a small group of your top performers in efficient and quick process that begins with a one-day workshop.
