The secret to getting your staff to use your SOPs?

The secret to getting your staff to use your SOPs, welcome to today's episode, I think this is one of the big challenges that businesses run into getting the SOPs to actually be used, it is relatively easy to actually write out a list of standard operating procedures.

It's like, okay, well, we'll just copy what we're doing right now, let's make a video of it.

You can transcribe it, you can just have the video, that's relatively easy.

And then you've got this wonderful document, this wonderful set of VHS videos that none of your team use.

This means that you'll eventually learn not to do it see, like, Man, this isn't working, like why waste time creating standard operating procedures if no one uses them, if they sit on the shelf, or if they sit somewhere in a drive and a Google Drive, people can't find them.

You see, this is the real challenge.

And when you get this sorted, suddenly your SOPs will stay current.

Why? Because people use them.

That's what you need.

You need people to use them.

So they can benefit from using them.

They like oh, yeah, that, that's where that file is.

That's where this is kept.

All of that information is right there.

It's a lot like building Lego-like Lego is infinitely easier with the instructions.

And so you've got to get people to use them.

But how do you do that? Well, I want to give you a clue about that.

Why don't you link the process name to the document? Okay, this is not that hard, you got to get the process name.

And then you got to link it to the document and then get them to track using the process to like what, yeah, okay, so you've got your process, they track using the process.

And if they want it, the detailed instructions are right there.

Now, these benefits, your experienced users, those who've done it a lot, they know exactly what's in that document, they know what's in that SOP, they don't need all the fine detail, perhaps they just need the link to the template or the link to like the one URL that seen that they know there is a danger in this by the way that your experience guys won't pick up changes, that they won't realize the changes have been made.

So ideally, you would have some kind of SOP software that would flag for your experience use that isn’t typically going into the fine detail to say, hey, there's a change hit.

Pay attention, you might even have them have to sign off.

Oh, yeah, I saw that change.

It won't allow them just to run off the process name.

When there's been a change in the detail they have to go through and go through and learn the new way.

And they're like, Okay, great, I can see that changed.

But for your new employee or your team member that's been pulled out of a different area and dropped into another business area, like you know what we are behind, we need this done, that they actually have the fine details, they can go to the process.

They're tracking the process.

They're like, Yep, I'm working on this right now, which gives you optics, which is helpful, gives them optics and remind them what they're working on in case they get distracted.

Because no one ever gets distracted these days.

They do.

And they're like, Oh, what was I working on? Boom, there it is.

They're working on that one process.

And when they need the fine detail when they need either just the headings, they're like, oh, yeah, I've done this kind of three, four times, I just need the headings yet.

That one, that one, that one, that one, then they can, but if it's the first time they've done it, then they can go through all the fine detail, you could have that fine detail as text, you could have that fine detail as short little videos.

This is the ideal use of video, where you've got a short little video per major heading in an SOP.

They can look at it, it's short enough to be actually used to use people are not going to watch 10 or 12 minute SOP to try and find the one bit of information.

They're like, Oh man, where is it? Where is it? You got to break it up.

The place for long videos is when you're first creating your systems.

That's when you're going to go through and you're like okay, yeah, I can see that this process breaks here and it breaks here and breaks here.

Right, we've got three processes.

Let's look at the major steps in their major heading.

Next process major heading, next process major heading.

And then you can even go through and use that original video and break it out.

But I warn you that you may when you do this, you may see obvious things that need to be moved around, just like that doesn't make any sense.

It'd be made way more efficient if we move that step into this process.

And you may have to do this as you expand more team members, when it's just one or two people doing a system.

You may not need to think about this.

But as you get multiple people on big systems working in parallel to get work done.

You've got to think about who is doing that particular work.

Do you split it out? We covered this yesterday where the copywriting and The installation of the copy into the email was fine in one process when it was just one person doing it.

But if you've got multiple team members, then you need to split that out.

And you might actually pull out all of the copywriting out of a system and have it early, where your copywriter is going to be doing it.

And then once it's done, then it gets installed.

This gets into some really interesting ideas about Lean processing, lean manufacturing, whereby How do you look at your rate-limiting steps and get them done? When you want to really look into this, this is thinking through like if you've got a conveyor belt of like a Henry Ford style conveyor belt where things are getting done, there'll be one slow step.

And there is no point in having anything else in that conveyor belt go faster than that one step.

But if you can have two of that and double it up, then you might actually change where the slowest step is.

But this comes back to being able to see the work it comes back to being able to design your processes, it comes back to being able to say, Hey, this is how we're going to do it.

And this critical insight that I want you to get, the real problem that you are trying to solve is how do you get your staff to use the SOPs, link it to the major instruct, like here's that here's the system.

Here are the processes that make up that system have the instruction linked so they can use it if they need it, but also get them to track it if you need help with setting this up.

Head over to systemio.dev.

Thanks for tuning in today.

I hope you got a lot of value out of it as we continue this rather interesting journey into the power of system script results.

Look forward to seeing you tomorrow on next episode.